Why We Should Keep Sarah from Getting a Degree in Medicine

All of my roommates (Sarah, Sara, and Victoria) and I were watching Grey’s Anatomy the other night, when the topic of surgeons leaving instruments in patients’ bodies came up. Sarah wants to become a surgeon, so we were all laughing about how she would be the type of doctor to forget a scalpel or scissors inside someone.

“You forget where you put the silverware after you use it, Sarah. What makes you think you won’t ever forget an instrument in a patient?” Sara pointed out, grinning.

“Haha, I guess that is totally something I’d do,” Sarah admitted. “But it’s not like I should have to worry about it anyway.”

“Hahaha, what do you mean you shouldn’t have to worry about a scalpel floating around in a patient’s body? Malpractice lawsuit, anyone?” I said.

“It, like, isn’t the doctor’s job to take care of that stuff. That’s why surgeons have nurses around,” Sarah said with a straight face.

The light-hearted mood of the conversation took a sudden dive.

“Wait, you think nurses are there to pick up after doctors who are too lazy to make sure to take out their surgical instruments?” I asked.

“Well, yeah. Surgeons have too many things to be worrying about than that. Nurses are supposed to do everything a doctor doesn’t have time for,” Sarah elaborated.

“I’m sorry, but nurses are not trained to be doctor’s maids. They are there to assist and help save a person’s life!” I exclaimed.

“Whatever, Roommate. You’re just getting defensive because your mom is a nurse,” Sarah turned away.

I was shocked. Yes, my mother is an RN (a registered nurse). And after hearing about her 25 years in OR, ICU, NICU, and Recovery, I know that being a nurse is not a piece of cake. My mother never complains in front of us kids because she wants to keep up a strong face, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized how taxing 16 hour day and night shifts were. My 5′3″, 130-pound mom has had to lift 400 pound patients onto gurneys. She has had to revive people who have flatlined. She has had to make sure premature babies don’t die over night. She has saved so many lives and witnessed so many deaths, and she never says anything about her life at the hospital until I asked one day several years ago. She watches CSI, House, and Grey’s Anatomy and just softly chuckles when my siblings and I ask her if what we see on TV is what it’s really like. My mother is a hero, every day, and I didn’t ever see it because she never said a word about it. So when this uppity bitch talks crap about nurses and how frivolous their purpose is, of course I’m going to be defensive.

I felt my eyes flashing, and I shot Sarah a disgusted glare and turned back to the TV. There were no more discussions about medical roles.

I’m a Slave 4 U

Not to state the obvious, but Sara and Sarah are two people who are very difficult to get on your side.

Sarah, the pre-med, is easy to read. She openly talks about how great she is at biology, chemistry, taking standardized tests, and how steady her hands are. Her elitist and condescending air makes anyone uncomfortable at the thought of putting their life in her hands. But for some reason, I think the other roommate is more hazardous to one’s health.

Sara, the ambitious and cut-throat business major, masquerades under the image of the I-want-to-help-developing-nations political science student. She claims to want to use her business/management knowledge to help people, and yet her underlying ambition to climb the corporate ladder at a huge consulting firm shows through the people she surrounds herself with (Big Four interns, kids with powerful/rich/political ties, and other cut-throats).

When we first moved in together, I figured having two friends who had direction in their lives would be a good deal, seeing as I had very little idea about what I wanted to do in the long-run. I was pretty nervous about living with two girls who had known each other since 2nd grade, but I figured since we were all in the same situation, I’d try to be agreeable (despite the differences I noted upon first meeting) and make the best of it.

Apparently, to the Sara(h)s, “agreeable” equals “doormat”. We had to do our laundry the first weekend after move-in, but so did the rest of the apartment building. Since our building has three washing machines and two dryers to share between over 100 people, we had to monitor our loads so that other washers wouldn’t throw our clothes onto the floor. Of course, my roommates wanted to stay up in our apartment to watch the MTV Video Music Awards, so they left me with all their laundry in the basement while they were glued to the TV. After handing me at least eight pairs of jeans (between the two of them), Sara waltzed back up to the room and promised over her shoulder, “Don’t worry! I’ll be back in a few minutes to help you!”

An hour and a half later, after I had started two new loads and put the previous loads in the dryer, Sara still hadn’t returned. Unable to carry three baskets of laundry up by myself, I hastily acquainted myself with a rather good-looking fellow washer and got him to help me carry some a basket up to our apartment.

“Hey! Sorry about not coming back; I got a little distracted by the VMAs. Did you see Britney’s performance?” Sara asked.

“No, funnily enough, I didn’t see it,” I smiled through my teeth. “Anyway, Ryan’s just helping me carry up some of our laundry. Will one of you come down to take over soon?”

“Oh, yeah, don’t worry. The VMAs are over soon,” Sara responded.

Of course, even after the VMAs ended, none of them had showed up in the laundry room, leaving me to lug up their baskets alone.

Figures.

Money Matters

A new term started in January at my university, so things have been really hectic around here. Textbooks cost at least $300 and sometimes hits $500 per term now. How ridiculous is that? The poor college student image is not just a stereotype, so I don’t know how publishers can think that kids can pay these prices on top of tuition, rent, and food.

Well, unless the kids they have in mind happen to be my roommates. Both Sara and Sarah complain about never having a job or money, and yet it seems like they come home with shopping bags at least every week.

It’s time to fill out financial aid forms, and so I had to make a million and a half phone calls to my mother to get her information (since I’m still a dependent on her taxes). Neither Sara nor Sarah looked stressed out at all.

“Hey, are you guys filling out the financial aid forms this year? You can probably qualify for a lot of things since one of your parents is unemployed right now,” I suggested.

“Eh, my mom takes care of everything,” Sara said.

“Yeah, even when I was applying to colleges, my parents filled out all my paperwork,” agreed Sarah.

Uhhh, okay. I’m glad we all learned to be adults the easy way.

I thought that perhaps Sarah could finally back up her money-burning ways when she asked me to help her with her resume later that night. As she is pre-med, she had never had to do a resume or cover letter before. So we stayed up late coming up with ways to make it sound like she had any transferrable skills.

Sarah put down as a bullet point “Coordinated a community service event”, and when I asked if she had really done it, she said, “Well, I was coordinated, but let’s leave that part out”. I had to explain to her that embellishing only goes so far, and making up a promotion from participant to coordinator was kind of pushing it.

After a while, I thought it was going pretty well–maybe she’d take me seriously when she saw how dedicated I was to helping her.

“So, I have an 8 AM class tomorrow. I’m going to go to bed,” Sarah announced at 3 AM.

“Oh, okay, but your application is due at noon; are you going to finish on time?” I asked.

“Um, yeah, I’ll just get up in the morning to finish it up. Can you just fix these points for me, since you’re always up late anyway? Just e-mail the changes to me when you’re done, yeah?” She walked off into her room.

I ended up staying up another two hours until 5 AM editing her resume and cover letter. And when I got back from class at 11, Sarah was just getting out of bed. “Did you submit your application yet?”

“Nah, I just woke up. Did you email me the changes?”

I blinked. Wait, what? Confusedly, I asked, “I thought you said you had an 8 AM class!”

“Oh, yeah. I was planning on sleeping through it, and I figured you’d be fine since you stay up late every night anyway,” she responded nonchalantly. She looked at her inbox. “Oh, got your edits! Thanks!”

So basically she lied to me about having an early class so that she could go to bed and so that I would stay up and do her work for her. Great. My hopes that she would grow up and learn to take care of herself had just been dashed.