First Day

Today was my first day of school. Last night, I lay in bed for hours jealously listening to the boy's even breathing and nocturnal chewing (he's the only person I know who chews in his sleep). I stared at the ceiling and wondered what today would feel like. I swear I barely blinked and the alarm went off.

And I went to school. It wasn't so bad, although predictably I showed up in the middle of a lecture and didn't have a clue what was going on. I steeled myself for the inquiries and I had already crafted a not-lying-but-still-not-admitting-I-failed response to "How did the boards go?" (answer: "I didn't do as well as I wanted to"), but a few people threw me a curveball I didn't anticipate.

See, our rotation schedules are posted. For medical students, schedules are everything. Well, grades and scores are everything, but schedules take a close second. We want to know what is going to happen and when, and we'll bitch up a storm if you don't tell us in a timely manner. The fun of asking people what their rotation schedule looks like lies in identifying who you'll be thrown into the scut with, who you'll be paired with on-call, and basically who in your class you'll be getting to know a LOT better for the next 16 weeks, if not the entire year. Also, there's the added fun of bitching about how hard X rotation is or how crazy Dr. So-and-so is. (In case you hadn't figured it out, medical students LOVE to bitch.)

I wasn't prepared for the "what service are you on?" wrinkle. I'm caught up in this dilemma because I don't want to outright lie but I also don't want to tell just anyone (and therefore, everyone--medical students also LOVE to gossip) that I failed. I could just tell them what my first rotation is and omit the start date (August, not April like everyone else), but what if they have that rotation in April? Then they'll be excited and want to talk about it, and I'll feel like a total liar and my guilt will probably get the better of me and I'll end up telling them anyway. That might not be too bad especially on a one-on-one basis, but today a guy asked me in front of four other people (that I don't know particularly well) what my first rotation was. I lied. I said I didn't know yet. And then I secretly resented him a little for being so cavalier with his question.

Somehow, I think this feels like being in the closet. I KNOW it's not nearly the same level of life-impacting, relationship-altering, reality-shattering truth as figuring out that you're homosexual must be, but I can kind of understand getting rankled at others' assumptions of your status. "Oh, are you married? What does your husband do?" must be an aggravating set of questions for a lesbian. It's almost worse when you know that people aren't trying to be insensitive; they're just ignorant, and you can't really blame them.