Anonymous Doctor

It's like I'm back in high school.

I went to the local shopping mall yesterday to kill some time on my day off, figured I'd see some little kids in costume for Halloween, and even though it's a pathetic way to spend a day off, I was a little bored in my apartment.

And, funny enough, at the mall I ran into another intern, who I've sort of had a crush on, who had exactly the same idea.

And so we spent the afternoon together, and it was kind of nice. We definitely talked too much about our patients, and about the hospital, but it was nice to spend a few hours outside of the hospital with another human being. Not being paged. Not dealing with nurses and med students and attendings and patients and families and rapid responses and sickness and disease. But still someone who understands what we're going through and who I could talk about this stuff with and not feel like I'm boring them to death.

We had a nice dinner-- an early dinner, since we both had to be back at work at 6:30 this morning-- but it was going really well, almost like a really good first date, my first really good first date in a really long time...

And then she told me about her boyfriend who's an intern at a hospital halfway across the country and how they're really committed to making it work even though it's so hard for them to see each other, and he was working yesterday, otherwise he would have flown in even though it would have just been for 24 hours and how they've both been desperately trying to switch days off with people so that they can have some common time off and would I be willing to trade part of my next vacation because I overlap a week with his vacation and it would be so amazing if she could go there and visit him for more than 24 hours at a time and she misses him so much and--

Oh, wow, look at the time, I really should get going, we have to work at 6:30 tomorrow morning, and, yeah, I'll think about the vacation thing, but I've already sort of made plans to go see my family and... argh. How do you spend four hours with someone and wait until you're having dessert to mention that you have a boyfriend?