I KNEW A WOMAN
The Experience of the Female Body
by Cortney Davis C 2001
Random House, New York
Cortney Davis is a nurse practitioner and poet, and what she wrote, "I Knew A Woman," is a beautiful book that follows her professional and private responses to some of her patients at a low-income and homeless gynecology clinic. One reviewer, Sapphire, says it better than me when she calls this book "an extraordinary blend of memoir, fiction, and clinical detail." I followed especially the story of Lila, the homeless teenager pregnant and living in a car with her legal adult boyfriend, as she grasps independence to make a life with her just born baby. It just so happens that I know someone in almost this same situation, a young woman with few choices who makes dumb choices when she can, who has just passed through my life, and I felt some synchronicity was involved in my reading this book.
I tend to walk around a library and let books fall off the shelves to my feet begging to be read... OK, not really, though that has happened...
I see how I become interested in a book because of the art of the book at times, lured by cover art, typography, and that was the case with this one. I was in for a wonderful surprise of a book, one I could not anticipate, at once titillating my interest in Womans Studies as well as the secrets of the female body, one of which I am in this life.
I don't think I will ever quite think of a visit to the doctor (or nurse practitioner) the same. I know now that they are judging me and my health from the moment I walk in, even based on what I am wearing and my attitude, and that they may cloak what they are really thinking or know about my condition from me for reasons of professionalism. I will be more sure than ever that they intuitively know if I am sick and what my prognosis will be while also being willing to give hope a greater chance than there is reason for.
Cortney Davis too reacts to her patients relating their desperation or poverty in terms of her own life experience. Page 118, hardback:
"What if there had been a fire? What if someone had broken into my apartment - not an uncommon occurrence in that neighborhood - and found my son and daughter? When I look at Lila, I remember being alone and poor and at my wit's end. When I look at Lila, her swollen belly, her thin lips, her jangle of earrings and chains, I remember something a great poet once told me. "Poems that are too perfect," he said,"like lives that are too ordered, lack the human mistakes that make them real." Because I never forget the reality of what I've experienced, I can forgive many of the mistakes I see my patients make. Because I know that I am a different person now, I trust that they, too, will change; that the girl Lila is now is not the woman Lila will become."
