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Last sentences from Part II: I was alarmed at how callously the students and even established employees treated some of the patients, especially the ones who were least able to defend themselves. One incident in particular still haunts me.
When the man first came in, the technologists would not speak to him or make eye contact, even though everything about him spelled agony. His face was contorted. Wide-eyed, he looked like someone witnessing a nightmare. His volley of groans ricocheted off the walls. He was sweating profusely.
When they moved him from the gurney to the examination table, a series of full-bodied screams broke from him. Alarmed, I wondered: why was his Level 10 pain not being acknowledged? To make matters worse, my role models would still barely look at him or offer any reassuring words.
Then, as they were moving him, his catheter became dislodged and urine escaped. Anything that prolonged the nightmare seemed disastrous, but the techs stopped everything and fell into fits of giggles as they joked about spilled “pee-pee.” The more they laughed, the funnier the incident seemed to become. Their giggles got worse as the man continued to gasp and scream.
I was only supposed to observe, but I thought someone could at least speak to him. I stood behind the examination table and said the only thing I knew to say. “Take a deep breath,” I said. “Take a deep breath, okay? And try to relax.”
Even as I said the words, I was already losing my belief in the power of deep breathing. But, to my surprise, the moaning actually stopped for a moment, and I saw his chest rise slowly and fall. But the words were unable to dam the tidal waves of pain, and the groaning began again, rising toward a new scream.
Meanwhile, the techs were still going out of their way not to look at him. I made a mental note to never let any family members be alone, when vulnerable, with hospital employees administering care.
After it was all over I wondered if the childish giggling was an emotional defense. Maybe seeing someone in pain secretly upset the employees so much that they could not look at the sufferer. Maybe emotional detachment was needed to perform the job correctly.
But I kept imagining what it must have been like from the point of view of the patient. Had I been in physical agony, the total absence of professional concern and an atmosphere of giggling revelry could have only made the experience worse. Many other, similar incidents unsettled me; it seemed that the more vulnerable and alone the patients were, the more likely they were to be treated badly.
The contempt some workers held for the patients astonished me. Once, I was instructed to follow two second year students to the ICU ward to observe what they did. A comatose girl in her early twenties lay behind one of the curtains. I overheard someone say she had been in a traffic accident and her odds of living were slim.
The second year students, both girls, took images. Afterward, they rolled the cart away and entered the main hall. As I followed, one of the girls leaned toward the other and said: “Did you notice? That girl, she is a skank. Did you see all that makeup she was wearing?” The other girl agreed that the unconscious girl must be a slut.
A slut. I was glad she could not hear what they said. But still, where was the concern I had been taught to expect from those were were charged with administering patient care to those undergoing trauma? Whatever my assumptions about professional concern had been were shattered by my behind-the-scenes look at what some who worked in the medical industry were actually thinking.
Not everyone I met in the RT program was cruel, stupid, or insensitive. There were friendly, mature, and even admirable people who managed to win the acceptance of their peers without participating in abuse. But maybe unfairly, it is the worst that I remember best.
Amid my 101 intro to suffering and callousness, I was still struggling with the problem of being accepted, which was complicated by my thinking less and less of my classmates as the days went by. Aside from their rudeness, their behavior was becoming more synchronized.
One day I returned to the classroom from a break to see a cluster of girls in the back of the room eating sundaes they had taken from the lunchroom. My impression was that they were all eating their sundaes as a synchronized unit. As far as I could tell, they were scooping at the same time and in the same way as if in a well-rehearsed choreography. They were like \”the Borg\” from Star Trek, I decided.
Meanwhile, my own aversion to the \”Borgishness\” caused problems. I was constantly chastised for “going off” by myself. Most of my classmates had stopped speaking to or making eye contact with me. I had not eaten a sundae after all; I was more of a cake person.
As much as I hated \”group think,\” I learned that it did have advantages. One day I was scheduled for E.R. time. I was supposed to observe and assist one of the second year students. She would speak in curt one or two word sentences. Her directions to me were “Get that” or “Close that.”
When I asked her to be more specific, she would not explain; instead, she would glower, huff, and do the things she had asked me to do: jerk a curtain closed or snatch a towel. It seemed that mind-reading was expected. I could not understand her hostility at being asked to define her pronouns.
But, observing the other students, I discovered that many of them were mind-readers. It was like they were attuned to some beat I could not hear. They anticipated and scurried and retrieved. They grasped the clinical choreography in a way I did not. They administered medical care the way they ate their sundaes: in synchronicity.
It was hard to admit my weakness; I had graduated college with honors and swept up a number of department awards. I was not accustomed to failure. But the clinical experience was becoming a nightmare; I was not cut out for it. My brain was not wired for it.If I had been skilled in clinical practice, I could have endured the social rejection. I had learned long ago that I did not need for people to like me in order for me to like myself. But the whole environment worked against my natural inclinations.
This job was not me. Even if I graduated, did I want this life to be my future? I tried to picture myself staying and defying obstacles and adopting ant-like efficiency and being detached around suffering patients, and learning to get along with students who slandered dying girls. But was becoming more like my classmates the struggle I wanted? I decided to talk to the teacher who headed the training program and tell her my problems before I quit.
“If you stay,” she said, “you will contribute a lot to this department. After you graduate, you will probably become a supervisor with a much higher salary than any of your classmates here. But to survive you will have to change. Your personality is not typical of the profession. To succeed you will have to become more like your classmates. You may have to do things you consider mean. But should you try to change your personality? That is up to you.
“Your greatest strength is your academic performance. But the focus here is not the academic side of radiology. Most of what we do here is monkey-see, monkey do. If you go I will miss you sitting on the front row and nodding at me when all the rest are giving me blank stares. No question: you are a brilliant student. But,” she gave me a pointed stare, “you are a bad monkey.”
The words dug in. They left me stunned. A bad monkey. No truer words were ever spoken. I was indeed a bad monkey. I had been since the day in the first grade, when I looked up to find myself in a vacant lunchroom. I did not function well in groups. I was not a good imitator. But did I want to be? I remembered my adolescent rebellion when I decided that being normal was boring; that I would be weird and do whatever I wanted and where off brand shoes and listen to unpopular music and learn for the sake of learning.
I went back to class for one more day to decide if there was anything about the program that was worth the struggle. But as soon as I got to class and saw my classmates, I knew I was not going to continue. Becoming a “good monkey” was out of the question. I had never been a good monkey and I was not about to start. In fact, I was warming to that phrase, “bad monkey.” Maybe I would have it printed on a t-shirt and wear it to some super-formal event.
I could have gone home early, but I decided to stay for the rest of the day. I thought I would look around and make note of all the things I would not miss. In fact, if I was going to leave, why not go out in a blaze of infamy?
That afternoon, when I set my tray down at the lunch table, there were the usual questions: Why was I late? Was I with my lover? I answered. “No, I had to skip the sex today because I was dying for a smoke. Chain-smoking helps stem the tide of my raging alcohol addiction.” I studied the girls to see if they believed me.
Silence. Blinks of confusion. They looked at each other. A few murmured questions. They were confused? Good. Let them be.
I worked to maintain a serious expression until a boy from a nearby table broke the silence. He looked at me with extreme interest and said, “You? Really? You are an alcoholic?” I looked him in the eyes and nodded gravely. His gaze settled on me for a moment, then he shrugged. “Join the club,” he said.
The following day, I turned in my badge to the head of the department. As I walked down the hallway toward the exit, I saw the future, like the path ahead, clear into a free and uncertain space. Somewhere out there, there had to be good jobs for bad monkeys. I wondered what they were.
My mind raced with possibilities. Maybe I could join a circus or become a graffiti artist or a freelance clown. Maybe I would invent a new kind of water or chase tornadoes. Or maybe I would do something crazier – the craziest thing of all.
Maybe I would become a writer.