She was crying, though her mascara and dark eyeliner did not trickle down her rouged cheeks along with her tears.

“I’m okay,” she assured me upon seeing the concerned expression on my face. Her tinted lips parted into a genuine smile, revealing bright, aligned teeth. “I’m just tired.”

Skeptical, I cocked an eyebrow. She laughed in response, wiping tears off of her lovely face with her left hand.

“Really,” she insisted, “I’m fine. I’m just tired. I cry when I feel tired. We’re all tired. You know how it is.”

We were only halfway through our first rotation as third-year medical students and here we were, discussing a physical and mental state that was verboten in the world of general surgery.

“What happened?”

“You know Mikolas?” she began. “I was in the operating room with him earlier… and you know how he is.”

I nodded. Mikolas was the stocky surgical fellow with a perpetual five o’ clock shadow regardless of the actual time. He always laughed at his own jokes, though we rarely found them funny. What he found amusing we found annoying. For example, one uneventful afternoon in the operating room, he and I engaged in the following dialogue:

“You’re right, that is the splenic artery. Strong work, Mary.”

“My name is Maria.”

“That’s what I said, Mary.”

“I said Maria.”

“Mary.”

“Maria.”

“Mary.”

I rolled my eyes, tacitly extracting myself from the conversation and quietly thankful that the surgical mask at least partially obscured my annoyed facial expression. He was clearly smiling behind his. To no one in particular, he then declared, “I can call her anything I want as long as it’s not sexual harassment!”

He laughed, smug and charmed by his own wit.

“What happened?” I asked again.

“Mikolas was performing the operation and everyone else in the operating room was a guy,” she continued. “The scrub nurse, the anesthesiologist, the surgical tech, and two surgery residents. I was the only female in there.”

She shifted in her seat and wiped her nose on the right sleeve of her scrub top.

“So Mikolas and one of the residents were pimping me(1) left and right and saying stupid things—which is fine, I’m used to all of that. But then my period started. And this was only an hour or two into the procedure. I couldn’t just leave the operating room with all of those guys in there; what was I supposed to say? ‘Can I scrub out because my period just started?’ So….”

She trailed off. I was wincing.

“So I just stood there and retracted(2) for the next five hours. And bled.”

She wasn’t crying anymore. Her hazel eyes were downcast, the circles underneath her eyes were thick and purple, and the whites of her eyes were still pale red from her tears.

We sat together in silence, watching the scorching summer sun glow orange-red through the leafy, tangled branches of the old sycamore trees.

(1) “Pimping” refers to a teaching technique that is somewhat (read: not really) similar to the Socratic method, though the questions may tend towards “what” rather than “why”. For example: “What is the name of this artery? Where does it branch from? What other organ does it feed? What organs are affected if it is tied off?”

(2) Medical students are usually assigned the thankless job of “retracting” (occasionally referred to “water skiing”) in the operating room. Students hold onto sterile, metal objects (”retractors“) that can resemble large, tapered bookends, shoehorns, hammers, etc. to keep tissues out of the surgical field so surgeons can see what they are doing and manipulate the tissues with greater ease.

(Part of the ongoing Relationship Series.)