The next day proved even more challenging, when a young female resident ordered me to go pick up X-rays for our daily 6:30 a.m. conference. I asked the film clerk for the X-rays over a dozen times–no films. My heart began racing, palms sweaty. Holy shit, I’d be reamed.
At six twenty, defeated, frightened, I called my classmate Colin to find out where conference was scheduled that morning. Luckily, I caught him in time. It would be even worse to arrive late and empty-handed.
“Room 402.”
“Thanks, Colin.”
I ran up to the fourth floor, but Room 402 was empty. Was everyone running late? I waited around for ten minutes, pacing back and forth in rising panic before it dawned on me... I had been conned.
Colin—that motherfucker had sent me to the wrong room, sticking his ambitious foot out to trip me. Sure enough, after running up and down multiple stairwells and hallways, I finally found the actual site of the conference: Room 502.
I sat in shame, taking verbal lashings for my extreme tardiness from my entire resident team, including Judas Colin, who, incidentally, had picked up the films that I had been designated. The female resident who had sent me for films that morning joined the stoning. I was earning demerits, and fast.No crying in surgery, Rory. No crying...
After this, I booked a meeting with my dean to see if I could get a better handle on my future. Dean Vernon was an extremely tall man with salt-and-pepper hair receding to his temples and a pot belly that jutted out over his belt. He garnished his face with thick horn-rimmed glasses, using his prominent Roman nose as an anchor.
“Dr. Vernon?”
“Yes, Rory. How may I help you?”
“Well, I need some career advice.”
“That’s what we’re here for.”
“Dean Vernon, I think I really love surgery, you the know—the art, the practice of it, using my hands, but I’m not sure I can get past the mercurial temperaments and personality disorders that so many surgeons seem to possess.”
“Rory, I don’t recommend surgery for you. You’re not enough of a bitch to go into surgery.”
Did my dean just say that to me?
“I mean, you’re a strong woman. I don’t expect you to be making pancakes for plumbers. But a surgeon? Why don’t you pick something a little kinder and softer?”
Angry, I turned to the dean and said, “And maybe the field of surgery needs to look at its bitch quota and start lowering it.” With that I huffed out, still not clear what to do with my life but definitely not okay with being told what Icouldn’tdo with my life.
13. Saved by the Straitjacket
The dreary, loveless days of my third year doggedly rolled by. My depression lingered and deepened. Ironically, it was time for my psychiatry rotation. I had always thought that med school would be an escape from my childhood solitary confinement, but now I felt like I was in my own emotional prison.
The new setting provided scant relief. The mental health wards were shabby and furbished with a neutrally dismal ambiance in blistered white paint supposedly brightened by cheap poster art. There were no padded walls, but maybe there should have been.
Of course, psychiatrists were odd Kumbayas who carried their own unique packages of neuroses. They were always seeking diversions from the daily tortures of their patient care. There were pictures in their offices from their off-site excursions to sweat lodges, mask interpretation workshops, macrobiotic cooking seminars, ayahuasca retreats, inner-child country weekends, visits to ashrams, and humane animal burial ceremonies.
It made a kind of nonsensical sense—the bizarre are uniquely qualified to treat the bizarre. I sometimes wondered how to define who was healthy and who was sick, including myself in that evaluation.
The beds were filled with souls far more crazed and needy than the usual breed of patients. At first, the infinite variations of pathology offered a fertile field for study and treatment. Then I quickly discovered that nearly every mental syndrome was now attributed to neurobiology, which would also provide the markers for treatment.
Medication would solve all problems. Freud and Jung were banished from prominence.
Personal talk therapy, the MO of good-old-fashioned head shrinking, was rarely conducted on the psychiatry wards. Doctors were required to pump patients full of Thorazine, vitamin H (Haldol), and the newer, atypical antipsychotics like Risperdal and Zyprexa.
These drugs were aimed at regulating neural transmission, or in some cases, hormonal imbalances. Keeping the patients quiet and unobtrusive was the goal more than finding actual cures. It was no wonder that each injection came with dire warnings of potential side effects. The human body—and the brain in particular—has a natural resistance to its chemical structures being reformulated or rewired.
Despite countless drug interventions, most of these inpatients did not normalize. Their bodies might function perfectly, but their brains had betrayed them. Virginia, an extreme manic-depressive, bum-rushed me every day with the same question: “Where’d you get those hickeys?” She would be gaping with her wide-eyed, drug-clouded brown eyes at the invisible purple spots she’d projected on my neck.
“Girl, your skin has measles.”
Walking past her room several times, I start warming to Virginia. I’d grown comfortable with being accosted and hoped she’d be able to keep seeing the fantasy hickeys. Her weird orientation was meshing with my own slippery grip on reality.
Leonard, in the room next to Virginia’s, stared at me, eyes like a rabid dog’s, ominously drawing a finger across his neck to warn that heintended to slit my throat. Frightening? Yes, but as long as his four-point restraints remained intact, I felt safe. Ironically, it felt much safer in here than in the outside world.
