Too much of an aside for an article of this nature, but this resident was my organic chemistry lab partner in undergrad. I abandoned premed after that, and hadn’t seen her in years. She remembered me first, because I was too shy to tell her I remembered her. We became reacquainted over a colposcopy.

Many medical school classmates who never spoke to me before this article was published – realistically, many classmates who I never spoke to because I am painfully shy and sat in the back of the lecture hall founding Rap Genius during GROSS anatomy lectures – came to me and said they were glad I published this piece. They did not tell me their own stories, really, which was probably smart of them.

After this piece was published, I agonized about whether or not I should’ve divulged more, or less. Fact is, I didn’t use drugs, I didn’t get kicked out of school, and I maintained my associations with my friends by remaining straight-edge. Went to a bunch of avant-garde or “hard” late-night rap shows, which does not count. At a certain point, I was reading a lot of non-medical books, but then I got to a point where I couldn’t read or watch TV anymore. I was just really, really down all of the time to the point where I couldn’t concentrate on school.

GIRLS was my “gateway drug” back into TV. It is true that I hung out with some toxic friends, but then I was hoping to become a toxicologist and/or at the time and on some level it contributed to the narrative. In fact, I watched GIRLS largely because I knew my friends would do so, not because I was interested in it, though I became interested over time. The most unflattering behavior was probably spending too much on cabs to The Brooklyn Larder during lunch hour.

For someone who works in gross anatomy full-time, I really hate the word “gross”! If it sounded like “dross,” I’d be fine with it, but I have to say the word “gross room” many times each day until it develops a Midwestern vowel flatness and a rhotic roll that is not that. Either way, I don’t like it. Sounds nasal and nerdy, and not in a good way. I really like the actor Mary Gross, and several friends with that last name, and most guttural words that are not “gross”! Not sure which free association will lead me to the answer. Self-hate, like that of a GIRLS character, who I’m sure also loves Mary Gross?

There is a Troop Beverly Hills false airs bent to this whole post, on a certain level. I picked this one construction solely for sentence cadence:

On GIRLS, med-i-cine is GROSS, which-it-IS, and-should-BE, on screen.

Fin.

I think “medicine is gross” works because it’s a statement of fact. Much of my writing benefits from revision. When someone asks what I am talking about, they are usually saying they don’t know what I am talking about. Pathologists have to speak simply! The usual M.O. (response) from a reader’s end, however, is “Hey, love that sound? What?” (I often use M.O. inappropriately because it sounds like Mo.) The editor here, who is a crafty writer in his own right, said he thought I sounded crisp like a blogger – paraphrase – and I got quite upset. I was an early blog adopter, but I thought it was the worst thing in the world to be as a prose stylist. Once a radiologist, always a radiologist, always with the words.

Whenever I am down I think of that line from The Giver: “Precision of language, please!”

Subliminal ad for Genius, I guess

Proton pump inhibitors target the hydrogen-potassium ATPase, muting gastric acid production and thus palliating a number of related erosive disease processes (via Wikipedia). PPIs are but one category of acid reflux drugs (generic name -prazole), with other clinical applications. In a moment of dumb luck, I found a purple Nexium ad on the 4 line when I was riding the subway to my NYU School of Medicine graduation in purple robes. Took a pic of the ad and the robe, to remember, because I now work as a pathologist and don’t prescribe drugs. As such, I forgot until now that PPIs alter bone density, which is such a just-girl-thing (osteoporosis risk factor).

As many others have written, Scrubs is probably the most “real” portrait of medicine that has ever been on American television, inasmuch as it is as cartoonish and sentimental as many doctors are. Other shows capture the exterior life of the hospital better, but Scrubs gets at the heart of the heartlessness, nahmean? Not saying “nahmean” is one reason why I work as a doctor, and not at (Rap) Genius! It doesn’t sound right coming out of my mouth!

Nor does this line, really. This line was not re-worded, but was moved up. Getting published is easier when you sound like someone else who already gets published. I wrote it to sound like a lede by a GIRLS character who wanted to get published, which is to say a younger, as yet unperverted version of me in the Internet theater. It had to sound knowing and residually wise, yet empty of any real profundity, leaving the reader with the impression that the writer has unearned sense of conviction, like some of the characters on the show talk. In a certain sense, though, I still believe it: I’d just word it less grandiosely, or more eccentrically.

For several years during medical school, I was irritated that young female writers in New York only got published if they wrote like Joan Didion or Janet Malcolm. Many of these writers came to my attention via Sasha Frere-Jones' internet presence and were profiled, to some extent unfairly, as “the Mollys” by the New York Observer. Public “Molly” number stop-dismissing-Mollys, nee Alice Gregory, has guest-starred on GIRLS as a stylish employee at Charlie’s Genius-like start-up. I think a lot of their critics missed that they were stylish prose stylists AND thoughtful, but the culture grew to them within, like, a year.

At the time of this writing, I had recently finished Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, the title of which I misremembered at Genius co-founder Ilan Zechory’s birthday party (“Inside Psychoanalysis?”) while trying to describe Aaron Green’s coat.

GIRLS is a good show, and I am a doctor who is letting that show. Blood-letting?

“Whoooooa, heaven, let your light shine down!”
– Collective Soul (of medicine), which Marnie has not yet covered on GIRLS

People seem to like reading articles about GIRLS when they’re not even about GIRLS! This essay attracted the largest readership I have ever received for any piece of my work – and were I not such a piece-of-work ingrate, I would rest on those laurels and Hamptons blouse on them into the brambles. This annotation is a trial void: I wanted to show annotations on a different Atlantic article, one about occupational medicine and physician burnout, but I felt an annotated version of GIRLS essay would lead to more hits to Genius. James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, a band I don’t even like that much, is very good at crystallizing this sentiment (e.g. “Shut up and play the hits,” “I told him, ‘Don’t do it that way, you’ll never make a dime!’”). As James Murphy put it, I don’t know what I really want.

Migos did the best Coachella commentary by replacing this entire poster text with THE MIGOS THE MIGOS THE MIGOS. Hope Drake brings them out with Makonnen. Not that I’d go.

This is the only book he talked about for months
https://twitter.com/Bro_Pair/status/550030081431969792