We're pleased to have two new articles by Sharon Farber in our final issue. This
first one dates back to her medical school days in St. Louis and demonstrates that
the embodiment of FIAWOL is not limited just to science fiction fandom. As its
definition implies, when used as an escape mechanism it can also help get one through
difficult times in life.  Recent studies have shown that doctors
tend to be obsessive-compulsive. Well duh -- only an obsessive could get an 'A' in
Organic Chemistry. And its not like other professions don't recruit from those with
diagnosable psychiatric disorders -- cops, firemen and paratroopers are often
sociopaths, hysterics (I have been told) make good actresses, and of course reporters
in the grand old days were all alcoholics. (I had a delirious patient in the ICU
once. "How much does he drink?" asked my attending. "One a day." The attending
shook his head in dismay at my student naivete. "Sharon," he said. "He's a
journalist.")Unfortunately, obsessives are prone
to the comorbidities of anxiety, depression, insecurity and anguish at their
imperfections. Perhaps as an undergrad you can know everything and you can smoke an
exam -- bemoaning your score of 99 rather than 100 -- but in a school full of other
high-performing obsessives and a fund of knowledge that exceeds human capacity...
Well, get ready to be severely bummed out.Sixty percent of my classmates sought
help. Two killed themselves.The question that has been asked is
this: Does a science fiction writer cope differently with the stress of med
school?# # # #
After a year in the dorm I moved into
an apartment a mile down the road, in a neighborhood once fashionable, then slum,
starting to be rehabbed. One of my attendings owned the mansion in which William S.
Burroughs grew up. They filmed a documentary there; she said he was her only
houseguest to bring his own methadone.There was one street of new shops, an
oasis in the decay. Many of the street people had been my patients at Malcolm Bliss.
I would either nod and hurry by, or avert my eyes. Someone was shot outside my
apartment one night. Another night watched cops wrestle down a suspect. A
conventioneer had his wallet stolen, and he pursued the suspect until he developed
angina, then slumped over my Dodge Colt. I checked his pulse with the ludicrous
phrase "It'll be all right, I'm a medical student."Medical students are the bottom of
the social hierarchy in the hospital, with only the nursing students exceeding us in
cluelessness. Even the janitors have our number. And the contempt spills out into
the nearby community. So I was astonished when the man was not only reassured but
announced in awe to his arriving friends, "She's a med student!"They had been at the Chase Park Plaza,
a once grand hotel now famous primarily because its auditorium was used every Sunday
morning for the TV show Wrestling at the Chase -- a name implying volumes of
social disconnect. The wrestling groupies would gather in the parking lot across
the street from my own and wait to meet their heroes.Our apartment building had been the
dernier cri in stylish modernity seventy years earlier, and had not been
remodeled or painted since. Even the cockroachs seemed courteously old fashioned.
(We kept them under control with a typically obsessive scheme -- a scorecard. Kill
5, you were an Ace. 86, a Red Baron. While waiting for the coffee to boil grab the
swatter and hunt roaches.)There were mice, too. We found the
hole they came in from and closed it up. Then lent our traps to the apartment below
us, inhabited by students in the 6-year combined program. Presumably smarter than
the rest of us mortals.One day one of them came upstairs.
"The traps aren't working," he complained."Well, what are you using for
bait?""Bait?"Their apartment was a humid mess due
to a continuously dripping shower. A friend of mine, going through a divorce, lived
there briefly. He came up one day, sat on the couch, and just shook his head.
Finally he said, "All you have to do is turn the handle firmly."# # # #
We were busy and didn't really get to
know the non-medical student tenants who were scattered in the various apartments
like raisins in a pudding. Okay, not a good metaphor. I remember once some guys
across the hall having a bachelor party. The stripper brought her child, an
auburn-haired little girl who sat in the empty stairwell engrossed in her coloring
book.Fourth year we had a kegger and (as
one always should do when planning a loud party) invited any neighbors close enough
to complain. The apartment above ours was currently occupied by some undergrads.They arrived duly, got paper cups of
beer, and began to hit on the women. Their line -- and it's a sad sad world to
think that it might under some circumstances work -- was the proud statement, "We're
accounting majors.""That's nice," said my roommate.
"Those guys are PhDs in biochemistry and the rest of us are just medical
doctors."The accountants refilled their cups
and stole away into the night.# # # #
We were an odd assortment -- a top
student, from a family of important doctors; the sexiest guy in the class, so
drop-dead handsome that women would turn and follow him down the hall; the president
of the Christian Medical Society; and me, the class bohemian. (A demented elderly
patient once snarled at me, "Are you a gypsy?" "No, ma'am, I'm a bohemian," I
replied, and my attending started laughing so hard I thought I'd have to Heimlich
him.)Later the cute guy took his mushroom
collection and left, and we acquired a depressed grad student and a succession of
others. The tiptop student in class lived there a while (the sister of the other
top student). Her talents, unfortunately, did not include cleaning. Once a week or
so we'd venture into her cesspit, stepping carefully between books and boxes and
discarded clothing, to retrieve coffee cups. When we were burglarized, the cops
looked into her room. "It's been ransacked!" they gasped in horror. Her embarrassed
sister hastened to agree.One day I took down the hanging
plants, watered them, and left them on the radiator. That day -- not particularly
cold, and a month earlier than usual -- was the day the landlord chose to turn on
the heat. The twins' mother -- herself an important physician -- called to ask for
one of her daughters."She's in the kitchen, performing
fluid resuscitation on a plant I just killed," I replied.There was a long pause. Finally she
said, "And to think we're turning you loose on people."# # # #
Once during second year, before a
particularly important test, we were all nervous. I told the particularly jumpy
studious roomie: "If you eat your dinner, do your homework and go to bed. I'll tell
you a bedtime story." This was it:A research biochemist married a
beautiful woman, and set her up in a lovely house of many windows. But she was
lonely, and complained he was always in the lab. So he cloned himself, and the two
of them got so much work done that he could spend more time with his wife.But his clone grew fond of a research
post-doc, and when he thought the scientist and his wife were both away, took his
girlfriend to their house. The wife came home early, saw them, presumed it was her
husband, sued for divorce, and won the house and half the patents.Which just proves that people who
live in glass houses should not grow clones.# # # #
Okay, not that good, but it was the
first bedtime story. They became more frequent, and developed recurring characters.
There was the Ivory Tower, dedicated to training pages to become knights. Then they
had to pass the Boards -- a plank bridge fraught with hazards -- in order to enter
the Magic Forest and become squires. In other words, they became third year medical
students on clinical rotations.I told most of the stories, of course,
and the epic began to parallel my own journey through the clinics. For instance,
while I was studying surgery Our Heroine was captive of the adventuresome but
dimwitted Green Knights. At the end of my rotation Our Heroine offered to go for
pizza and ran like hell. But I had put off three weeks of surgery until fourth
year, and when I had that rotation Our Heroine, on her way elsewhere, blundered into
a clearing still full of Green Knights awaiting pizza. Thinking quickly, she said,
"Okay, was that 43 pepperoni and 17 sausage, or 17 pepperoni and 43 sausage?" And
escaped again. It was the only time I've ever pulled off a joke with a sixteen
month buildup.
Because City Hospital, where I did
neurology, was next door to Malcolm Bliss Mental Hospital, and because neuro and
psychiatry deal with different aspects of human consciousness, I invented a castle
called the City of Distress (shades of Dante) wherein dwelt the bold Knights of the
Hammer, always accompanied by their saber-tooth Catscans. But at night it
transmogrified into the horrific Tower of the Blissful. Once the Green Knights
decided to invade the Tower, and were held off by the last remaining Knight of
Sigmund, who analyzed them into stupefaction.Another time the Dashing Rogue -- the
gentleman thief character chosen by the guy who was head of the Christian Medical
Association and about as undashing and unroguelike as you can get -- was in the Tower
to steal the Grandiose Grail. As he climbed out the window, dawn broke and he was
hanging in mid air...Our roomie the very top student
appeared only once. As Our Heroine is in the tilting-at-windmills class and
complaining that no one can do that, she does. Oh well.Gradually a plot of sorts occurred.
Our Heroine, thanks to her many screw-ups and consistent distractability (especially
whenever she sees the Wonderful Knight) is charged with finding the Pen of Flexner
and healing the ills in the Magic Forest. (Abraham Flexner wrote the 1911 book
which reformed American medical education.)Our Heroine stumbled from adventure
to adventure, eventually gaining some knowledge and talents. She was aided by The
On-Call Knight, an idealized amalgam of helpful interns I had met. Finally there
was a big battle, the Pen was recovered, the evil wizards defeated, everyone with
amnesia remembered his identity, the king was rethroned, etcetera etcetera. And Our
Heroine was rewarded yet punished by becoming the new On-Call Knight.Well, you had to be there. But
transforming my travails into a metaphoric silly Arthurian quest helped get me
through it.# # # #
This is the year of my twentieth
reunion (which I don't intend to attend). Life is still weird, work hard, people
bizarre. Just a few days ago I was royally yelled at by a patient whom I refused to
give a motorized wheelchair because she didn't meet Medicare criteria. Because she
walks fine. I was called callous and heartless and well, I've heard it before.I'll leave with a gross-out story. A
couple months ago I saw a hospital patient and noticed that his toes were, as we put
it, a little dusky. He indeed had poor blood flow to his legs but refused
intervention.A month later saw him in the ICU --
back because a friend had scored some cool drugs and he'd tried a few too many.
Which he freely admitted. I was called to see him because of the brief self-induced
coma.I pulled back the sheets to test his
reflexes and paused. His distal right foot was now black. Not dark or gray, but
frank black, like my polished leather shoes, with a line of demarcation. He had
gangrene. Two toes were missing, having sloughed off. (They can do that in dry
gangrene. Of course, anything bigger than a digit won't, and unless dealt with will
prove fatal. And as for wet gangrene -- well, let's not discuss the odor.)I well knew the answer, but I was
rather shocked and said "Gee. What happened to your toes?"He looked down with casual unconcern.
"Ahh," he said, "they came off in my socks."Well, again, I guess you had to be
there. All illustrations by Teddy Harvia |
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