Clash Of Cultures

16. Teenage Vaping

Noor

Almost 7 months after starting my intern year on Gen Peds A, I was back on service on the general ward. This time though I was on Gen Peds B, with my co-intern Emily and senior resident Mark. I still had PTSD from my first month on the general peds service, but I realized now that it was more due to a certain senior resident and not my own lack of medical knowledge and skills.

Emily and I had never worked together before but I remembered her from our orientation last July. She was the red-head who had a bazillion questions for Sal. I still remembered the way his hand had rested on the small of her back, but I didn't know why that memory still bothered me.

Let it go Noor. You're on a roll here. This is not the time to get distracted by a man you have no future with.

And then there was Mark, our senior resident this month. Before we had even started on service I overheard him boasting to another male resident.

"Dude...I have not one but two girl interns this month. I'll basically be spending every call night with a hot gurrll!!", he laughed with a cheesy grin on his face.

Ugh...misogyny and sexism is alive and well.

As we were waiting for Mark to show up to the resident room on the first Monday of our rotation, I whispered to Emily, "Hey, I feel like you should know about a conversation I overheard between Mark and another resident".

After hearing what I had overheard, Emily rolled her eyes and said, "I am not surprised. I heard from another intern that he hit on her the entire month they worked together. Its ridiculous that we have to put up with this"

"Why do we have to? Why can't we report him?", if this was a pattern, I wondered why he hadn't he been reprimanded yet.

"Think about it Noor...what would we report? There is no real evidence of his behavior. Its basically your word against his. And he is an otherwise highly accomplished resident. No program is going to want to take action against him without hard evidence."

Well, that sucks

Emily was right, and our inability to do anything was exactly why sexual harassment is still so prevalent in medicine. 

"Don't worry though, I have a plan. Just follow my lead", she said walking up to Mark as he was setting down his things. 

"Hey Mark!"

"Oh, hi girls!", he replied to her a little too enthusiastically. 

And he had called us girls! I hated when men referred to adult women as 'girls' in professional settings. What about me travelling halfway across the world, saving people's lives on a daily basis and, living independently, screamed 'young, female child or adolescent'. It was yet another way to denigrate professional woman to weak, unimportant and therefore lesser qualified members of the workforce. 

Emily was now asking him if he had done anything interesting on the weekend, and Mark had launched in to a detailed description of the bar crawl he had done on Saturday. 

What the heck is a bar crawl?

When he finished, she said, "Oh that sounds like fun. I just stayed in with my long-term boyfriend. I love him so much, I am sure he will be asking me to marry him soon!"

Mark was looking at her with his eyebrows raised, clearly caught off-guard. I was confused about why Emily had just relayed what I thought would be very private information to a creep like him. And then it struck me, she was saying she was off the market without using those exact words.