From Hollywood to the Hospital: Redefining Glamour

For the naive, happy, carefree outsider, the world of medicine often carries an oddly "glamorous" mystique. For proof, we look at Popular Media, where the glory of doctordom is handily presented in broad strokes: 5-second miracle brain transplants, routine chest-cracking/bare-hand heart massage and placenta-less, assembly-line pregnancies. In this world, general anesthesia is essentially a formality, replaced by the swoon-inducing, sheer hotness wattage of budding Patrick Dempseys and Katherine Heigls.

The media mystique is pervasive:
- You've got doctor soap operas featuring chiseled, Botoxed doctors barking "Nurse, scalpel, STAT!" as they powerfully steer gleaming gurneys through endless hallways, while scandals fester in deceptively innocent supply closets.

- You've got cheesy doctor documentaries with the token James-Earl-Jones-esque baritone gravely narrating things like, "The young boy's heart had stopped beating and all hope seemed lost - when finally, Dr. Smith decided to take a chance on a miracle", accompanied by some kind of backwards-ticking digital clock and a beeping red heart rhythm pulsing ominously on the screen.

- You've got doctor beach-lit featuring a tortured young doctor-protagonist questing after a tainted stethoscope which has been implanted with a timed-release, deadly diarrhea-inducing virus and is now spreading the runs among patients with each auscultation. (This, sadly, could actually be real life. Reader, meet C difficile.

- You've got beanie babies inspired by loveable, charismatic interns such as yours truly. (Come on! The Obama girls are too glamorous to be anything but doctors when they grow up.)


In 2008, 31,000 people applied to jump on the medicine glamour bandwagon in 2008 - and that's 31,000 people who are clearly not reading this blog. (Perhaps, by listing this statistic, I could be part of the search results for "number of applicants to medical school", which Google reports has been searched for 5,833,000 times. Talk about instant increase in blog readership!) At least some of them (or their parents) must have been motivated by the seeming panacea of glamour offered by the M-bomb. After all, what better way to quickly sum up the biodata of "steady-income-earning potential with requisite intelligence, strong likelihood of compassion, PLUS a lifetime of free medical consultation bypassing hours of flipping idly through backdated issues of Golf Digest in a cramped doctor's office" than simply attaching the "M.D." after your name?


Ah, glamour. In former, naive, pre-internship times, I thought the term referred to things like strappy patent leather high heels, Paris, Fred Leighton drop earrings, spelling glamour with a "u". Back then, I also used an eyelash curler, sometimes read Dostoevsky and Sedaris by a crackling fire, served as an upstanding member of the DSW Frequent Shopper Rewards club, lovingly tended to a clothing collection which conspicuously lacked drawstrings, reversibility, and the color group "sickly pale green".


Then, I entered the world of medicine.


Some people think the hardest part of medicine is getting used to the "blood and guts". Tales abound of the 6'2, broad-shouldered football player who faints at the sight of an IV line or the neophyte intern who trembles with nausea after smelling the yeast growing under her patient's pannus. Sure, there's weeping ulcers, bile-stained dressings, toenail fungus, prolapsed hemorrhoids, inflamed follicles, oozing pustules, frothy sputum, ecchymoses, furuncles, liver spots, blood-streaked stool, tarry stool, fatty stool (sorry, there's a lot of stool). But forget all that. The hardest part of medicine in a nutshell? Quite simply: the sacrifice of the wardrobe.


At first, my natural instincts protested against the scrubification of my soul. You see, in those pre-medicine days, I was an ardent follower of the venerable art of wardrobe sciences, the reigning neighborhood shopping marathon endurance champion. I was the kind of shopper who obsesses over the subtleties of onyx vs jet black, who tries on two (seemingly!) identical pairs of the SAME SIZE trouser jean to evaluate subtle, sub-size/style variations in fit or wash, who navigates to fitting rooms using only smell, memory and touch due to the tower of clothes in her arms obscuring her vision. I curated my closet with the same fervency and dedication of a Smithsonian expert, organizing clothes by color, texture, season, temperament/mood, number of compliments (or odd stares) received.


And then, one fine day while journeying along the path to medicine, I suddenly found myself facing the prospect of obtaining my outfit from a vending machine.


I stared into the bowels of the behemoth, Darth-Vader-like automaton ScrubVendor TM, where rows of puke-green 70% polyester cylindrical bundles appeared to mock me, daring me to select them. The prospect of donning a pair of drawstring pants in my early 20s - not just any drawstring pants, but a pair of bunchy, tapered, thigh-enhancing, leg-shortening, crotch-disfiguring pants - flooded over me; feeling suddenly faint, I grabbed onto a chair for support. I briefly contemplated quitting medical school, then decided to furtively drive 30 miles to a specialty store to pick up a tailored pair of boot-cut, low-rise scrubs.


For a while, I continued to stubbornly resist enculturation into the world of medical fashion, determined not to be taken in by the temptations of tackiness marauding as socially acceptable norms. I boycotted clogs, refused to pair scrub tops with jeans/ khakis/mismatched scrub bottoms, never wore a scrub top without at least one "safety shirt" underneath, and of course, never, EVER did things like wear scrubs to the grocery store or the gym. Even as the anemic green rags snickered with a tempting, mindless, just-choose-me-I'm-so-convenient appeal at the fashion-challenged hours of 4am, I resolutely marched to my closet, determined to exercise my brain cells in choosing a real outfit that reflected my mood (needless to say, there were several outfits consisting of black, metal chains and spiked cuffs). While every other (sane) individual soft-shoed around the tiled hospital floors in ergonomic harmony, I was the one clack-clacking away in 3-inch heels, inciting intrigued/annoyed glances from nurses and unit assistants shopping for Louboutins on eBay/trying to reconcile medications.


But of course, like so much else, things change. Maybe it was the time I was sitting on a swivel chair, clad in a flowy A-line skirt and cognac pointy-toed heels, grasping a pair of heavy-duty pliers with one hand and the callused, toenail-fungus-ridden diabetic foot of a schizophrenic patient in the other, trying to complete the assigned task of removing said toenails with said pliers. Or perhaps it was the time the intoxicated college student in whose arm I was trying to place an IV decided to wake up and retch all over my camel-wool trousers and tie-neck blouse (at least the boots were spared!) Or maybe, it was waking up at an ungodly hour one morning and realizing that by wearing scrubs I could snag an extra fifteen minutes of beautiful sleep!!. That was it. The shapeless, tapered duds went on. A thunderclap was heard, and somewhere the evil denizens of de-fashionization cackled and rubbed their hands in glee.


Clearly, the glamour of medicine does not emanate from its wardrobe. It's also not likely to stem from the routine tasks of internship (see: Bowels, Idiosyncracies of; Missing Studies/Tests/Labs, follow-up of and endless waiting for; Google/Wikipedia, worship of; Agitated Patient, calming of; Mysterious Dizziness in 32-kg, 125-year old gentleman, lengthy workup of; Chicken With Head Cut Off, constantly running around like.) To be honest, it's probably more glamorous to be a resident of Albert, Texas - just think: if you had twins, you could almost double the population!


But even if it's not glamour in, say, the we-are-all-devastatingly-attractive-and-scandalous Grey's Anatomy sense, there is still something extraordinary about being part of the fold - about being one of the scrub-clad army of neophyte physicians. It's funny, the way it works. When the thin catheter you're inserting in a patient's chest suddenly slides in perfectly and the cloudy fluid drowning his lungs finally starts to drain; when you suddenly connect textbook facts in the context of your patient to arrive at a diagnosis; when you update a patient's family member and realize that they actually seem to trust and respect your opinion - that heady rush of "specialness" sort of hits, as close as I've gotten to sensing the M.D. glamour. But invariably, it's at these very moments that my undereye circles are their most cavernous, my stomach is likely staging a vocal, Graham-Crackers-Are-Not-Enough-themed protest, my scrubs seem especially ill-fitting, or my stethoscope is once again yoking me unceremoniously and un-glamorously to the doorjamb. Go figure.

So pshaw, TLC. You don't want no scrub? Pass 'em to me. They may get no love from you, but I know how to work it.