Dead Med, page 3
“I’m really sorry,” Abe says to me again when I return.
I nod at him, noting that Dreamy McCutie is snickering slightly as he pries open our dissection kit. Abe must have told them what he did to me. I’d vow revenge on him if he didn’t look so upset about the whole thing.
“I’m Heather,” I say to my two new lab partners. I don’t bother to offer my hand, since they’re both already wearing blue rubber gloves.
“Mason,” says Dreamy McCutie (apparently actually named Mason). He glances up at me only briefly before going back to rifling through our dissection kit. He fishes out a scalpel and examines the blade carefully through narrowed hazel eyes.
The tiny girl gives me a little wave and speaks in a voice that’s barely a whisper, “I’m Sonya.”
“Nice to meet you, Sonya.”
“Sasha.”
“Oh, sorry. Sasha.”
I can barely hear her. She’s one of those people who would benefit from a volume knob.
“Mason and I are roommates,” Abe explains to me. “They usually assign roommates to be lab partners to make it easier to share study materials.”
“Oh.” I glance at tiny Sasha. “But Sasha and I aren’t roommates.”
“I live alone off-campus,” Sasha explains.
I get this really bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. We’re still expecting a fifth person in our lab group, and Sasha doesn’t have a roommate. That means that the most likely person to be our fifth lab partner is…
Oh great.
As if on cue, Rachel arrives at our table. She looks like she’d rather be anywhere but here. Her dark hair is pulled into a messy ponytail so that strands fall along her cheeks, and she’s not even wearing scrubs—she’s wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants. Worst of all, I’m pretty sure she’s not wearing a bra.
“Hey,” she says, running a hand through her loose strands of hair.
Mason manages to tear his eyes away from the dissection kit long enough to notice Rachel’s breasts, and his breath catches slightly. “Hey,” he says.
We go around the table with another set of mumbled introductions. To Abe’s credit, he doesn’t seem remotely interested in Rachel’s chest.
Now that the trauma of being splattered with embalming fluid has worn off, I take a look at our cadaver. He’s really big—a good two hundred fifty pounds, at least. But he’s tall, fit, and carries the weight evenly. He could have been a bouncer in a bar. His face is pressed into the cold metal of the table, but I place his age around fifty. There’s a tattoo on his right arm that I can’t make out due to the dryness of his skin.
“He looks like a Frank to me,” Mason speaks up. “What do you girls think?”
Rachel shoots daggers with her eyes. “To me, he looks like a human being who had a name of his own.”
“Aw, come on,” Mason says, flashing a killer smile.
“You’re naming this cadaver over my dead body,” Rachel says through her teeth.
“Fair enough,” Mason says. He winks at me as he menacingly lifts a scalpel out of the dissection kit. Abe shakes his head at his roommate. Seriously bad taste. Fortunately, Rachel is too distracted by the cadaver to notice.
“I brought gloves,” Abe volunteers, nudging my elbow with his. He points under the table, where there’s a little tower of glove boxes. “Three different sizes. I heard you’re supposed to double glove in order to, uh, keep out the smell.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” Rachel says. “Nothing is going to keep out the smell. Tonight, we’re all going to stink like formaldehyde.”
My roommate—always a burst of positivity.
“So who wants to make the first incision?” Abe asks the group.
Anyone but me. I step away from the table, trying to make myself invisible.
“I’ll do it,” Mason volunteers with a shrug. He holds out his right hand. “Scalpel,” he barks.
Before I know what I’m doing, I start fumbling with the dissection kit and remove a scalpel, which I obediently place in his right hand with a resounding plop.
Rachel’s eyes widen, and she looks furious. “You know,” she says to Mason, “Heather’s not your scrub nurse.”
Well, she’s right. But let’s face it: between the five of us, Mason is the only one who looks like a real surgeon. I can almost picture him in the operating room, slicing through the skin of a real patient’s back. His hands are so steady. Mine are shaking like a leaf, and I’m not even doing anything. I’m just standing there.
“Dr. McKinley!”
My heart practically jumps out of my chest. I whirl around and come face-to-face with Dr. Conlon, our anatomy professor. He’s dressed in scrubs (no bowtie), which makes him look much less dorky than he did on stage the other day. I noticed before how black his hair is, but I didn’t realize how bright-blue his eyes are, even behind thick glasses, and he looks younger up close than I originally thought he was. He’s still clutching that cane in his left hand.
“Dr. McKinley,” he repeats. How does he already know my last name? “How are you going to learn anything from back there?”
I avoid eye contact. “I’m not a doctor.”
“And how are the rest of you feeling?” Dr. Conlon asks my partners. “Are you making the first incision, Dr. Howard?”
Mason nods. “Just about.”
“Dr. Kaufman…” Dr. Conlon lays his eyes on Abe. “Can you tell me the names of the three erector spinae muscles?”
I have no idea what the answer to that question is. Does Abe know? I don’t think he does, based on the way he’s squirming. But Dr. Conlon doesn’t make him suffer for too long.
“Going from lateral to medial, we have iliocostalis, longissimus, and spinalis,” Dr. Conlon says. “The mnemonic is ‘I Love Sex.’ Or if you’d prefer, ‘I Love School,’ depending on which you like better, school or sex.” He winks at us.
Okay, Dr. Conlon isn’t so bad. He’s kind of cool. Even though he wears bowties.
As he limps away, Rachel leans toward me and murmurs in my ear, “God, what a sexist pig. Who does he think he is?”
“Our anatomy professor?”
“It’s like they forget there are women in this class too,” Rachel continues to rant. “It’s not as if women make up… oh, I don’t know, half of all students entering medical school…”
I try to block out the sound of her voice as Mason’s steady hand draws the blade of the scalpel down the length of the cadaver’s back. There’s a layer of thick yellow fat beneath the skin, and I brace myself for that queasy sensation, but to my surprise, it doesn’t come.
I look up, and Abe is raising his eyebrows at me. I give him a thumbs-up sign.
Wow, I might actually get through this in one piece.
5
News flash: Medical school is really hard work.
I knew it would be. Obviously. But it’s really, really hard. Harder than premed biology. Harder than organic chemistry, and I only pulled a B in that through the skin of my teeth (and a lot of help from Landon).
The weeks pass rapidly, but the days are slow. And the labs are endless. We have anatomy labs three times a week, and each session feels like I’m stuffing an encyclopedia’s worth of information into my brain.
“If I have to memorize one more nerve or artery today, my head will explode,” I say to Abe at least once per lab. It’s become my catchphrase.
My brain just isn’t that big. But Mason’s is, apparently, because he knows everything before the lab even begins.
Dr. Conlon gives weekly quizzes for anatomy class so that students can assess our progress before the first big exam. They’re not going super well. I failed the first two and was pathetically happy when I eked out a passing grade on the third.
Well, not a pass exactly. It was a low pass. To make us feel less competitive, instead of A, B, C, and D, we have honors, high pass, pass, and low pass. But they’re obviously the exact same thing. Essentially, I got a D on the last exam, which is nothing to be proud of.
Why am I doing so badly? I’m studying nonstop. Literally. I take the lab manual to the toilet with me. But somehow, it’s the wrong material. Or else I’m studying the right material, but it all flies out of my head seconds before the quiz.
The anatomy labs themselves don’t make me feel any more confident. Dr. Conlon is always sneaking up behind me to ask a question I can’t answer.
“Dr. McKinley,” he says to me one day. “What is that?”
I used to sort of like it when he called me “Doctor,” but with each poor quiz grade, I like it less.
I follow the path of his gloved finger, pointing deep into the cadaver’s abdominal cavity. I have absolutely no idea what he’s pointing to.
“The celiac artery?” I guess.
Dr. Conlon’s blue eyes widen.
“The main pancreatic duct,” I quickly correct myself.
His black eyebrows rise in horror.
I take one more stab in the dark: “The… gastroepiploic… vein?”
The usually patient Dr. Conlon, so befuddled by my answers, just stumbles away, shaking his head. Apparently, I’m unteachable.
“What is it?” I whisper to Sasha, who is standing across from me.
Mason would have known and likely shouted out the answer, but he’s at some other cadaver right now. He follows around his favorite teaching assistants in order to soak up as much information as he can. He only graces us with his presence for about half the lab, although he still manages to do most of the work.
Sasha looks down at where I’m pointing.
“It’s the duodenum,” she says without hesitation. She’s tiny and quiet, but she knows her stuff.
“Shit,” I say.
Sasha seems somewhat traumatized by my profanity, so I add, “Sorry.”
She nods. “It’s okay.”
“Why am I so bad at this?” I whine.
Sasha shrugs. “Just study more,” she says, not unkindly.
Sasha and I don’t connect. I thought that after my failed friendship attempt with Rachel, I might be able to hit it off with my other lab partner. But Sasha is too quiet and seems completely uninterested in communicating with me beyond exchanging information about anatomy. Every attempt I’ve made to get to know her has completely flopped. I asked her if she had a boyfriend, and she just looked at me blankly.
Not only that, but Landon and I barely talk anymore. Every time I call him, he says he’s busy studying, and he often seems distracted. He barely calls me at all. He had insisted this long-distance thing would work, but I’m starting to have my doubts. On a scale of one to ten, he probably misses me only like a three… or maybe even a two.
So in summary, I have no friends, my relationship is falling apart, and I’m failing anatomy.
It all seems so impossible. I’m being tasked to memorize encyclopedias’ worth of material, and there are only so many waking hours in the day. I’ve always been someone who needed a lot of sleep, and by around nine in the evening, my eyelids are sagging, and nothing sticks anymore.
If only there was something that could help me stay awake longer.
6
I may not be great at anatomy, but I have become a Master of Procrastination (MoP).
I was all right at procrastinating in college. I mean, I always managed to get on social media a few times during the course of any study session. But this year, I’ve stepped it up. It seems like every time I need to study, I end up becoming desperately curious about what all my former friends from high school are up to. And then I try to figure out what that song in my head is. And take a few online quizzes. And I text message literally everyone I know.
So instead of studying, which is what I should be doing right now, I decide this is a perfect time to look up the details of the alleged drug problem at our school. Rachel isn’t around, so it’s perfect timing.
The information is so easy to find, I’m slightly embarrassed that it took me this long. All I have to type in is “DeWitt Medical School” and “drug overdose.” Pops right up. How is it possible that I didn’t know about this?
Drug use is apparently rampant at our school and at the nearby college. Nobody entirely knows the source, but three years ago, a student at DeWitt overdosed and died. Then it happened again each of the next two years.
The student who died last year was named Darcie Peterson, and she was a first-year student. She was failing anatomy (sound familiar?) and apparently turned to amphetamines in an effort to boost her studying efforts. She collapsed in the girls’ restroom and was discovered to have died from a burst brain aneurysm thought to be related to her substance abuse.
There’s a quote from Dr. Conlon that’s repeated in several of the online articles: “Darcie was a wonderful student and a wonderful person. She had so much potential. This is a great tragedy.”
So much potential.
A door slams, and I nearly jump out of my skin. I minimize the window on my laptop seconds before Rachel strolls into our bedroom. I can’t say exactly why, but I don’t want her to know I was reading about the drug problem at DeWitt. Mostly, I’m afraid she’ll say something to make me feel worse about it than I already do.
Without asking if it’s okay, Rachel lays out her yoga mat on the floor and starts playing some music that is probably supposed to be soothing, but it just gets on my nerves. Besides, I’m studying (kind of). Listening to classical music is supposed to make you study better, but I can’t concentrate with music playing, and anyway, this isn’t classical music.
“I’m trying to study,” I say to her.
She’s already on her hands and knees on the mat. “So study. Who’s stopping you?”
I can’t imagine Rachel would understand, considering I’ve yet to see her crack open a book. “You know,” I say, “we’ve got our first exam coming up soon in anatomy.”
“You’re kidding.” Rachel straightens out her legs and spine so that her body makes a triangle with the floor.
I don’t get it. I’d say she must have a photographic memory so she doesn’t need to study, but it’s clear from the lab that Rachel has no clue what’s going on. Isn’t she worried about failing?
Maybe I should try yoga. Maybe if I did some meditation and stretching, I’d stop worrying about the exam too.
Or maybe some pills would do the trick. Apparently, they are pretty easy to get around here.
Oh my God, why did that thought just pop into my head? I’m really starting to lose it. I’ve never failed a class before in my life, and anatomy isn’t going to be the end of me. I don’t need pills to study.
I can do this.
7
I show up early at the DeWitt library the next day, equipped with my anatomy atlas and my textbook, along with a water bottle and a baggie full of chocolate bars and potato chips. Yeah, that pretzel and Coke yesterday were just the tip of the iceberg. All I eat anymore is snack food—I haven’t had a real meal in days.
Abe is meeting me so we can study together—the primary social activity at DeWitt. We’ve decided to try to study together more regularly, although he can’t meet every night since he’s—amazingly—got a part-time job at a student health clinic. He texts me that he’s almost here, and I try to flip through the chapter on the thorax on my own. It’s hard to concentrate, though. I keep thinking about my abysmal quiz grades.
“You look deep in thought.”
I snap my head up. It’s not Abe, like I expected. It’s Mason. He looks mildly amused at the expression on my face as he slides into the seat across from mine at the table.
“Mind if I join you?”
I could never study around Mason Howard. He’s pretty much the biggest distraction I can imagine. I would have thought spending all this time with him in lab, during which time he’s proven himself to be the biggest asshole on the planet, would diminish his appeal, but it hasn’t. He’s just that sexy.
He looks way too good right now. Every med student I’ve seen so far today looks like they haven’t slept in weeks, but Mason seems like he’s just come back from a long vacation at a spa. His clothes aren’t wrinkled, and his jaw is clean-shaven. His books are lined up in a neat stack on the table, and I can’t help but see one of his anatomy quizzes sticking out of the textbook. The grade at the top is one hundred. Figures.
“I put in some quality time last night with Frank. But now it’s time to hit the books,” Mason says.
Despite Rachel’s discomfort with naming the cadaver and a long email-rant she sent out to the entire class about how disrespectful it was, Mason still calls him Frank. It doesn’t bother me. And to be honest, I like how much it seems to infuriate Rachel.
“I feel like I should give up right now,” I mumble.
Mason frowns. “Why? What’s wrong?”
He really has no idea.
“How do you do it, Mason?” I sigh. “You know everything.”
“Well, I want to go into plastic surgery,” he says with a shrug. “I’ll never match in a plastics residency if I don’t study my ass off. What do you want to do?”
“I thought I wanted to be a doctor,” I say.
I meant it as a joke, but it’s sort of true.
Mason winks and flashes me this smile that makes my heart skip in my chest. Ugh. I need to stop being such a girl!
“Don’t look so stressed out, Heather. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”
“What if I’m not?” I say. “What if I fail the exam?”
“So you’ll get a job at the post office,” he jokes. “And one day, you can come back with a shotgun and blow the brains out of all the other students.”
I don’t laugh. The whole thing is kind of in poor taste considering we’re at a school nicknamed Dead Med.
“Come on,” he says. “You’re going to do fine on the exam. I promise.”
Mason reaches across the table and puts his hand on top of mine. And my hand starts to tingle like I’m having a stroke. I hate myself for having a schoolgirl crush on Mason.
“You’ll be fine, Heather,” he says. “Don’t worry so much.”
