It is simply a pleasure to talk with Marine-she has a big forehead, beautiful teeth, hazel eyes and is up-to-date with the latest fashion trends. Ten years after moving to New York, Marine has turned into a New Yorker with her preferences, lifestyle, humor, energy and manias. Marine Sisakyan is member of the New York Medical College Department where she teaches and administers the hospital; she also works as a doctor and psychiatrist at the ambulance department of the “Metropolitan Hospital Centre”, she has her own practice and is a psychiatrist at the East Upper Side of New York.
“I love my profession because it is difficult, complicated yet at the same time interesting. It’s a matter of life and death. It seems as though working as a first-aid doctor is like extreme medicine-they might bring in six to seven patients with different problems starting from suicide and ending with cocaine abuse,” says Marine who believes that despite her heavy schedule, she practically doesn’t get tired.
“If I have a good patient and he knows what he is doing, I don’t get tired. But if I don’t trust him, then it’s obvious that I get tired. I go on Sunday at midnight and work until 8 in the morning. I walk home from the hospital for twenty minutes, exercise for half an hour, take a shower and then go to my office. I have to be there at nine”.
Marine is the psychiatrist of the residents of the Upper East Side of New York, or East New York. This is the section from 57th street to the 5th avenue where the wealthiest people live. “One of my patients is the son of actor Dudley Moore. He suffers from bipolarity. I have 70 patients whom I have to see at least once a month. I usually visit them”.
-So, you are a VIP psychiatrist.
-You could say that. One of my patients is a French woman. She has studied art and communications at the university and was diagnosed with a psychological disorder during her senior year. She is an artist, has had 4-5 exhibitions, but she is a schizophrenic. Her parents spent millions, but nothing helped.
– So, is stress more common among rich people?
-I can’t generalize, but most of them are drug addicts. They use cocaine. I have a patient who is a 48-year old millionaire, has buildings, hasn’t worked his entire life, isn’t married and doesn’t have any kids. He only wears “Chanel” brand name clothes each costing 4-5 thousand dollars. However, he suffers from schizophrenia and one of the manifestations of that is that he can’t spend money on food. He spends 15,000 dollars on diamonds at the store, but doesn’t spend any money on food. He asked me to take him to the store to buy food. He didn’t buy anything, tasted on the spot and was full…One time they brought in a patient who was an extremely handsome man around 35. He was a Harvard graduate, but was completely…naked. He had a psychological disorder. He hadn’t taken his medicine for a while and had started to use cocaine. Police had found him naked in Central Park (one of the most well-known and green areas of New York, the “Monument” of Armenians in America, but more spacious, beautiful and preserved, without any deforestations, hotels or villas-A.A.). When asked why he was naked, he said: “I decided to share the beauty of my body with the rest of the world”. Well, what was I supposed to say to that? I told him that his body was really beautiful. He knew seven languages, knew about Armenia, the Genocide and even pronounced a couple of Armenian words. But he suffered from multi-personality. It is a chronic disease and starts from the age of 18.
According to Marine, you must have knowledge of New Yorker culture and go with the rhythm of life in order to work as a psychiatrist in New York. You have to know how the people live; otherwise you can’t give a complete evaluation about the hardships, lifestyles and goals of the people. “If I approach people with the Yerevan mentality, then I have to cure everyone in New York. Even family relations are different in New York. New York is really different. I remember during my first years in America we went to Florida for a vacation. I realized that people there were really different. I told my American friends and they told me Marine, they are the real Americans; New Yorkers are not Americans, New Yorkers are New Yorkers, they are unique in their own way”.
Marine’s story would have been the story of an ideal, successful person if it weren’t for one thing. We were eating at a restaurant, which is one of the most popular and expensive spots in New York, and I noticed that Marine was eating with her left hand because she didn’t have a right hand. She had lost it twenty years ago during the 1988 earthquake and it turned out that it was that loss that made her pack and escape to New York.
“After the earthquake, it was difficult for me to continue living in Armenia. I was living in Spitak and I was only 24-years old. I immediately aged. I lost my mother, my 30-year old husband and my two-month old baby…I only had my older son David who was one and a half years old at the time”.
Marine was also on the verge of dying. First in Moscow, then the treatment in New York saved her life. She moved to Yerevan in the ‘90s where she started to work as an artist. She went back to New York again and this time the goal was to study reanimation medicine.
“I came to the University of Columbia in 1992 to study reanimation medicine with famous doctor Stanley Meyers. After working with him for two months, he told me that I have to examine his patients. I told him that I don’t speak good English, am handicapped and can’t treat patients with one hand. He said that I can and that was the end of discussion. I believed in him; he instilled so much faith and belief in me. I used to watch from the side how his patients were scared of his shaking hands and was amazed that I would be authorized to treat patients. It felt like I was in a dream.”
After training, Marine returned to Spitak to work in the hospital founded by Norwegians. But she then realized that she could no longer stay in her native city.
“The patients used to come and say ‘your life is in ruins, look at what happened to you’. I couldn’t live in that environment. People would remind me every day of who I was, what I had, whom I had lost, saying ‘see what happened to Marine”…As if my pain and tragedy weren’t enough, now they were reminding me of that, as if I would forget…”
Marine made her final trip to New York and stayed. She only came for a year and has been living her for ten years ever since. After a while, she met with Armenian doctors who advised her to take the required exams to work as a doctor. “I started to study, took courses. I had answered half of the questions during the first exam and got 68%, which was not enough. I cried so much, I was crying like a schoolgirl. My American friends started counting the points for the questions I had answered and noticed that I had really answered almost 90% of the questions. I hadn’t even reached half of the questions. I had to sit down, read and answer the questions and I did just that.”
Marine is a very charming and energetic woman who faced even the hardships of life in America.
“It was very difficult-I had a child, limited resources and was living without the authorization to work. I was living in such a bad apartment; my son and I used to spend hours and days in the metropolitan museum in order to cut off from the bad environment so I wouldn’t feel depressed…I used to go and sit in the furniture department of Bloomingales and read, I practically spent my nights at the Barnes-and-Nobles bookstore and I never missed out on the free concerts at Central Park. So, I have suffered a lot, more than you could imagine. I still don’t have a “Green Card”; I am here with a business visa. My son David tells me that you have to take the hard road to do everything. I can’t receive a loan for my son’s education because I don’t have a “Green Card” and I have to send a 3,500 dollar check every 1st of the month,” says Marine and continues after a short pause: “When you lose so many things…what could have possibly scared me more? I lost my mother, husband and child. This life was a gift and I have to live for the sake of my David. I am working so that David will have everything, in fact even more than I had. But of course, I am sad; I have succeeded yet it is painful. Words can’t describe how much I miss my mother, how much I need my husband…”
Marine did not remarry. After our dinner, we took a stroll around Manhattan. We went everywhere-sat in different cafes and talked about everything. Marine told me about her first years in New York and how she had rented an apartment from an Armenian millionaire living in New York who later turned out to be a sex maniac. Maine was forced to spend all of her money to pay lawyers to try her case in court. After a couple of years, she lived with an Armenian woman who was doing everything possible to get intimate with Marine’s son David.
“Each person has a crazy story to tell in this crazy city,” says Marine in closing whose friends told me to be tactful when discussing her past.
Marine’s wounds still have not healed and perhaps that is the reason why she works on December 7th every year. It is the day of the earthquake and she always has a fever on that day. As a doctor, she can’t find any explanation for that. She doesn’t even try to find the explanation because she already knows why.