"It's all fun and games until someone gets shit in their eyes."

Although I blogged on this topic not too long ago, I firmly believe in knocking down the facade of the seemingly glamorous lives of doctors. Everyone sees the fancy cars, the long white coat, and the self-assured and cocky attitude of doctors, but rarely does anyone realize what this job actually entails.

My mom was always enamored by doctors. She didn't get to go to medical school and always regretted that decision. She said things that were classic of a non-doctor like, "Wow, you get to be economically self-sufficient" or "Doctors get so much respect," or "You help people!" In short, the classic immigrant lines about the American Dream. She, of course, had me at "economically self-sufficient."

I find that it is my duty as the resident blogger/muckraker to dismantle the myths about this seemingly dignified, respectable profession of the bourgeois class. I realized this year that being a doctor involves doing a lot of shit, literally.

For instance, last week, I scrubbed into a procedure that I thought would be simple - a mere colostomy and central line placement. But then, suddenly things took a dark and sinister turn as the patient was placed in the lithotomy position. The surgeon started to explore this lady's anal cancer as if he were the Vasco da Gama of the anorectal canal, and I was his humble skipper there to help with whatever was needed.

The scrub nurse (who had the attitude of a cab driver in rush hour in NYC) aggressively forced a small yellow bowl and suction into my hand and told me place it under the butt hole (for a lack of a better word) as the surgeon irrigated the fistula that had developed there. As he cleaned out the fecal matter from the vagina, I got to suction the lovely contents up like a dutiful Vanna White that I was. It was at this point that I thought, I went through 8 years of extra schooling to do this? To have the dubious honor of suctioning up shit?

My internal diatribe was interrupted suddenly with a huge splash. The saline and fecal solution that the surgeon had been irrigating splashed on my face and eyes. The moment was very surreal - did this really just happen? I didn't say anything at first until I heard the scrub nurse making a huge commotion about how it got into her eye.

"Uh, can I, uh, please get a towel?" I asked timidly still thinking that my job of holding the feces bowl was still relevant despite actual contact with someone else's bodily fluids.

"WHY?? DID IT GET IN YOUR FACE?" the nurse said in a panicked voice.

"Yeah, um just in my eye and face," I said. I was then forced to de-scrub and promptly head to the eye wash to irrigate my eye.

The doctor looked at me with bemusement and said, "It's all fun and games until someone gets shit in their eyes." Ah, a surgeon's sensitivity.

When I told my friends about this incident, they couldn't stop laughing. "This happend to YOU? YOU?" they said with incredulity as they pictured their prissy blogger friend in such a horrendous, disgusting situation. And then I had an epiphany as I filled out an incident report at the nurse's station that day: that being a doctor doesn't require the intellectual mind of a great thinker. Because when all of that prestige and respectability and glamor is stripped away, all you're left with is someone who is willing to get down and dirty and deal with all the literal and metaphorical shit of people's lives.

--By Mariam, who loves the "Wedding & Celebrations" sections of the New York Times, just like Katherine Heigl in that crap movie 27 Dresses.