Helping Hand: Stories about the kindness of strangers

Whether it’s a completing a lab, writing up a grant proposal, or just getting through everyday life, everyone needs a little help. In this week’s episode, both of our storytellers share moments where they lent or received support.

Part 1: One moment Keith Mellnick is cycling home, the next he’s in the emergency room of the hospital with no idea what happened to him.

Keith Mellnick is a freelance photographer whose past work in the Middle East, Central Asia, and East Africa has been highlighted by National Geographic Books, the Atlantic, and his brother's refrigerator. Based in Washington, DC, he currently works primarily with organized labor and progressive causes throughout the US. In addition to photography and storytelling, he enjoys any opportunity to escape into the woods--far from politics, screens, and oppressive DC heat indexes.

Part 2: Medical student Fabiola Plaza feels compelled to help a woman on the New York subway get a doctor’s appointment.

Fabiola Plaza is a fourth-year medical student at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. Native to Venezuela, she grew up as one of seven children in South Florida. She began playing the viola at a young age and attended a middle and high school for the performing arts. She then attended Columbia University, majoring in Neuroscience and Music. While at Columbia, Fabiola discovered her love for medicine and giving back to the community. Her current research interests involve language differences leading to healthcare disparities, health provider bias against those who are justice-involved, and the effects of gun violence in healthcare. When she is not busy studying, you can find Fabiola playing viola in the New York Repertory Orchestra, being very competitive at Bananagrams and any other board game, or completing another 1000+ piece puzzle.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

Five years ago, I'm bicycling home from a happy hour down on 8th Street back here to Petworth about five miles. It's 8:30 at night, beautiful day, and I could not be in a more irritable, pissy mood. I'm in this mood for one very specific reason and it's because I'm tired. I'm super jet lagged.

But that is not a satisfying reason to be in a shitty mood, so I use a little trick I learned from my mom at a young age and that is if you ever find yourself unjustifiably grumpy, just start blaming everybody in your path. This is what I've been doing for like two weeks. I'm blaming President Trump, I'm blaming Tucker Carlson, I'm blaming kids today, I'm blaming the collapse of democracy, anything I can think of basically.

And on this particular evening, I'm pissed off at the bartender who had a very non-egalitarian way of deciding who got served when. And I'm pissed off at some guy who laughs too loud as if he wants everyone to know what a great time he's having.

So this is my state of mind as I'm bicycling home coming up one of these long and terminable but not very steep DC hills. I come to the other side and I just gun it. I start bicycling as fast as I can down that hill and I get a little kick of adrenaline. I start to feel good. I feel giddy in a way I haven't for a little while.

I try to embrace that moment and enjoy the warm sun and the wind blowing through my scalp. It's really nice.

Then I blink my eyes and in that time when I opened them, I'm no longer riding my bicycle. I'm on my back in a bed in the hallway of what is clearly an emergency room. I look at the wall. There's about an hour of my life that's just missing and I have only the vaguest ghost of a recollection of a car that came out of nowhere and hit me.

I have no idea how bad my injuries are. I can feel that my head is locked in place so I try to wiggle my toes and wiggle my fingers. Everything wiggles just fine. I take a deep sigh of relief and, when I do, it feels like a fistful of steak knives are going into my chest. It feels like my right leg has been smacked with a crowbar

Keith Mellnick shares his story at Smitty’s Bar in Washington, D.C. in April 2023. Photo by Ellen Rolfes.

I'm feeling around for my cell phone so I can get to see what my face looks like. I find it. I put on the selfie camera and it's not as bad as I might have expected. There's a couple of big, yellow blocks wrapped around my head and there's some blood on my nose and a couple of oxygen tubes but it's not so bad.

I take a selfie and then I look at the selfie. I don't like the selfie so I take a few more. Like even in an emergency room, the vanity of selfie etiquette prevails.

This is when I hear a voice say, “Oh, good, you're awake.” A police officer steps into view and says, “This is for you. You gotta be more careful out there,” and he hands me a piece of paper.

I'm not thinking fast enough to be able to ask him for the details of like what happened and the car and anything I can get. I'm just kind of a little bit pissed that I'm getting ticketed for getting hit by a car. I can't really even read the ticket so I just put it in my pocket. I'm paying more attention to a guy in a lab coat who's coming straight at me with like that Terminator commitment the way he's looking at me.

He gets to my bed and he says, “You want to get a CAT scan?” As if like he and his buddies are going out for CAT scans and they wonder if I want in. I'm not really in a position to make the choice on this so I defer to him.

So he wheels me into the next room for CAT scan where the technician I think explains to me how a CAT scan works but he might as well have been speaking in some exotic foreign language at auctioneer speed because I can't get any of it. All I get is the final question which is, “Do you have any questions?”

My only question is, “Do you know what happened to me?”

And he says, “You were in a bike accident. That's all I know.”

I'm like, “Yeah, that much I'm aware of.”

So they do the CAT scan and then they wheel me back into my spot in the hallway. I look at my phone again and I've got a pile of missed phone calls and messages, which is when I remember, oh, shit, I sent one of those photos to my good friend Josh with no caption or explanation, which is not cool to do to your friends.

I call him up. He's like, “What happened?”

I said, “I was in a bike accident.”

He says, “I'm on my way,” and he hangs up. I'm assuming I also told him where I was because he got there about 20 minutes later. He's the first person I feel like is really… he's really compassionate. He's there for me when he gets there and it feels good.

He walks in and he sees something on my ear and he says, “Is that silver glitter on your ear?” And he's like, “Did you get hit by a car at a strip club?”

But then it's our first clue. It's like, okay, it was a car. It's a silver car and I'm trying to remember this but it's like I've got 10 pieces of a 10,000 piece puzzle and I'm rearranging them hoping to make some sense of this but, somehow, I can't. I can't get very far.

Then I overhear two nurses talking and one of them says, “So how drunk do you think that guy is,” and he gestures over to me. The other says, “I assume like really drunk.”

And so the guy walks over to me and he says, “We need to give you a breathalyzer test,” but he says it in the tone as if it's just to settle a bet. So I blow into it and he looks at the results.

He's visibly confused. He says, “You're not drunk at all. I mean, you're not sober either but you're sober enough to drive a metro bus.”

I think, “That shouldn't be a phrase.”

Then he goes off and I'm just so frustrated. I appreciate everyone's doing their job but this just feels like this perfect metaphor for society today or something that like if you let your guard down for a second, you're going to literally get run over. A lot of people aren't going to notice or care and you just kind of go on with it.

Keith Mellnick after the accident. Photo courtesy of Keith Mellnick.

I was lying there for probably a half hour, 45 minutes. How many people went by without calling 9 1 1? Not maliciously but, you know, maybe they're looking at their phones or maybe they assume someone else had called. We're all just caught up our own worlds and it kind of pisses me off. I really don't feel like interacting with humans ever again.

I mean, we're sitting there until 2:00 in the morning when the doctor finally walks out and she says, “Sorry it took so long, but we've got all your results back and it's all good news. You've got a mild concussion. You've got a cracked rib, but that's pretty much it. You got really lucky.”

I appreciate that that's all the damage but I don't want to be told I've been lucky for getting hit by a car.

She says, “Do you have any questions before we let you go?”

I just said, “Yeah. Does anyone have any information about the car that hit me?”

She says, “The car that hit you? That's not our understanding of what happened. Apparently, you fell asleep while riding your bicycle and hit a parked car.”

As soon as she says that I think, “That's right. That's it.” Yeah. Oops.

Suddenly, this little tiny memory that had been dodging me all night long suddenly jumps out of me closing my eyes for a second trying to be mindful of this moment, and then a tiny voice in the back of my head saying, “Dude, do not fall asleep. Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”

But the doctor goes on to explain a little bit more. She says, “As soon as your body tore off someone's side mirror with presumably your rib cage, your head bounced off the hood. Luckily, you were wearing your helmet. And, immediately, a car going the other way pulled over and called 9 1 1. Two people on a passing bus called 9 1 1. Two pedestrians ran up. One called 9 1 1, the other stood in the road and blocked off the area and protected you until the EMTs got there.”

At this point, even my Grinch heart has grown three sizes. I think about all these people who I've been blaming anonymously who pretty much saved my life and then I make a commitment to try and be more compassionate in stressful, uncertain moments.

And yet there's still one person I haven't yet let off the hook and that's the police officer. So I go and I reach into my pocket to look at that piece of paper and, sure enough, it's a ticket. For 25 measly dollars for not paying appropriate attention to my surroundings.

Thank you.

Part 2

It's 7:30 in the morning and I'm booking it to the Astoria Ditmars station. It's December of 2022. I'm in my neurology rotation and it's the day of my last case presentation.

Me being the perfectionist that I am, I stayed up a little bit too late working on it the night before, which led me to oversleep, which led me to where I was right now running after the subway station.

So I run up those stairs. I hear the little ‘too-doo’ of the subway doors as they're closing and I make it just in time for them to shut in my face. I know. The worst. I walk out of breath to the middle of the subway station and, as any other typical medical student would do, I just pull out my phone to start preparing.

Fabiola Plaza shares her story at Kraine Theater in New York, NY in March 2023. Photo by Zhen Qin.

For those of you who don't know, the third year of medical school can be pretty tough. It's a lot of studying and a lot of information being thrown at you constantly. A lot of the times I find myself with this mindset of medical school is just simply a stepping stone before I get to do what I actually want to do, which is being a doctor and helping others.

Anyways, I'm standing in this middle of the subway station and a phone in my hand. Out of the corner of my eye, I see this short Hispanic woman, which is funny to say because I too am a short Hispanic woman, dressed in a cardigan that is far too thin for this December. She walks up to me. In a thick Spanish accent she asks me, “Hi, do you speak Spanish?”

To which I say, “Si, que necesita?” Yes, what do you need?

“Quiero ir a East Harlem. Como puedo llegar?” I want to go to East Harlem. How can I get there?

“Puedes sentarte conmigo porque voy el mismo direccion.” You can sit with me because I'm going in the same direction.

I always give directions to anyone who asks them of me in the subway. I remember being 18 when I first moved to New York City. I was moving in as a first year at Columbia University coming from Florida. I'm sorry. I'm a Florida woman. We're not as bad as they all think. And I was so overwhelmed by the subway system so I can imagine how much this woman is feeling, so overwhelmed even with the added language barrier.

I never know whether or not I should start talking to the person I'm giving directions to or if we should just stand there next to each other quietly on the subway, but she quickly breaks the silence and she introduces herself.

“Hola, me llamo Maria. Por cuanto tiempo estas aqui?” Hi, my name is Maria and for how long have you been here?

I tell her how I moved here from Venezuela when I was eight years old. I moved with my whole family. I'm one of seven. I remember my home country very vividly. I know exactly what my backyard looked like and I know how gorgeous the beaches are in Venezuela. And I remember being on that plane and not knowing whether or not this was forever but knowing I was saying goodbye for a while.

In my first two weeks of being in this country, Hurricane Wilma hit. We had no furniture, no electricity. I looked at my parents and I said, “Is this really the American dream y'all talking about?” I could not believe it.

I then asked her, “How long have you been here?” She replies that she's been here for three months now.

I asked her the most loaded question you can ask any immigrant, which is, “Why did you come here?” And she replies for her own American dream. She has two kids back at home who are adult children. One of them ‘tiene sus ojos’, meaning ‘I have her eyes’ and she's working to send them money back home.

She currently works as a nanny making ‘muy poquito’ working for three children who are all under 10. This is actually her first day off in the three months that she's been here.

So she responds and she asks me, “What do you do for work?” And I tell her that I'm a medical student. And in that moment it occurs to me to ask her, “Where do you get your medical care?

“No sé. No tengo seguro.” I don't know. I don't have insurance, she tells me.

And me being the curious medical student, I ask her, “Do you have any long standing medical issues?” To which she tells me that years ago, she had a large goiter in her neck and so she had her thyroid taken out. She only came here with three months’ worth of her thyroid medication and she's been spacing them out to make them last.

“Ahora no puedo sentir los puntos de mis dedos.” Now, I can't feel the tips of my fingers.

In that moment, it dawns on me how all of the problems in her life, immigrating, getting this job, working every day have caused her to cast her health issues to the side. Immediately, I recognize that if I don't get her an appointment right now as I'm sitting next to her, I don't know if she'll get herself that appointment.

So I remember I'm a part of the Latino Medical Student Association, a large national organization of Latinos all over the country. I send a quick message in this group chat saying, “Is anyone here from Mount Sinai,” because they have a free clinic close to East Harlem. Within a minute, I get a reply with someone's number.

And as we're waiting for the six, Maria and I are huddled by my phone as it's on speaker, with the loud subways blaring past us, trying to get this appointment in. Within minutes, she has an appointment. I felt so accomplished that I was finally able to get her the medical care that she actually deserves.

So we get back onto the six and she asks, she tells me I'm her guardian angel. She thanks me so much and she asks me for my number. Usually, I don't give my number to strangers on the subway but at this moment I was like, “Okay. You are my tia now. You're my auntie now. Of course, we can exchange numbers.”

Then in the middle of my presentation later on that day, I get a text from her in typical Hispanic kind of mother grammar saying, “Hola, Fabiola. Que hermosa eres. Cuidate mi niña. Que Dios te proteja siempre y pronto seras mi medica.”

Hello, Fabiola. How beautiful you are. She said that. That's not me saying that. May God protect you always and soon you will be my doctor.

When I read her text message, I thought back to when I moved to this country. It's hard enough being the new kid, but it's even harder when you're an immigrant and you have an accent. I felt ashamed of my heritage when I was growing up because it constantly reminded me that I was the other. Never would I have thought that I would be standing here in front of you guys telling the story about how proud I am of my heritage because, without it, I wouldn't have been connected to this large organization of Latinos. I wouldn't have been able to speak to this random stranger on the subway in her native language and I never would have met my future patient, Maria.

Thank you.