Anonymous Doctor

One of the residents has a husband who brings her dinner whenever she's on call overnight.

I'm scrounging for food from the vending machine, and her husband drives over to the hospital with a homemade dinner, all packed up for her, still warm.

Not just a piece of pizza, or a tuna sandwich. A real, actual meal.

And she sits there, eating it, while the rest of us are trying to lick our fingers to get all the salt from the bottom of the pretzel bag before we toss it in the trash.

She's the only one here who isn't married to another doctor, of course. Doctors don't have time to make dinner. They certainly don't have time to hand-deliver it to the hospital.

You'd think maybe she could offer me a cookie-- a homemade cookie, by the way, and I don't think it's from one of those frozen rolls of cookie dough. You'd think maybe, in exchange for not bothering her with questions for the 10 minutes she takes to devour the food-- she could offer me a couple of glazed carrots.

You'd think she would realize she should probably go off into a room where the rest of us can't watch her while she eats. You'd think she would realize the rest of us are just as hungry and just as tired, and just because we don't have a husband or wife with the time and inclination to make us dinner, we shouldn't have to suffer watching.

I have 14 more hours here before morning when I get to leave. 14 more hours of vending machine food. And she has a piece of fish with a caper-lemon sauce. I have a pop tart. A stale one. She has a chocolate cupcake. With a heart on it. I have Pringles. And really just the crumbs, because the other intern ate most of the intact ones. She has a fork. I have a spork. Which I can't even hurt myself with, because the prongs aren't sharp enough.

Life is unfair.