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.