From Jamaica to the Pelvic Floor

April 9 2026 On my way to work I stopped at the deli to get some tea. The tuxedo kitten who used to wrap around my ankles is now a big guy lounging on the top shelf behind the register while supervising all the transactions. The young woman ahead of me is pulling colorful cups out of a container on the counter while waiting for her mom to pick up. “Mom! They have jellies, they’re like jello with fruit?? They have them in Jamaica, so I have to get some!” Either her mother is loud, or her volume is up high because I hear her mother say in a heavy accent “They don’t call them that in Jamaica. The conversation has caught the attention of the other person waiting, a tall black man. “Are you from Jamaica he asks?” “I was born there,” she said. “I came here when I was 7.” “Why don’t you sound Jamaican ?” he asked teasingly, and I heard the traces of his own accent. “My mother never talked to us like that growing up,” she starts to explain and then gets flustered . “Mom! It’s your fault, you can explain.” When I left, Mom and the man were talking to each other through the phone while the deli clerk and the cat watched it all like a one act play had suddenly erupted among the racks of chips and candy. At work, the theme of the day is struggling with the Social Security Admin who had their staff decimated by Musk. Not only are they now short-handed, my friend who is an expert SSI lawyer pointed out that because many people took early retirement they lost the people who actually knew how the extremely complex system worked. They are trying to compensate by putting more of their functions online and pushing people to interact with them that way. The problem is that to even set up an online account with them, you have to make it through a rigorous identity verification process. I could probably do it since I have had the same home address since 1996 and the same cell number since I started working at Sylvia’s more than 20 years ago. But for our young homeless clients, it can be impossible. The client we’re working with needs to replace his social security card– when young people run from violent homes or are thrown out in a dramatic, angry scene, this type of document often gets left behind. Before COVID, you could take your ID to the card center down on Williams Street, fill in a form and the card would come in the mail. Now you have to have an appointment, which you are supposed to make online. But when I press the button that should take me to the appointment page, I get a royal blue box with no text at all. There is one word- “continue” – at the bottom but pressing that takes me back to the page I just came from. I give up, adding that task to the list to be done another day when hopefully the website will have recovered. The next thing to do is to help someone apply for disability benefits. This is another thing you used to be able to start by walking in and waiting a long time. Now you are supposed to be able to do it online. But first you need an account, and that means the identity verification. It’s going ok until the end when it asks for his phone number. This is a client who does not have a phone. He often uses our office number so we try that – and it can’t verify him. Misty, the staff member who is most adept with computerish things, takes over while I go deal with things downstairs. When I come back up, they are still struggling with it, so I dial social security and turn down the volume so that the hold music is playing quietly in the background. We have spent so much time on hold with them that Misty starts singing along with the music. An hour later – which is actually not that long for this type of call – someone picks up. She searches, but then comes back and says there are no appointments available and that she will have to message our local office on 48th St so they can contact me when they have one available. This also happened the last time I called. This process leaves no flexibility in scheduling – when they offer you an appointment, you just have to grab it and make yourself available. At 6pm, a couple of clients were still hanging around, just enjoying the trans-friendly space. I didn’t want to rush them, but I had to dash out the door to get to Union Square for physical therapy. When I got there therapist asked me if I’d found my cat. I told her I had, but I must have seemed surprised that she remembered because she said, “you were very stressed last time.” She gave me these stretchy things to pull and told me to “row.” “I used to row with my dad in Central Park.” I told her. “Are those boats all manual?” she asked. When I said that they are, she told me that she had walked by the lake with her niece and they considered rowing but were afraid they would get stuck in the middle of the lake. “It’s not hard,” I told her “You’re pushing the water so if you want to go forward you go like this, and to go backwards you reverse it. To turn you just use one oar. One person can use both oars, or two people can each take an oar and coordinate.” She went to help the other patient, leaving me with the stretchy bands and my memories. The last time I went rowing was maybe a year before Dad died. Kate and I did the rowing this time, Dad was just along for the ride. He was totally blind by then, and pretty confused, but he could feel that we were on water. “What ocean is this?” he asked, probably thinking of the many cruise ships he'd been on. He liked to take the long trip to Europe where he would buy his extremely expensive eyedrops for much less in France. Once we explained that it was a lake, not an ocean, he trailed his hand over the side, feeling the water and the aquatic plants, “seeing” them with his fingers. The next thing was isometric exercises with a squishy yellow ball. When we got to the backwards ones, jabbing the ball with my elbow, I joked that it was like elbowing someone on the subway. She laughed. “Maybe that’s what we’re practicing,” she said. At the end of the session, she told me that she wouldn’t be in for a week. “Are you going away?” I asked. “Professional development,” she told me. “Mt Sinai is opening a pelvic floor program.” As I got on the empty elevator, I considered that and I thought to myself that at least there was one medical problem I don’t have.