Interns

Interns
I was about to turn the radio off and go weed my garden, when I heard Scott Simon’s interview with the intern in her 40’s. Cute, I thought at first; then my mind crashed back 40 years to the first time I heard that word, “intern.”
When I was 12, my parents made the incomprehensively brave decision to move our family from our relatively comfortable home in Czechoslovakia, to America, where they had never been. Prague Spring had just ended with the invasion of the armies of the Warsaw Pact. They’d both been children under the Protectorate during World War II, and, in their words, did not want their daughters to live under an invading force.
We spent the first six months in America living with kind relatives – but put eight people in a three bedroom house with one bathroom, and the most marvelous intentions turn to pure hell. I was a communist-schooled atheist back then; still, I prayed, for the first time in my life, for my parents to pass the ECFMG, the exam foreign medical graduates must complete to practice in the United States.
They did. And so that we could move out on our own as quickly as possible, my parents got the only jobs they could - as interns at the Doctors’ Hospital in Seattle, Washington. I can’t imagine their humiliation. My father had been the head of pediatrics in a largish county hospital; my mother had developed relationships of trust and candor with tens of thousands of mothers who came to her clinics. Suddenly they were glorified students, expected to answer difficult medical questions about topics they hadn’t addressed in decades.
At the first birth at which he officiated, my father was told the parents had decided on the name “Jason.” Did they know where the name came from, he asked. And there in the delivery room, in what must have been barely understandable English, he told the story of Jason and the Argonauts to the parents, the nurses and the other doctors.
Some intern.