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“Soumya, I’ve been having excruciating back pain. It’s really bothering me, so I’m going to the Emergency Department.”
I received this voicemail from one of our respected division faculty members as I started my weekly visit to the nursing home as a Geriatric Medicine fellow. Five months earlier, we had learned that the young daughter of two other faculty members had an inoperable brain tumor. Six weeks earlier, the night of November 8, 2016, I was glued to the television, white as a sheet. A first-generation immigrant woman from India, I watched as a man who boasted about sexually assaulting women, and who started his political career calling non-white immigrants rapists and criminals, became president-eElect of the United States.