The Writing of Making the Rounds: Defying Norms in Love and Medicine By Patricia Grayhall

The Writing of Making the Rounds: Defying Norms in Love and Medicine

By Patricia Grayhall

February 2019

I take out the letters and journals in the file labeled Boston with shaky hands from the locked file cabinet in my closet. For forty years the letters from Dani lay unread because I couldn’t bear to look at them. Forty years of no contact with this woman I had so loved and wanted to make a life with. In the bottom of the box are my journals from the 1970s and letters from other lovers.

The fire crackles in the wood stove of the log home I share with my partner, Linda, on an island in the Pacific Northwest.  I sit down in my red leather recliner to read those old journals and letters feeling again the rush of yearning and loss.  I am so absorbed that I forget to put another log in the stove. As the room becomes chillier, I look up from the journal and say to Linda, “Oh, this is so rich.”

Who knows what you might find when you go delving into the past? Perhaps some answers to questions that were unresolved or too painful to contemplate at the time. I know that the past isn’t dead, it lives on inside of us and influences us whether we are aware of it or not, shaping our present responses and who we are now. 

The late 1960s and 1970s was a turbulent time; outwardly with the fight for civil rights, second-wave feminism, the sexual revolution, and the anti-Vietnam war movement. And on the personal level, swimming against the current, coming out as a lesbian, training to be a doctor in a nearly all-male profession, bouncing from relationship to relationship, and struggling to balance the personal and professional. I often felt tossed about in the eddy of my own liberation, a free agent who also pined deeply for stability and nurturance.

Today, successful in my career, comfortable in my marriage, I still have questions: how did I manage to survive potentially damaging relationships with men, the rigors of medical training in an environment often hostile to women, and betrayal in love? As for Dani I also wondered: how did such a passionate and mutual love go so wrong? And how did that experience with her, and other women change me into a woman who could trust and be trusted with the love of another? 

Linda chops onions for soup in the open kitchen. I put another log in the stove and continue to read in silence—reading late into the evening and all the next day. Sometimes, my vision is blurred by tears, occasionally I chuckle. When I finally put the journals and letters aside, I announce, “I’m going to write a book.”

Linda looks up from her tablet, where she is playing word games. “About what?”

“Life, love, and medicine in the sixties and seventies,” I answer. 

“Why do you want to bury yourself in the past?” she asks. “It’s over and done with.”

“Because I’d like to make sense of it–perhaps help others struggling with relationship issues.” As much as we’ve made incremental progress over the past few decades, queer women still must struggle in a world ruled by the male gaze, and even a woman’s right to control her own body is at risk. My story could be inspirational for those who have ever lived the burden of being told their passions amount to “wrong feelings.” Or for those marginalized people—queer, female, disabled, of color—who are struggling to fulfill dreams that others take for granted. Perhaps, there is a young person in some conservative community who has the intelligence and drive to become a doctor, or a lawyer, or a judge, or a professor, a publisher, or a writer and who needs to understand that such a goal may not be easy, but it is still possible–even now when the country appears to be moving backwards from the progress made in previous decades.

Linda doesn’t look pleased. “Suit yourself, though I probably won’t read about all your past relationships.  I like the end result; I don’t need to know the recipe.” 

I understand that. She might no longer feel special. Although it is because of all my previous relationships that she might learn how special she really is and how our relationship was possible because of the ones that came before.

***

And so, I began my emotional and physical journey into the past, contacting old loves and friends. In the end, I would travel with Linda over three thousand miles from Seattle to Florida in mid-March 2020–just as the tsunami of the Covid-19 pandemic was breaking on the coasts of the US—to reconnect with some of the dear friends that enriched my life in the seventies and to share what I had written about them.

***

No Signposts in the Sea, the title of one of Vita Sackville-West’s books, sums up my experience studying and training to be a doctor in the early 1970s before Title IX, which prohibited discrimination in education based on sex. As only one of five women in a class of one hundred in Salt Lake City, and the only woman in my internship in Boston, I encountered few, if any, female role models that could affirm my ambition or provide encouragement. 

Tossed around in the rough seas of medical training, chronically exhausted, and emotionally drained, I yearned to have a stable love relationship that would offer the same care and support my male colleagues seemed to find in their wives and girlfriends. Though I loved women, the only model of relationship I knew was heteronormative. My exposure to the women’s movement in Boston in the ’70s taught me female eroticism was cause for celebration, but it provided few models for how to sustain a relationship with a woman beyond desire. Being open with such love also threatened my ambition to become a doctor.

Making the Rounds is the story of how I navigated those seas without signposts tossed by the tempest—battered, but never broken. Brene Brown said, “One day you will tell your story of how you overcame what you went through, and it will be someone else’s survival guide” I hope my book will be not only entertaining but someone else’s survival guide.

—

Patricia Grayhall is a medical doctor and author of Making the Rounds: Defying Norms  in Love and Medicine as well as articles in Queer Forty and The Gay and Lesbian Review.  After nearly forty years of medical practice, this is her debut, very personal, and frank  memoir about coming out as a lesbian in the late 1960s and training to become a doctor  when society disapproved of both for a woman. Patricia chose to write using a pen  name to protect the privacy of some of her characters as well as her own. She lives  with the love of her life on an island in the Pacific Northwest where she enjoys other  people’s dogs, the occasional Orca and black bear, hiking, and wine with friends. 

For further information visit, www.patriciagrayhall.com 

 

MAKING THE ROUNDS: DEFYING NORMS AND LOVE IN MEDICINE, Patricia Grayhall

Defying expectations of a woman growing up in Arizona in the 1960s, Patricia Grayhall fled Phoenix at nineteen for the vibrant streets of San Francisco, determined to finally come out as a lesbian after years of trying to be a “normal” girl. Her dream of becoming a physician drew her back to college, and then on to medical school in conservative Salt Lake City.

Though Patricia enjoyed a supportive friendship with a male colleague, she longed for an equal, loving relationship with a woman. But her graduate medical training in Boston, with its emotional demands, long hours, lack of sleep, and social isolation, compounded by the free-wheeling sexual revolution of the 1970s, made finding that special relationship difficult. Often disappointed but never defeated, Patricia—armed with wit and determination—battled on against sexism in her male-dominated profession and against discrimination in a still largely homophobic nation, plunging herself into a life that was never boring and certainly never without passion.

A chronicle of coming of age during second-wave feminism and striving to have both love and career as a gay medical doctor, Making the Rounds is a well-paced and deeply humanizing memoir of what it means to seek belonging and love—and to find them, in the most surprising ways.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing