I smiled, scooting myself closer to the edge of the folding chair I had propped up next to his hospital bed. My cell phone was balanced precariously on the end of my clipboard, recording. When I’d first approached Mr. Jenkins with a request to interview him for my project, he’d looked skeptical. “You folks never stop asking questions, do you?” he’d said wearily. But when I broached the topic of the interview, he had taken pause, then waved me over and signed a form consenting to be enrolled and recorded with a flourish. And like with most of the patients I had interviewed thus far, Mr. Jenkins seemed to burst forward with thoughts. After all, no one had thought to ask him his opinions about doctors’ communication practices, especially not in regard to whether they were discriminatory.
“You’re here, in the hospital,” I said conversationally. “You’re accepting care from the physicians. But you don’t trust them?”
“I don’t have a choice,” Mr. Jenkins said. He leaned back in his hospital bed, tilting his head up toward the monitor. “I can’t fix me, can I? Now, don’t get me wrong. Everybody here has been real nice. Veronica,” he said, referring to his nurse, “has been really attentive. But I don’t trust anybody in this place but God.” He gave me a critical stare. “You’re from the motherland, aren’t you?”
I nodded, and, satisfied with his assessment, Mr. Jenkins smiled to himself.
“It’s the skin,” he declared. “You’ve got that smooth, dark, African skin. Beautiful, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “Thank you.”
“What I mean is that I’m sure you and your family are new to this country. You might not know all about what they did to us here.” He adjusted his glasses on his nose. “My mother died in the basement of this hospital, back in sixty-three. She came here for help, and they threw her into the back somewhere and forgot about her. Her bowels ruptured. She was thirty-two.” He held my gaze for a long moment, his old pain renewed. Then he closed his eyes and leaned back on his bed. “So no, to answer your question. I don’t trust the doctors. I just lay here and pray that the good Lord will guide them to treat me right.”
I walked out of Mr. Jenkins’s room half an hour later, our conversation saved and uploaded to the cloud. It was late, almost eight o’clock at night, and as I trudged back to the workroom I went through my mental checklist. I needed to stop by Dr. Reed’s office to put Mr. Jenkins’s paper consent form in our folder. I had to forward his recorded interview to the transcription company and check my email to see whether they had sent me any completed transcripts of my prior interviews.
The email from the Beenhouwer Association announcing that we had been rewarded three thousand in internal funding had come two weeks ago. Dr. Reed called me immediately upon its receipt to rejoice, but all I felt upon reading it was the sensation that I had successfully climbed up one rung higher on an infinite ladder. We read over the potential edits to our proposal, which included that we discard the focus group idea and opt for a more open interview style, allowing our participants to drive the conversation themselves. I accepted the critiques, then immediately got to work. In a short time, I had already single-handedly recruited and interviewed fourteen patients, a number that Dr. Reed found incomprehensible.
“When do you have time to do all this, Angie?” he said, exasperated.
“I make time,” I said.
And make time I did. On most days, I left the hospital after sunset, sticking around after I’d signed out my own patients to hunt through the wards for more to recruit. I conducted my interviews, walked home, did practice questions over a late dinner, completed a twenty-minute aerobics workout in front of my TV, showered, and went to sleep. Rinse and repeat, day after day.
“That is no way to live,” Michelle had said, disgusted, on the rare day that I allowed for an interruption in my routine for a dinner out.
I shrugged. I liked my new, structured schedule, actually. It kept me occupied and made me feel useful.
The workroom was empty when I entered; the night team had probably already left to admit patients. I grabbed my backpack and tore off my short white coat, slinging it over my elbow, then stalked over to the elevators. My heels clacked loudly against the hospital tile, echoing through the empty halls. I pulled out my phone, scrolling to the group chat. Markus had sent a series of increasingly more filthy memes over the course of the day, and I snorted with amusement as I read them, pressing the elevator button for down.