First Class, Cattle Class

After ward round, the consultant brings us into the doctors’ lounge for a break.

With a wave of the doctor’s badge, the translucent glass door slides open, Star Trek-style. With one step, we enter a different universe that is the brand-spanking new multi-million-dollar doctors’ lounge. The décor is ultra-modern and looks straight out of an IKEA catalog: light wood-paneled ceiling with spotlights beaming down on streamlined couches, abstract metal sculptures seem to float effortlessly over the minimalist coffee table resting on the slate floor, next to the restaurant-grade refrigerator with glass doors, a professional espresso machine spits out fine coffee made from freshly ground premium beans at the push of a button, you can even froth your own milk. While enjoying your cup of coffee, you can flick through every channel available on cable on one of the Giant LCD TVs. Down the other end of the room, beech-veneered lunch tables and translucent lunch counters are impeccably paired with ergonomic stools and chairs. The whole room overlooks the hospital’s courtyard through tinted wall-sized windows. In another room, computer workstations are set up with comfortable chairs and soft lighting. I stand there like a farm boy in the big city, marveling at everything; the setting, more suited to a fancy private hospital, is rather incongruous in this public hospital.

After the break, we walk out of the lounge and back into the utilitarian hospital hallway. I slip back into the med student common room directly across the hall. Compared to the doctors’ lounge, the student common room is downright proletarian: mismatched and well-worn chairs and couches in green and brown and every other shade in between haphazardly arranged around tables with dull laminated tops and wobbly legs, harsh florescent lights fill the room, and the industrial linoleum floor ties everything together, giving it that institutional feel only a hospital can. An old TV sits forlornly in one corner of the room; the five free-to-air local channels are your choices. Before the new doctors’ lounge was completed a year ago, the junior doctors shared the common room with us students. When they moved to their new digs, the free instant coffee and tea left with them. But to show their pity and generosity toward us, they left behind the warped pool table with ripped felt.

Maybe it was a way for the hospital to let us know, ever so subtly, what they think of med students. Or maybe it was to show med students what we can look forward to and, to make us appreciate the new lounge, a bit of contrast can be useful. Of course, making the doctors’ lounge “absolutely forbidden” to med students unless accompanied by a doctor isn’t exactly an ego booster for us who are not even on the bottom rung of the ladder yet. Just think, at the end of November, we will still be lowly med students who don’t even warrant a flicker of the eye; but by next January, those of us lucky enough to be an intern at this hospital will have unrestricted access to the lounge and the right to sit in the same room as the most senior consultant.

Unless there’s an ultra-luxurious, ultra-secret senior doctors’ lounge somewhere else in the hospital that only the very privileged would know about.