Monday, October 27, 2003
One woman's meat is another woman's poison.
2 comments received about that last post, the first that it sounded bad, the other that it sounded beautiful.
Eye of the beholder.
2 comments received about that last post, the first that it sounded bad, the other that it sounded beautiful.
Eye of the beholder.
Friday, October 24, 2003
(Written posthumourously)
19 Oct 2003
I remember times that now seem so distant and surreal, when our everydays overlay each other's. It feels like there were so few. I have more memories of trying to remember you now, than I have of you.
But vaguely still I remember standing on the shadowy periphery of that brilliance that you constantly gave off, watching your eyes and lips slide into that familiar yet indescribable grin, and feeling my own lips twitch involuntarily in response.
So long ago now. I'm lying in bed writing by the dim lamplight of my bedside light, my pen oozing a damp shadow with every stroke. Funny how you never thought you'd lose your old friend from yonks ago you said, once upon a time. Funny how J. was right, and yet so wrong. Funny how you were just wrong.
So it seems we're all grown up now. But sometimes, strangely, I almost expect my bedside phone to ring.
My bedside phone will ring in my freezer-sized hostel room, and as I pick up your "hello?" will bring light to my dawn, and with it a mild sinus tachy.
My bedside phone will ring and I will dive quietly onto my bed for it to stop it - and I forget - but yes, eventually mum will wake up anyway and, bedgragged with bad bedheaded ill-temper, stagger in and hiss fiercely at me to Go to SLEEP.
My bedside phone is silent. I don't even know the number to it now.
I shrug into my white coat everyday and I'm sucked into it till I knock off. I worry about old men who just want to go home to their wives, dying suddenly of ruptured AAAs that I found incidentally on examination - how will their wives cope then?
Sometimes I relive that question you voiced once, What's the point? What's it all for?
My last successful crash was weeks, maybe months ago.
I don't worry about what you think of me anymore. I haven't done for ages now.
As I walk home after watching Gladiator in the mess, my world crumbles as I empathise with Maximus. I too yearn for the welcoming embrace of death, the door opening to reunited love beyond. Except that there is no one on the other side of my door - If I were to die, now, this moment, I feel like I would pass in gentle gratitude. To what End? I tell myself, it would be good, to see God.
I don't need anybody to die for.
I shiver as the wind pries chill fingers through the buttons of my billowing great coat and gaze up into the starlit sky that I never saw in my childhood, except on film.
And I can almost feel the balmy breeze on my body as I lie on my back, next to - I can almost smell your hair, sense your presence - you, in our teenage years, marvelling with you at the myriad constellations - so, so many! So many. Countless.
But it never happened in this reality. And the times for that have long since passed.
I am too old.
I don't need anybody to live for. I have myself and my dreams, what few remain.
I send you my love from the past, K; almost gone now and cast out into the random tides of existence. I toyed with the idea of a letter in a bottle, thrown into the sea for a while, but the sea is too far away from right now.
May it find, and touch your life someday.
May you be well, always, my friend.
Happy Birthday.
19 Oct 2003
I remember times that now seem so distant and surreal, when our everydays overlay each other's. It feels like there were so few. I have more memories of trying to remember you now, than I have of you.
But vaguely still I remember standing on the shadowy periphery of that brilliance that you constantly gave off, watching your eyes and lips slide into that familiar yet indescribable grin, and feeling my own lips twitch involuntarily in response.
So long ago now. I'm lying in bed writing by the dim lamplight of my bedside light, my pen oozing a damp shadow with every stroke. Funny how you never thought you'd lose your old friend from yonks ago you said, once upon a time. Funny how J. was right, and yet so wrong. Funny how you were just wrong.
So it seems we're all grown up now. But sometimes, strangely, I almost expect my bedside phone to ring.
My bedside phone will ring in my freezer-sized hostel room, and as I pick up your "hello?" will bring light to my dawn, and with it a mild sinus tachy.
My bedside phone will ring and I will dive quietly onto my bed for it to stop it - and I forget - but yes, eventually mum will wake up anyway and, bedgragged with bad bedheaded ill-temper, stagger in and hiss fiercely at me to Go to SLEEP.
My bedside phone is silent. I don't even know the number to it now.
I shrug into my white coat everyday and I'm sucked into it till I knock off. I worry about old men who just want to go home to their wives, dying suddenly of ruptured AAAs that I found incidentally on examination - how will their wives cope then?
Sometimes I relive that question you voiced once, What's the point? What's it all for?
My last successful crash was weeks, maybe months ago.
I don't worry about what you think of me anymore. I haven't done for ages now.
As I walk home after watching Gladiator in the mess, my world crumbles as I empathise with Maximus. I too yearn for the welcoming embrace of death, the door opening to reunited love beyond. Except that there is no one on the other side of my door - If I were to die, now, this moment, I feel like I would pass in gentle gratitude. To what End? I tell myself, it would be good, to see God.
I don't need anybody to die for.
I shiver as the wind pries chill fingers through the buttons of my billowing great coat and gaze up into the starlit sky that I never saw in my childhood, except on film.
And I can almost feel the balmy breeze on my body as I lie on my back, next to - I can almost smell your hair, sense your presence - you, in our teenage years, marvelling with you at the myriad constellations - so, so many! So many. Countless.
But it never happened in this reality. And the times for that have long since passed.
I am too old.
I don't need anybody to live for. I have myself and my dreams, what few remain.
I send you my love from the past, K; almost gone now and cast out into the random tides of existence. I toyed with the idea of a letter in a bottle, thrown into the sea for a while, but the sea is too far away from right now.
May it find, and touch your life someday.
May you be well, always, my friend.
Happy Birthday.
Thursday, October 23, 2003
Casualty.
11 days in.
I want out. Morale has been generally poor. You can overdose on too much of a good thing. My mind is gradually turning to mush, and the daily routine of wake up, eat, go to work, go home, sleep, wake up was getting a little too repetitive for me. My mind turned renegade escapist on me, was beginning to harbour bizarre thoughts about colleagues... mostly involving sharp objects, imagined glares from nursing staff just trying to hurry things along. And looking at another doctor's hair and musing how very attractive her hair was (?!!).
Sprightly stride at the stard, midway through, just tired eyes and a slow squelch through the A&E. A nurse commented she needed a doctor to see to her, and someone pointed at me (one can actually develop eyes in the back of one's head if one practices paranoia enough) and, just out of earshot (except to the vaguely homicidal paranoid nutcase) she replied, I want a nice doctor!
Enough was enough. Especially when I caught myself contemplating the aesthetic appeal of dyed-brown hair.
I needed out.
Thank God for Terry Pratchett.
Night Watch, my salvation.
A nice curl up in bed last night (sleep? who needs sleep!) after a few irate posts online at various pseudopolitical forums (there is no true politics back home, just rather insipid play-acting) with Sam Vines and his merry men (oh dear. how dodgy that must sound. Unfortunately the babellicious Angua, werewolf extraordinaire who spends most of her time naked in his other books was conspiciously missing) and today none of it mattered... nevermind that I mistook a hybrid of SVT and LBBB last night for VT at first glance and fast bleeped the med reg and anaesthetist for "no reason" (they were very nice and understanding about it, and vaguely patronising... or that may have been the paranoia speaking) nevermind that the ABG I was doing as they showed up, and vanished instantly 5 seconds later (the ABG came up a minute after they left) showed a pH of 7.10 on a man who frankly looked like he had kicked the bucket with one foot, and wedged the other firmly through death's door.
Rumour has it he was still alive this morning on NIPPV but wound up in ITU anyhow. Ie, RIP.
Anyhow.
None of that matters. I can laugh it off now with relative ease. I can laugh off, with relative ease the psychotic woman I had to refer to the ortho reg, because her neurotic neurological signs did unfortunately add up to a cauda equina syndrome, nevermind that her 10 of 10 pain score and her inability to weight bear without vicious sobbing and squirming and collapsing sideways subsided into a rather less impressive weight-bearing-with-no-difficulty when the orthopedic SHO saw her, 4.5 hours post morphine.
I can even laugh off the atypical chest pain I saw a month after I last saw and discharged him, when serial ECGs and troponin were normal and ECG changes were absent, in a 40something year old man with no risk factors aside from sex. Today, his pain remained atypical. (burning pain in both shoulders, pain in his tummy and burping +++), and but for the Q waves in II, III and AVF, and the marked T wave inversion, AND the negative troponin. And the extremely nice med reg telling me, oh well, you should have done more than 2 ECGs last time around before discharge. (immediate gut reaction : WTF? They were 2 hours apart and had no changes on either!)
Nevermind. Tonight, Sam Vines, Corporal Colon and Carcer shall be my bedfellows.
1 shift to the weekend!
11 days in.
I want out. Morale has been generally poor. You can overdose on too much of a good thing. My mind is gradually turning to mush, and the daily routine of wake up, eat, go to work, go home, sleep, wake up was getting a little too repetitive for me. My mind turned renegade escapist on me, was beginning to harbour bizarre thoughts about colleagues... mostly involving sharp objects, imagined glares from nursing staff just trying to hurry things along. And looking at another doctor's hair and musing how very attractive her hair was (?!!).
Sprightly stride at the stard, midway through, just tired eyes and a slow squelch through the A&E. A nurse commented she needed a doctor to see to her, and someone pointed at me (one can actually develop eyes in the back of one's head if one practices paranoia enough) and, just out of earshot (except to the vaguely homicidal paranoid nutcase) she replied, I want a nice doctor!
Enough was enough. Especially when I caught myself contemplating the aesthetic appeal of dyed-brown hair.
I needed out.
Thank God for Terry Pratchett.
Night Watch, my salvation.
A nice curl up in bed last night (sleep? who needs sleep!) after a few irate posts online at various pseudopolitical forums (there is no true politics back home, just rather insipid play-acting) with Sam Vines and his merry men (oh dear. how dodgy that must sound. Unfortunately the babellicious Angua, werewolf extraordinaire who spends most of her time naked in his other books was conspiciously missing) and today none of it mattered... nevermind that I mistook a hybrid of SVT and LBBB last night for VT at first glance and fast bleeped the med reg and anaesthetist for "no reason" (they were very nice and understanding about it, and vaguely patronising... or that may have been the paranoia speaking) nevermind that the ABG I was doing as they showed up, and vanished instantly 5 seconds later (the ABG came up a minute after they left) showed a pH of 7.10 on a man who frankly looked like he had kicked the bucket with one foot, and wedged the other firmly through death's door.
Rumour has it he was still alive this morning on NIPPV but wound up in ITU anyhow. Ie, RIP.
Anyhow.
None of that matters. I can laugh it off now with relative ease. I can laugh off, with relative ease the psychotic woman I had to refer to the ortho reg, because her neurotic neurological signs did unfortunately add up to a cauda equina syndrome, nevermind that her 10 of 10 pain score and her inability to weight bear without vicious sobbing and squirming and collapsing sideways subsided into a rather less impressive weight-bearing-with-no-difficulty when the orthopedic SHO saw her, 4.5 hours post morphine.
I can even laugh off the atypical chest pain I saw a month after I last saw and discharged him, when serial ECGs and troponin were normal and ECG changes were absent, in a 40something year old man with no risk factors aside from sex. Today, his pain remained atypical. (burning pain in both shoulders, pain in his tummy and burping +++), and but for the Q waves in II, III and AVF, and the marked T wave inversion, AND the negative troponin. And the extremely nice med reg telling me, oh well, you should have done more than 2 ECGs last time around before discharge. (immediate gut reaction : WTF? They were 2 hours apart and had no changes on either!)
Nevermind. Tonight, Sam Vines, Corporal Colon and Carcer shall be my bedfellows.
1 shift to the weekend!
Saturday, October 11, 2003
Standing on the porch looking up at the full moon the last two nights reminded me how I used to wonder if You saw that same moon, halfway across the world. Large and perfectly circular, with minute grey blemishes on the surface, perfection in imperfection.
If I were the dramatic sort, I would have lit a fag and scuffed my heels in the dirt.
Trouble is I don't smoke, never have, and I need my shoes clean for work.
Trouble is, I'm a pragmatist.
And standing on porches staring wistfully at large round moons is for romantics.
Trouble is, I'm confused. And it all started a long, long time ago when someone put a gun in the small of my back.
Enough. Cut to action, Colchester Casualty, scene 201951, take 1.
If I were the dramatic sort, I would have lit a fag and scuffed my heels in the dirt.
Trouble is I don't smoke, never have, and I need my shoes clean for work.
Trouble is, I'm a pragmatist.
And standing on porches staring wistfully at large round moons is for romantics.
Trouble is, I'm confused. And it all started a long, long time ago when someone put a gun in the small of my back.
Enough. Cut to action, Colchester Casualty, scene 201951, take 1.
Sunday, October 05, 2003
Odd.
I remember dragging my heels with dread as I headed back to Colchester for a late evening / early night shift. The sheer dread of going back to work, after a four day break; the oppressiveness of it all.
and then I stepped on the wards, and time flashed by in a blaze of euphoria, constantly juggling patients and being amazed that I knew what to Do. (once upon a time, I dreamed I would, while sewing someone up, look up and say oh my God! I'm a doctor! Hallelujah... and freak the living daylights out of my patient. well, let's just say it's a good thing I wasn't sewing anyone up yesterday)
today time's been a bit draggier, and i'm becoming a bit ragged around the edges, eyelids a bit heavy, shoulders ache a little... but it's still good.
catch me after 9 days of this. let's see what I say then.
but right now, right here... A&E / ER / Casualty is Fun.
I remember dragging my heels with dread as I headed back to Colchester for a late evening / early night shift. The sheer dread of going back to work, after a four day break; the oppressiveness of it all.
and then I stepped on the wards, and time flashed by in a blaze of euphoria, constantly juggling patients and being amazed that I knew what to Do. (once upon a time, I dreamed I would, while sewing someone up, look up and say oh my God! I'm a doctor! Hallelujah... and freak the living daylights out of my patient. well, let's just say it's a good thing I wasn't sewing anyone up yesterday)
today time's been a bit draggier, and i'm becoming a bit ragged around the edges, eyelids a bit heavy, shoulders ache a little... but it's still good.
catch me after 9 days of this. let's see what I say then.
but right now, right here... A&E / ER / Casualty is Fun.
