The Miracle of Life

I do not want to be an OB/GYN. Immaturely put, I do not want to look at vaginas for the rest of my life. I knew this before I started med school, and I knew this when I started my OB/GYN rotation. I was, however, looking sort of forward to one part of the rotation, and that was delivering a baby. It’s just one of those things that I always sort of wanted to try doing in life. Like milking a cow. I really want to try that just once. It’s probably not as awesome as I keep thinking it’ll be, but hey, you’ll never know until you try. So I was reasonably excited when I began my L&D (Labor and Delivery). Even when I got stuck on the night shift, which is several hours longer than the day shift because you have to come in before your shift for the daily lecture at 5pm. But I’m not bitter. Nope, not at all. Fuckers.

After the lecture, which ends at 7pm, you dash into the hospital café to grab a cookie or something (because doctors don’t like to see you eating on their time, hunger is for the weak), then report sadly to the unit while your lucky day shift classmates skip home. You look up at this giant whiteboard where all the expecting mothers are written on, along with their current cervix size, how far down the baby’s head is descended, and how many babies each mother has had. There’s a whole slew of additional information, like what medicines every mom is on and if the kid has weird birth defects and the gestation age, but the first three things I listed are really what matters if you want to help deliver a baby that night. See, movies are always showing the mom screaming in pain and dads fainting and the baby popping out all cute. What they don’t show are the hours and hours and hours and hours of waiting in between for the baby to get in position, and those assholes can take their sweet time. During those hours, you, as a medical student, get to pop in every half an hour or so to ask the moms how they’re doing and maybe get them some ice. Some moms are really nice about it. Others start to get irritated, especially since it is nighttime and most people are trying to sleep. Another advantage of the day shift. Again, not bitter. In between waiting for those cervices to dilate, you can chill in the ED and see if other women are showing up in labor, which has its ups and downs.

And if it’s a quiet night, you just sit in the unit and try to study. It gets old really fast, especially when you’re trying to keep your eyes open at 4am, surrounded by eagle-eyed residents ready to dock you points if you don’t look like you couldn’t imagine doing anything else but reading about yeast infections. The same residents, I should mention, order huge dinner trays around 10pm, then laugh and munch in our faces. We ignore the delicious aromas of chicken fingers and dessert brownies and resolutely study our notes on uterine cancer.

But I digress. Back to the whiteboard. After you see which moms are the farthest along and which moms are multiparous (had at least one other baby), there is a brief and frantic battle-royale fight with the other medical students to write your name next to the most desired patients’. You then put on your most chipper face and go introduce yourself to the mother and the rest of her family if they’re there, being careful NOT to mention that you, an inexperienced medical student, are dying for the chance to catch their newest family member.

The supposed advantage to night shift is that there is less staff around so you have more of a chance to get involved and deliver babies. This was how I consoled myself. Especially that first day when I showed up and a resident told me proudly, “Sally (a medical student, the name has been changed) delivered a baby on the day shift.” There was a pause. Then, “She cried.”

What exactly am I supposed to do with this information? What response are they expecting? Two thumbs up? Jumping up and down for joy? Doctors, I’ve noticed, do this a lot. They tell me about previous medical students with a certain tone in their voice and a certain look in their eyes. I’m notoriously bad at reading people’s minds, but I will tell you every time they do this, I get the distinct impression that I’m supposed to be impressed and should follow suit. In this case, I guess when I delivered the baby, I was supposed to cry. This was bad news. I did think witnessing the miracle of life would be pretty cool, but I did not think I’d be so touched as to cry.

Still, I was hopeful. Maybe delivering a baby really would be that mind-blowing. Surely I could squeeze out a few tears. Unfortunately, my first baby that night was by a first-time mother. To be clearer, her vagina had yet to be traumatically ripped open by a 7-lb mass of flesh, so even after the cervix is dilated and everything is technically ready for the baby to pop out, the whole process can take several hours. The process, specifically, is for the medical student and nurse to watch the monitors and whenever a contraction begins, you each take a leg to help the mom curl up and then yell encouraging and inane phrases like, “Little harder!” and “Push into it!” and “You’re almost there!” over and over again as the mom bears down. Once the contractions are over, you set her legs down, let her breathe, and wait for the next contraction. Occasionally, a bored doctor finds their way in and checks down there to see if the baby’s head is visible. If not, they leave, and we resume our awkward cheerleading. Again, to reiterate, this can literally take hours, especially when it’s a first-time mom because she doesn’t know exactly where to squeeze to force the baby out.

My mom was particularly confused or something because after many an hour passed, the baby was still stuck inside and she was getting worn out. At this point, it was decided instead of a simple delivery, the team would have to use forceps, a slightly more complicated procedure, which meant I would have no part in it. All that waiting, ice chips-delivering, and cheering for nothing. I deflated a little inside. Still, witnessing a live birth. It should be interesting.

Once the doctors all scrubbed and gathered around the patient, the real show began. I couldn’t see everything, having had to step out of the way for the doctors, but the first thing I did see was poop. When mothers bear down hard, well, it makes sense. Still, it was kinda gross, especially when a doctor stepped in it and then walked around the room, smearing it everywhere on the floor.

I stayed as still in my tiny corner of the room as possible. And then the amniotic fluid. Which is not particularly disgusting to behold. The smell, on the other hand, I was not too fond of. And of course, I started to see the top of the baby’s head. Every time the mom pushed, it would sort of slide forward. And then she’d stop, and it would retract back inside. After seeing the poop, I couldn’t stop thinking of it like a giant hard piece of turd.

And then, the doctor must have pulled hard on the forceps because there was this loud wet pop, and an entire head jerked out. The odor in the room also increased. I did not cry, but I almost screamed. It was just so…violently sudden. And it was all wet and smelly. And the baby looked dead. I thought it would emerge all soft and pink and crying. But no, it was covered in body slime and its skin was sort of a grayish waxy complexion and its head was squishy and slightly deformed from squeezing out and the forceps. It was not cute or touching.

The rest of the body quickly followed, as creepily dead-looking as the head. It got handed to the nurses, who checked vitals and rubbed it with a towel and the baby finally started crying and waving its little limbs and finally looking a healthy color. Much cuter after that. Alas, when it hits that starting-to-look-cute phase, the pediatricians take over to make sure it’s good and healthy. OB/GYNs, on the other hand, are focused on the mom and getting the placenta out.

This quickly became my favorite part of the delivery. Largely because the doctors were much more comfortable with letting us medical students deliver the placenta than the baby. And, if you ask me, after seeing the yanking out of the slimy corpse baby, the placenta was looking rather adorable. It’s like a giant amoeba or something.

Not to say the first time I did it I wasn’t terrified. The placenta also doesn’t come out until it’s good and ready, and if you yank too hard on the cord, you risk ripping something and causing a hemorrhage and, well, killing mom. I really didn’t want to kill mom, so I went slow. Too slow, and the doctors yelled at me, so I decided, ‘Sorry mom, I hope you don’t die’, and yanked hard, and out slid the placenta and mom didn’t die. Hurrah.

Since night shift doesn’t end until 7am-ish, you usually get the chance to be at 2-3 deliveries every night. So I did later go on to deliver a baby, and doing it as opposed to seeing it wasn’t any different, emotionally. No tears. Just terror. This time, the terror largely stemmed from how heavy and slippery the baby is when it first pops out. There’s a reason right before the delivery, every medical student is again reminded by the doctor, “Just don’t drop the baby.” Because that’s a very real possibility. Luckily, it didn’t happen to me.

Better yet, during another delivery when somehow the yanking out of the baby resulted in an eruption of amniotic fluid from the birth canal, I did not have my mouth open like the father-to-be.

I also wasn’t present during a delivery where the baby somehow managed to piss on the first-year resident’s head. That had to have been epic because at no time during the delivery is the baby in a position where it should be able to do that.

Why don't you like horses?

Everyone likes horses! They have long, knobbly legs, and pretty manes and tales, and long snouts and you can ride them and feed them, and their ears are cute! They have hooves and long eyelashes!

They're not the coolest animals on the planet, but they're still pretty darn cool. That's like saying you don't like giraffes!

I actually don't remember refusing to do what the counselors said, but I do remember making unicorn-pegasi at every possible opportunity, and being crushed, CRUSHED, when someone told me I couldn't draw a unicorn pegasus for an assignment. I thought I usually went along with authority figures! Was I a more difficult kid than I thought?

I'm pretty sure I already knew there was a poem about unicorns by Shel Silverstein, because I really liked his poems back in the day. I only vaguely remember the whole ordeal, though. My unicorn was indeed hideous and it was about how unicorns were serious dumbasses who couldn't figure out it was in their best interests to get on the Ark.

We revolted, really? Are you sure that's what happened?

I'm pretty sure I went to art camps after that, though. I think. I know I went to some without you, but it's hard for me to remember if it was before or after the unicorn incident.

Let's see... I remember making a lot of hideous projects in art camp, like a horrible purple-and-pink paper mache fish, and a T-shirt with a poorly fabric-painted Oriole on it. I did manage to make a pretty cool blue pottery bowl, but most of my projects turned out pretty terrible. There was a parrot cup, and a mold of the head of Dr. Robotnik, and a ceramic TV with "I LOVE MOM" or something similar scrawled on it. Oh, and plenty of poorly-made unicorn pegasi, most of which were malformed or their wings or horns broke off during firing or later, so I'd try to glue the pieces back on with Elmer's glue.

My unicorn pegasi ended up looking more like bears with Apatasaur heads and weird Tinkerbell wings, because... I dunno, I guess I thought fairy wings were cooler than bird wings. It must have been my obsession with flutter ponies.

Quest for Unicorns

When I first started this blog with Tetradecimal, I was really thinking of writing mostly about my medical school experiences. But somehow, all our goofy childhood (mis)adventures keep getting brought up, and I guess it's no real surprise that I'd prefer talking about the good ol' days than the hellish gauntlet of disease and death and bodily fluids and hospital bureaucracy I'm currently crawling through. Like most little elementary school girls, we had a borderline fetish for creatures of the equine variety. I really don't know why, and it bothers me more than I care to admit to this day, because after extensive Wiki and Youtube searches over the years, horses appear to me now to be almost dismayingly boring compared to some of the other animals on the planet. The most interesting clip I've come across involving horses was a video named "Mr. Hands", and involved a man being willingly sodomized by a horse. I later learned the poor gentleman ruptured his colon in the process and died of septic complications. I therefore wish to pass the message along: Horse penises are serious business. Disrespect them and they will mess. You. Up.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately...ok yeah, fortunately), this was NOT the reason I liked horses. I just don't know what was. Whatever it is, I feel someone should look into it. I mean, a whole demographic generation after generation just goes nuts over a random animal; there has to be something there. It's like teenage girls and sparkly vampires these days.

Anyway, most people get it when you say "I liked ponies as a girl". That does not disturb them, because just about every girl was like that, at least the ones I knew. But Tetradecimal and I took it to another level. Looking back, I feel someone should have intervened, because it was really a somewhat unhealthy obsession. I feel no other event in our lives demonstrated this as well as when we went to *dundundun* Art Camp.

Besides being rabid pony fangirls, we were also aspiring artists (and sadly still are, but at least we are more aware of our delusions now, yay), so in a sweet but misguided gesture of support, our parents sent us to Art Camp. Knowing my parents, I'm pretty sure they were expecting me to emerge after a couple weeks of summer vacation as a young Van Gogh with a new array of technical skills and maybe even some basic knowledge of art history so I could start developing my own bold and avant-garde style. At the very least, I'd learn to draw something besides those damn horses and learn to color inside the lines (you might pick up from previous entries that while I did graduate from horses, I still hate coloring, ESPECIALLY inside the lines).

My point is, this was a serious and essentially guaranteed setup for disaster and disappointment, not to mention worried parent-camp counselor conferences about if we were budding antisocial serial killers or hopefully just "special". I don't remember probably 95% of what the counselors tried to get us to do, but I do remember thinking it was fucking retarded and refusing flat-out with Tetradecimal at my side because what were they going to do, white people don't hit their kids. I just wanted to draw my magical horses, not make pottery or use watercolor or even talk to other kids because they were sickening little sycophants with no artistic vision. Yes, I was a smug little troll. But I take comfort in the fact that none of the kids actually hated me, from what I remember, because they were too busy being scared of our strange artistic endeavors and ramblings, and avoiding us like the plague.

The counselors quickly learned we were going to be an issue. To their credit, they were really patient and good-natured, more so than I would have been, and never quit trying to get us to go along with their planned activities for the day. Sometimes they even succeeded halfway.

One of those rare successes was when it was decided we were going to put on a play for our parents using paper-mache puppets. The uniting theme of the play was that all the acts would be of poems by Shel Silverstein, either from "Falling Up" or "A Light in the Attic". Most kids were quite satisfied. Not us.

I remember how excited the counselors were when we agreed pleasantly for once to be in the play.
And then we asked, "Is there a poem about unicorns?"
Things got ugly fast. For myself, I could barely comprehend how this Shel Silverstein could consider himself a poet if he didn't write poems about unicorns. I think I remember Tetradecimal and me trying to compromise in our own demented lala-land way. The counselors could pick whatever poem they wanted for us, and we'd make paper-mache unicorn puppets.

When that didn't seem to be working, Tetradecimal and I agreed quite calmly that well, clearly, we just couldn't be in the play then, because if one could not make a paper-mache unicorn, then one should not make a paper-mache anything at all. There was this silence, while the whole Art Camp watched, as the counselors probably struggled with the surreal-ness of it all while frantically trying to find a way to con us into the play. After all, the play, unlike some of our other activities, was actually being performed to our parents, and our parents would probably be very confused when neither Tetradecimal or I appeared.

Eventually, one counselor decided to look for unicorn poems by Shel Silverstein. I shudder to think what would have happened if he hadn't found one. But he did, and it was aptly named "The Unicorn". Unfortunately, it was in a whole other book by Shel Silverstein, "Where the Sidewalk Ends". This almost created an uprising, when the rest of the Art Camp kids, sensing special treatment, also wanted to choose poems out of that book. In retrospect, I'm not sure why the counselors refused. The poems from all of the books weren't particularly connected that I was aware of. I think they just felt they'd hit their "bending over for serious self-respect ass rape-age by kids of people with too much money just so I can pay for my college tuition" quota for the day. Anyway, it was decided that only Tetradecimal and I would get to use the other book (because we asked first, not because the rest of the day would be unspeakably horrible if this wasn't resolved, nope).

Later, of course, we learned that the poem was actually about how unicorns were sucked and refused to get on Noah's Ark when it flooded, so they drowned and now there are no unicorns or joy in the world, but hey, it had UNICORNS in it. So, we made our ugly paper-mache unicorn puppets and gleefully brandished them to the world.
Our parents never sent us to art camp, or any camp, together again.

Technical Writer

I am currently a technical writer. I did not train to be one; in fact, I didn't even take any srs bsns writing courses in college. I did try to take one once, though. It was a Creative Writing course, and I quickly realized I was in the wrong place because a writing sample was required to be accepted into the class:

I wrote a story about a gas station attendant with rage issues who discovers the porta-potty next to the station contains a horrible black hole monster of evil, and promptly begins gleefully directing people to it while they get horribly eaten.

One girl wrote a story about a middle-aged white woman. She gets divorced, then takes up pottery and starts selling her pottery at this art gallery her friend runs. Later, she looks at her ring finger and realizes her tan line has disappeared. The tan line is a metaphor for how she got over her husband and began Respecting Herself.

Another girl wrote about a girl who goes to the beach, and gets naked. Then she dances in the waves, and it is Erotic. The waves, they are freeing. Like sex.

Like sex.

Those two other girls read their samples aloud to the class.

The professor clapped like a seal.

I was placed on the waiting list.

Anyway, so I didn't really take any writing classes in college. I did take a number of programming courses, in which they didn't really teach you how to program. Especially the later courses. Man.

I am getting really off track. The point is, I am not trained as a writer, but somehow got hired as one based on my mysterious ability to write words. Words that say things! I do not know how I got this mysterious ability. It may have had to do with reading lots and lots of silly books about unicorns and mecha when I was little.

My interview was very terrifying (as are all interviews, to me), and involved puzzles. It seems to me singularly cruel to take a nervous applicant and then demand that they tell you how to get a gold bar across the river with two locks and two keys and a thieving ferryman, but I had been playing Professor Layton obsessively at the time (it is the only way to play Professor Layton), and so I came up with an answer and somehow blundered my way through some question about SQL. So there you go. I got here by playing video games and reading about mecha.

Now that I am hired, it is not my writing ability that is the biggest stressor of my job, but making sure that people tell me what I'm supposed to be writing about. Because developers are sneaky and they will keep things from you, or they'll change things without telling you, or they'll wait to design a feature until a week before all coding needs to stop. I also do not like the weekly meetings in which we discuss what we did, because I can never remember what I did, especially in front of seven or so people staring at me.

However, it is much better than my last job, which was as a software developer who had to work with Javascript and CSS. INTERNET BROWSERS ARE THE DEVIL, and also DEADLINES AND SMALL SOFTWARE COMPANIES. And also, when I was little, one of the things I wanted to be when I grew up was a writer.

I probably should have specified what kind of writer.

Unlike whyyy, I do not have a set career path, which is good and bad. It's good because I don't feel tied down to any committed job, and it's bad because I have no real direction in life, and no one or thing to tell me what to do. Like my friend who works at a publishing house, I don't think I want to stay here forever, but don't know what I should be doing instead. I'm kind of convinced the things I like doing (drawing comics, for instance) won't actually get me anywhere. So I play video games. It's pretty depressing.

The Good Thing About Being in Medical School

So, I go to medical school, which means that at some point in the future, so long as I pass all my exams and do not intentionally kill someone (at least I think they forgive us if it's unintentional), I presumably will be a doctor. I am not looking forward to this. Like most good little Asians, I started off down the path to doctor-hood because Mommy and Daddy had convinced me that there were only three occupations in the world: doctors, lawyers, and losers who should just kill themselves. Even later, when I realized that there actually were other jobs to be had, I was really too scared to even consider them for the fear of somehow shaming my family.

At some point, though, I did get sort of excited about becoming a doctor. I mean, you get to do some crazy stuff to people and they'd better like it because you are SAVING LIVES. A picture Tetradecimal drew of me sums up how I sort of started seeing my future self, all starry-eyed and shooting rainbows out of my hands.
Actually, I thought I'd look a little less goofy and more smart. Experienced. Like a war-torn veteran. But angelic and compassionate, like Mother Theresa, so I could magically touch the hearts and lives of my patients in ways other doctors had failed. Like that Patch Adams movie, although what I actually remember is that he built a giant vagina around a building entrance, and that his girlfriend got murdered, but let's not nitpick. I'd be that doctor who bonded with the autistic child or the gruff elderly patient who's just hurting inside.

Also, I thought I'd be sexier. That way, as I strolled purposefully down the hospital halls to SAVE LIVES, all the staff would notice me and say, "There goes that hot doctor. But she's more awesome than most hot people because she is also smart and kind." A real badass mix of House plus Mother Theresa plus Jessica Rabbit.

Needless to say, once I hit the wards, I realized that no, I was not going to be House plus Mother Theresa. I guess Jessica Rabbit is still a possibility if I start saving up for plastic surgery or something. In fact, I wasn't sure I wanted to be a doctor anymore (and most nights, I just wanted to survive until the next day and maybe get some goddamn sleep).

But that's okay. It's always better to look at the bright side of things, right? And so, I brainstormed the good things about being in medical school, some of which they actually taught us. Like, if I decided I wanted to be a drug addict as well, I would actually have an easier time than most people because I would have access to narcotics and other fun stuff; hell if I had doctor friends they might actually write me prescriptions because surveys have shown doctors are too chickenshit to tattle on their friends. So yay!

And I get to develop a god-complex for saving lives. And while this is certainly not unique, since police and firefighters do that shit too, I don't have to do it while being shot at or putting out raging fires. Yay again!

I guess, though, for now, until I decide to develop a drug habit or actually save lives, the best part about being in med school are the super fun stories you get to hear. For example, one of my friends was doing a neurology rotation. He went with his neurologist to do a spinal tap on a patient. This means you're trying to suck out spinal fluid without hitting all the nerves running through the spinal cord. Failing to do so can mean some major damage and suckitude. Like all beginning medical students, my friend had never done one before. The encounter went as such:

In the end, the patient was fine and I don't think he suffered any major neurological damage. Maybe next time I will tell the tale of when I cut someone's leg off.

The Circus

After we met, I realized that we had many shared interests. Like unicorns. Some of the other little girls liked cats, but that was dumb because unicorns were horses with MAGICAL HORNS, and the only thing better than unicorns was a UNICORN-PEGASUS (plural: unicorn-pegasi). This was very important. 

It was very important because at some point in Kindergarten, between burdening belaguered high school volunteers with ravings about my stuffed bear (who looked almost exactly like Benzaie's Beary-- WHERE DO YOU BUY THIS BEAR?) and making poorly-conceived ladybugs out of construction paper, I was informed that we would be putting on a CIRCUS.

This meant that all the little children in my class needed to dress up in poorly-constructed animal costumes and perform tricks for our parents, most likely as a kind of consolation. I mean, sure, you carried some dopey kid in your stomach for the better part of a year as your body ballooned with retained water and you ached and you felt horrible and ugly and it was all for the sake of nourishing a not-yet-sentient parasite gorging itself on your blood and nutrients and crushing your bladder and filling your poor taxed stomach with pee and it'll probably cost $2 million until you're finally free of your obligation to it and it'll grow up to resent you for cooking, cleaning, and caring for it for years, sacrificing years of free time and emotional energy to a sullen, uncommunicative psychopath you can only hope magically transforms into a real person while your husband complains loudly that YOU NEVER LET ME DO ANYTHING and IT'S YOUR JOB TO RAISE THE KIDS and then your mother-in-law is like WHY DON'T YOU EVER COME TO SEE US WE LOVE TO SEE OUR GRANDCHILDREN, BUT AT LEAST IT CAN NOW PERFORM CIRCUS TRICKS FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT. THAT IS THE IMPORTANT PART. YOU MUST TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE SITUATION NOW.

Anyway, the point is that we could all choose various circus animals to be. Whyyy and I insisted that we should totally be unicorns. But our teacher insisted that THERE ARE NO UNICORNS IN A CIRCUS, and so we needed to cosplay actual animals that were real and existed.

So we wanted to be ponies.

The only problem was, there was already a girl who was a pony (perhaps reasoning that the decree from above would enforce strict NO UNICORNS policy). So only one of us could be a pony.

I don't know how it was decided who would be pony and who would be not-pony, but in the end, I ended up being a tiger. It was a little disappointing. My mom made me a tail and apparently filmed me turning in little circles on a stand, because that is apparently what tigers do at the circus. She also had footage of Whyyy, who was apparently having a grand time being a "PRANCING PONY" and galloping about the gym mats.

But I wanted to be a pony.

Much later, my dad taped over The Circus footage with a recording of a televised golf tournament.

How did you meet? (part 2)

Sigh. This normally ranks as one of the questions I hate most having posed to me, usually during one of those awkward get-togethers with some close friends who you actually like having in your life but then there are those dreaded semi-friends-of-friends that you are somehow expected to chum up with purely on the basis of the fact that your close (and regrettably more sociable) friends seem to think they’re okay. And THEN, because they don’t know you well enough to start a conversation that you’re actually interested in, these semi-friends ask you inane questions like, “So what are your plans this weekend?” like they actually gave a shat. Which they don’t, for the 0.11% of you people who are still friendly and chipper and young in the ways of the world.

Pardon the bizarre metaphorical imagery of my mind. Also, the reason I rant instead of talking about how we met is for one, I am an angry and bitter person who probably needs a better outlet, and two, I also do not recall how we met. As such, the button-stealing story seems as good as any.

But...since I am the one who got all excited after brainstorming this topic, I guess I should put some effort into coming up with something. It had to be either kindergarten or first grade, because the teachers were told to start separating our homerooms and classes starting in second grade. And I think it was the first day of school, because I was very very very anxious to have a friend. I remember looking around the classroom for someone with a face as desperate and self-conscious as my own, a "I'll-be-your-friend tell-tale face" of sorts. But somehow everyone seemed to already be chatting with the kid next to them.

And then..I remember relief. Hope. I was saved. My eyes had fallen on another classmate who wasn't talking to anyone just yet. A girl. An Asian girl. Just. Like. MEEEEEE. Surely she could not reject me!

And so I shuffled over and said hi or something. ...And that's seriously all I can remember. That's right. I was a dumb racist little snot who chose her first, best, and almost-only friend because she was Asian. I say "almost-only" because I had one other friend in elementary school. Who was also Asian. But then in high school she was "born again" and decided I was the devil and then we weren't really friends anymore. But whatever, that's another story.