Julia and the Amazing Technicolor Fingernails
- Hey! Are you a medical student?
So asked the smiling young woman standing in the hallway of Mott 7 West, the Heme/Onc floor, who had just seen me come out of our team's work room. I replied in the affirmative, and asked how I could help her?
- You, she said in a cheerful voice of command, need your nails done!
Me? Nails done?
Um, er, ok? :-)
She cheerfully waited for me with all her bottles of nail polish lined up on table in front of her. There was hot pink, and deep purple, magenta and even clear with sparkly glitter. Her name was Julia, and she was a young lady on our Heme/Onc service recieving experimental chemotherapy, and under a jaunty baseball cap covering her now-hairless head, she greeted me with a wide smile. She had, this afternoon, decided that she was going to open a pedicure salon right here in the common area of Mott 7 West, and she had decided that I was going to be a customer. Um, er, uh, sure! :-)
Now, I have never had my nails painted before.
Actually, in rifiling through my memories, the number of times that I can remember even possibly using makeup in my whole lifetime can be counted on the fingers of one hand. There might have been some makeup involved when I was the lead in our schools musical. (In the fifth grade, I played a singing caveman. Story for another day.) And silmaril and Jesse helped put cat whiskers on my cheeks with makeup pencils for a dance a glorious Samhain ago ( A Dance on All Hallow's Eve). And... I think that's about it.
I don't and never have used makeup. I've never used cologne. I have probably spent literally less than one minute in my entire lifetime thinking about the relative merits of various cosmetic products. In a world today which gives us all a vast, almost bewildering palette of options with regards to our personal appearances -- dyes, cosmetics, tanning booths, tooth whiteners, and so on -- my personal appearance product purchases are basically limited to white blocks of soap bought in dozen-bar packs and INSERT_GENERIC_STORE_BRAND econo-sized bottles of shampoo. I take showers. I comb my hair. I get it trimmed when it starts hiding my ears. Like in many other aspects of my life, when it comes to cosmetics, I'm a pretty simple (boring) guy. :-)
So, needless to say, I'd never actually sat down to consider what *color* I wanted my nails done before I sat down at Julia's table and presented my hands for her artistry. Pink? Purple? Magenta? Glitter?
Er, um, er, how about all of the above? A few of each? Yeah! That's the ticket!
And so Julia merrily worked from my right thumb to my left little finger, carefully turning my nails each a different color...
- At far left is me and Julia, posing proudly with her handiwork; if you click on the thumbnail and look closely, you might be able to see my funky amazing technicolor fingernails. You might be able to see them more clearly in the closeup later shot by one of my amused classmates.
Julia had started the day with the volunteers on our floor, then worked her way up to a med student (me), and by the end of the afternoon had also done the senior resident leading my team and the Heme/Onc fellow as well. (Interestingly, all guys. All of us guys.) And so it was that me and W. the senior resident and J. the Heme/Onc fellow went into report with our Heme/Onc attending, a distinguished scientist and clinician who also happened to be the medical school's Assistant Dean for Research & Regulatory Affairs, all of us with our brightly painted fingernails.
Our attending didn't actually say anything during rounds. Not right away, anyway. But our attending had spent his formative years at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia back in an age when guys didn't wear long hair or earrings, and you could tell he had unanswered questions, was weighing whether to ask them, and wondering if he really actually wanted the answer. It wasn't until later in the day, when he had completed his rounds around the Heme/Onc floor and Julia had gleefully informed him of her exploits that he came back to our team room with a combination of amusement and relief, saying "You know, I was *wondering*..."
He was far from the only one, the rest of the day. From the PICU to the Dean's Office to Cynnabar dance practice later that night, the rest of the day was filled with strange looks and WTF questions. (To her immense credit, okuninushii's first reaction on meeting me for the very first time that evening, amazing technicolor fingernails and all, was not to run away from Teh Crazy.) And that's the tale of Julia and the Amazing Technicolor Fingernails. Hee! :-)