By the time my husband graduated from medical school I had spent eight years paying for it. On the lawn afterward his mother took the flowers out of my hands, he pushed an envelope into them, and I opened it standing in front of eighty people.

Idris Kalu and I are friends. That is all it is and all it has been, and it is one of the four or five good things that came out of that year.

He drove me home from the parking lot that afternoon. He did not offer advice and he did not tell me what he would have done. He sat in my kitchen for two hours while I did not talk and then he washed the four days of dishes in my sink and left.

I applied to medical school in the October of that year, at thirty-one.

Not to Keswick. I want to be clear that I looked at Keswick for about nine minutes and then closed the tab, because there is a version of going back that is really about being seen going back, and that version would have eaten me.

I applied to four schools. I got into two. My personal statement had eight years of revenue cycle work in it and a paragraph about what the inside of a billing office teaches you about how patients actually experience a hospital, and one of the two interviewers spent forty minutes on that paragraph.