What happened

November 3, 2006 at 1:34 am | Posted in neurosurgery | Leave a comment

I’m bored out of my mind right now. I have a long To Do list, which is getting done very very slowly. I get writer’s block every time I sit down to write Thank You notes, and the letter from my first away rotation still hasn’t arrived. And there have been NO new interview invitations in over two weeks. No rejections, either, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot. So I’m fighting disappointment, and right now the disappointment is winning.

You may wonder what precipitated the gunfire on my last away rotation, when I constantly lament that I’m not on top of my game. Well, two things happened in the space of two days which made it look as though I had locked up a spot there, when in fact that was not at all the case.

First, on rounds Wednesday there was a patient in the section where I was rounding in whom an MRI was contraindicated due to some sort of metal implant, but whom everyone thought had a brain tumor of some sort. However, the CT scan that had been done instead showed a 1.5 x 2.5cm nonenhancing and ill-defined hypointense lesion in the basal ganglia/internal capsule region. So everybody in our little group took bets on what it was. The 5th year (i.e. the resident with the most say in ranking applicants) said he thought it was a lymphoma, and then turned to me and said, “if you get it right you’re in.” At breakfast, I told him my guess, which was that it was an ischemic stroke. The next day in team rounds, he said that the neuroradiologist had indeed read it as an ischemic stroke. I said, “YES!” and did a small happy dance, and the 5th year said, in front of everyone, “you’re in!” After rounds I heard the chief chiding him for saying that, and he replied with something to the effect that he thought they needed an older resident, and then I couldn’t hear any more. So later at breakfast that day, I sat down with him and the chief and made a point of saying I wouldn’d hold him to what he’d said, since he hadn’t seen all the applicants, and I hadn’t seen all the programs.

So I told the other students I’d said that, to try and head off any jealous sniping, and one of them replied, “well, of course he was joking. Nobody ever says something like that and means it.” Which I thought was kind of bitchy, but I let it go.

Then the next thing that happened was on Friday after the last two of us gave our presentations. I’d started off my presentation saying that it had been several years since I’d given a talk to an audience that size, and apologized for being a little rusty. I had let the other student go first, since that presentation was on a non-research topic and I thought that student would look better presenting before the research talk than they would after. And their talk did go well, and I was impressed. And I didn’t think my talk had gone well at all.

However, later that morning I was scrubbed into one of the program chairman’s cases, and that other student was case-hopping, and happened to be in my room when the chairman came in for the critical part of the case and made a point of complimenting me on my presentation. He said that it was a good presentation, and that I had no need to apologize for my presenting skills. He said nothing to the other student, probably because he didn’t know the other student was in the room. Unfortunately, that student happened to be the most insecure of the group, and felt at a disadvantage coming from a lesser-known school and without research experience. To make matters worse, that student was also my assigned roommate for the rotation.

So it was downhill from that point on. I don’t know how to deal with other women’s envy, and I never have been able to do it well. The problem is that I actually do care whether they like me or not, but I always feel as though the more I excel, no matter how considerate I am of them in the process, the less other women like me. I know that screwing up is not the answer, but I’m at a loss for how to keep women friends otherwise. Men don’t seem to react the same way in this respect. You excel, they respect you more. Maybe they don’t ask you out, but they don’t punish you for being better than them at something. So it feels like I really do have to choose between excelling in some particular arena and having women friends there as well.

And the sad thing is that I’m not really better than them. There was just the perception that I am. And really not even the perception, but only the other students’ impression that there was. What I mean by that is that I’m quite certain the chairman would have complimented the other student as well, had he known the other student was present. And my CT scan read was born of a year’s worth of participating in neuroradiology rounds with the neurology residents when I was on service. And the neurology residents were held to a much stricter standard when requesting MRIs than were the neurosurgery residents, and consequently there were numerous instances where there was only a CT scan available. I mean, even if I weren’t trying hard to teach myself how to read the scans, I’d have at least learned a few things by osmosis. So not only was that not an even playing field, but the other students weren’t even asked their opinion.

Still, it’s worth noting that if the situation were reversed, I’d have congratulated the student who read that scan correctly, and echoed the chairman’s sentiments had they been directed toward the other student. At most, I’d have joked within everyone’s hearing about how there were only 3 spots left now. But none of those things happened.