In Stitches Anonymous

I wasn’t going home with my mom that night. She was waiting outside the clinic to pick me up just like she did every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday night, and I heard my phone buzz with the predictable “I’m here” text. But instead, I told her to head back. I felt bad, but this wasn’t like most nights at the clinic. This night was shaping up to be the greatest night of my life. I was going to be assisting in a stitch-removal procedure.

OK, it sounds pretty lame. But you don’t have the opportunity to get up close and personal with injuries like that as a high school student unless you’re the one with the injury.

As the longest-standing employee at my clinic, Pediatric and Adolescent Care Associates (three years and counting!), I’m trained to do basically everything involved in running a clinic—except, of course, the actual being-a-doctor part (I hear I need a few more years of education for that bit). I suppose I’m a medical assistant-receptionist hybrid. Most of my evenings are spent preparing all the patient materials, taking and answering messages, getting vital signs and medical histories, and taking notes for charts. But because I do so many different tasks, I spend most of my time as a receptionist rather than as an...