Anonymous

The day I started rotations, I traded the verdant iron rhythm of my first name 

for the two unresisting syllables of my last. And before you say it’s out of place 

to introduce myself as doctors do, I want you to imagine being fifteen, 

playing badminton in the forest, little cousin in tow, and a stranger says,

 “Hey! You’re pretty good. What’s your name?” And you say your name 

how you’ve always heard it said back to you, a sound they can imitate with ease, 

and the child next to you says loudly, in shock, “No, it’s not!” 

And something breaks beneath the awkwardness of the moment, 

beneath the mangled body of the word you’ve just spit out. 

A meaningless bastardization of a name so often said wrong, 

even you forgot how to say it right. So for the next ten years, 

you teach people, patiently, meticulously, holding up the Starbucks line 

as you spell it out. But when you start working in the hospital, the stakes 

change. The patient who can’t say your name doesn’t call you for help 

when they need it. The attending, whom you’ll see for two days, 

can either spend that time learning your name, or teaching you medicine. 

Good intentions, good intentions, good intentions! The kind old nurse 

who asked me to repeat my name until she got it right, then turned and asked 

if I was Eskimo. The Japanese attending who observed over my shoulder

the flash of my name on the login screen, and asked me to teach him how to say it, 

and got it in one try. “See, it’s not that hard!” The Indian doctor who greeted me 

and watched me quickly lose a battle as I decided what name to say. 

“But I go by-” it doesn’t matter. My name rolls off her tongue with ease, 

and that is how she introduces me to her patients. “This is अक्षता.” “Huh?” 

I convince myself it’s hard enough that a patient should recall correctly 

their allergy to am-lo-di-pine, or their em-pag-li-flo-zin dose, or that 

they’re scheduled for a bi-lat-er-al ca-rot-id end-ar-ter-ec-to-my. 

It’s hard enough that an attending should hold on the tip of their tongue

twenty names and numbers and diagnoses and treatment plans 

of the people whose very lives depend on it. But the truth is not nearly

so selfless or gentle. I use my last name because it is exhausting to show 

each person how to painstakingly resurrect a butchered language, 

how to rebuild the ruins of a tongue with phonemes they’ve never tasted, 

how to lovingly debride the decay from vocal cords that don’t bend that way. 

Every “this’ll take me a few tries” every “yeah, I can’t say that” 

every “do you have a nickname” is a papercut, no matter the good intentions, 

no matter how much they want to learn (and sometimes, they do not). 

And you say it’s not my responsibility to teach, but if not me, then who? 

To have a name made foreign by their mouths is a beautiful burden - 

sacred, to see a language left for dead come alive when I am called.

Akshatha Silas; Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine