I ended the call and pointed the car toward the highway. The dark road ahead was empty, the dashboard glowing blue against my hands. I have spent my life believing in medicine, not in the naïve way laypeople sometimes imagine doctors do, but in the hard, earned way that comes from seeing what good medicine can save and what bad medicine can destroy. I have operated in the middle of the night on ruptured aneurysms, bowel perforations, gallbladders gone septic, appendixes that should have come out six hours earlier but did not because someone hesitated, someone missed a sign, someone assumed instead of examined. One of the things that had always made my blood boil was when physicians let bias override clinical judgment. I had seen it more often than I liked to admit. Young men with tattoos were more likely to be labeled drug seekers. Women with pain were more likely to be told they were anxious. Black patients were more likely to have their symptoms minimized. Poor patients were more likely to be judged before a single lab was drawn. Hospitals rarely liked to say this aloud, but medicine was not immune to arrogance, laziness, or prejudice. Sometimes it rewarded them.
And Ethan, my son, looked exactly like the kind of patient a lazy doctor might dismiss. Both arms sleeved in tattoos. Long hair. Nose ring. He had spent years curating an appearance that older men in starched coats often interpreted as a challenge. But Ethan had never touched hard drugs in his life. He was finishing a master’s degree in environmental science. He spent his weekends volunteering at wildlife rehabilitation centers, bottle-feeding orphaned fox kits and scrubbing cages at a raptor rescue outside campus. He wrote papers on wetland restoration and carried granola bars in his backpack because he worried about other students skipping meals. He was, in ways that embarrassed him whenever I said it aloud, one of the kindest human beings I knew. The thought of some smug ER physician taking one look at him and deciding he was a liar made my grip tighten around the steering wheel so hard my knuckles hurt.