Steeped in my English major but flirting with medicine, I sat on my dorm room floor and listened through the phone to my father’s cynical perspective on being a doctor. It was the early ‘90s, my queerness was a mere heart-whisper, and I thought maybe my big brain could solve the AIDS crisis. “You’ll be bored,” he said, “and they’ll have found a cure by the time you finish.” It was a quick call: short enough to shut down the question, but not nearly long enough to thwart the ache that would, twenty years later, send me back to school.
Rebecca Ingalls is a former English professor, now midwife and nurse practitioner. Her work has been published in Five Minutes and Beautiful Things (River Teeth).