A man walked into my office twisted with concern about his 9 year old clutched by his side.
"Doctor, she has a boil on her chest and it's not going."
They had flogged the illness with antibiotics and now that it was out of their hands, a doctor had to save the day.
So I asked the little girl to come show me this swelling on the couch. While her hands reached for more buttons of her pink shirt to open, I saw it. She pointed me there with a finger from her other hand.
What was a "boil" to them was a budding breast...a painless growth peeking through her chest to ensure she becomes the beautiful woman she was designed to be.
The father had grown up in an age when girls reached thelarche at age 13. To see the seemingly far-fetched breast development begin in his 9 year old innocent baby suddenly struck him with ounces of surprise too heavy for his composure.
"Ah, she has begun the journey of a woman!" he exclaimed with wet eyes.
I understood the emotion. He had prepared his whole life to be there for his little girl in the various stages of her own life and he couldn't even identify when "life" began for her.
He had tried to cure with antibiotics what he should have celebrated with fatherly embrace.
Maybe I won't have had that patient if she had a mother to relate with or an older female friend she often talked to but I didn't bother exploring why they came to the hospital rather than rely on social information.
More poignantly, I stared at my life, our life too, just as he must have wondered about the chest growth on his daughter.
Could it be possible that we are trying to cure our own "boils" not knowing they are "breast-buds"?
Could it be possible that what we are wishing away, praying off, casting out, hating on is the very thing without which we will be nothing like we are meant to be?
Thank God he doesn't heal some of our "boils". Much as we would like Him to, he knows they are breasts masquerading through our stark ignorance as diseases rather than desires.