Freaking Out Friday

So, in roughly twelve hours I'm supposed to be at this conference, right? Gosh, it seemed like such a good idea at the time. It's right down the street from the hospital, sponsored by our department, four or five nice little talks, a good lunch. And the department offered to pay for the first ten residents who wanted to go. End of my vacation. Nice idea.

Except, I didn't realize the weekend when I asked to go.

And now I'm having a relatively big panic attack at the prospect of going to this thing tomorrow.

Oh, it's totally irrational. Although it was totally escalated when I just looked at the flier and realized that it's not being held where I thought it was and I actually have no earthly idea where this place is on campus.

So, three years ago, I spent the second weekend in April at this conference. It's the one I mentioned as being the event that changed my life and ultimately led to me not taking any more shit from the man behind the curtain and leaving the Emerald Palace. I was in all sorts of trouble for going to the AAGL class, right? But I went anyway. I thought maybe I could learn something. I thought maybe I could prove myself, you know? But I just ended up in trouble. So, anyway, I went to this thing, and all morning, I'm listening to these talks, you know, and that's fine, but in the breaks I start talking to talk to the other residents who are there. And they're listening to my stories - which I'm telling because I think they're normal - and they're all like, wow, that's...that's not good. I was like....um....okay....

And then we had lunch. There were these roundtable discussions, and I had, like, my top six choices all ranked in the program, and so I was headed to, table number 3 or whatever, for, like, Pearls for Reducing Your Rate of Complications in Hysteroscopy or something like that, when, suddenly, I didn't. For reasons I still can't explain I veered to what I think was my fifth choice, named something along the lines of Teaching Yourself Laparoscopy in Residency. Where I ended up sitting at a table full of residents, with one other intern who was SOOOOOOOOOO excited about her program, and the speaker, we'll call him Tony, who used to be a program director. I spent most of the lunch with my head down trying not to cry. These people were in a whole other world than I was. Tony was all "my residents" this and "my residents" that, so protective of them, and he had been in private practice for a couple of years by then.

Later that afternoon, we had labs. I spent the first half mostly with equipment reps, using the virtual reality trainer, picking seeds out of a pepper with a hysteroscope, plucking potato and toothpick "tumors" out of a pig bladder, that sort of thing. And then I went to the other room, to work on the older trainers and the foam rubber uteri with the real doctors and the real instruments.

And I was really good.

So here I am, right, on the trainer, and Tony comes up to me, watches me for a while, corrects my posture. He's like, you're really good. What are you, third year? I said, no, remember, I'm the intern who's in trouble for being here. I was running circles around my training partner, who actually was a third year. He's like, you have great dexterity. You're a really quick learner. Wow, you've got great strategy. And then I rotated on, and the next thing I know I'm doing moderately complex maneuvers with three of the best endoscopic surgeons in the country when back home, I couldn't tie a open field square knot without getting yelled at. It was surreal.

At one point, this black woman, who was like a fourth year resident somewhere else, she and I were talking, and I said something about things getting better when I got to second year. And she says, "Well, or you'll realize that your program just sucks." Um. Well...or there's that...

And then that night, I met up with my friends from home. I was still a little stunned from the day's events. And they were all like, good God, you look like hell, what are they doing to you up there?

It was a good question.

I went back the next morning (because it was a two-day conference), and talked to this other woman, this Greek girl who was doing her residency in Boston somewhere. I talked to Tony a little more, because it turned out that he and this Greek girl had gone to the same medical school. I listened to his lecture, which was essentially the same thing he'd told us at the roundtable the day before, but, it was, again, there was that undertone of "this is what you're entitled to as a resident. Someone's required to teach you, you're entitled to learn."

It was like someone had flipped a switch that first day. It was like some of the color had come back into my grey life. I went back, and within four hours of getting home my world started collapsing. My life, my career, my sanity, it imploded four days later. I can't even begin to explain the magnitude of that decision. How far-reaching the fallout would be. I still don't even comprehend the full scope of what happened. That sounds overdramatic, but trust me, it's not even close.

And Tony, well, Tony's a whole other post. Hell, Tony's a whole other blog.

Everything changed that weekend. Because I went to some random conference.

I know it's a whole different situation now. I know that what happened needed to happen. I know I'm in a very different place living a very different life now than I was then. I know I was skidding towards that catastrophe long before I even signed up for the AAGL class, that it was just a catalyst for things that had to happen. That this is so different. Different time, different people, different situation.

But that's not how PTSD works.

I don't know if I can go tomorrow. I don't know if I can do this. I don't know that it's the worst thing ever that I don't, and if I had shelled out for the registration myself I wouldn't think twice about not going. But I didn't pay for it. Now, honestly, I don't really know that the department did, either - I mean it's their conference.

It's totally irrational and superstitious, but you know, things are going well right now. I don't know if I can run the risk of everything changing again. I'm just completely terrified of it.

Okay, you know what? I never said I wasn't crazy.