My father stopped speaking to me when I dropped out of medical school to care for my sick boyfriend. Five years later he drove over to take me home — and the moment he walked into our front room he stopped mid-sentence and said this can’t be real.

PART 1 — SAY IT

In my family, medicine was not a career choice. It was a tense.

My grandfather Aurel Duquette was a general surgeon for forty-one years. My father Roman is an interventional cardiologist. My mother Margit was a theatre nurse before she married him, which in that house was described as “how they met” rather than as a job she had for nine years.

I was not pushed into it. I want that on the record because it is load-bearing.

I grew up in a house where the coffee table books were anatomical atlases and where the dinner conversation was a bad night in a cath lab, and I loved it. I asked for a stethoscope at nine and got a real one. By sixteen I was reading my father’s journals for fun and understanding about a third of them banc.