I was fully aware that I was of interest to the interns because of the ways in which doctors had worked on and altered my body. But I wasn’t a car or an experimenter, and I didn’t want to be regarded as such. Eventually, Dr. Elliot understood and complied. “You’re all grown up now,” he said. Vince clearly was not going to acknowledge this. What was I to him, then, as a patient? Perpetually a little girl? A half-man, an almost-man, an almost-woman, an almost-person?
In this quote Emily Rapp is looking back on a memory she has that she can easily recall. She is writing in first person. She writes about how she viewed the experiment when it was happening and then towards the end of the quote she states her point of view that she has now looking back on the event. This is clear when she uses the phrase, “What was I to him, then, as a patient?” She is trying to illustrate how she is now realizing how naive she was then and how naive the people in her life believed her to be. In trying to figure this out she tries to put herself in Vince’s shoes and ask what he was thinking.