Difficult Communication

My first rotation had some minor problems with communication.  Many of the doctors in the internal medicine department were from India or Pakistan.  I had absolutely no problem with the people, they were friendly and open to teaching.  Occasionally, they would forget I was there and slip into Urdu.  I still actually understood a few words, like the numbers, which were similar to the numbers in Farsi.  Though, it was a little hard to understand a sentence where the only word you recognize is "five."  I would clear my throat, and they would realize I didn't understand and translate even if it was useless information, like "I had the eggs for breakfast" or "Mrs. Doe told me I was a gosh darn mother flubber when I didn't give her more percocet."  I had gotten completely used to my interns and residents a few weeks into my rotation, and the problems started when I was around them so much that I started to just barely develop an Indian accent of my own.  I wasn't trying to mock them, or even doing it consciously, but I noticed I was putting the emphasis on the wrong syllables while I was at the hospital.  I would tell my resident I was going down to the emerGENcy room to get an H&P, instead of my usual eMERgency room.  This just shows that I'm turning into Mariam circa kindergarten.  The subtle inflection left when this rotation was over, and hopefully I didn't offend anybody.  

Today, I had my first hostile patient.  I arrived at the outpatient clinic and this particular patient was too short of breath to explain their story to the medical student after she already explained it to the nurse.  She was not too short of breath to yell at me to get out of the room.  After this troublesome encounter, I overcompensated by being extra-friendly and asking permission to do anything.  Apparently, my compensation also involved developing a country accent for the small town patients at my AHEC rotation.  "What's that? Y'all try to get out on yer bicycle when ya can.  Well, that's downright healthy for yer heart, it sure will bring down yer cholesterol."  I can't help but annoy myself when I hear the country drawl coming out of my mouth.  I don't mind country accents - I just know I'm being  a total poseur and perpetuating the stereotype that country people are friendly.  One day I hope to find my own voice, my own self - just like Christina Aguilera sang in Mulan - when will my reflection show, who I am insi-aye-aye-ide.

--By Farrah, who's very happy to be back in Toledo from her AHEC, doesn't really know why she picked that picture of Dr. Nick, and realizes the video was probably overkill

M&M's "Just Ok"

Abby and I have few opportunities to hang out together ever since we started our 3rd year, so we've started eating our feelings in the form of chocolate.  We went to the store and found rows of fancy boxes claiming to be "m&m Premiums."  You'll open up this box to find a lavish gem-like coating on these scaled up icons of the candy world.  You'll bite into them with a shocking jolt because your teeth won't expect the lack of crisp candy shell. But I pose this to you blog readers, is it still a m&m if it doesn't have a crispy candy coating?  I didn't think so either, so Abby aptly renamed the chocolates. I now pose this questions to myself, did I really just write a blog about m&m candies?  I even took a picture of the box, which means I thought this was a good idea for a blog for longer than five minutes.  Though I don't think that now, I clearly need to get out more.  Let this be a lesson to us all: Don't use bad blog ideas, just say no.

--By Farrah, who will make a better effort one day to not be so very boring

The Subtle Art of Bragging

My mom is very computer illiterate. In my mind, I imagine all moms having no operating knowledge of how the mysteries of computers and the Internet work. However, my friends sometimes casually say things like, "My mom emailed me this article," and I am always in shock. How can Baby Boomers, who thought that the advent of televisions in their home was a novelty, know how to use this newfangled contraption?

My mom is infamously bad with computers. The really endearing thing is that she really wants to learn but she never seems to really get the hang of it. It's almost as if she's Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, as he poetically looks up at Countess Olenska's Paris apartment and says with such poignance, "Say I'm old-fashioned: that's enough." You see, like the ironically named Newland, my mother may as well belong to another time - a time where one used a slate and chalk to do long division math instead of calculators. Of course, this may all over the top metaphorizing, but you're probably used to my blog hyperbole.

Imagine my surprise when, I got this email from my "mom":

Dear Mariam,
I was able to able make it to NC.We both miss our medical student daugter. My fingers and my mind are somewhat exhausted after such a lengthy email.
yours Mom
ps your physician dad is saying hello

The joke here about the medical student daughter is that we often laugh at parents who subtly include their children's achievements into conversation. For example, "Johnny would come out to dinner, but he's got to go to the law school library and study." Now of course, said parent could just say, "Johnny has got to study," but by including "law school library" everyone knows that this kid is no ordinary Gen-Y slacker. It's sort of like that David Sedaris story "Ship Shape" in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, where David and his mother overhear a lady at the Korean dry cleaners say, "My sister and I are visiting from out of town. I'd love to stay awhile longer and explore but my home - well one of my homes - is on the garden tour, so I've got to get back." Apparently, the Korean man had no idea what she saying, and merely nodded "the way you do when you're a foreigner and understand that someone has just finished a sentence."

Once, we met this guy who was a neurosurgeon, who went to Harvard undergrad and had a host of other impressive achievements. His parents were fawning over the Harvard experience and how Ulysses S. Grant had lived in his dorm room. My dad, not one to be outdone, said in a tiny voice,"Uh, Mariam likes English and writing?" as if this question/statement would impress the parents of a Ha-vuhd grad. For once, my parents were at a loss for bragging rights. Finally, my dad resorted to another technique, hyping himself up - "I exercise a lot, and I have successfully reduced my LDL merely through diet and physical activity." This statement just got lost in the conversation, and no one even heard it - since the parents were now going on about how the governor of their state had invited them to his daughter's society wedding and how they were thisclose to the VIP glitterati of society. Finally, the Qureshi family conceded defeat in this bragging war, and we just sat there and listened, silently fuming at why I wasn't smart enough to go to an Ivy League and consoling ourselves by saying, "Well, UNC is a public Ivy."

Now, that's not to say that I, myself, am immune to bragging in an underhanded fashion. For instance, I still cringe at how when I first got to medical school, I would subtly include my MedStart status into all conversations with strangers. For example, after an introduction with the Block 1 professors, I'd sidle up to an unfriendly stranger and say, "Yeah, CBC is so incredibly nice. Do you know she went to school with Jennifer Garner?" as if to imply, I've got the inside track to MCO, bitch, and CBC and I do each other's hair after school, so take that! Hopefully, I've learned how lame that is and no one wins friends by saying they are a MedStart student - they merely incur the wrath of other fellow medical students who get angry because you didn't take the MCAT.

--By Mariam, a medical student who is so incredibly busy these days with night calls. Oh crap, was that bragging again?

Things I didn't expect

1)  My first blog-related rejection letter:

"We are sorry to inform you that your personal statement submission, "Traumarama: Cake Will Not Get You Off the Waitlist," was unable to be accepted for publication in this year's The Legible Script.  This year we had many more submissions than there was space in the magazine.  We hope that this will not deter you from submitting your work again in the future.  We are enclosing a copy of this year's magazine for you to enjoy."

When they say "enjoy,"  I assume they mean bitterly page through while telling myself that my story was better than the others.  Now, Mariam's rise to fame in The Independent Collegian leaving me behind hurts so much more.

2) A post-board exam equivalent of post-partum depression.  After delivering my knowledge baby for 8 hours, I was feeling glum.  But I guess it wasn't the real post-partum depression, but rather the normal response to pregnancy that didn't last longer than a couple days - all better now. :)

3) Forcing myself to pretend to laugh at my patient's incomprehensible jokes.  Here's an example you can follow if you encounter a similar situation:

Patient: *with heavy accent*  A man walks into with a jamican and a purple man valks through the woods, and found a wife, into the and to the blurg bloobidie, and they ran into a dentist!

MS3:  Oh, hahaha... hoohoohoo.  You sure do know a lot of jokes.  Now, I know where to send the nurses for a comedy show.

4) Bringing my dog, Teddy, to Toledo means waking up a half-hour earlier everyday.  During this half-hour, I'm outside in my professional clothing begging Teddy to take a poop so I can get to the hospital on time.

5)  There is so little time to blog.  Sorry.

--By Farrah, a new MS3 who is convinced that she has lyme disease

My Tortuous History with the MSA

When I was at UNC, I was "morally opposed to the MSA (Muslim Student's Association)." For those readers of the non-saracen persuasion, MSA is the club to join if you are a Muslim college student. It's a great place for Muslim kids to network with each other on campus and find their lifelong best friends who can understand their definitively unmainstream lifestyle choices. Anyway, despite the fact that my roommate was a hardcore MSA geek - she was "social chair" - I would refuse to go with her to any events or meetings because of a belief system that I had arbitrarily made up before even setting foot on campus.

Do you ever look back on what you thought was super important and wonder if it like, really mattered? Do you look back and think...okay, my convictions were slightly extreme and well, irrational? Well, this is what happened to me with regards to the MSA (and my previous bitter hatred of cauliflower and cabbage - both are really good!).

My whole rebel without a cause, anti-establishment attitude stemmed from what I thought was a really good reason to hate MSA - that girls got all dressed up in their cutest, modest clothes to find a husband. The year before I got to UNC, the social chair of the MSA had married the vice-president, a trend I noticed at many campuses around the country (i.e. George Washington University - where all East Coast Pakistanis congregated). I thought this was morally reprehensible. Finding a husband in the MSA? Lame, I thought! How anti-feminist! Backwards social thinking, I sputtered, this is what kept saracen girls behind - the neverending quest to find a husband! We were at a top institution like UNC to learn about William Blake, capitalist markets, and population genetics, not search for an appropriate boyfriend from the MSA. And so, thus began my four year boycott of MSA.

Ironically, what I failed to realize was that MSA was where I met my closest friends. I went to the first "social" at Mediterranean Deli and met Sukaina, who seemed quiet but told me she liked my aggressive handbag so I obviously thought to pursue the relationship. At Jummah (Friday prayer), I met Sinthia, and then the three of us nerd-bonded over how hard Chem 11 was.

Despite meeting some lifelong friends at MSA, I still refused to attend any of the events because I thought I was so "above" Muslim people culture - i.e. going to hookah bars and thinking they were all badass (which I still think is lame, but I digress), having ice cream socials in Carmichael, and putting on an annual MSA Sportsfest (this seems dumb to me even now since I hate playing sports). Ironically, I became president of the MSA in medical school - how that came to be was a mixture of fate and bad timing. Anyway, when I told people from my former life that I was MSA president, they would incredulously ask, "You?"

The MSA at UTCOM was not at all about social networking and Muslim bonding but about guy/girl segregation and awkward lunch meetings, but (silver lining) it taught me how to deal with conservative guys who didn't like interacting with people of the female persuasion. And I often wish I was back at the cushion-y safe haven of UNC MSA where there was decidedly less drama and male/female tension.

Anyway, as I reflect upon my college years, I really wish that I had not been so hard on the MSA. In retrospect, it was a meat market (with guys checking out the hijabi girls surreptitiously from across the room), but so what? There was no need for my theatrics and my easy dismissal of it as unprincipled, uncool, and lame. What other forum would allow Muslim guys and girls to hang out in a halal way? At an even lamer ISNA matrimonial event? Because at the end of the day, let's face it, Muslims, even the hardcore haafiz ones, still need a little lurve.

--By Mariam, now an MS3 at UTCOM (mashaAllah).

What I Want to be When I Grow Up: A Blogger

During USMLE study time, I did 3 things:

1) Study.
2) Watch decade old-reruns of 90210.
3) Read ever single online publication/blog out there - the lowbrow, the middlebrow, the highbrow, the middlebrow for the high brow. From the obscure to the mainstream, I read practically everything on the World Wide Webs to avoid learning.

As a result of number 3, I came to a major conclusion: blogs are the wave of the future. A recent New York Times article was about a socialite who blogged about her married life and issues with dishwashers. If the esteemed Times could spend time waxing poetic about a blog composed mainly of uninteresting pictures, then how important had blogging become to the upper-middle class white people culture? The guy from Stuff White People Like had gotten a book deal. Julia Allison, Star Magazine's editor-at-large and the real-life version of Carrie Bradshaw, was a constant object of mockery on Gawker. Perez Hilton, formerly an unknown, chubby but snarky loser, was now a still-chubby, famous Hollywood power player.

Before the internets, artsy types hoping for a glamorous career amongst the New York literati had to be a well-connected rich kid who could hire a ghostwriter (I'm looking at you Jonathan Safran Foer...JK).

However, with the handy advent of the Internets, blogging has now democratized the entry into these formerly exclusive halls. If enough people found your thoughts were interesting, you, too, could get a book deal or sell ads at an upwards of $50,000. Maybe most of you devoted fans of this blog (all 8 of you) already realize this, but I just realized that blogging could be a legit profession literally two days ago.

Weirdly, last year, when the winter of my discontent became all-consuming, I'd ironically say I wanted to be a "blogger" when I grew up, and I laughed at the utter absurdity of such a career. After all, as a first-generation, in my world-view people got jobs as professionals. People didn't blog for a living. They wrote blogs as side projects because they were fundamentally, at heart, narcissists, who thought their unfiltered, unedited, grammatically-incorrect posts mattered to an invisible legion of kind-hearted readers.

However, blogging is merely a component of "micro-fame." It satisfies our voyeuristic sensibilities that define the current zeitgeist. After all, consider the popularity of reality crap shows like The Hills. The seemingly vapid LC's willingness to live her life out on the stage of Hollywood has granted her a certain tabloid fame, well beyond the allocated 15 minutes.

And so, we blog on, thinking that our spur of the moments thoughts matter in some small, shitty way. But now, there is this fear of "oversharing" on the internets that Emily Gould let us know about in her cover story in New York Times Magazine. She was a former gawker.com editor who would overshare about her relationships on her blog and on her posts on the website, and it came back to bit her in the ass when her ex divulged all her dirty little secrets in Page Six. So while all bloggers believe sharing is caring, I think we all know what the lesson here is: while Al Gore is an all-round do-gooder these days with his fancy Noble Peace Prize, his crazy invention of the Internet is really difficult to control. So, be careful, little lady, it ain't safe out there on them blogs.

--By Mariam, who can't figure out how Hilary Swank won two Oscars. I mean she played Steve Sanders' GIRLFRIEND on 90210.

A Blogging Gift

Hello Upper East Sider...er Toledoers, Blog Girl here,

Just kidding. The latter was a mere parody of bloggers who think of themselves as reincarnations of Kristen Bell since the advent of the show. Well, the Back Row Ballers are still on blog-iatus, tragically. I am withering away in North Carolina studying and having random aggressive, emotional outbursts aimed at foreign medical school graduates, NBME, and inexplicably Katie Holmes. So in short, I will not be back sharing sarcastic adventures for a while.

However, to tide blog readers over, I have found this so-bad-it's awesome blog via Gakwer: "socialite" Emily Brill's blog (her dad invented Court TV), a therapeutic exercise in narcissism (as I guess all blogs are) and self-aggrandizement and an obvious attempt to portray oneself as an up and coming "It" girl but with an "edge." Let the mocking of the disaffected, over-privileged Ivy League grads begin!

You know you love me, xoxo

--By Mariam, who seriously hates lysosomal storage diseases. HATES. THEM.