The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [30]
Judging simply on penmanship, Carter would never have stood a chance of winning this particular honor, in my opinion. Still, I find the idea of a Note-Taking Prize enormously appealing. Were UCSF to resurrect it, I have no doubt the winner would be Ming, a pharmacy student I’ve gotten to know over the past couple of months. Her notes make mine look feeble, although, granted, our styles differ greatly. During the minilectures in lab, I simply jot words and phrases onto a small pad that fits into my scrubs shirt pocket while Ming records sentence after sentence on sheets of graph paper in tiny, perfect print. She uses a four-color Bic pen, the kind I have not seen since junior high—red ink for notes on blood vessels, black for nerves, green for muscles, blue for organs—clicking from one to another with barely a glance up.
It was over the topic of note taking, in fact, that Ming and I bonded during one of the first labs. I happened to be standing next to her and saw her in action.
“Those notes are beautiful,” I said in all sincerity in a pause between her clicks.
“Oh, these are just rough,” she replied, and not out of false modesty. Ming planned to rewrite them once she got home, combining her lecture and lab notes and supplementing them with snippets from the textbook. She would then transfer those to a three-ring binder, color-coded by course subject. Now that’s my kind of obsessiveness.
From this meeting on, I would regularly drop by her table and say hello. Ming had a sense of style as quirky as her personality—bohemian chic meets Tokyo pop. She loved hunting for vintage clothes on nearby Haight Street. Up in the lab, though, beneath oversized goggles, rubber gloves, and a disposable full-length smock (thrown out after each lab), she looked like a holdover from the film Outbreak. She had made it her job to take notes, holding her Hello Kitty clipboard like a shield in front of her chest. This left her no time to actually participate in dissections. But, as I came to understand, this was fine by her. The copious note taking was, intentionally or not, an avoidance strategy.
Sometimes I would spot Ming at the opposite side of the lab, standing at such a remove from her group that I’d feel the urge to walk over and give her a gentle push from behind, just so she would actually be in the huddle. And once she took that actual step, I felt a genuine sense of brotherly affection for her. Late one afternoon, after most of our fellow students had left, I pulled Ming over to my group’s cadaver. I suggested we review the vessels of the neck together. At one point, she got so caught up that she set her clipboard down and, without really thinking, used her prize pen to poke at the artery we had been searching for.
“I cannot believe I just did that!” she said, laughing and brushing it off on her smock. On second thought, she went over to the sink and washed it. Returning to the table, Ming picked up a metal probe with a tiny flourish and we continued studying. The following week, she told me with pride, she performed a dissection by herself.
Several weeks later, the day before my visit to the library, I ran into Ming as I was heading up to the lab. This would be the last lab before the final exam, so it seemed natural to ask how she thought she had fared in the course.
A sheepish look washed across her face. “Well, I kind of had a hard time at first.”
Yeah, I conceded, I kind of noticed.
While I’d assumed that Ming planned on working at a Walgreens or someplace similar, she confided that, in fact, she hoped to be a clinical pharmacist in a hospital. Deep down, though, she hadn’t been