CIVILIAN . YUKIMURA, KEI

Female

Heterosexual

Thirty-nine

March 28, 1973

Japanese

Japanese
French
English
Spanish

雪村啓
Minette

0.50
1.25
until the month of June

Civilian

N/A

N/A

08/20/13 by Dani

Kel

None

Yes, No, Whatever.

NAOMI KIMISHIMA from TRAUMA CENTER

Kei is currently employed by Hope Hospital as an ER doctor. Formerly she was a cardiologist at Cleveland Clinic (which is highly ironic given Hope Hospital is well-known for its cardiology department), but Kei has her reasons for changing specializations. Of course due to switching specializations, she is once again in a residency program (bottom of the totem pole) and her schedule can get more than a little hectic with her working upwards of 80-90 hours a week. Despite working like a dog, pay as an ER doctor is not as high as a cardiologist. However, Kei is still considered as upper middle (borderline upper) class due to her family background and financial assets.

At present, Kei lives in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, or at least she does whenever her daughter is with her. When her darling nine year old is with her father, Kei lives in the heart of Los Angeles in a spacious studio apartment as a way to avoid the killer commute. Her Palos Verdes home is needlessly large; 6,838 square feet of living space. Five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a wine cellar, a pool, a private elevator, and ocean views to take your breath away; her ex swears she bought the luxurious home as a way of bribing Nanako to stay with her more often. Perhaps he's right, but thus far she's had little success. The studio apartment in the city is 795 square feet with a decent-sized kitchen, a living and sleeping area, and a balcony.

Thanks to her mixed descent, Kei has a few rather eye-catching features. Most noticeably her long hair is white as the driven snow (she started going grey, so why not just skip straight to white?) and her eyes are an extremely light and vivid blue. Her eyes are more European in shape, rounded and with a more definite eyelid. However, the majority of her facial features come from her Japanese heritage. She has a small oval face and her eyes are neither wide-set nor close together. Her facial structure is delicate, but with a firm jawline, and a few worry lines have begun to crease her forehead.

Overall her bone structure is delicate and slender, but with subtly defined muscles that give her shape. Kei’s definitely no Olympic athlete but she at least looks like she works out to a certain degree (and she does, to a certain degree). Being in shape means she’s also fairly light at just about 135 pounds. She’s slightly taller than your average Asian, thanks no doubt to her French blood, and stands just over 5’7”. Most of that height comes from her legs and, if she had to pick, it would be her legs that she considered her best feature. Her chest is not as small as your typical Asian either, yay C cup!

In the hospital she wears the white coat you stereotypically think of doctors wearing, paired usually with a blouse, skirt, and a pair of comfortable kitten heels. Some mascara and a touch of lipstick, and she’s ready for work. On occasion she’ll opt for slacks and a comfortable pair of work shoes though; even she appreciates practicality over fashion every now and again. You may even catch her schlepping it in her scrubs and no makeup on days when she just can’t be bothered to care about her appearance – the infamous burnout effect.

On her days off you might catch Kei sporting a spindly pair of stilettos that’ll make your ankles hurt just looking at and low cut, short dresses that don’t leave much to the imagination. She might be nearly over the hill, but that doesn’t mean she can’t look damn sexy. Of course she dresses far more practically when her daughter is around or if she’s, say, going on a hike. Long sleeves, conservative hemlines, properly covered cleavage, the whole shebang.

Rule-follower, strict, inflexible – there are rules for a reason. They don’t necessarily have to be her own personal rules, or be terribly logical, just rules in general are meant to be followed. She follows instructions to a T and expects others to do the same, and so help you if you try to go against the grain. If the red hand is flashing in the crosswalk, you don’t cross, if bedtime is at 9pm, there will be no concessions. And when it comes to work, she’s the medical world equivalent of a strict Catholic nun. You better behave or she’s gonna break out that ruler.

Uptight, boring – basically she is incapable of cutting loose or just letting go. She’s folded herself into this neat little mold and doing anything out of the norm is just inconceivable. Of course, on that note, her daughter has brought up many times how “boring” her mother is. She never does anything ‘bad’, she never does anything ‘fun’. So to her credit, Kei is trying. She can loosen up too if she wants to. Did you know, she took a pen from the radiologist’s office last Thursday and still hasn’t returned it! Scandalous!

Diligent, persistent, determined – bottom line is she’s a hard worker and she won’t quit until she’s done. Kei will burn the candle at both ends if that’s what it takes; she’s not one to shy away from putting in the hours to do the job correctly and completely. Of course there are others who would call her obsessive, but Kei prefers to look at the positive side of this trait. Unfortunately there have been sacrifices due to her (at times) overzealous work ethic – her marriage, quality time with her daughter… She’s like a bloodhound on the scent and can have a very one-track mind, which sadly means that other (more important) things get put on the back burner.

Intelligent, logical – it comes as no surprise that Kei possesses a high degree of intelligence. She’s also extremely logical and firmly believes that everything has an explanation, no matter how farfetched that explanation is. She’s never been a big fan of “random” events and, although she’s not one to believe in a higher power, she’s aware that there are some things which can’t be explained…yet. Little inconsistencies weigh on her mind and she’s always working on sorting them out in the far recesses of her mind. Of course, being too smart can also be a harmful thing.

Naturally being a medical physician, she certainly has book smarts in spades; it’s the street smarts that she lacks. She’s gained a special discerning eye that one acquires from years of looking at patients (this one is trying to scam me for pills, that one is seeking attention), but applying that to the world outside the hospital is a different story for her. Kei’s naturally inclined to be more cynical and dubious of people’s intentions, because logically she knows that the majority have less-than-pure reasons, but a tiny part of her still hopes for the best in her fellow humankind.

Decisive, authoritative – she’s not one to roll over and take it, or stand still for lack of action. Kei makes up her mind quickly and resolutely, she’s the one people look to for leadership in emergency situations. Perhaps her plan of action will be the wrong one, but she’s not about to sit there wasting time trying to make up her mind. This has been more of an acquired trait; when she was younger Kei feared making any move without her father’s approval and figuratively ‘danced to the beat of his drum’ until she entered her third year of med school (24). When your action or inaction is literally the difference between life and death, you learn to grow a pair.

Tactless, insensitive – if there’s one thing she hasn’t learned, it’s how to sugar coat the bad news. Kei’s never had a way with words and it shows so very clearly when she has to give patients or families the bad news. It’s not really a lack of warmth or empathy, or plain brutal honesty; she just always seems to fail at using the right words to “put it nicely” in a way that doesn’t offend anyone. Sometimes people chalk it up to a culture thing when she speaks too bluntly or uses a sensitive word, but there are other patients and family members who have flat out threatened to sue.

Concerned parent – of course she’s going to worry and fret over her daughter and their mother-daughter relationship. In the past year Kei has felt a growing distance between herself and her daughter, and she’s desperate to lessen it. Buying a beautiful home for Nanako to stay in when she visits, taking Nanako to amusement parks, the zoo, attending festivals together. She’s always worried over being a good mother and whether or not she’s doing it right. When her ex moved out to LA, Kei gave up her position as a cardiologist in Ohio and switched to practicing emergency medicine in order to move to LA and work at a hospital near him so that Nanako would have both parents nearby. Hey, she’s trying everything she can to make amends and not play the bad guy.

Born to a Japanese businessman and a French architect in Osaka, Japan, March 28, 1973. To say she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth might be a bit much, but the Yukimura family was definitely well-off. The Japanese economy faced it’s most serious depression later that year with the Oil Crisis of 1973 and was struck again in 1979. Even the wealthy took a hit as oil prices soared. Thankfully due to his shrewd business sense, Kei’s family did not suffer immensely. During this part of her early life, her memories are fleeting and bittersweet – her father coming home late at night (if at all), the smell of sakura in the spring, her mother brushing her hair before bed, humming sweet lullabies in French.

In the early 1980s her father began buying up properties all over the world, but most notably in the United States. He, like many other wealthy Japanese, had discovered there was money to be made in the real estate market abroad. Yet though he began to invest more heavily in real estate, his technology company was still his main focus. New technologies were the future and he was a very forward-thinking man. Thanks to his business decisions, Kei and her mother enjoyed a life of luxury. She attended a private school in Osaka, wore the finest quality clothing, and went on frequent vacations. It was a peaceful and happy time in her life.

1988. A year of change and upheaval. Tragedy struck when Kei’s mother fell deathly ill in early January. She’d always been a frail woman of poor health, but this bout with pneumonia took the last of her. The April funeral had been a bitter event for the then-fifteen year old Kei who attended without her father. It was typical she supposed, that he should have a business meeting on the day of his wife’s funeral. She’s never quite forgiven him for that. Her mother had been a more stable figure in her life; although strict, she had shown affection for her daughter where from her father she received only scant attention. In the years to come she would miss the warmth of her mother, the tenderness when she called her “ma minette” – a French term of endearment meaning “kitten”.

That same year land value hit an all-time high in Japan and Kei’s father decided it was a financially wise decision (and perhaps a necessary change of pace for his daughter) to sell his properties in Tokyo and move his family to the United States, something he had been considering for few years now. Their relationship grew even farther apart after her mother’s death and his decision that they should move to California. If it was possible, she saw her father even less.

Kei began a new school, a new life, in San Francisco, California. She attended a private school, the French American International High School. It wasn’t a terribly difficult transition for her. Japanese and French had been spoken often in her home, and English was taught in school. It was a relief, too, to be surrounded by kids of all different nationalities. She didn’t feel like so much of an outsider; it felt like everyone was in the same boat, and it brought about a sense of camaraderie that she wasn’t familiar with. In Japan, school had always been a competition. You were always striving to be better than the person next to you, not be best friends.

She had always been a bright child and she thrived in the school’s International Baccalaureate program, even picking up Spanish as a fourth language. As a sixteen-year old junior, Kei applied to and was accepted into Oxford University’s Department of Experimental Psychology for the autumn trimester of 1990. There were other universities of better ranking for her degree within the United States (Harvard), but her father wanted his daughter to have an Oxford education. Money had never been an object, and he wanted her to have a worldly experience. She had no real choice in the matter (or she did, but she never went against her father) and thus it was off to England in October.

Four years passed in an instant as she worked on her BA in Psychology and Linguistics. Going into college she had been asked what her aspirations were and what she wanted to do with her degree; at the time she couldn’t have told you. What did she want to do? What did it matter, her father was the one who decided everything. Move to the United States, go to this high school, go to Oxford, she hadn’t said a word. Yet now here she was, at Oxford, literally the world at her fingertips. They told her that she should find something to do that was “of meaning” to her, so she dedicated a small portion of her time trying to decide what in her life actually meant something to her.

Her mother. When she thought back through her seventeen (going on eighteen) years of life the event in her life that held the most meaning was the time she had spent with her mother. Of course her mother had been an architect, not a doctor, but it was from her mother’s death that she drew the inspiration to study medicine. If she had known even a little bit she might have been of help, she could’ve prolonged her mother’s life or prevented her from getting ill. Perhaps it was idealistic, and more than a little naïve, but for the first time she genuinely had something she wanted to do.

When she was nineteen she broached the subject with her father. He was all scowls, but not straight out disapproval. After all, being a doctor was a respected profession that paid well and she was asking his permission before she actually made the decision to apply for med school… Kei got the approval she was seeking – though, looking back, she really had no need to get it. At his behest she looked into universities closer to home with an excellent reputation, University of California – San Francisco fit the bill.

In fall 1994 she began med school with a focus in internal medicine. Never before had she been so busy. Attending med school was a wild ride, that’s for sure. There was no time for a social life, you lived and breathed medicine, and the intensity didn’t lessen at all as she flew right through her four years and into a residency program for cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. Her father wasn’t pleased with her choice, he would have rather she remained in California or at least did her residency with a more prestigious hospital. It was infantile perhaps, but Kei had no desire to do anything he wanted by that point.

In her third and final year of residency she started romantically seeing one of her attendings, never a bright idea when you’re just a resident. It worked out all right in the end, no big issue since she successfully completed her residency there and even took up a fellowship at the same hospital (again it was slightly just to spite her father that she stayed in the center of the country, the center of nowhere as far he was concerned). It was just a fleeting relationship and they mutually separated after a few months, but it was her first taste of an actual relationship.

She met Nanako’s father at a bar near the hospital on May 14, 2001 after a particularly long shift where everything just seemed to go wrong. Though slightly intoxicated, Kei can still recall that night with startling clarity – which might have something to do with the fact that it has been retold many a time. It was certainly a night to remember. He’d come up to her with the cheesiest pick-up line she’d ever heard. “So there you are! I’ve been looking all over for you, the woman of my dreams!” At the start she was confused and tried to rack her brain for where/if she knew this man, but when he got to the end she just bust out laughing. Holy crap was that pathetic.

His smile had faltered a little while she struggled to regain her composure enough to (politely) tell the guy no. “It sounded better before, ya know, in my head.” She focused her gaze on him, light blue eyes full of mirth. “I imagine it did.” Just four words, but my god how it rocked him. The sound of her voice was pleasant to say the least. Her English was perfect with just a hint of a Japanese accent and something of a French one too. Four words and he was hooked, from that day on that man would not leave her alone. It was his persistence that won him a chance at last after several months of trying.

Kei found herself pleasantly surprised by him at every turn, and when a couple months turned into a year, she was sure that she loved him. In late May that year, Kei discovered she was pregnant. What a terrifying and exciting few weeks that was. She was shocked, they had always used protection. Most worrisome to her though was the fact that they weren’t married. My god, her father would never approve. Not to mention that she was currently doing her fellowship in cardiology at the hospital. She had no time for this. But denying the life inside her was impossible and she swallowed down her pride to tell the man she loved. Was he ecstatic? Oh no, much beyond that. The man proposed to her on the spot (he’d been planning to anyway, he said) and tears of relief rolled down her cheeks.

They were married shortly after with her father actually deigning to make an appearance at the ceremony. She had invited him, of course, but to be frank she had not expected much. The wedding was held at a castle in the south of France and it honestly could not have been more like a fairytale. A few months later and they were the proud parents of a beautiful baby girl. Kei took her full twelve weeks of maternity leave at her husband’s insistence. She hadn’t wanted to because it would set her even further back in completing her fellowship, but in the end she still managed to finish and pass her boards perfectly on time.

From the beginning Kei had always been a workaholic. She’d put in 90 hours a week without a second thought, cover shifts for co-workers, and volunteer to be on-call. After her daughter’s birth there was not much of a change. She was like a woman possessed. At the rate she was going, her husband felt Kei was going to burnout soon, but at the very least that she was going to miss important moments in Nanako’s life. It was a constant source of strain for their relationship. He too had a busy career, but still he would carve out time to be home with his daughter. Kei argued fiercely back that his job did not have lives on the line; it wasn’t fair to put the same expectations on her. She was stressed out from the job, the baby, her relationship with her father, her relationship with her husband, and it showed.

January 17, 2008 Nanako’s fifth birthday, Kei missed it – the final straw. It hadn’t been her fault, there had been an emergency at the hospital, but it was all her husband could take. The following day she returned to divorce papers and an explosive argument ensued. Kei was married to her job, she had no time for anyone, let alone her husband and child. He was tired of being the only one who made sacrifices, and she thought he was being unfair. People’s lives were literally in her hands, he just didn’t understand.

It was signed, over, and done with. The courts gave them joint legal and physical custody, but Nanako would primarily reside with her father. It broke her heart to agree to this, but the logic was stacked against her and Kei was intelligent enough to understand why. He had offered to be the one to move out of the house, but Kei didn’t want to cause more upheaval for Nanako. Unfortunately her gracious decision to move out was of no consequence because within the year her ex accepted a job offer in Los Angeles, California. Kei was floored. Not only were they now divorced, but he wanted to move away and take her baby with him?

He had a logical argument. His ex-wife had no time for her daughter and besides, Kei’s father also lived in California and Nanako had never met her grandfather though he had made attempts. Kei had been making things difficult, not wanting to deal with her father whom she still held a grudge against. Of course her husband had kept in touch in her stead, corresponding with her father through phone calls and emails. A few of their arguments had been about this as well, Kei did not approve this way of going around her back. And now he wanted to take their daughter to California, a state she had silently swore not to return to. Kei fought his decision through the legal system, but she was unwilling to reduce her hours, a simple request. The day she put Nanako on the plane with him was the day she drunk herself stupid.

She wallowed in her own personal pit of self-pity for several weeks before deciding to damn it all and just move out there as well. Kei immediately looked into the hospitals in the area, not caring what position was open as long as she was remotely qualified to do it. She secured a job at Hope Hospital working as an ER doctor; a resident once again. Maybe it was overkill, but she also bought a beautiful home along the coast in Palos Verdes. It was frivolous of her and a very obvious bribe. Despite being raised in a wealthy home, Kei had always had a tendency to favor practicality when it came to living spaces – which showed in her choice of a much more utilitarian studio apartment in downtown LA near the hospital, the place where she would live most days.

Being nearby she has been trying to maintain a more active role in Nanako’s life. The first few times Nanako came to spend the weekend with her she was clearly awed by the house and would spend hours exploring it. They enjoyed the pool, went to the beach, honestly any activity that Nanako desired. Kei would bend over backwards to make her daughter happy, though there were still rules that couldn’t be broken. There was a bedtime, there were restrictions on her cellphone use (yes, an eight year old with a cellphone, it’s ludicrous), movies were rated G, there was no wearing makeup, homework and studying were done every night and grades had to be maintained. They weren’t such unreasonable rules, were they? She always felt awful having to lay down the law.

Every scolding Kei gave, she worried herself sick over it afterwards. Did she do the right thing? Was she being too strict? Was she going to lose her daughter? Every “I hate you”, every door slam, every temper tantrum; it cut at her soul. They had fun times too, didn’t they? She could call up the memories if she tried, but she felt like her attempts at peace-making were stymied at every turn. It was always “dad lets me do this”, “dad never makes me…”, “it’s all your fault”, “why did you leave dad?” She never had an answer or a retort. In her daughter’s memories, Kei was never there. She worked long hours, would miss important events, and was just generally a ghost who seemed to come and go like the wind. Kei rationalized that she was just too young to understand the importance of her mother’s job, but that excuse seemed so thin and flimsy to her now…

Now she’s trying to fix the damage, and praying that it’s not too little, too late. The stress of it all is getting to her and usually (on days when she doesn’t have Nanako) you can find her sitting at a bar somewhere nursing a single malt whiskey as soon as she’s off shift. Just that bit of alcohol helps take the edge off; she’ll never admit that it’s becoming a crutch.

Motion Sickness: Kei has a terrible case of motion sickness. Cars, trains, planes, you name it. If it moves faster than her own two feet she’s likely to get sick to her stomach. She takes Dramamine as needed when travel is necessary but does her best to avoid it. A note on cars: Kei does a fair bit better when she’s the one driving and does not need to take any medication for short drives under an hour.

Alcoholic: Although nowhere near as bad as some people, she is to the point of addiction. Her body needs and craves that small bit of liquor at regular intervals. She views it as being under control and, for the most part, it is. Kei is always mindful of the time and her work schedule. If she’s going to be at work in eight hours or less, she won’t drink a drop, and she doesn’t usually drink in excess.

OCD: Although it’s not quite debilitating, yes, she is one of those people who straighten the picture frame on the wall if it’s one millimeter crooked. She also has a habit of counting things. So if there were thirty-three pens and then there are thirty-two, be prepared for her to notice. And you had better be sure never to move anything once she’s set it down. Lord help you if you borrow a stapler and then put it back down two inches to the left. Everything just has its proper place, okay?