Rosario Ortiz (reluciente) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2023-10-10 09:52:00 |
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It wasn’t like she hadn’t been expecting the hit. Rosario had aced most of her Shelf exams, landing over the ninetieth percentile for all but surgery, but her clinical evals had been so damningly ‘meets expectations’ as to drag her grades down. She scraped a high pass in internal meds, managed only a pass in surgery, and honoured only in paediatrics – an achievement she was queasily certain she hadn’t deserved, since her attending had treated her with kid gloves from the moment he’d seen her sharing lunch with his buddy “Archer”’s son. Her psychiatry resident had opined that Rosario was really more the ‘surgical subspecialty type’, while her surgical attending had suggested that she was more suited to the ‘softer’ specialties like psych. They’d both been miserable rotations, marked by psychotic patients scratching and spitting on her (psych), clinicians telling her to assume every patient was going to lie to her (psych again) and accidental haruspicy during a colonoscopy procedure (surgical… twice). She knew she hadn’t done great. Even still, it was a shock when the letter arrived. As you know, the terms of your scholarship require you to maintain a median grade of… …into account your grades for the academic year 2022/23, the Foundation is pleased to offer you a 50% scholarship… Fifty percent scholarship— Fifty percent. No. No, no, no no— She couldn’t afford fifty percent tuition. She couldn’t afford ten percent, fuck— But the terms were there in black and white. Rosario felt like heart had dropped through her stomach, through the floor and through the four levels beneath that to the cold hard concrete. She wallowed for a bit. She blamed herself, then Apollo, then gods and Fate and the stupid Two of Pentacles all bent on dragging her out of this world she’d set her sights on and into theirs, then herself again. There were some tears on Cathal’s shoulder. Some murmured reassurances and a bottle of wine and a pep talk from Lyra and a bag of ghost pepper donuts (which did not go with the wine, but which she ate anyway). Eventually, the only thing left to do was to face up to it. Think it through rationally. So a couple of days later, Rosario cracked open her notebook. With pen and ruler, she divided an empty page into quarters. Along the x-axis, she wrote LOAN and DROP (she couldn’t bring herself to write the OUT). Along the y-axis, PROS and CONS. It was only an exercise. She already knew what she had to do. But writing things down made them concrete. Rosario breathed. Loan cons first. More student debt, she wrote, and underlined ‘debt’ twice. Financial uncertainty. Okay, now the pros. Finish MD got a double underline as well. Long-term gain - career, salary. Good Step score & a year to repair grades. One year to go. The cons of dropping out were even more self-evident. No MD. Wasted 3 years. Strike that. Wasted 7 years. Wasted $$. No med career. Limit prospects. What then? The last two words got a vicious slash of an underline. Pros? None. There weren’t any. What person ever wanted to become a med school dropout? Rosario squeezed her pen tighter. Not want. Pros and cons, that’s the exercise. Keeping it objective. Mouth in a scrunched line, she frowned down at the empty square before writing, doubtfully, Less debt. Okay. That was one. Almost finished. Her pen moved again. Won’t have to go back to hosp— She bailed halfway through the word and crossed the whole line out. Then she crossed it out again. Then she coloured it in methodically with her pen until all of the letters were erased. It was moot, in the end. Five days after the first letter had arrived there came a second, in a crisp envelope printed with a crest and a Manhattan address. Dear Ms. Ortiz, it is with pleasure that I write to you to inform you that you have been accepted into the Orion Foundation Scholarship Program… Bastard. That bastard. She didn’t want to accept it. She didn’t need to be even more under his thumb, and she sure as hell didn’t need to give him the satisfaction of thinking he was saving her. Shit. She didn’t even know where this fell on her list of pros and cons. Even if it did solve a problem. Even if it did, technically, save her from more student debt. Even if, come to think of it, he owed her for all the trouble he’d caused, all the messing around and the games and blackmail and prophecy, and, and— And there was a part of her that didn’t wanna find out whether he’d let her say no. |