Medical Students are Notorious Heartbreakers

7 Responses

1. Ange

   September 6th, 2007 at 12:27 pm

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   Hey Adam, just take it one day at a time and have fun…. life is too short.

2. Adam

   September 6th, 2007 at 1:01 pm

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   Yeah that’s why I plan on being single… I just don’t want her to get too attached because I don’t make a good boyfriend…. I make a much better friend though.

3. Eve

   September 7th, 2007 at 4:58 am

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   Bravo, Adam! I have stood back and watched your blog, lurking from a distance. Today I decided to catch up on your sarcasm/adventures. I see you haven’t changed a bit! hehehe. Seeing your newest score, I wanted to share with you and your readers, if let me through the confirmation process, my own story of dating a medical student, a very long-distance relationship at that.

   Like most men I’ve been attracted to, my med student guy (who we will call “H”) was a little bit of a bad boy around the edges, not really the kind you feel safe talking to when you needed someone.

   To be fair, he was a complicated individual so there was some nurturing side, but the word might have been lost on him. This was particularly true when my mother suddenly passed away and I definitely grieved alone. Through my experience, I came to see that med students often are self-centered and neurotic to the point where they often don’t listen when sometimes you just need a friend. Certainly, I’ve been through my share and then some of heartache in the last three years, so having that source of comfort would have been great. But it didn’t happen because most of the time I was the one giving and not feeling appreciated. Yes, I know that’s my fault.

   I’m going to leave out a whole bunch here because it’s not really relevant anymore, except to say that I spent a lot of time, in private, crying myself to sleep and writing letters that never got sent, the whole damn thing. I used to tell him, “My pillow is having an identity crisis” but I don’t think he got what I meant. I even plotted to move to his far away land, renting a cottage through a friend who lived in the same country. But I never went after one of many relationship hemorrhages, losing the deposit and two weeks’ rent.

   So one day a while back, I called him up, and we discussed things. I was feeling particularly hurt and needed to ask for what I needed. After I started to say what I was feeling, with kindness but in a direct way, the way things really were, he said, “You realize you are burning bridges here”. I wondered how asking for what I needed, speaking my mind in an effort to resolve a problem, was burning a bridge. But then it hit me like a Dick Cheney statue falling out of the sky: asking for what I needed wasn’t allowed because my relationship with H wasn’t about me, really. Silly me. OK I will say this part: He had a really nice gluteus maximus and he was stellar when it came to the bedroom. Telling him that would make it go to his head, and telling him that I thought about it often, addictively so, would have the same effect. But so what. No one holds a monopoly on either of those, and yes I did think about it often in the dark of the night, hugging my poor pillow.

   Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. I had rented a van to help a friend move. I had the worst headache for two days, worse than I had ever had. With the van filled up, and driving towards my friend’s new place, I started to feel a very weird sensation everywhere and like I was losing control of my own body. Fortunately, I was in parking-lot traffic on a frontage road, so I managed to stop the van and pull slightly off to the side. In what seemed like a blink I was staring at a paramedic who was talking to me and I heard the words, but I couldn’t put the ideas together nor respond.

   Long story made short, I ended up in the ER and found out I had a seizure and it wasn’t the first either. So now I know I have a form of epilepsy, which explains a lot of other things that have been

   happening in recent months.

   As I was waiting to be released from the hospital after three days of tests and close monitoring, I

   kept seeing this young man staring at me and smiling. I wondered if I was dreaming or having

   another strange seizure, but no headaches and no sense of loss. He looked familiar, too. It turns

   out I had seen him many times, at a favorite place I would go to jog. He was at the medical center

   to pick up something from his father, who is on staff there (MD). Let’s call him “R” for the sake of this post.

   Fast forward again. R has been like this angel that appeared out of the darkness. We’ve spent a lot of time together, talking and sharing and holding each other. I keep pinching myself because I can’t believe he could be real: he’s drop dead gorgeous, ruggedly handsome, young as in 28, funny, smart, and he has managed to remodel my thinking about the male species in the caring department. He does crazy things like shows up unannounced just to hug me and then away he goes to do his errands or work, or sends me random notes to let me know how much he appreciates me.

   I’m not sure I can take it, someone who cares I mean; but I’m going to try. I’m not sure this will be difficult.

   The moral of the story: don’t date medical students. OK, so I admit, his father is a doctor. In fact,

   a big wig who used to teach at Johns Hopkins and everything. A respected surgeon. But R is a

   whole different genre: a film director and a fellow musician. He seems to have the manual on me.

   We’re talking about moving to his upper west side apartment in NYC and making music together.

   When I think of the one formerly known as H, I feel a great sadness because I really loved him. I

   still do. But I also feel a sigh of relief for I know he will be happier, probably with another medical

   student to torment him into shape, make him realize doctors are healers and they need to be more

   caring. Maybe he will figure out I’m right: the body is an organism, not a mechanism, that needs

   much more than drugs and surgery. By depriving himself with another self-centered medical doctor in the making, if that is to be, perhaps he will see what I’ve been trying to tell him all along. And maybe I’m wrong, maybe that medical student will be the luckiest g. in all of Melbourne, er., Alice Springs, er. Outbacksville.

   Enough said. Good luck on your new adventure, Adam. Keep up the sarcasm and adventure. I promise to check back more often!

4. Adam

   September 7th, 2007 at 7:09 am

   4

   Thank you Eve for sharing your story. I hope everything works out for you and please check back often. That med student guy that you previously dated sounds like a real jerk and you do deserve better than what he could have provided for you given the circumstances. Just remember that there’s 2 sides to every story and maybe he had a whole set of problems that you weren’t aware of, who know, I’m not a psychiatrist and don’t intend on being one. Just do me a favour and be careful out there because the world is harsh. Things happen for a reason and I’m sure if you didn’t get rid of ‘H’ then you wouldn’t have met the ER guy and it seems to me that you’re much happier now.

   I’ve learnt a lot from my previous relationships too, we all do to some extent.

5. ruff nurse

   September 8th, 2007 at 5:00 am

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   yeah, adam, why not give it a try. i also believe that we all have that one person we could always go back to after everything has failed, and just like yours he’s halfway around the world

   cheeriup adam. enjoy life while youre still young. and dont let the pressures of medschool kick you a**. you can do it adam. i believe in you!

6. Adam

   September 9th, 2007 at 7:23 am

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   Thanks Ruff! Like I said, I’m just going to have fun for now and I’m sure I’ll settle down eventually. It seems like I have been deprived of a proper single life due to my previous relationships.

7. Eve

   September 14th, 2007 at 11:08 am

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   I don’t think he’s a real jerk so much as I just needed him to care and it was always about him; I felt like I was truly there for him 110% of the time; he said so many cruel things in the heat of the moment and then tried to retract them; after awhile, it’s hard to absorb. I silently, quietly-to-myself, grieved. Often. In hindsight, I ask myself why that is and I realize that he had a certain “grace” that he got without working for it. Some people are like that, i.e. they earn a place in your heart just because of who they are and you can’t figure out why but you just accept it. That’s why it was even harder to absorb, because that is something very rare and special. It’s also something that lingers, for the same reason, but after a time, you see the human side of it all. It’s so hard to explain, but so real to feel it.

   No one is really “better off” without someone so much as it is that they come to a place of not having to have the pain to see the lesson. Somehow calibrating your heart and your mind is the biggest maneuver. I’m not sure it is possible. But being the eternal, forever kind of hopeless romantic that I am, I think I will let myself off the hook from that task. I’ve also come to believe that when you love someone, you never stop loving them–there’s always a place in your heart that is just for them. It never stops hurting completely, either; it’s just that you learn to manage it or it finds a place of acceptance in your heart. Once I had a bf and we made a beautiful connection while camping on an island, on a cliff high above the ocean. I went back to spot several years later, and the familiar feeling of connection and sadness returned for just a moment, so as if to remind me to keep feeling. I had tears in my eyes, strange as that sounds. But the point is we never stop loving those we love, not ever, not even if they don’t believe it. It’s still true.