You Can't Break Me

Monday:

Monday was a holiday, but I couldn't leave the house.

Tuesday:

I was just barely able to scrape myself out of bed and pretend to be human. Dave and I went out to the DaVinci exhibit at the natural history museum. There were exhibits of things made from his drawings. Da Vinci was quite the imagineer.

Wednesday:

In the mornings I meet with a couple of students before class to go over material or to just gossip and complain. Then we walk over to the classroom together and wait for the instructor to arrive. (This morning we all looked exhausted. Everyone is burned out, just like me. This is a stupid schedule and it's stupid for no reason, which makes it worse.)

One of the students I study with is from a country in Africa. She's been here for a long time, but she still has an accent and she is one of only two black students in my cohort. Recently I was complaining to my study buddy about the head of the program, the woman I called Moron a couple of entries ago. The Moron is racist, which I realized pretty quickly after talking with students about their interactions with her. It's funny: All the white students had nothing but positive things to say, while the brown, black, and asian students would often shake their heads in disgust because they had gotten the runaround or worse from Moron. She left one Asian student cooling her heels in the waiting room outside her office for FOUR hours after their appointment time, but the student refused to leave until she had been seen. (I've heard her doing similar things to Hispanic students, sending out her assistant to tell the student she wasn't available to meet after the student had arrived for the appointment. Telling students that she didn't have open appointments for a month or more.) A Native American student was told by Moron that nothing could be done for her problem--after a white student with a similar problem had told the Native American student (by way of intending to be helpful), "Talk to Moron, she took care of my problem right away!" A black student told me that she had been assured by an advisor that her credits from another institution would transfer with no problem, but then Moron was refusing to allow her to apply for the program, insisting that the black student start all over again with her pre-requisite classes. It goes on and on and on.

When I told my study buddy about all this, she said, "I've never told anyone, but last term I was required to get a letter of recommendation from her for a scholarship I was applying for. When I asked her, she said that before she wrote me the letter, she wanted me to write her a report about my life in my home country and how hard it was for me there and what I had done to help people there--" I said, "Are you serious?" "Yes," my friend answered, "she said she wanted to know all about my family and why and how we emigrated here and what my family members were doing now and how much better our life is in America than in Africa."

We know another woman, a white woman, who got the scholarship and I said, "I wonder if she asked the other applicants for that same kind of thing before she wrote them letters of recommendation. You should go to the dean about this." My friend shook her head and said, "Please don't tell anyone."

Thursday:

It's a clinical day. I set my alarm for 4:15 a.m. instead of 4:30. I'm at the point in the term when I am slow and clumsy in the morning and late is not an option. While I am eating breakfast, I bite my tongue and taste blood.

One of the ICU patients I'm helping to care for is Russian, as is her husband. The care team doesn't like the family. One of them says of the husband being in the room, "It's like being watched by Vladimir Putin." I shake my head but say nothing. I know how many Americans feel about Russians. Me? I've always gotten along with Russians. They are almost offensively straightforward. They have steely souls. I admire that.

An hour into the shift, out of the blue, I spot one of the program administrators, a woman from Ukraine who I like very much. She's standing in the hallway outside the patient's room talking to my clinical instructor. I've never seen her at a clinical site, but there she is, in the flesh. I walk up to her and say hello, then ask, "Do you speak Russian?" She says, "Of course I speak Russian." I explain the situation with the patient and the family and she goes into the room and talks to the family. The family is relieved to have someone who speaks their language. The conversation is short, but it goes a long way toward dispersing some of the tension. Even so, I hope I haven't overstepped my boundaries by asking her to do talk with the family, so I send an email to her later, thanking her.


That was the bright spot in the day. The rest of the time I'm just hanging on.

When I leave the hospital, I go and meet Dave and play with Buzz a bit. Dave has to buy a new computer for his new job, so we run out to the Apple store and drop a couple of grand on a new Mac. My cheap school computer has recently died, so I look over the little candy-colored tidbits on display in the store, but I won't. If I have to, I'll buy another cheap thing to get me through to the end.

Friday:

Another clinical day that starts when my alarm goes off at 4:15.

I don't want to deal with the anti-Russian sentiment today, so I wrangle my way into following a respiratory therapist around instead. We spend our time mainly to the trauma ICU, but there is one patient in the neuro ICU. Making rounds takes a couple of hours, then I spend the rest of the day just helping out in general.

It was an easy day, but I cry on the way home.