The extra time I spend with them sets me back, making me a few minutes late for the next appointment. It is a domino effect, one that happens more often than I’d like because compassion is not easily rationed. I bounce from room to room, checking wounds and scans, charting treatment courses, offering surgery to one patient and a hug to another.

I fall into my office chair to sign off on orders and see a sticky note on my computer screen. It’s a web address with my assistant Lacey’s signature smiley face on the bottom.

Curious, I type the web address into the browser and see that one of my patients has transformed her food blog into one about her journey from diagnosis to treatment. She’s written a post on her first visit with me, when I surprised her by asking about her work and family before asking about her symptoms. I remember her nodding and biting her lip in our last visit. It had taken time to get her talking. She’s posted pictures of herself with her family, a tangle of limbs and grins on a scruffy sofa.

I close the browser. Clinic is messy enough as it is. The operating room is a theater sanitized of microbes and emotions. When I bring scalpel to skin, I am gloved and gowned, capped and masked. Patients are transformed too, draped in completely sterile blue sheets so that only the relevant square of skin is exposed.

My cell phone rings.

“What’s up, Dayo?”

“My blood pressure,” she replies. Dayo was two years ahead of me in residency, where we were the only women in the program. She chose to subspecialize in breast care while I chose oncology.

“What is it this time?” I say, glad to hear her voice. Dayo never gets angry without reason, nor does she ever not turn her anger into action.

“I just sent you something I got from an ER resident. She was intubating a critical patient, and some dude tells her that she looked hot doing it.” I hear her greet someone cheerily, then pick up where she left off. “And this dude happened to be her supervising attending. Such bullshit.”

“Completely. I’m sure you provided her with some sound advice already. When are you off next week? You owe me tacos.”

“People are getting tired of my advice. Reporting this stuff doesn’t give anyone satisfaction. Anyway, call me when the taco truck is on your block,” she says before she hangs up.

Dayo, whose family had immigrated from Nigeria when she was sixteen, started off as my mentor but became so much more when the city imploded.