Can't be tamed

Today I woke up at 3:30am to have breakfast with Martin before he went in to work.

Then I headed back to bed at 4am. Only to wake up 10 minutes later to sounds of cop cars tearing past with their sirens blaring and a helicopter overhead circling our neighborhood.

Ah, East LA. So different from Streeterville, Chicago.

I hope they found who they were looking for. But I'm double-bolting every single door and every window, just in case.

Karma

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

And oh boy, was I cold.

I woke up at 5am yesterday for the first time since surgery ended, so that I could catch a cab to get to the airport in time to catch my flight to LA. And luckily, there was a cab waiting outside my apartment so I climbed in, grateful to get out of the drizzle.

Which airport? he asked, his voice strangely familiar to me.

I looked at him, and my brain's recognition center started firing like crazy. It was him, the crazy cab driver who refused to take me to work just a week ago. I felt my face getting red, as my anger started to build up, remembering how rude he was to me.

You!! Oh no. I'm getting out. You wouldn't take me to the children's hospital, so you're definitely not taking me to the airport.

I got out and slammed the door.

And then I re-opened it. Oh, and by the way? Today I was going to pay in CASH.

I huffed off, and hailed a different cab. A different cab that deserved a fantastic fare, and a fantastic tip. Any cab but #3344.

He probably didn't even remember me, but I felt so good afterwards. Karma's a bitch, and so am I sometimes.

A million parachutes

This week, I need to:

1. Decide psych vs ob/gyn.

2. Write my personal statement.

3. Register (and pay) for a gazillion tests and things.

4. Apply for an international elective. (Czech Republic vs South Africa vs Uganda)

5. See the boy!

I'm only excited about one of those tasks.

Young forever

ME

Hey Miss Brooke! I have your discharge papers! You ready to go home?

BROOKE

Mmhmm!! YAYAYAYAYAYAYAY!!!!!

ME

Well, I will miss you - you have been the happiest and sweetest patient I have ever taken care of! Do you have any questions before I have to let you go?

BROOKE

Um, well, I've been a really good girl in the hospital. [pauses]

ME

[confused]

Um...why yeah! Yeah, you've been a great patient!

BROOKE

No, I know - So I got a lot of stickers from the doctors and nurses for being good and for not crying and not yelling. And they have sparkles! And they're smelly! But I'm not that sick, and there are kids in the hospital that are really sick. So...could you take these and give them to those kids?

She handed me a giant stack of stickers, and it just about broke my heart. It was so so so precious. I took the stickers, and dutifully gave them away as instructed. And she was right - she did have the best stickers, and the little girls I handed them to were ecstatic to plaster sparkly Disney princess stickers all over their hospital gowns.

I guess surgery isn't so bad when you're taking care of the cutest kids.

Come find me

Go check out the rest of this guy's stuff - he's mad talented.

And don't forget to call your dad this Sunday for Father's Day!

Make me wanna scream

I should have known that today was not going to be a good day.

First it started off with the Worst Taxi Cab Driver EVER. I got in the cab, told him where to go, and then gave him an fyi that I only had $3 in cash so would need to pay with credit card, and if he didn't mind, could I get a time-stamped receipt so I could get reimbused by the med school? I then found myself stranded on the side of the road, late for work and trying to hail another cab at 5:30 in the morning, on a deserted Lake Shore Drive. The kicker is, he demanded my $3 before tearing off into the sunrise. Thanks sir, thanks.

On morning rounds, while I was giving him a sticker, my 5 year old patient decided it would be funny to BITE MY FINGER. Har har har.

During conference, I accidentally fell asleep and whip-lashed into my attending who was sitting in front of me..

Then, later that day, in the OR, I started to feel sick to my stomach. And before I knew it, I had to hurl.

ME

Um, I need to scrub out...

RESIDENT

But you're retracting!

ME

I have to throw up.

RESIDENT

Oh. Sigh. Okay then. You can't hold it?

ME

Uhhh... [vomits into mask] I guess not.

RESIDENT

Oh my goodness, yeah go scrub out.

[after the surgery is done, he finds me in the post-op area, with my head between my knees]

RESIDENT

You okay?

ME

No, I don't feel so good. I'm really dizzy and nauseous.

RESIDENT

Uh. Hm. What to do...

ME

I really want to go home.

RESIDENT

Well, why don't you just go lie down in the call room for now? You'll be fine in an hour or so.

ME

I really rather go home.

RESIDENT

Oh, okay. You're going to miss sign-out though.

ME

Oh darn.

Except I didn't say that last line. Even though I really wanted to.

I am so happy surgery is ending in T-2 days. Seriously, these people are a breed of their own.

Gimme gimme (that thing called love)

I miss my boy.

Another one bites the dust

I hate my gen surg attending.

There. I said it.

I hate her. Passionately. Vehemently.

I know I've written about how terrible she was to me already (example 1, example 2, example 3), but I held out hope that she was being mean and unyielding to help me develop a stronger character, to help me become a better student, to help me learn.

Today, I got my evaluation from her. And today, I realized I should not have made any excuses or concessions for her.

Because she is a mean mean mean person.

Granted, the evaluation started off well. She gave me an average score, which was better than what I was expecting from her. And the comments started off pleasantly. "Michelle was a pleasure to work with. She was always enthusiastic and showed great compassion towards her patients. Her patients easily developed trusting relationships with her, and she was a reassuring point person for them. Furthermore, Michelle was always on time, which is always greatly appreciated."

And then the giant BUT came. The BUT that you knew she was leading up to.

"However, Michelle was a bit of a disappointment."

!!!!

It kept going.

"...I was appalled that she didn't know answers to basic questions about physiology or anatomy that were directly related to her patients' cases."

She then put in parentheses, "for example" and then listed all the pimp questions I had ever gotten wrong. It was not a sampling of mistakes I had made, as "for example" would suggest, but rather, the entire smorgasbord of questions I couldn't answer during the month.

Really, Dr. Meanie Bikini? Really??

I was shocked, to say the least.

The kicker on all of this is that there are comments that go "above the line" - these comments ultimately go in our deans' letter that we send with our residency applications. And then there are "below the line" comments that are meant purely for me to see. It is usually here that attendings will write things like, "needs to work on fund of knowledge," or "needs to improve physical exam skills." Stuff like that.

My gen surg attending put ALL of her comments above the line. Every single uncharitable remark that she made was above the line. Every single mean comment to be read openly by residency programs that I'm trying to impress. I am a disappointment. I know nothing. I am a terrible student.

Seriously, what kind of educator writes comments like that to her student?

I set up an appointment to talk to my clerkship director. To beg her to remove those comments as they were damaging to my future career. My clerkship director read over the evaluation, and paused before answering, "I know this seems terrible, but coming from your attending, Michelle - this is actually high praise!" "Not to be rude, but she said I was a disappointment. I don't see how that's high praise," I replied, stoic. "She said you were 'a bit' of a disappointment - not a total disappointment - and trust me, she's said that before about others. I've read many of her prior evaluations, and this is a good evaluation. Especially from her," my clerkship director laughed.

I was unamused. So Dr. Meanie Bikini grades her students on how much they disappoint her. That doesn't mean I'm going to be happy that I only mildly disappointed her.

When I told my roommate about all of this, she was outraged, vowing to kick Dr. Meanie Bikini in the gonads and say, "You know what you did!" All kidding aside, I don't quite know what I'll say to Dr. Meanie Bikini when I do ultimately run into her again in the hospital. All I know is that I worked my butt off for her. And I improved 300% during my month with her. I find it sad that a female surgeon who I'm sure has had to jump through many hoops and break through numerous glass ceilings to get to where she is, is unwilling to recognize when others are trying to do the same thing. There is no need to push me down into the gutter.

Dr. Meanie Bikini - I will remember you forever. I will remember you as the educator I never wish to emulate. I will remember you as the person who pushed me away from pursuing any type of surgical specialty. At the beginning of the rotation, you said you wanted to teach me how to be a doctor. Well, congratulations. You've shown me exactly what I don't want to be.

Here's my evaluation for you, Dr. Meanie Bikini. You were not inspiring. As an educator, you were a disappointment. And I am appalled at your lack of empathy and compassion towards students. You were definitely not a pleasure to work with, and I pity the students who come after me.

Bulletproof

Does anyone remember the original La Femme Nikita? My older sister and I used to watch it religiously, and the fact that it was on USA and not basic cable just made it seem more special.

And then I became a fan favorite of Alias because it had a similar backstory.

And now I find out that they're remaking Nikita? With a hot Asian-American actress as the lead to boot?

Yeah, I'm already hooked.

Dust in gravity

My on-call teammate and I ran over to the Emergency Department as soon as class was over. Our pagers had gone off in the last half hour, and although we were required to stay in class, we were intrigued by the "motorcycle vs auto" alert we had received.

We walked into chaos.

We quickly found out that although we had only been paged about one accident, there had actually been three completely unrelated traumas.

• A MVA (motor vehicle accident) in which an unrestrained passenger in a taxi smacked his head on the partition separating the taxi driver from the passenger, and was now complaining of headache and confusion.
• A "motorcycle vs auto" in which the motorcyclist, trying to avoid a collision with a car, skidded across 3 very busy freeway lanes, before falling off and smacking his head against the asphalt, leaving behind a sizable puddle of blood.
• And then a "pedestrian vs auto," in which a student jay-walking across a street got hit by a woman who was texting while driving, here with likely multiple fractures.

They all occurred so quickly and so close together, that by the time the trauma team had gone to meet the first patient, the other two patients were rolling in the door. There was no need to page them again.

We were so shocked, we just stood there, mouths agape. And then the trauma attending saw us. "What are you doing! We need all the help we can get! Each of you, take a patient and start getting the history! Michelle! Bed 1. That's the motorcycle accident. Sarah! Bed 2! That's the student. GO! GO!" She nudged us, as though to provide us with the momentum to start moving.

I tore off my coat and put on a mask and gloves and stepped inside the curtains.

And then I saw him. One of the nicest attendings I had ever worked with previously, was now my trauma patient. I gasped, and the resident who was trying to stop all the blood gushing from his ear, looked up. "Oh man! Er, um, he was my attending!" I said, trying to figure out if it was okay that I was now taking care of him. "Don't worry," the resident reassured me, "he's completely amnesic right now, and won't remember a thing. Here, hold up his head for me."

I held my attending's head, trying to stay calm and get a history all at the same time. "Hello sir, do you remember what happened? Did you fall off your motorcycle or were you hit by a car? What's the last thing you remember? Do you know who you are? Where you are?"

He didn't remember anything from after he left the hospital, he told me, alarmed that he couldn't remember the last 2 hours of his life. "Has someone called my wife?" he kept asking, finally turning to me and pleading, "please make sure my wife knows I'm here."

His scalp laceration now closed, my resident shooed me away to get more details from the paramedics who were still milling about, waiting to give report to someone.

I wish I could say that everything worked out and everyone went home okay. After all, all's well that ends well, right? The student ended up having a lot of bruises and just a minor ankle fracture, and was sent home with crutches. The taxicab passenger had a slight brain contusion, but was back to baseline, and could probably go home after another couple of hours of observation in the ED.

But my patient - my attending! - ended up being transfered to the neurosurgical ICU, where he would get constant monitoring and CT scans every 4 hours, because he had a subarachnoid hemorrhage, an epidural hemorrhage, a temporal bone fracture, and a deep 7 inch laceration above his right ear.

The neurosurgical team took over and sent me home, even though I wanted to stay, wanted to help, wanted to know what was going on, wanted to comfort his wife.

I did as I was told and walked home, but I couldn't help but remember all the things my mother had taught me when I was little. Look both ways before you cross the street. Wear your seatbelt. Put on a helmet.

Listen to your mama and do all of those things. Be careful. Be cautious. Because you never know. You just never know when those mama-isms will end up saving your life.