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The room tittered with laughter.
He raised the award. “But thank you for this recognition. When you’re going about your day-to-day life, you’re usually not thinking about the lives you touch. As a physician, you know you’re making a difference, but for many of us, after a while, it becomes more about how well your patients recover than whether people see you as some sort of hero. I do what I do because I love it.”
He paused.
Raina mouthed, “You’ve got this, baby.”
“Something many of you might not know about me is that I had a couple of learning disorders when I was a child,” he went on. “Words and numbers never looked right, but I did grasp numbers much quicker than I did letters. The problem was, being a doctor has always been my dream, but for a while, I was the only person who believed I could attain such a lofty goal.”
He heard a few sniffles.
A fewawws.
“I remember hearing my teachers calling me all sorts of names, and at the time, I believed them. See, another thing many of you might not know is that I didn’t grow up wealthy. I was born in Turkey and moved here as a child. My parents could barely speak English, and with them being poor and Muslim, we saw many more closed doors than open ones. But then, one day, I met a doctor from Uganda who also happened to be my best friend’s father. He helped me understand that I didn’t have to accept what people called me. ‘It’s their opinion,’ he would say, and that it wasn’t up to me to prove them wrong. My job wasn’t to base my life on making sure I ‘showed’ them. It was to build confidence in myself. So, I did.”
He gripped the award tighter.
Liberation, he’d been expecting, but telling his story made him realize what Raina had been telling him all along. He’d overcome a lot of obstacles that, at the time, had seemed permanent. Had he lived the other version of his life, the inauthentic version, he would have buried the hard work that had led to his accomplishments as if success despite drawbacks was something to be ashamed of.
“I went to college, the first in my family, and then went to Georgetown for medical school. And while those might seem like great accomplishments, nothing’s greater than standing up here and seeing that I’ve been able to make a difference. The poor Turkish kid with the immigrant parents made a difference. Hemakesa difference. He matters to his students and his university, and then he married the most beautiful woman he’d ever set eyes on in his life.”
A few whistles floated around the room.
He grinned. “Thank you, again, for this recognition. I know people always say this, but let no one tell you that you were born to fail, whether it’s a parent, aunt, uncle, grandparent, teacher…whomever. Greatness waits on the other side of fear, and while it’ll be hard work to climb that hill, I guarantee it will be worth it. Now, my honey isn’t feeling well, so we’ll be leaving, but once again…thank you.”
He left the podium to applause, Delilah following. She slipped the award from his hand, and he picked Raina up again and headed for the exit.
Delilah drove while he sat with Raina in the backseat, his tuxedo jacket draped around her.
“I might have picked up the flu from that very last shoot I did,” she said. “A few people had scratchy throats.”
She closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, she immediately protested.
“Saraci, no.”
“Don’t fight us,” Delilah said.
He hoisted her out of the car and entered the hospital emergency room. If his hunch was correct, this was where she needed to be, even if it was just a “simple flu.”
He used his connections to get her a room in under two hours and sent Delilah home with the car. Thankfully, Delilah didn’t give him a hard time about staying at her sister’s bedside.
Raina was with her husband.
Her physician husband.
Who was obsessed with her.
She was in good hands.
“I don’t need to be here,” Raina argued, settling on the hospital bed. “They’re just going to give me fluids, break my fever with Tylenol, and send me home.”
He pulled a chair up next to the bed. “You might have a lowered immune system. If that’s the case, thisiswhere you need to be.”
“A lowered immune system from the flu.”
“No. Not from the flu.”
