| The Funny Bone |
Buns of Steel For me, the solution to bed head was the bun. Once firmly pinned in place, a bun can be indestructible. My bun also made me a quieter, more collegial call-room bunkmate, as in bed it kept me from rolling from side to side. The next day my bun was looser, true. I could have avoided that with the techniques geishas use—they preserve their buns by coating them with hot wax and by sleeping on wooden neck blocks that support the head in midair. It turned out, though, that I was better off when I looked just a hair less kempt post-call. When my bun was too splendid, teammates would scornfully say, “Apparently you had an easy call night.” A severe bun has long been a trademark of women in medicine, from Dr. Mary Prance in Henry James’s novel The Bostonians to the impenetrably tight bun of “Hot Lips” Houlihan in M*A*S*H. One reason is that buns are practical as well as ornamental. They can help scare patients into pill compliance, and they’re useful repositories for nursing-station pencils and, more uncomfortably, EKG calipers. In movies, a bun worn by the heroine in the first act is always taken down in the third. She shakes out her hair, and the male lead suddenly realizes she is Julia Roberts. This doesn’t happen much in hospitals. What does happen, at least if your colleagues are neurologists trained to recognize herniations at the back of the skull, is that every once in a while a friend will call across the cafeteria, “Hey, what’s that on the back of your head? An encephalocele?” Alice Flaherty ’94, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, recently turned in her hospital-issue white coat for one from Scrubs Unlimited that fits. This article appeared in the Winter 2007 issue of the Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin.Photo: Graham Gordon Ramsay |
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