ick

today is crappy.

i woke up on my couch this morning - at 3am - with my eye glued shut from the oozing stuff coming out of my lacrimal gland. i had fallen asleep over articles on acute lymphoblastic leukemia, to gnawing thoughts about the 6 year old who we sent home with a bruise in his butt (what if his family doctor had not checked his blood count again?) and guilty feelings about forgetting to come back and talk to his mom yesterday evening, after i said i would. i tried to rinse the crap off my eye, but the glue seemed to have also fused my eyelid to my eyeball and it was not a very good feeling. it occurred to me that everything didn't have to be this difficult and i could actually take the day off from the peds ward and possibly spare some little children with cystic fibrosis or leukemia the joy of an extra eye infection. i got back into bed and decided to call one of my best friends, currently stranded in qatar (hi bean!) and catch up with her and find solace in the fact that we are both feeling trapped by decisions we made about our careers that now make it difficult to live the types of lives we hoped to have. after that i called in sick and made an appointment to see my doctor.

after i got my antibiotic eyedrops, i decided to continue with my productive day and visit parking services about a ticket i got for parking after hours in an empty patient parking lot next to the library i was studying at. the conversation started relatively well, but just kept falling apart the more we talked, with - at one point - the woman, who apparently had some african-american heritage in her blood, said to me "now don't you even go there" when i implied that it seemed a bit discrimatory to me that my car, the only one in the lot with a white coat in it, was the only one that received a ticket. and of course, what i should have said was something to the effect of "of coures i'm not comparing this to the type of discrimination people of color can experience every day of their lives, but as a woman, as an immigrant, and as someone who gets treated like shit pretty regularly for simply wearing a short white coat, i would have to say that there might be some other types of discrimination -maybe not as volatile as the one you seem to be impling- that can and do occur once in a jiffy around this little loving campus of ours". but of course i didn't say that, and instead just stared at her like an idiot, said something to about paying $28,000 a year and still not being able to park in the empty parking lot when i want to use our sad excuse of a library trailer, and left.

about this time, the week of poor sleep and dehdryation and bad eyesight, the three months of 1-6 hrs a night of sleep, the dirty house, the broken computer, the parking tickets and tow charges, and the fast dwindling bank account all caught up with me, and my brain just went nuts for a little while. what the hell kind of an institution is this? why is it that i pay $28,000 to work 80 hours a week for free and i still have to park a mile away and walk in the dark at 4:30 am or 9:30 pm freaked out that someone is going to jump me? why is it that someone who makes money, had a full night of sleep and does not have goo coming out of her eye think that she can lecture me about when i can and can't use the word "discrimination" and why does the discussion about my parking ticket have to end with her effectively telling me that white girls shouldn't complain about anything in their lives? what kind of a medical school makes it impossible for us to see our doctors unless we're already sick and falling apart? why is it that as a medical student or a doctor, i have to be nice to absolutely everybody absolutely all the time, when people around me who have normal hours and normal lives, can be as rude and unprofessional as they want to be, and i'm still going to kiss their ass and treat them with compassion and care if they ever become my patients? agh! i need more sleep...