Reviving a Friendship After the War Helped my PTSD
As a psychiatrist, I’ve struggled to accept my own vulnerabilities
I knew Nick before 9/11. He was in graduate school in the same city where I went to medical school. We met through my roommate. They’d been friends since childhood. The three of us spent many late nights at Ernestine & Hazel’s, one of our favorite bars in downtown Memphis. Nick often helped me forget I was a medical student, what I thought at the time was a stressful life.
At bars, Nick sometimes pretended to be an arrogant doctor, based on the Alec Baldwin character in the 1992 film Malice: “The question is do I have a God complex... If you’re looking for God, he was in operating room number two on November Seventeenth and he doesn’t like to be second guessed.”
It never failed that a drunk stranger believed him and interrupted what he was saying. Then the three of us laughed and bought another round, including one for the stranger. I remember waking up after those nights in bars and reeking of smoke. Few states limited cigarette use back then. That world seems so long ago now.
It was before what I’ve needed to forget.
Students graduate and move. We parted ways during the summer of 1999. I joined the Navy, and within a year, was a doctor on a ship…
