Irony at Thirty Thousand Feet

I go home to California for a few days at the end of every summer.  So there I was last week, with carry on luggage full of bagels, trying not to flip my shit at the woman next to me who had three open canisters of nuts on her lap, when a flight attendant cleared her throat over the intercom.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please remain calm, but is there a medical doctor or D.O. on board?”

Clearly, life was mocking me.  You see, up until 48 hours earlier, I’d been a premedical student.  And then I had freaked out, booked a meeting with the pre-law advisor, and bought the LSAT study guide that was currently open to the first diagnostic exam across my tray table.  I hadn’t yet told my parents.  I figured that kind of news (I’d also sort of dropped summer session Mechanics II two days before the final) was best delivered in person.  Dad was going to kill me for that one.

“Excuse me,” the flight attendant said again, her voice noticeably more frantic, “but is there a medical doctor or D.O. on board?”

I wanted to help.  I wanted to tap the flight attendant on the shoulder and calmly assure her that I was a medical student, or a medical doctor, and everything would be just fine.  But I couldn’t. I wasn’t either of those things.  I was a future health policy lawyer, on a straight path to becoming a paper-pushing, contract-writing business suit.  And in those moments when it looked like my nearly-expired Red Cross CPR and First Aid certification was the only medical “expertise” on that two-hours-remaining flight, I realized cruel fate was showing me what it was like to be unable and unqualified to save a life.

Finally, a physician in first class took off his noise-canceling headphones and contacted the flight crew. The medical emergency, whatever it was, subsided without his help.  And I finished my diagnostic LSAT exam somewhere over Nevada, scoring exactly what the pre-med advisor told me I would need.  

But the thing is, sometimes you don’t know what you need until you figure out what you can’t live without.  And then it goes without saying.  Juli, I know I told you last time we spoke that I was going to pass-fail organic chemistry II and take the October LSAT, but that’s not exactly the plan anymore.  Now my dad is really going to kill me.  I’m back to being a pre-med, and just in time, since Columbia classes (aka organic II) start tomorrow.  

Life is really going to suck this semester.  Because, during that blissful, stress-free summer week when I was sleeping in my childhood bedroom and lazing about the Los Angeles suburbs, I overcommitted.  Stay on as an associate editor at IvyGate? No problem, if all you have to worry about is a couple of English classes and a lingering history requirement.  Big problem, if you need the kind of grade in Orgo II that will make up for an inexplicable withdraw from summer session on your medical school application.  

So here’s to a semester where I have Friday morning science lecture, a thesis and a senior writing project, a bioethics journal to lay out, Philo parties to host (and clean up) in my apartment, and grad school in a different state looming in the spring. 

In the words of Brotherhood 2.0, press start to begin.