You know when you get treated wrongly and you think of the perfect thing to say or do to give the bullies their comeuppance?

Me neither. At least not 99.87% of the time.

But no matter because you know what happened in that 0.13% sliver of chance? Not a thing except the opportunity to serve up the biggest heaping dose of karma EVER. If you’ve never had the chance to bury your own hatchet, by all means, live vicariously through me. Underdogs of the world unite!

My tale of triumph took place during my internship on Labor and Delivery. To be more specific, it was 2:00 am and I was on call at the private hospital where we did rotations. Working in this hospital was a little different than when we were at the university one. Here, very few patients were “ours.” These women had private doctors whom they had lovingly and thoroughly researched, interviewed, and selected. Exhaustively and with extreme commitment. All of this research was frequently laminated and saved in binders as prologues to their twenty-five page birth plans.

Unfortunately for them–and really me–these ladies often had not read the fine print:

Your doctor has a  sweet deal at a teaching hospital. This means he has residents as his scut monkeys to do the majority of his labor (pun intended and reveled in). The resident’s job is to stay up for ungodly stretches of time caring for you while absorbing your ire. Your physician will glide in just minutes before your baby crowns. He is NOT coming in to triage or to supervise your labor because let’s be honest, he’s just not that into you.

Yeah, no one was ever pleased about not seeing THEIR doctor “right now!” so I thought my new preterm labor patient in triage was just having the typical indignant reaction when she saw me pop through the curtain. The indignation always amused me because in triage, I reigned as judge and jury, deciding who got to stay and who shouldn’t let the door hit her on the way out. Staying was a good thing when you wanted your spawn out yesterday, not so good when you were preterm.

As I strode into the room, the patient jerked up in bed and practically levitated. She was twenty-seven weeks pregnant, so preterm labor was a scary situation. My eyes flew to the fetal monitor, but no contractions were registering. In the blink of an eye, I introduced myself, asked the patient if she was in pain, and moved to adjust the monitor on her belly.

“Are you having contractions?” I asked as I moved the monitor around, reassured to see the strong and responsive fetal heart rate.

“No,” she squeaked.

I was scanning her chart to see if she was a preterm labor risk, but her strangled response tore my eyes away from the chart.

“You seem to be in a lot of distress. What’s going on?” I asked.

“I had a little spotting and some pressure so Dr. Busyonhisyacht wanted me to come in and be monitored.”

“Do you feel any contractions now?”

“No,” she stammered.

“Well that is excellent, but I’m going to need to do an exam with the speculum to see if you are dilated or have any rupturing of your membranes.”

“Where is my doctor!?!!” The squeak was now so shrill it could have cracked a wine glass. Or my nerves.

I replied, “It’s standard procedure here for a resident to exam you and report to your doctor what is going on. Using this information he will make decisions about your care.” Implied but not stated: On a side note, I would not piss me off because I will have my hand up your vagina in about five minutes. Just sayin’.

“But won’t he come in for ME?”

Poor delusional thing. “No, Sweetie, I’m sorry.  And besides, we need to know now if your cervix is changing for the safety of the baby. We can’t wait for him to drive in.”

“You don’t remember me do you?”

Mental Rolodex whirred furiously. I am abysmal at remembering people on a good day. I had been working for twenty hours, so I had no hope .

“We were in the same suite in college,” she whispered. She at least had the decency to look ashamed.

Insert screeching brakes and a twelve car pile up in my head. This was the girl who had tag-teamed with my other suite-mates to inflict misery upon me for five months of my junior year. Sleep deprivation was not the culprit here. My brain was functioning under the protection of denial and repression.

At my college, getting into the fabulous upperclassmen suites was an exercise in backroom politics. It was all about who you knew. People already living in the suites got to pull other people in. At housing lottery time, the schemes, bribery and treachery flew around like glitter during a pole dance.

After countless hours of wheeling and dealing, I thought I got pulled into the Nirvana of all suites. It was two stories with five bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. I pulled my good friend into my room with me. We even had our own bathroom.

Well, to put it simply, things went to hell when the girl who pulled me in unexpectedly moved off campus and we ended up in this suite with four rooms of the cliquiest Mean Girls whom we  enraged with our very existence. We had blocked the final members of their Axis of Evil from moving in and they were bent on making us pay.

They were pros at tormenting us. Some of their attacks were blitzkreig-esque like when they threw our pots and pans away or when they dumped our possessions out into the stairwell. Sometimes the torture had more of a prisoner of war flavor when they would place speakers up against our door or they would jack up the thermostat. We counted ourselves lucky when they were just calling us names.

My friend and I lived like hermits behind our locked bedroom door until we could be liberated at the end of the semester. We tried to have as little contact as possible with the other girls.

But here SHE was . . . about to have a lot of contact with me. Can you imagine? Regret served up on a speculum. Sounds like the worst country western song ever.

I treated her professionally, and thank goodness she was not in preterm labor. But in those wee hours of the morning, as I snapped on my gloves, I like to think that I not only served up great patient care, but I delivered the most epic dose of karma a Mean Girl has ever had to swallow.

-Ellen