How to Write to a Young Girl

You were able to visit Asma and her family in Malmö, not me. You had a speaking engagement at the university there last summer, and you dropped by. I loved that she had to squeeze you into her busy schedule. Even though school was out, her off-season was filled with numerous activities, organized and not. She suggested that you take her and her scout troop out for ice cream—seventeen double-scoop cones!

I skype with her once a month, and she texts me regularly, but my guidance, if we could call it that, is primarily through letters. That’s what she wanted.

“Send me a letter,” she said. “Once a week. Not more than that because that would be too much. One letter that tells me what you did that week so I will know what to expect as a doctor.”

Once a week, I write. I tell her what surgeries I did and how I performed them, what incisions where. I even go as far as telling her how many times I had performed the procedure and how comfortable I felt doing so. I tell her about my patients, both the easy and the difficult ones. I explain briefly each situation, how I talked to the family, what I said to the patient, what the nurses said. She is a dry sponge for medical information. She berated me in the beginning for writing to her as if she were a child, for explaining the diagnoses in simple terms. She did not appreciate that. I was to treat her like any physician. She wanted a full anamnesis. She could look up any of the difficult words. She was no dummy. She knew how to use Google, after all. I complied.

Her mother was right. Asma is willful. And I adore her.