My mother kept a list of every female doctor she had ever seen who was 'good.' It was on the side of her refrigerator for thirty years. Eight names by the end. She updated it the way other women update Christmas card addresses.
She did not explain why she kept the list. She did not need to. I figured it out somewhere around eighteen, the first time I made an appointment for myself and she said, on the phone, in a particular tone: ‘See if you can get Dr. Choi.’ She did not say ‘ask for the woman.’ She did not need to.
The list went into her things when she died. I have it in a drawer. Eight names, in three different pen colors, with little notations next to each: 'listens,' 'won’t rush,' 'will refer.' One says 'doesn’t talk down.' One says 'good after Christine.' Christine was the doctor my mother saw before this one; she had stopped going when Christine retired. The list was a relay system she had built so I would not have to start from scratch.
I added a name to it last year. I do not know if I will give it to my daughter or if she will inherit it the way I did, by going through her grandmother’s drawers. Either way, the list will outlive me. It already has the only sentence my mother ever directly said to me about being a woman in a doctor’s office: 'It matters who’s in the room.'