Cautionary Tales

Last week, I started a clinical attachment at a clinic which shall not be named. Buoyed from the raging success of the last clinical attachment (I scored 4 gig of music from the vet as part of my ongoing education, as well as possible career direction, I was feeling the love), I ambled in, blithely unaware that I was to glimpse a frightening possible future self.

She sailed in an hour and a half after actual consultation time actually began, by which time I'd gotten bored of watching nurses doing their jobs. I couldn't contribute so I spent the hour and a half alternating between reading random bits of Merck and staring at my toes. It was a bit of a relief when she finally appeared. I took her Hello Kitty scrubs as a good sign. Silly me.

"Hello," I said, poking my head into the consult room, "I'm sorry to disturb you, but I was wondering if –," I never got to finish my earnest little request to watch her at consult, because without ever turning around, she waved an imperious hand in my general direction and snapped, "Go help the nurse with the barium radiograph."

I was summarily dismissed.

I spent the entire morning watching the nurse feed a rather indignant and seriously overweight Shetland a barium contrast medium than waiting for it to move through its digestive system. The dog went to sleep at some point while I waited with it in the freezing cold X-ray room. "Do you think she’ll let me watch any consults?" I asked the nurse. He looked at me with something suspiciously resembling pitying amusement, then shrugged eloquently.

I didn't watch a single consult that day.

I learned several things during that clinical practical.

First, fat people are not necessarily jolly. She was the kind of person that used her fat for evil, not good. Her bulk would have been used to maim small children in narrow supermarket aisles. I've seen dead people with more joy on their faces.

Second, just because you've been out in practice for a long time does not make you good at what you do. One memorable afternoon had her scolding the nurse for not reading up on her own surgery, getting me to retrieve the textbook on surgery from her room, and telling me to summarise the entire procedure on mammectomies in short, simple points. This left me feeling like y skullw as being turned inside out because after reading the relevant bit, I had to try and think of a way to not let on that she'd done the surgery in a...well..novel departure from the approach set out in the text, hence leading to the failure of haemostasis and subsequent difficulties in surgery necessitating her sending me to get the textbook.

Second, the stereotypes about single women pat a certain age who live with their mothers and far too many cats really dos have a basis in truth.

She had the same unhealthy love for cats that I do for German Shepherds, but it's all about context. That’s like bang Jewish and living in Germany in 1940 and living there now. She didn't like her job, didn't like her life as far as I could tell, didn’t like her mother. I had to hold the phone for her in surgery once so she could yell at her mother while still performing asepsis, then told me to hang up on her. However, I realized it is not the obsession with cats or female parents that made her the raving obese ball of sniping bitterness and unprofessionalism that she was. It was the fact that she was single and hated it.

I realized this when she was complaining to a friend during surgery that shed been invited to a party full of couples and she didn’t want to go because she didn’t want to be the only singleton present. I had a brief moment of sympathy for her. Then I nearly got a pair of Metzenbaums in my stomach and stopped feeling bad for her because I was too worried about sustaining grievous bodily harm due to the temper tantrum she was throwing (a common occurence, I was to learn).

Loneliness is corrosive. She hated her life and where she was because she was lonely and it infected everything. She was sad and angry and mean and emotional and lashed at everyone and anyone. And while I could understand it, I could not agree with it.

I left the clinical practical having learned not very much about medicine, but learning that the Raj wil agre to shoot me dead if I ever end up like that.