I'll start this off by saying that most of my classmates (or at least the ones I've met so far) are friendly and intelligent people who will probably go on to become really great doctors. However, there's always a small handful of individuals who had to have pulled a fast one on the admissions committee, namely because there is something incredibly off-putting about them in a "Oh-God-please-don't-let-this-be-the-future-of-medicine" sort of way. Like the student who can't grasp basic, bare bones concepts despite having them explained to him/her multiple times. Or the douchebag who thinks he's like House but totally isn't because House is awesome and this guy's just a douchebag. And the girl who, as I will describe below for your reading (dis)pleasure, almost had me believing that she wasn't even human.
It all started on a typical weekday in November. I was on my way out of the medical library, after having acquired an impressive amount of knowledge regarding the workings of the human body (or was it after dicking around digg.com for awhile? It was one of the two.) As I neared the exit, I passed a girl whom I recognized from class but had never actually spoken to in any length. I smiled and said hello, since social convention dictates that sort of thing, and as she returned the gesture, our eyes met for a brief second. And in that brief second, I noticed something strange about her.
Her eyes were completely blank. Not just blanker-than-a-blank-slate sort of blank or "Don't bother stopping by because there's no one home!" blank (and yes, I'm aware that a) I've pulled these expressions out of my ass and b) I've grossly overused the word "blank".) I'm talking every character on every reality show ever featured on MTV, all rolled into one sort of blank. It was actually that bad.
Now since I fancy myself to be a fairly rational person, my first thought was "Well, maybe she's just really tired and sheer exhaustion is giving her that glazed over look. Hell, I'm pretty much on autopilot myself right now." And I just left it at that...for a few hours. But curiosity overwhelmed me later that afternoon, and since I'd mastered the art of Facebook stalking (I prefer to call it Facebook sleuthing) long ago, it didn't take me long to find her profile online. And lo and behold, there in her display picture for all of cyberspace to see, was that same vacuous look.
Initially I figured that it was just a fluke - sometimes people get a bit glassy-eyed when they stare into a camera lens for a long period of time, waiting for the photographer to take the damn picture. But this girl had some 230 photos of herself uploaded onto Facebook, and as I skimmed through the first batch of them, it was just that empty stare over and over again. These pictures were taken in different places, at different times of the year, with different friends, and yet that eerie, expressionless look persisted in each and every one of them. "What is going on with this chick?" I wondered.
I'm sure you've all heard that saying about the eyes being the windows to the soul, or however it goes. Well, I based my train of thought on that. Maybe this girl didn't have a soul. Maybe she wasn't even completely human. Maybe she was - dare I think it - a cyborg. Why couldn't she be a cyborg? Cybernetic doctors would be invaluable - they would have no need for food or sleep, they could assimilate massive amounts of information, and they're probably not going to unionize on you. Or maybe she was just designed by the school administration to keep medical students in line. Like she'll go T-1000 on your ass if you fail an exam or an attending calls you out for being unprofessional. Thank God I know where they store liquid nitrogen in this building; if Terminator 2 has taught me anything, that should at least slow her down if she ever turns on me for finding out her secret.
So I thought I had it all figured out at the time. And I more or less went about my business as usual, except for taking extra care to avoid passing Cyborg Girl in the halls because her blank stare still continued to both irritate and unnerve me. But, as fate would have it, we would run into each other again about a week later. This time it was while I was alone in the anatomy lab, poking around the cadavers and studying late into the evening for an anatomy exam that was coming up.
She came in with a few other girls from our class, who were presumably human (or at least a more advanced type of cyborg) since they lacked her cold and emotionless gaze. I watched them out of the corner of my eye as I worked, waiting to see if she would bench press a table or peel the skin off of one of the cadavers to patch up her metal exoskeleton or do whatever it is that cyborg medical students do on their Thursday nights. As she and her friends unzipped one of the body bags containing a cadaver, I heard her speak for the first time:
"Oh. My. God. This is, like, so nasty! Okay, girls, what am I, like, looking at? Like, is this supposed to be this guy's junk or something? Oh my God, it's, like, totally his junk! I- I can't touch this stuff. I mean, I got my nails done, like, two days ago. And it smells gross in here! I'm meeting my boyfriend in, like, an hour, and I don't want dead body stank in my hair! Ugh, this is, like, so unfair!"
That's when I realized the real reason why this girl looked vacuous all the time. She wasn't a cybernetic construct. She was just an airhead. And one day she's going to be someone's doctor. Maybe even yours.
Welcome to a small slice of the future of medicine, baby. Creating cybernetic doctors just might be a good idea.
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*sigh*
ReplyDeleteIt's people like her in med school that make me wonder how I got rejected. I'd like to think of myself as slightly more intelligent than an airhead, right? Right? I certainly hope so. And I most definitely fear for the future of medicine sometimes. -_-
You have more intelligence in your little finger than all of the airheads in the world put together. Don't worry about not getting into med school right away. I'm not sure if you heard the conversation I was having with Judy earlier (I think you may have been too busy kicking Eric's ass at all those Wii games you played), but the admissions process can be so arbitrary to the point that it's practically a giant lottery. Smart, awesome people can get rejected just because they may have had a bad semester (or even just taken a really hard class) which lowered their GPA to just tenths of a point below the cutoff. Dumb, douchey people can get accepted because they were able to crank up the charm and really sell themselves for 90 minutes during the interview. I would say that most of my classmates are on the level and are probably well-suited for medicine, but there's no doubt in my mind that some people snake through the admissions process and get accepted despite having some really unsavory qualities.
ReplyDeleteBut I think things still turned out awesomely well for you. I'm expecting to see my name in the Acknowledgments section of the many, many papers you're going to publish in Science and Nature, and you know I'll be pissed if you don't thank me in your speech after you win the Nobel prize.