AITA for embarrassing my friend’s girlfriend and “mocking” her medical knowledge?
So, I(m26), I lived most of my life in the US and that’s where I finished high school. My parents set up a trust for me that would basically set me up for life, and I wouldn't have to work a day in my life.
However, they imposed one condition for me to access the money: I had to graduate medical school. Before they became wealthy my parents grew up in the eastern bloc, and they have this mentality that “worst case scenario” the world will always need doctors, fair enough.
Anyway, frankly I had little interest in medicine, but I wasn’t going to say no to that kind of money. I used my european passport and finished med school in europe where it’s only 6 years and an undergraduate program, instead of 3-4 years of undergraduate and then 4 years of graduate school in the US. Plus it was a lot cheaper…
I always had a pretty good memory so I managed to graduate last year with pretty damn good grades. But I really grew to hate medicine, honestly do not like talking about it except with "Fred".
“Fred”, is one of my best friends since high school, and he chose medicine as his career path, and he’s genuine about this stuff. He just finished his second year of med school, and took step 1. So I flew over to celebrate with him this weekend.
He also has a girlfriend now “Emily” (f26) who is also year 2, they’re pretty serious. This however was my first time meeting Emily, and I don’t think “Fred” explained my situation to her at all…
One of the running jokes/ banter I have with Fred is “bad medical knowledge”, I’ll say stuff like “pee is stored in the balls”, “melanoma? It ain’t that serious, it's just a mole”, etc, in a dead serious tone.
Now… This really rubbed Emily the wrong way, and I sort of understand why. The examples I gave were the more extreme ones, but we also have more subtle ones that actual patients say, and I think those really ticked her off.
Last night, as we were hanging out at Fred’s place, she snapped at one of my jokes and said in a condescending tone something along the lines of “can you please stop? what the fuck do you know about medicine?”
And I’ll admit, that ticked me off. So dared her to a game: we’d each ask medical questions to the other and respond.
She is pretty smart actually, and answered many of the harder questions, but as the game kept going I kept increasing the difficulty and at some point she started going red with embarrassment as she couldn’t answer my questions. Meanwhile she couldn’t even think of new questions for me…
And at some point, the other people at the party started kinda making fun of her. Idk, from what i gathered, it seems she’s very proud of her medical knowledge and seeing her fumble was kinda cathartic to the friend group.
Honestly at the time it felt great, but in hindsight… it doesn’t really seem fair how I ambushed her with the more advanced questions? Was I an asshole?