Leah Mawhinney

Leah Mawhinney received her undergraduate degree from Hampshire College, where she studied nutrition, agriculture, and dining culture. She graduated in 2010. After working as a teacher, baker, and farmer, Leah became a doula. This work propelled her into the field of women’s health. She is currently studying to become a nurse midwife and women’s health nurse practitioner, and will graduate in 2018.

Mr. Duffy

“Mr. Duffy thinks he’s God,” the nurse tells me during morning report. 

I read over his chart and find that Mr. Duffy has Bipolar disorder. He has been taking lithium for years, to avoid manic episodes like this one, but sometimes he stops taking it. “It makes my hands shake so much,” he tells me, “I can’t button my shirts.”

My Duffy is a shabby looking older man, barrel chested and with great, bushy eyebrows. His hospital gown is disheveled and too short, revealing lots of thigh. He peers up at me from under his eyebrows and winks.

I glance over Mr. Duffy and determine that he is not God.

“I’d like to examine you,” I tell him, and he looks pleased by this request. He sits up a little straighter.

I look over his face. It is sloppily shaven, as though he shaved during an earthquake and in the dark, but of course it was me who shaved him. It’s harder than it looks, to shave the face of someone who is half asleep with these disposable hospital razors. His beard grows in thick and covers an impressive portion of his face, nearly becoming one with his eyebrows. How is it that a body distinguishes between types of hair? His beard grows and grows, while his eyebrows stay the same length. It is a small marvel, but I’m grateful for it, grateful to have only had to shave the bottom half of his face.

I shine my penlight into his left eye and watch both pupils constrict. What a novice I am, still thrilled by these reflexes, as if I really have a hand in their presence. And yet, how remarkable that there is this muscle inside of the eyeball that responds to light. Are there any other muscles that do that? We have all grown these bodies beginning with the division of a single cell, a process that at some point knew to make this one particular muscle respond in this most unusual way.

I warm the diaphragm of my stethoscope in my hands and put it to his chest, listening to the blood passing through his heart. Three million new red blood cells each second, all growing inside of these big, old bones, getting pumped through this antique heart. Three million. Six million. Nine million. Constantly multiplying to maintain their numbers. Twenty seven million. Thirty million. The postal service of the body, pushed around by this strange, chambered pump. Never mind all the other things sloshing around in there with the blood cells, carrying around little parts of food and leaving a little here, a little there, slowly building more of him, a new Mr. Duffy, and taking the old one away, piece by piece. 

I move my stethoscope to his back to listen to his lungs. It doesn’t sound like much, air passing through a tube. It’s an anticlimactic assessment for such a remarkable system. Beneath my hands, there are some four hundred and eighty million alveoli in his chest; perfectly permeable balloons taking in precious life force and breathing out poison. Breathing it right out of the blood.

I place my stethoscope around my neck and hold his hand in my own, pressing his nail bed for a count of three. I watch the white enamel bounce back to pink and imagine the network of capillaries, too small to see individually but collectively giving him his pink hue. What a system this is, that we all have inside us. Fifty thousand miles of blood vessels, carrying invisible chemicals to every corner of the body: the invisible chemicals that sustain life. Fifty thousand miles of them. Long enough to wrap the earth twice, like a Christmas package, done up with ribbon. Long enough to wrap the earth twice, and yet here they are, so carefully arranged as to be collected right in front of me, in this man who thinks he’s God.

And who am I to say that he’s not?

Mr. Duffy thinks he’s God.

Maybe he is.