Tragedies

Yesterday, I delivered the baby of a 28 year old Puerto Rican woman. When the baby arrived, the nurse exclaimed "it's a girl!" and tears rolled down the patient's cheeks. The nurse asked "those are tears of joy, right?" and the patient nodded yes, but her tears did not look happy. I asked her the gender of her two children at home and she told me she had two girls. She admitted she had been hoping for a boy. She was crying because the new baby was a girl.

She was reluctant to breastfeed after the delivery.

I have never understood how people could be so disappointed with the gender of their baby. I found this scenario tragic. I wondered how this kid would feel if she ever knew that her mother cried with disappointment when she was born.

Then again, you never know what people are going through. Perhaps the father of the baby (who was absent for the delivery) was putting pressure on the patient for a male child. Perhaps he was sexually abusing her other two girls and a third girl would mean more pain. Who knows what was behind those tears.

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A 34 year old woman on our service is dying of cervical cancer. I heard she missed her pap smears for only 6 years. She did have some mildly abnormal paps before but I mean, who knew? Now she is dying. She just told her two kids who are 8 and 10 years old.

During resident sign out when she was discussed, my chief resident said, "Jesus! I hope she doesn't die on our shift. That would really bum me out for the holidays."

I silently vowed to schedule my pap asap.

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I recently found out that one of my contemporaries, a black gay man in Chicago, died from AIDS. His death really shook me up. People are not supposed to die in their mid thirties. It's just wrong, so wrong. I had heard stories about this person engaging in risky sexual behavior in his youth (ex: sex in a Zayre parking lot, forest preserves and in the old IC station--now Metra--on 53rd). He got himself arrested once for indecent exposure during one of these episodes. I don't know. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Just about everyone has had some instance of sexual irresponsibility in their lives. I mean, when I think about the behavior I witnessed in college...Hello? AIDS and cervical cancer seem to me to be too steep a price to pay for having sex.

Depressing.

mean girls

I just saw the movie Mean Girls, and realized I am living it.

Ob/Gyn programs tend to be small, intimate, and gossipy. The women (and men!) in this program have taken gossip to another level. I've even heard people who are friends talk about each other with astounding viciousness. The latest dish: the wife of a male resident is pregnant, and people are speculating that he is not the father. Riduculous, horrible, unfounded, and mean, mean, mean. To make matters worse, this particular resident has suffered a lot of abuse in this program from both residents and attendings primarily because he is different. He is Nigerian, speaks slowly and is sometimes difficult to understand. So despite the fact that he is well read and knowledgable, he is called stupid and slow because no one will take the time to listen to him. They will, however, take the time to talk about him.

Even the nurses and attendings gossip like junior high girls. I had one particularly difficult surgery with an attending, who sat down with me afterward and explained how I could improve my technique. I thought he was sweet until I heard that he had gone around telling the other attendings that I am surgically weak, based on that one case. Fortunately, this rumor has since died after my subsequent surgeries went well. Every time I saw the surprise on an attending's face that I did such a good job in the OR, I felt like spitting in the face of that gossipy attending. The Labor and Delivery nurses gossip as well. They talk about whichever resident is not in the room at the moment and try to draw other residents into the conversation. Dangerous, petty, and mean, mean, mean.

There are residents in the program who prey on your personal information like vultures. They will ask questions about your life outside of the program (the million dollar question always has to do with who you are dating/sexing) then they will practially run to tell someone else. The worst ones will actually swear secrecy ("I won't tell a soul, I promise") before they serve you up. After being pestered about my personal life, I actually made up some juicy info about a fictional boyfriend who was supposedly causing me torment, and told the class gossip, just to see what would happen. Sure enough, despite the fact that I swore her to secrecy, the info floated back to me in a matter of weeks. Hilarious!

Actually, I have the goods on most of my classmates for real. For whatever reason, people tend to pick my shoulder to cry on and my ear to bend about their problems. I have volumes of sensitive information about several people in my class. I keep my mouth shut because 1) it would be wrong to tell, and 2) who cares?

I guess if you spend every waking hour in the hospital, you need some kind of diversion. Some people turn to gossip. I content myself with sleep, long distance telephone conversations, and infrequent social activity as time permits. Not much of a life. I think the stress of residency brings out the bitch in everyone, when it's not making us crack under pressure. A few years ago before I got here, a resident who had an ill-fated affair with a divorced male attending (and naturally everyone knew about it because there are no secrets here) had a "nervous breakdown" and dropped out. At the University of Maryland there was an Ob/Gyn resident who committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the hospital. It's no wonder so many of us are popping Zoloft and Wellbutrin like tic tacs.