I remember one time when I was about ten years old. Around that time every summer our house would become a breeding ground for geckos. There was always a family of geckos clustered around the light as we ate dinner, fighting over the best bugs that were stupid enough to fly towards the bulb.
It was one night that I went into the bathroom to have a shower as usual. I shut the door and locked it, as one does when they have a shower. I then proceeded to have a lovely long shower, daydreaming under the hot steam just like any ten year old girl. I took my time, off on some other planet as usual.
When I was done I opened the door to the bathroom. When I did something caught the corner of my eye, a small movement. So I stopped and examined the place where I thought I had seen something move. It didn’t take me long to find what it had been.
Mum came running the moment she heard me screaming. She came upon me collapsed in the bathroom doorway with tears streaming down my face. “Stephanie, what’s wrong?” she asked me frantically.
It took her a while but eventually she understood, between my sobs, that when I had shut the door when I had first gone into the bathroom, I had caught a gecko in between the doorway and the door.
It was clear that a least one, if not both of its back legs were broken. Half of its intestines had been squished out the side of its body. Blood marked both the edge of the door and the doorframe.
Mum finally managed to calm me down, telling me that geckos heal quickly and it would probably get better soon and that it was just a gecko anyway. She cleaned up the small and rather insignificant mess that it had made because I insisted that I could not walk past those small bloodstains unless they were gone.
I don’t know why that incident made me so upset. But I know that the moment I found the gecko, badly hurt and probably in a lot of pain, I felt horrible. The thing that hurt me the most was the fact that that gecko had been caught right from the beginning of my shower. I had taken my time and enjoyed myself, off in some dream world, all the while this gecko had been caught, unable to escape, unable to stop the pain. And it had not said a word. It didn’t have the ability to make any word that I could hear to let me know that I had hurt it. It couldn’t let me know that it was in pain; no scream or yelp or even a whimper. The fact that it couldn’t let me know made me most upset; I had unknowingly caused it pain and while I was having a great fat time, it was in pain because of something I had done. I was so close to it, and yet oblivious to its suffering. That was what me most upset.
Perhaps that is why I want to be a doctor. So that I can stop people hurting, especially those ones who can’t say when they’re in pain. Those people to whom pain has become a daily thing, a part of life, they are the ones who I want to help most of all.
Because why should I be happily enjoying life, while they are not?
I did not forget that gecko for months afterwards. And even now, sometimes when I walk into the bathroom, I remember that poor gecko, who I hurt, and who could not cry out.
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