Suicide Med (4 page)

“Dr. McKinley
,” he repeats. How does he already know my last name? “How are you going to learn anything from back there?”

“I’m not a doctor,”
I mumble. My cheeks feel like they’re on fire.

“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…”

Ugh, Rachel needs to stop talking.
I shake my head to drown out the sound of her voice and watch Mason’s steady hand draw 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.

_____

I stink.

When you’re in the lab, it’s like you don’t even notice the smell.
Eventually, at least. But the second I walk out of the lab into the real world, I start to notice that I personally do not smell good. I strip off my scrubs in the ladies’ room and put my street clothes back on, but it honestly doesn’t help that much. I still stink.

I stand outside my Ford in the parking lot for about five minutes, not wanting to spread the smell to my precious (used) car.
My bookbag already kind of smells. Is everything I own now going to stink like cadavers?

Finally, I get into the car and drive home as fast as I can.
Thank God, I beat Rachel home, so I’ve got first dibs on the shower. As I peel my clothes off in the bathroom, I realize that they’ve definitely taken on the scent of the lab. Especially my bra, which I guess I was wearing in the lab. Where’s the incinerator?

I step into the shower and my shoulders don’t relax until there’s scalding hot water streaming down my
naked body. If I could have, I would have showered in bleach.

Thirty minutes, half a bottle of Dove Body Wash and Moisturizer, and a handful of peach-scented shampoo later,
I step out of the shower. I pick up a few damp strands of my hair and sniff critically. Oh my God, it still smells! Not, like, strongly, but I can definitely still detect formaldehyde.

Has the formaldehyde fused with my DNA?
Am I going to need gene therapy in order not to stink anymore?

I sigh, pull on my
bathrobe, and make my way into our bedroom. Rachel’s arrived home, and she’s sitting on her bed, reading a magazine. I can smell her all the way across the room—it’s horrible.

“I’m done with the shower,”
I announce.

“Uh huh,” Rachel
says.

I expect Rachel to make a beeline in the direction of the bathroom, but she doesn’t budge
.

“
Aren’t you going to take a shower?” I ask her.

“Yeah.
Later.”

“But…”
Oh my God, is she kidding me? She needs to shower
right now
.

“Relax, Heather,” Rachel says.

She
adjusts her position in bed, probably grinding the smell into her blankets and sheets. It’s almost too awful to watch.

“The water is all… you know, warmed
up,” I croak.

“I’m sure it will still be warm in an hour,” Rachel
says. I wince and Rachel adds, “Or two.”

I’m almost tempted to grab my
purse and offer Rachel cash if she’s willing to clean herself. But no, I’m not going to let her bother me.

Screw Rachel.
I’m going to take another shower.

Newsflash: Medical school is really hard work.

I knew it would be.
Obviously. But it’s really, really hard. Harder than pre-med 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 Seth).

The weeks pass quickly, 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, I think 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 g
ives 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. In order to make us feel less competitive or something, 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 actually 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. It seems like 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
raise 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 Ginny, who is standing across from me.

I know 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.

Ginny 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.

Ginny seems somewhat traumatized by my profanity, so I add, “Sorry.”

She nods.
“It’s okay.”

“Why am I so bad at this?” I whine.

Ginny shrugs.

“Just study more,” she says, not unkindly.

Ginny and I don’t really 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 Ginny 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.

So in summary, I have no friends and I’m failing anatomy.

And then to make my life even better, what is apparently the duodenum starts spasming and ejects what appears to be retained fecal matter all over my hands.

Shit.

Literally.

_____

Sometimes anatomy just feels completely hopeless. I stare at my anatomy lab manual for hours and feel like I don’t absorb a word of it. It may as well be in another language. At some point, I realized I was just wasting time and shoved my lab manual under the bed.

Dr. Conlon says
to me one day in lab, “Tell me the branches of the celiac trunk.”

I peer down into our cadaver, down at the celiac trunk branching off into… okay, truthfully, I don’t really know.
I look up at Abe, across the table, who is mouthing something at me. Too bad I can’t read lips.

“The hepatic artery?”
I guess.

Dr. Conlon sha
kes his head at me and I recognize the disappointment in his blue eyes. I watch as he leans his cane against the table and pulls one of our blue gloves onto his left hand. I hadn’t noticed it before, but our professor’s right hand doesn’t seem to be fully functional. His fingers are curled up and it takes him a few awkward attempts to get the glove in place. But once he does, he picks out a pair of forceps with his left hand and grasps a blood vessel.

“What’s this
artery called?” he asks me.

When I don’t answer, he looks over at Abe.
Abe hangs his head as he replies somewhat grudgingly, “The splenic artery.”

“Right,” Dr. Conlon says.
He focuses his gaze back on me. “Are you reading the lab manual?”

You know you’re in trouble when your professor says that to you.

“No, I’m not,” I confess. “I… I don’t really get much out of it.”

“That’s not too surprising if you don’t read it,” he says.
I can’t tell if he’s making a joke or not. He’s definitely not smiling when he adds, “You have a lot of potential, Heather. Don’t waste it.”

He’s stopped calling me Dr. McKinley.
That’s kind of depressing.

His words ring in my ears an hour later, a
s I dig through the pelvis, searching for an elusive nerve. The rest of my lab group is absent, and only Mason is across from me. Usually, Mason is up to his elbows in the cadaver, but right now he’s just watching me. It’s a little bit disturbing.

“What are you
doing
?” he finally asks me.

I put down my scalpel and straighten up.
He’s blinking his pretty hazel eyes at me. His eyelashes are very long—I’m almost jealous.

“I’m trying to dissect out a nerve,” I say.

“Which nerve?”

“The
ipsilateral nerve,” I say. “But I can’t find it.”

Mason stares at me a second, then bursts out laughing.
I mean, really laughing. So hard that he manages to squeeze out a few tears, and has to wipe them away with the back of his forearm. There’s a part of me that always sort of wants to punch him in the face, but right now I really, really want to punch him in the face.

“What’s so funny?” I say through my teeth.

“Heather,” he snorts. “The word ‘ipsilateral’ just means ‘on the same side as.’ It’s not the name of an actual nerve.”

I think I’m going to cry.

Mason’s eyes soften when he sees my face.

“
It’s okay,” he says. “Look, you didn’t wreck anything. I’ll help you. That’s the femoral triangle, right?”

I look down at the body.
I have no idea.

Mason picks up the scalpel I abandoned and takes over my dissection like he’s been doing it for a million years.

_____

For the rest of lab, I feel like I’m just holding back tears.
I let Mason do the entire dissection because we all know it will be faster that way, and it means I can get home sooner and start crying. I need to have a good cry.

As I drive home, I say a silent prayer that Rachel won’t be in the room when I get there.
I can’t cry in front of Rachel. I wish I had a roommate that would comfort me when I’m feeling sad, but that’s obviously not going to happen. I don’t know what Rachel would do if I cried in front of her. But probably nothing that will make me feel any better.

Thankfully, she’s out somewhere as usual.
I sit down on my bed cross-legged and brace myself. But somehow the tears don’t come. I’m blinking my eyes, trying to squeeze them out, but somehow it’s not working. What’s wrong with me? I’m even failing at
crying
now.

I pick up my phone and call Seth.
I hold my breath, waiting to hear his voice on the other line, but after six rings, I realize that’s not going to happen. His voicemail picks up and instructs me to leave a message.

And that’s when I start to cry
, “Seth, please call me back. I really need to talk to you.”

I bury my face in my hands, sobbing.
Why am I so bad at medical school? Maybe this whole thing was a huge mistake. Nobody else in my lab group is struggling. It’s just me. I’m the only one. Plus I have no friends.

I dial Seth’s number again.
No answer. Where
are
you, Seth?

I pick up my shoe from the floor and hurl it at the wall as hard as I can.
It leaves behind a little shoe-sized spot of dirt. The whole thing doesn’t make me feel any better, just crazier.

I just feel so hopeless right now.

I end up leaving about three more tearful messages for Seth, then hating myself for having done it. I am definitely playing the part of the nutty, clingy girlfriend.

About thirty minutes and a dozen wet tissues later, my phone buzzes
with Miley’s voice. It’s Seth.

“Christ, Heather,” he says. I’d like to say he sounds worried, but there’s also an air of irritation in his voice. “What’s going on?”

“I just…” I bite my lip.
“I wanted to talk to you.”

“You wanted to talk to me?”
Seth sounds baffled. “I have twenty-three missed calls and a whole bunch of messages. Is that, like, normal behavior?”

I squeeze a half-used tissue in my fist.
“I was feeling sad.”

“Christ, Heather,” he says again.

He’s right—I was being crazy. But isn’t part of being in a relationship that the other person understands when you’re not at your best? Seth is being pretty much the opposite of understanding. And right now, he’s the only person I have to confide in. He used to love me, but now he sounds like he doesn’t even like me very much.

It seems like pretty much every aspect of my life is falling apart.