Racism and the Off-Duty Doctor - YES! Magazine Solutions Journalism

How my hospital ID has become an 鈥淚 exist鈥� card.

In medical residency, I trained at a county hospital in Los Angeles. Black and Brown patients lay on gurneys in the emergency room and lined the halls on the wards. Our patients were mostly poor, often undocumented. The doctors were mostly White. One of my Guatemalan patients told me that on the difficult, monthlong walk into the U.S., contending with blisters and diarrhea, she鈥檇 learned that our hospital was the first place to get decent, free care. As residents, we worked and lived in the hospital so many nights, it felt like home. On one of my days off, in street clothes鈥攋eans and a T-shirt鈥擨 went into the hospital to finish dictating some patient notes. It was morning. As usual, I went through the metal detector coming into the hospital. I collected my stale coffee from the cafeteria. Later that morning, I got stopped by a police guard coming out of the bathroom, suspicious I might have been shooting up in one of the bathroom stalls. I presented my doctor鈥檚 ID out of my jeans pocket, and immediately apologies flowed like water from an open faucet from the mouth of the police guard.

My dark skin is so much like my patients鈥�. I learned never to walk the hospital without an ID. Until then, the hospital had felt like home. Suddenly, it was not a home where I could move freely without question. It was no longer my home. A few months later after a long on-call shift, I decide to drive to the ocean. Making my way to the water feels like making my way home. This is a habit of mine. The air by the water is fresh and clean and welcoming. It opens the lungs after 30 continual hours in the hospital. The neighboring cities of Redondo Beach and Hermosa Beach are beautiful, with strips of bars and flocks of White folks that flood them in the evening hours. It鈥檚 11 p.m. on a Thursday and beachfront parking is full. I want to bypass the crowds and the bars and go sit on the beach to clear my head. As I circle for parking in my sister鈥檚 black, beat-up 2004 Jetta, I can see a cop car eye me as I come around the block again in search of parking. My black, beat-up car and my nearly black skin in this dark night. My third time around the block, the cop starts to follow me on my parking search, a slow dance around a three-block radius. He pulls me over. The cop is rude. He flashes his light onto the back seat, where he suspiciously eyes an ophthalmoscope and reflex hammer. He shines the light in my eyes and asks what the paraphernalia in the back seat is all about. He doesn鈥檛 give me a chance to answer. He asks for my driver鈥檚 license and registration and proof of insurance, his voice finding its footing somewhere between irritated and angry. I am nervous. I was living in New York on 9/11, and immediately afterwards I saw fear in older White women鈥檚 eyes as they looked at me. It is a look I recognize in my dying patients鈥攖he fear鈥攂ut it always catches me off guard when I look into someone鈥檚 eyes and realize I am the thing they fear. Back in the Jetta, my white coat hangs off the back of my driver鈥檚 seat. My doctor鈥檚 ID hangs off my white coat close to the driver鈥檚 side window. The policeman鈥檚 flashlight catches the ID and he asks if I am a doctor. I say yes, at LA County a few miles away.

The pile of papers in his hand鈥攄river鈥檚 license, registration, proof of insurance鈥攂ecome like a lotus flower as he opens his palms and they flow back to me. He apologizes and apologizes. He says he didn鈥檛 realize I was a doctor. He didn鈥檛 realize that I worked at the hospital, the trauma center that takes care of cops when they get hurt or shot. My doctor鈥檚 ID becomes a get-out-of-jail-free card. An 鈥淚 exist鈥� card. I exist. I exist. Something to distinguish me from the Black, the Brown, the sick, the poor, the nameless, the undocumented鈥攆rom my patients.

Sometimes when I fill out death certificates I wish I could write the cause of death as poverty. Or American racism.

What if I had been a plumber, looking for the sea after a hard day鈥檚 work? What if I had been one of my patients, Black and Brown and nameless? I remember taking care of an undocumented Mexican man who worked and worked for four decades in the vineyards of Napa. He never had health insurance. I saw him in the hospital when his bone marrow finally failed, exhausted by decades of fieldwork. His body was announcing its existence the only way it could. If the soul is ignored long enough, the body rebels. A mass in the throat rises to the surface of the skin. A cavity in a lung riddled with tuberculosis starts to bleed. The body announces its existence. Sometimes when I fill out death certificates, I wish I could write the cause of death as poverty. Or American racism. As a doctor, I am looking to make common cause with a Navajo woman. Uranium mined from the earth and left bare for Navajo folks to fall ill. The uranium in the earth rises as a lump in a Navajo woman鈥檚 breast. As a doctor, I am looking to make common cause with Black boys stopped by the police, shot by police without a doctor鈥檚 ID to protect them. As a doctor who travels to work with patients in Liberia, I am looking to make common cause with the 11,310 Black bodies who died from Ebola. They came into our awareness only in sickness and in death. Before blood flows from every orifice, can we note their existence?鈥� The 109 Black bodies killed by the police this year.鈥� May we learn their names in life? They exist.鈥� As a doctor, I aim to stand with them before the beautiful fire of their lives becomes ash.鈥� In this country, the only way I know home is through them. 鈥↖ want to reclaim a space for home for the Black, the Brown, the nameless, my patients, myself. I try to find my home through them. This essay appears by permission of the author, Sriram Shamasunder. Excerpted from Endangered Species, Enduring Values: An Anthology of San Francisco Area Writers and Artists of Color, edited by Shizue Seigel, , 2018. This essay was previously published by DailyGood.

Sriram Shamasunder graduated from University of California, Berkeley and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Harbor UCLA Medical Center. He obtained his Diploma in Tropical Medicine & Hygiene in 2013. Throughout the last decade he has spent several months out of every year in underserved settings around the world including South Los Angeles, rural Liberia, Haiti, Burundi, and rural India. Sri is an Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSF, and co-founder and faculty director of the HEAL Initiative, a health workforce strengthening fellowship working in Navajo Nation and 9 countries around the world. HEAL currently has over 160 fellows, over the last five years, half of whom are Native American and from low and middle income countries(LMIC). He was awarded the Young Physician of the Year in 2010, by the Northern California Chapter of the American College of Physicians and was named an Asia21 fellow by the Asia Foundation in 2012, a Fulbright-Nehru scholar to India in 2012 and a Draper Richards Kaplan entrepreneur in 2016. He is currently an Emerson Dial Fellow. Dr. Shamasunder led the HEAL UCSF response during the ongong COVID surge in Navajo Nation spending several weeks with HEAL's partner site hospital taking care of COVID patients and supporting UCSF nursing and doctor volunteers. Over 40 nurses and doctors In April, May and June 2020 from UCSF joined the over 50 HEAL fellows(Native and non-Native) in Navajo Nation. Sri is a published poet and studied and taught with June Jordan鈥檚 Poetry for the People while at UC Berkeley. He is interested in a solidarity that draws untold stories to the surface as well as health equity. In 2016, he gave a Berkeley Ted X talk entitled "Whose Suffering Matters Less, and Why"?