“What did I say wrong?” the student asked, and I glared at him.
“You cannot say that being black is a risk factor for heart disease.”
“But it is…” he spluttered. “Our pathophysiology textbook says so…”
“Then your textbook is wrong.” Judging by the look on the kid’s face I had said something scandalous. “It’s the social disadvantages that go with being black that are the risk factors: being poor, being malnourished, having a lower standard of education, and impaired access to health care. There is nothing intrinsic about skin colour that affects heart disease risk.”
“But…” the kid said, and I shook my head.
“That’s just crap,” I said. “Just like being gay isn’t a risk factor for HIV infection. It’s the sexual activity itself that is the risk factor, not the orientation. Read your textbooks with a critical mind, people. Deep-seated prejudices run through them.”
There was stony silence around the table, though Blake was looking smug and managing to mostly hide it.
“Have any of you got a textbook with you?” I asked. “I’ll show you what I mean.”
I’d politicise these brats before this was over. It was that, or I was going to wind up cancelling the tutorial and stomping out.
Nevins handed over a textbook from his backpack.
Excellent; it was a reproductive anatomy text; I couldn’t have asked for a better example.
Five seconds in the index gave me the page I wanted. “Tell me what’s wrong with this passage,” I said, and I began to read: “Menstruation is the failure to achieve pregnancy. If the egg released at ovulation is not fertilised, the corpus luteum degenerates, the endometrium deteriorates and the necrotic tissue is lost through the vagina.”
I waited, and no one said anything. “Well?” I prompted.
I banged the text down on the table, making them all jump. “Menstruation is the failure to achieve pregnancy?
What sort of sexist rubbish is that?”
More silence, but at least it looked like some of them had got the point. “And what about the language? Failure?
Degenerates? Deteriorates? This is entrenched prejudice, people. I want all of you to rewrite this passage…” I checked the page number, “on page sixty-seven in culturally neutral terms. For tomorrow.”
I pushed Nevins’s book back across the table to him, picked up my files, and left them sitting around the table with looks of horror on their faces. They were going to have to grow some left-wing sensibilities if they were going to train in the public health system.
Chapter Five
It hurt, there was no way around it. I pulled the NGT out of my nose and smeared more lube on the end. Of all of the things I’d ever done with lube, I’d never put it up my nose before, and it seemed intrinsically wrong.
Following the adage that ‘too much lube is almost enough’ helped, and this time I managed to get the tube into the back of my nose. The back of the throat bit was worse, even with sipping water to help it down, but I did it, despite a couple of hangover-type retches.
In the mirror I’d reached the mark I’d made on the tube, so I put the 20ml syringe on the end of the tube and aspirated.
Yuck.
Ramen noodles.
That was definitely in the right place. This was reaching a new stage of hideousness.
When I’d hauled the tube back out again, I had a new appreciation for the whole process. Guess that was what Dr.
Maynard had intended.
I dropped the tube into the green garbage bag hanging off my wardrobe door and stretched out on my bed, ignoring the textbooks digging into my side.
Fuck, but the term Registrar’s Mattress had real appeal right now. That man was hot, and if the circumstances had been different, I would have jumped him today. Oh, yeah, jumped him hard. I still couldn’t quite believe he’d hit on me, that we’d been standing there like that, both staring at the lube I’d been holding.
Then that fuckwit Nevins had blundered in. Dr. M. had been right, it had been screamingly funny in a frustrated, unbearably horny way and I wasn’t sure what might have happened if we hadn’t been interrupted. We couldn’t have shagged, not on the ward…
I groaned quietly.
…but we could have done something… even snogging would have been heaven.
There was lube left from my NGT learning curve experience, so I unzipped myself and curled slick fingers around my cock.
Dr. M looked even more gorgeous the next morning at rounds and I decided I was well on my way to being obsessed with the man. I was a pushover, totally.
He, however, seemed miles removed from the bloke who had tried to pick me up the day before. In the staff room, he was grim and distant.
“Who actually attempted to insert a NGT last night?” he asked.
About half of us put our hands up.
“Who succeeded?”
Lin and I were the only ones who kept our hands up.
“Fine,” he said. “Everyone else is in this room at the end of rounds, practicing on each other.” Relief swept through me. If there was anything worse than having to insert a NGT in myself, it was holding still while one of these clowns did it.
“But…” one of the students I only knew by sight said.
“What if we don’t want to?”
“Just be glad it’s not urinary catheters,” Dr. Maynard said.
“This is assessable.”
We went to the pub that afternoon. It was the only possible response, and honoured the long-standing tradition that, of all students, med students drank heaviest because they best understood how to recover from a hangover.
I wasn’t sure how this fitted in with my personal awareness that man could not live by ramen noodles alone; I was just sure that drinking beer was more important right at that moment than eating was going to be for the next few days.
Nevins and Lin solved the conflict by buying for me.
Seemed that Nevins’s folks had money, and Lin had a scholarship, so we drank pints really fast, settling in at the bar ahead of the rush as the medical system at the hospital cut back to evening staffing levels, but well behind the nurses, whose day shifts ended at 3.30 p.m..
Lin was downing Southern Comfort shooters with her pints, which I thought was a stupid thing to do, but she seemed to hold her liquor well.
Nevins, on the other hand, was a giggler, in the sort of silly, infectious way that only geeky blokes had. I liked him better like that, especially when I noticed it was only Lin that he kept spontaneously hugging.
She seemed sober still, apart from her pink cheeks, but she kept cuddling Nevins back, and fiddling with her hair. We had actual, in the flesh, nerd courtship happening here, and Nevins was so damned pleased with himself that I kind of forgave him for walking back into the storeroom yesterday.
I leaned back against the bar and scanned the room just to avoid intruding upon the eyelash-fluttering and lip-licking that was going on—and that was just Nevins.
