Crabbypants McGee Tells Some Stories

If bad things come in threes, I’m afraid of what’s going to happen next…

Hit #1: Last week my wallet was stolen. I was studying at a bookstore and some motherfucker stole my wallet out of my bag WHILE I WAS SITTING RIGHT THERE. I guess I was reading too intensely to notice. I found out about an hour later and flipped the fuck out. When I called my credit card company to cancel that shit they said the person already tried to charge $500 to an electronics store not a mile from where I was studying. (Electronics store? Really, guy? How cliché. My roommate said her wallet was stolen once, and the thief tried to charge $75 worth of sausage. Lol. At least THAT criminal had personality. Though, I suppose if you were really creative, you wouldn’t have to resort to stealing pink wallets from little girls. Yes, my wallet was pink. Don’t be jealous.) And there was no insight this time, no sympathy for the crook. I didn’t care about the money, but I had to cancel my credit cards and get new ones and spend my day off at the DMV getting a new license and all that shit. When I told my sister, she said I should have been grateful that it was stolen under those circumstances and that I wasn’t mugged on the street at gunpoint or something. And that made me feel not grateful but fucking BUMMED, that our standards for other human beings are so low that we should be THANKFUL when we AREN’T victims of violent crime.

In the surgery call room there is one of those demotivational posters that says, ‘Just because you’re necessary, doesn’t mean you’re important.’ And I always thought that that wasn’t true, that necessity and importance were synonymous, but when I think about it, they’re not. The shit in my wallet, my credit cards and cash and drivers license and insurance card, it’s necessary for me to have, but it’s not really what’s important. What’s important is safety and health. So how come I care more about the necessary things than the important things?

Hit #2: On Friday night I took a study break to grab dinner and was riding my bike down Damen Ave to get back to my apartment. Naughty By Nature was playing a show at a bar on Damen (yes, this was Friday, June 26, 2009, not 1991) and there was a loooong line of cars waiting to pass through the intersection. I was doing my thing in the bike lane. Some impatient bitch decided to cut out onto a side street. I saw it coming, so I dinged my bell (yes, my bike has a bell. Don’t be jealous) about a million times. She hit me anyway.

I don’t know if I had a death wish or what but even though I totally saw her coming, I didn’t swerve. I just kept going. I keep thinking about this and the only two possibilities I can come up with are that either I have too much faith in humanity and I thought she would stop, or I wanted her to hit me. I don’t know. I don’t want to die; I’ve never wanted to die, but sometimes I wish I were dead. And I know that’s incredibly selfish of me, especially seeing patients deal with the things they deal with and all that happened to me was getting struck by a motor vehicle and escaping with some bruises, but there’s just this overwhelming pressure, all the time, to be awesome. There’s such a disconnect between the medical world and the normal world. In the normal world, I am awesome because I am in the medical world. In the medical world, I am a parasite and worse than the worst: I am average. I’m starting to think about residencies and ‘what makes me unique’ and why a residency program should pick me and I’ve never felt so fucking inadequate in my life. What makes me unique? What the fuck kind of question is that. If everyone is unique, then how does anyone get a spot? I’m NOT unique. I’m in the middle of the curve for everything. The shit that makes me unique isn’t stuff you put on a curriculum vitae or something you can measure on a standardized test. I’m an AVERAGE medical student. I’m going to be an AVERAGE doctor. I’m FINE with that. Why do they have to make it so hard? Why does everyone have to be the best? It wasn’t getting my shit stolen or being run over that stressed me out; it was the fact that I’ve never felt like a victim in my life and all of a sudden it happened twice in a very short time.

When I saw that car coming at me, I was scared, but not that I would be severely hurt or killed; I was scared that I wouldn’t. It sounds really fucked up but it’s true. The first thing I thought (and said) was, ‘WHAT THE FUCK YOU JUST HIT ME WITH YOUR CAR ARE YOU CRAZY.’ The second thing I thought (but did not say) was, how is this going to affect my studying? I didn’t even call the cops or go to the hospital or anything even though it hurt like hell, because I’ve seen what happens in emergency rooms and hell if I was going to spend my Friday night in a hospital. Everyone was gawking and asking if I was okay, which is kind of a stupid question because I JUST GOT HIT BY A CAR, I’m not ‘okay’, but I was okay physically in that nothing was broken, but if I really wasn’t okay, I probably wouldn’t be able to answer anyway.

This blonde lady and her meat-head boyfriend were like, do you want some ice? And I was like uh okay, WHATEVER. So the lady went to get ice, and the boyfriend said to me, ‘It’s gonna be okay… She’s a DOCTOR’. Really, guy? ‘What kind of doctor?’, I snapped. ‘She’s a… O. B. G. Y. N’, he replied, just like that, like he had to really think about the letters. I just looked at him and said, ‘Great, so she’s going to give me a fucking pelvic exam?’ He looked kind of taken aback and said, ‘Um… no… but I think they go to medical school too… she can get you the… ice’. I didn’t bother saying that I was a med student because it was pretty much irrelevant in the situation. Plus I was wearing my normal clothes so I’m pretty sure everyone assumed I was just another dirty hipster biker. The vag doctor came back out, I iced my leg in front of them for about seven seconds, and then I tossed the bag of ice in the trash and peaced out without saying anything else. Everyone was still staring. It was awkward. Especially since all the cars were still stopped, most of the people were walking the same way I was down Damen, and my front wheel was totally jacked up so I couldn’t exactly ride off into the sunset.

I don’t know why I was being such a cunt about it when those people were just trying to help, but at the same time, getting hit by a car sort of temporarily released all my inhibitions, and in that sense it was kind of refreshing. Still, the overwhelming feeling was straight-up anger and frustration. No relief that I was alive. No gratitude for the bystanders who offered me ice. No sympathy for the lady driving the car, who was more flustered than I was.

There’s that saying about how your true character comes out when you’re in hot water… Well, turns out I’m a bitch.

I should be ashamed of how I acted. If it was a year ago, I would have been. But I’m not. And I feel kind of bad about that. Last week I went out with some friends who I hadn’t seen for about a year, including a former roommate, and they all said I’ve changed so much. I said, ‘Yeah, I grew up and became boring,’ and they laughed. I wasn’t joking. Half the time my face hurts and I don’t know why and then I realize I’m frowning. I’m going to have that permanent anger triangle crease on my forehead pretty soon.

Usually when I get this crabby I look at my calendar and discover that I am about to menstruate and then everything makes sense. Unfortunately, ladytime has already passed this month, so there goes THAT excuse. And, great, I’m 25, so I only have ten years before my risk of having retarded, deformed babies goes up exponentially. NO PRESSURE.

But isn’t it depressing that a future doctor doesn’t even have enough faith in the health care system to go to the emergency room after being hit by a car? The half-mile walk home was worse than any walk of shame I’ve ever had to do. In my head I was screaming, ‘I JUST GOT HIT BY A CAR!!!’ No one cared, obv. It was Friday night and I live in a neighborhood that gets pretty crazy on Friday nights so there were a lot of people out but I felt really fucking alone. So I called up a friend, went to a dive bar, had a Jameson on the rocks, questioned my mortality, went home, popped some Advil, and fell asleep. The next day I got up at 8am and studied all day, per my schedule.

If I had died on Friday, what would I have had to show for my life? I racked my brains for all my accomplishments and achievements and any possible impact I could’ve had on anyone, that would actually mean something. Going to college? Big deal, what the hell did I do in college. Getting into med school? Puh. So I passed a test and impressed somebody in an interview. I could only think of one thing. When I was on my internal medicine rotation, there was this lady on our service who had something wrong with her pancreas. I don’t even remember what it was because I have a horrible memory and I’m not that great of a medical student. She wasn’t even my patient. But for whatever reason I went into her room one morning and talked to her for like an hour. Not as a med student, not about medical stuff, but just because she seemed sad and scared when we saw her on rounds and our senior resident was pretty bitchy and cold to her. She cried for a long time and I held her hand. Later, when she was being discharged from the hospital, she thanked me for it.

So that’s the best thing I have ever done. So why am I trying so hard to be a doctor? A four-year-old could have done that. A well-trained monkey could have done that. (Comforted her, that is.) There’s no such thing as a professional comforter. (But if there was, I bet you could get it at Bed Bath and Beyond. (It really bothers me that there aren’t commas in ‘Bed Bath and Beyond’. What is a bed bath? It sounds like something that would collect a lot of mold when not in use.))

Eff my life. This shit is eating me alive.