Truths of Old

There's this ad here in the cinemas that's really funny.

There's this little girl holding a bunny in her arms with her back to this little boy who's peering over the wall between their houses.
And he says "show me the bunny"
She says, sternly, "...again."

"show me the bunny!"

"say it like you mean it!"

"SHOW me the BUNNY!!"

"you're not convincing me"

"show me THE bunny!!!"

"louder!"

"SHOW ME THE BUNNY!"

pause

"no."

*****
I had the bestest day ever today.

I :

1) slept in late
2) bummed in house till mid afternoon, doing absolutely nothing
3) crept out to the gym. This wasn't actually part of the "best day" thingummy and has led to Re-minisce's Reformation Act :

section 1.1 : Do NOT go to the gym with sore throat, two days after fencing when bum feels like it's been run over by a mack truck with chain-link tires. Or if you do, do NOT try running on the damn treadmill.

On the bright side I seem to have spectacularly and mysteriously gained upper torso strength and can now lift 50 kg (that's 7 kg up) with some difficulty. Must be the big dinner I had last night, with T and her parents. T's the Cullinary Corruptor and prime culprit for the development of re-minisce's pseudo alcoholic tendancies. (Asti. Must. have. asti...)

4) went to the park next to the gym, lay down in the sunlight (that's right! There was sunlight!! the real thing. Hot even!) and passed out in exhaustion. I really did pass out. None of this falling asleep rubbish, lay down, felt a little faint but nice and warm, and woke up an hour later with a tan. laughs.
Ogled a pomeranian (it was soooooooo cute) as it accelerated around the park recklessly at random people scaring the living daylights out of them (hehe). Those things have a surprising turn of speed for creatures with such short legs. It almost bowled over a nice old lady with her walking stick but apparently had a change of heart at the last instant. heh.

5) walked home (the sunlight faded as I walked) and caught dinner at a cheap and cheerful eatery near my place, and ogled a blonde chick (with such cheekbones. swoon) in her cool blue car as she stopped for a traffic light.

So now I'm home alone. MMmm. Think I shall get around to filling in my locum app forms now, before doing more glorious nothing.

I read Zena's latest post with a touch of deja-vu.

She writes about accents; about the poncy gits who return home after two years with a "fake" british accent, and about the wonders of preserving her thoroughbred Singaporean accent, and quotes the Straits Times which, predictably enough, believes that a Singaporean accent is best in the biculturalism (or rather, biaccentualism) debate. Made in Singapore is always the best; and there's no need to feel inferior to the West.

Zena's another medical student in london who hails from Singapore, and her writing sometimes touches a (rather paternalistic) chord in me; it's rather like watching baby grow up. I guess maybe the relationship with the ex was a little like that too... One feels tempted to helpfully interject now and then - after all, I've been there, and done that.

Experience tells me that the usual result is resentful rejection (of advice) so perhaps I'll keep my geriatric (COUGH AND FROWN) and vitrolic retorts here, on my own blog.

First off, I'd like to say that one of the most amazing things about people is how adaptable we are. We can spend three quarters of our lives in a tropical country, and then fly halfway across the world to a temperate climate, and within a few months we've acclimatised. (Mad) people journey to the north and south poles, occasionally.

When I first got here, I thought I had a pretty neutral accent. It wasn't particularly British (even though my grandfather taught English under colonial rule and my ex-legal-eagle mother has a bee in her bonnet about el-lo-kew-shun, cue marry poppins) and it wasn't particularly Singaporean either, thanks to her subliminal influences through my youth.

I never really liked the Singaporean accent; it's a decidedly ugly accent. 'H's are dropped (Tree instead of three), 'T's are wielded with the subtlety of battleaxes ('why like Dat'), sentence construction is often awkward, stilted, and alternate words are pitched to sound as discontinuous as possible. Sing-song-singaporean, if you catch my drift.

I suppose I'm a bit of a cultural elitist when it comes to accents. The girls I found attractive were

1) an ozzie, but I suspect that had a great deal more to do with her personality than her accent

and

2) a canadian, but again, this had to do with personality, uh, and looks.

Nonetheless, getting back to what little point I had, when I first arrived I thought I had a pretty neutral accent. The brits, on the other hand, thought I had a yank accent. And disturbingly enough, a couple of canadians wanted to know where in Canada I came from. (eh??)

Now the Real London accent - the true british accent, and not the ridiculous public-school accent we in Singapore associate with England, and Bad Men holding guns to Chinky heroines' heads - is actually pretty easy to emulate. It's a very neutral accent that focuses more on mannerisms than accent per se. The mannerisms are by and large quirky, silly, and very, very human. (You big girls blouse you)

I will confess that I rather liked Britspeak after a while. Bollocks is such a nice word. heh heh.

And somehow, through the years, I've acquired it. It's always struck me how much harder it would be, living in the UK as I do, and not just staying here (there is a huge distinction) to preserve a Singaporean Accent than to gradually incorporate Britspeak into your daily lingo. It'd take a conscious effort on my part, and

1) I don't see the point, and

2) I'm far too lazy to do anything quite as pretentious as that.

So today, seven (going on eight) years later I've got a pretty much neutral accent with an unmistakably British tinge to it. (It'd also be far too much effort, and far too pretentious to do the Public School thingy, since I don't encounter that on a daily basis. Having said that, one of the blokes I fenced with the other night was from Eaton. heh)

It worries me sometimes, now that I'm considering going home to work amongst my options.

Singaporeans, you see, are ALL accentual elitists.
The one thing that sets us apart from other people of other nations (even malaysians!) is how much we care about how people speak. And how ready we are to condemn (or crucify. or cane on the bum. or hang.) nonconformists.
If it isn't overtly Singaporean, then it's evil (unless of course it's californian, in which case give us a shag then).

It's funny, the Honkies do it with clothes (I was close to this girl in first year uni, who looked a bit like err. was it fann wong? dunno. typical waifey fresh-faced look. She tried to explain it to me, summat to do with how not dressing well reflects poorly on their parents) and we do it with accents. Singaporeans, incidentally, are slaves to fashion as well, except they pretty much dress alike. The kids, anyhow. They all wear their hair the same way, have the same stick-thin figures, and wear the same clothes... it's almost as if they're all in uniform most of their lives. Londoners (by which I mean City people) in contrast are often exquisite dressers. They're not a pretty people (gimme germanic features anyday. Claudia Schifferrrrr) but they are well groomed.

J, a once-close friend of mine went home and received a lot of stick for her supposedly ang-moh-rised accent after three years in uni.
J is a lovely girl with the heaviest peranakan accent I've ever heard. It's not quite Singaporean, but it's obviously 100% south east asian. It's almost as if her simply having lived here for a while branded her an outcast the second she set foot on home soil again.

I can't wait to go home and put my unacceptably anglicised head into the Lion's maw. Sigh.

Maybe I should just give up and go work in California. heh.
*****

It doesn't help that I don't know what I want. I need to think, except that thinking will get me nowhere. And so, instead, I catch myself staring at my mobile phone and doing the opposite.
*****

I haven't ever really found a place that I call home
I never stick around quite long enough to make it
I apologize that once again I'm not in love
But it's not as if I mind that your heart
ain't exactly breaking

It's just a thought, only a thought

But if my life is for rent
and I don't learn to buy
Well I deserve nothing more than I get
'Cos nothing I have is truly mine

' always thought
that I would love to live by the sea
To travel the world alone
and live more simply
I have no idea what's happened to that dream
'Cos there's really nothing left here
to stop me

It's just a thought, only a thought

But if my life is for rent
and I don't learn to buy
Well I deserve nothing more than I get
'Cos nothing I have is truly mine

if my life is for rent
and I don't learn to buy
(Well) I deserve nothing more than I get
'Cos nothing I have is truly mine

While my heart is a shield
and I won't let it down
While am I
'fraid to fail
so I won't even try
Well how can I
say I'm alive

If my life is for rent...

- Dido, Life for Rent

I suppose it should bother me that all the songs that seem to capture my life and thoughts are sung by female soloists.

Blimey.

It seems I've had my moment in the limelight without even being around to notice it, thanks to mrbrown linking my national day rant while I was on a chain of night shifts. Suddenly my hit counter is in the hundreds and they're mostly referrals from... mrbrown.

Well, thank ye all kindly for dropping by, please leave a coin or two on the way out; hello there big brother! that's a pretty black book you're carrying!
and mrbrown...

argh! take it back! take it all away! I don't want it.

gesticulates wildly.

all this fame and notoriety rubbish is for narcissitic people like you and xiaxue (and at least you have an excuse. you've got a baby...)

re-minisce prefers the quiet of his own little bubble in his head, wandering through the mean streets of london (and tonight, Potters Bar) ruminating over life, medicine, and once in a blue moon, love.

*****
It's amazing what a year out from fencing can do to you. I'd forgotten all these muscles existed. I remember now that they're busy reminding me. ouch. arg.

aka The Worst Shift of my Life.

I stood over the kid listening to his heart sounds. Or rather, to the absence of heart sounds, for sixty seconds, and wrote :

o (that's medspeak for "no". don't ask me why) heart sounds 60s
o breath sounds 60s
o pulse 60s
o response to pain
pupils bilaterally fixed and dilated

as the nurses fussed about, trying to disguise the ?belt mark around his neck before the family came in to visit.

I was relatively dispassionate about it. I've seen it all before now, several times, in fact.

okay, I wasn't that dispassionate, a few seconds before, as I slammed home the brown venflon and my staff grade called it almost within seconds of his arrival in hospital. I felt slightly disappointed, but what exactly at I wasn't sure. Not that we hadn't even tried much in the way of resuscitation - this kid was dead on arrival. You get a feel for things like this, and you just know when they come through the door. And his downtime of 30 min in asystole made him a no-hoper.

Still, I felt disappointed, looking at his youth, gradually draining from the beautiful corpse that he left behind. What a waste of life.

I discreetly wandered out the cubicle to the empty one next door, crossed myself and said a few short words to myself, and hopefully, God as well. Then walked out with my head down, back onto the battlefield.

*****
That wasn't the bad part. Like I said, I've done it all before.

The bad part was when a nurse suddenly called me for help - "his father's just arrived, and he's a little distraught". (oh, and he might have a learning disability too)

I scurried after her to the relatives room.

A little distraught didn't begin to describe the wreck in front of me. He was a big man, and moving powerfully with the inner demons tormenting him tonight. The policemen either side of him were having trouble constraining him as he shouted that he wanted to Know.

As he saw me, he lost it a little more, and asked what I had come to tell him, over and over again.

I paused, and then I knelt down before him in silence.

He ranted - had I come to tell him that it wasn't hanging, but drugs? That's what I'd come to tell him wasn't it, that's why there were police everywhere (and there were. I'd only barely taken it in, in my haste to get to the rellie's room (damn I sound so australian sometimes) but yes, I had waded through a sea of black and white milling around outside the door to get here...

... kneeling on the ground in front of this big man goggling at the eyes, with his neck veins standing out, straining at the gently restraining arms of the policemen on his shoulders.

I wondered if I could duck in time if he lashed out at me, and then I put all thoughts from my mind, and started speaking.

I got as far as the word "hung" when he leapt out of his chair, without actually leaving his seat. It's something I've only seen on television before, and I can attest that it is frightening in real life.

It all felt rather surreal. There's something remarkably moving, and also very scary about a man saying the same word over, and over, and over again.

As he unfolded before us, words of grief, guilt, anger and bitterness spilling from his mouth, and his utter shock that he wasn't crying ("no tears! I must be mad!") I couldn't help but feel that he was anything but. This man, as he shouted and heaved in his chair wasn't spilling his guts to us. He was bleeding words from his soul, in a torrent. He was verbally exsanguinating before my eyes, and all I could do was hold his knuckles, or put a hand on his knee in sympathy (his shoulders were still being gently and carefully held down by the policemen flanking him either side).

He wanted me to tell him why, to give him a reason and some meaning to this tragedy, and I heard someone say, several times, through numbed lips "I'm sorry, I haven't got the answer to that question for you."

I tried gently probing to see if he was religious... Laughs... remind me never to do that again. Ever.

He was so broken, this ranting, burning hulk of a man, and for a strange moment I wanted to hold him. I didn't of course, it would have been inappropriate in any circumstance, even had I been female, and he might have become violent again.

*****
There's just so much more i want to say, right this very instant. I'm burning inside to write everything that's tumbling through my head, but barely four hours of sleep later, I have to get back to work (thank you, rota lady) and so I'll continue this later.

It's been six hours since I knocked off shift, and I'm still feeling sad.

I guess this is what they call "transferrence".

Why I do this job? I don't know. It's just a job, but not quite like any other.

But in an odd way, for all this - it's an honour, and a priviledge. And all the celebrity or wealth in the world would not begin to compare.

It’s been long enough.
I’m coming out of my closet now.

I’m an addict.


As imminent unemployment looms (for some reason, some part of me is insisting that the greater part of me wants to be a surgeon) and my days in accident and emergency gradually draw to a close, I can’t help but feel that I’m going to miss it.

I’m not going to miss my colleagues, like I did as a medical and surgical house officer - it isn’t going to be that beautiful ward pharmacist, or that lovely nursing student that I’m going to pine for, but rather the nature of the job. The nurses in A&E were nice enough, but there were just so many of them that I never really got to know them. And there wasn’t an Abby lookalike dammit.

I remember signing for two A&E jobs in a row. Everybody thought I was mad at the time, and I even wondered myself if perhaps I had masochistic tendancies. But after my first A&E job, I knew I wanted to do it again, to try and do it right this time. To learn how to be competent, and not just passable.

I reckon I am competent now. I’m not a terribly confident doctor. I believe that confidence takes years of experience to build, and any confidence I were to try to wear after a mere 1 year in the job would simply border on arrogance.

And I simply cannot imagine a career in A&E… becoming that craggy generalist consultant who subspecialises in administration would kill me.

But the SHO and registrar level work gives me a buzz that I’ve never felt in any other field of medicine.

I saw a young chap with severe left back pain last night that wasn’t tender to palpation, and wasn’t worsened on resisted arm movements.

I reckon most of the other SHOs would have let it go there and sent him home with a strong NSAID, but something in my head clicked and I noticed he was tall, and thin. And on closer examination, had a possibly high-arched palate (it’s never as easy as in the textbooks is it?) and a very long arm span. (1 inch greater than his height, to be precise.)

So suddenly I was ordering a flurry of “unnecessary” investigations (the nurses thought so, anyhow) including left and right arm b/ps which consistently showed differences - fortunately the differences alternated from left to right. good old nhs equipment.

and a chest X ray, and ECGs, and re-examination for radial-radial and radial-femoral delay, and close auscultation for any quiet murmurs I might have missed the first time around.

Granted everything came back normal after all that - no mediastinal widening on CXR - and his pain gradually settled to a tolerable level, and I did send him home in the end with a strong NSAID and advice for him to consult his GP for referral back to hospital ? Marfans, and for follow up cardiology (that’s how the NHS works. Mere casualty doctors aren’t allowed clinic access… we’re too incompetent, apparently.)

The point was, that something elusive clicked, eyeballing the patient. Somewhere along the way I’ve transcended the initial brainlessness of a new casualty officer and matured into a proper “Senior House Officer".

And, well, it’s a nice feeling.

So it wasn’t with quite the trepidation I expected, telephoning the locum agencies today and learning that they could secure me middle-grade or registrar grade locum positions in A&E in several of the london hospitals I always wanted to see the insides of…

Surgery can wait another six months, I guess. Or however long it takes for me to get a job.

Right now, I’m still an A&E addict.

*****
Senescence is a Strange Thing

Somedays it feels like life's on hold. When you don't get a single call or text message, or even an email, and everybody else's web page has gone into stasis. And nobody's left even a mark on yours.

It's days like this that make me think how much I miss home, and life from once upon a time, when there were always messages on my answering machine, and emails from close friends in my mailbox.

Senescence is a strange thing.

Reading Lysithea's account of her encounters in the wierd and wonderful world of competitive chess, I can't help but remember some of my own.

I remember the first tourney I played in. I was young. Very young, and very, very scared.

For some reason, when I play chess I get really petrified - the fear factor never quite wore off for me years later as a seasoned veteran.

The symptoms are beautifully described in medical textbooks. Sympathetic overdrive - pallor, sweating, nausea, butterflies in tummy, increased resp rate, and presumably pupillary dilation although I never did find time to look at myself in a mirror during tournaments.

The chap I was playing was probably about twice my age, but he was a kid too (I was a very young kid.)

Ponderously, with hands trembling, we exchanged piece after piece.

And then he made a mistake. I think my fear was probably rubbing off on him - as the game progressed, his confidence waned, just a little bit, little bit more... and then he blundered.

And suddenly I was the victor. David KOs Goliath.

I don't think I was a particularly inspired player, although I did make my school team. I always lived in awe of the other 3 guys on the team (our fifth board was frankly... poor. laughs) who all happened to be close buddies of mine.

There was A, our lead player and top board, who had the mind of a supercomputer (on electronic steroids). A was my best friend at the time (says a lot about me?) and I liked him because he was always calm, dependable, and underneath that facade of utter and absolute blandness lurked a quiet and very understated humour - with just that touch of a mean streak. He was a strange blend of BBC and HBC (hongkong). For some reason, many of the people I really liked back in those days were all born abroad. They were alive.

A played chess like Deep Blue. Calmly, deliberately, and he gradually overwhelmed you through sheer force of impeccable logic. If he'd been a tennis player he'd have michael chang, only much taller, much more powerful, and playing every shot from the baseline till his opponent fell dead of sheer boredom. :)

I lost touch with A somewhere along the way. He went off to the states to become a supercomputer (I think he works for IBM) and fulfill all his electronic fantasies, and became too important for the rest of us mere mortals.

Our second board was K, who is funnily enough my best friend today, and my best buddy of all time.

K has an american sense of humour, but nobody's perfect and I've forgiven him for it for all our lives. I was his best man at his wedding, and I gave a wedding speech nobody is ever likely to forget - or understand. Damn this strange hybrid accent I've grown into.....

K played chess with an interesting mix of common sense and sheer unpredictability. He had frequent flashes of quick brilliance which I was in awe of. In the blink of an eyelid he'd have you pinned to your back ranks and struggling.

But he was also fallible, as people who take risks often are, and once in a blue moon even I could get the upperhand with one of my much rarer moments of inspiration. K also collapsed occasionally out of sheer ? insanity for very little reason, but he was definitely cut out to be one of the powerhouses on our team.

Then there was our third board, Z, who I never really got to know very well. He grinned a lot and was quiet a lot of the time when he wasn't being horrendously perverted. He played chess a little less extravagently than K, but he was also more A-like. Very calculating, and also very deliberate (but not quite as formidably so).

I constantly resigned myself to playing as fourth board. A pale shadow of the other three, a more even mix of dependability (but not quite as cerebrally inclined, not quite as logical) and unpredictability. I was, to my mind however, predictably unpredictable. My risks were mostly calculated, and foreseen two to three moves in advance. In a word, easy to read, to the superior player.

The one day I had a major chessmaster moment was unfortunately in tourney vs Z. I'd much rather it'd happened against someone else, since we were playing in the individuals, and of course it'd have been better to knock someone else out from another school. It reflects poorly on your school if you have only a few, or no medal-winners, nevermind that they slaughtered each other off at the starting board.

I remember a strange sense of awareness. Of quickening. A slight prickling at the back of my neck. Hmm, funny that, it sounds a little like someone else's account of falling in love.

I saw. It was like learning a streetfighter combination attack quite by accident - and knowing what you'd just done, in advance. Almost like deja-vu.

It unfolded in my head as I stared blankly at the board. Not two, not three moves ahead, but ten.

I sat absolutely still, and analysed, and analysed, and analysed. It looked utterly infallible. It involved an initial gamble of a completely illogical sacrifice (I think it was a rook for a pawn), but somewhere down the line it resulted in a massive and overwhelming victory.

Z began to look a little nonplussed as the minutes rolled by. Finally, half an hour later I woke from my reverie and started the chain of events leading to the highest point in my chess career (and a national medal).

He was puzzled. And he looked up and saw fear in my eyes. And looked back down. Who sacrifices a rook for a pawn? About ten minutes later after a lot of deliberation, he took the bait.

And ten moves later, I was leading by a rook, two knights, a bishop and a queen. It was a bittersweet victory, but more a victory over myself in my head, than over Z.

(Sure I had other victories, even against the infamous V, from ACS who had a reputation for being completely and utterly clinically insane. Rumour has it that in his navy days he managed to misguide his crew and vessel several thousand miles off course thanks to a "misinterpretation" of his instructions. Accidental my foot. laugh)

I went home that night, and obsessively played the scenario out over and over again on my own little chess board, and discovered a fatal flaw in the grand plan. On move one, completely unforseen by myself, and thankfully, by Z. It wasn't about not falling for the gambit, but about responding to it differently.

My victory within a hair's breadth of becoming an utter, and absolute exercise in humiliation.

Heh heh.

Such is life, innit?

*****
Several years (funny, the first time I wrote that it came up as "tears") later, I flew halfway across the world to make a sacrifice.

It wasn't a gambit - I don't think I stood to win anything from it, and all scenarios led to loss.

It was completely illogical, and insensible. It was, metaphorically speaking, trading my queen for a pawn, the pawn being me. Intentionally, and cold-bloodedly, for the simple reason that the pawn needed to be lost.

Somehow, fate conspired against me and turned my sacrifice into a gambit - albeit a temporary one. And I emerged the transient victor, in a competition I hadn't even intended to enter.

It turned out to be an illusion, and the defeat came later, inexorably, and utterly predictably. But in that brief time, I walked on wind, hands held akimbo, and my soul was freed, and so, so happy.

She thought I'd meant it to be a gambit. I suppose that was equal parts Her, and equal parts her best friend's counsel - someone, I suspect, who is very much like K, who advised me not to even make the sacrifice in the first place, since it didn't make sense. And if even K thought it didn't make sense, then believe me, it so didn't.

I do have regrets today. But not because I made that insane trip across the world - rather, because I fell prey to stupidity, and cast aside the one person who brought laughter into my life, and eyes. I guess in a nutshell, I did it all because I was, and just had to be - myself. Would that the same could be said today, when older, "wiser", more mercenary and corrupted by "adulthood" (and this has nothing to do with age) all I can do is reminisce fondly on my younger days, and miss the few people who helped to shape me into someone better than I am today.

Sometimes, you just have to make that sacrifice, because it's written in your nature.

It's amazing the extremes I go through to implement changes on my page which are so subtle they're almost unnoticeable. I guess I have this thing about preserving things as I found them.

Granted I changed the colour schemes for this blog around a fair bit. They were horrible before, so I (for some strange reason) went with this gold and reddish brown combo. Very McDonald's dontcha think?

Strange that, I'd have expected me to choose all shades of blue. It's my favourite colour. Shrug.

The one thing I absolutely did not do was to go to great lengths to make this page look all prefabricted and pretty and beautiful. Don't get me wrong, I do like the pretty pages out there and I even experimented with a very, very beautiful graphical template for half a day... but it just didn't feel right. It didn't feel like... the old re-minisce blog.

shrug. maybe someday I'll create a proper professional-looking blog with bells and whistles and things that spin round and round and all.

For now, I'll keep tweaking my blog so that it looks like nothing's been done to it. :D

I guess moms will be moms will be moms.

heh heh heh.

****
You know when you're so tired the skin on your eyelids starts to smart a little... and if you rub your eyes you get this awful stinging in your eyes? I get that everytime I do a twelve hour shift, somewhere around the eleventh hour.

Right now I'm indulging in a long thirty minute dinner break. Absolutely nothing is going to convince me to get up and go back onto the shop floor early today. nothing.

*****
At the gym the other week :

gym attendant (brunette, but decent looking) as I'm walking out the door : Excuse me sir, did you use the sunbed?

re-minisce : uh no. Why, do I look like I've used the sunbed?

gym girl : actually, yes, you do. (smile)

re-minisce : um. thanks! (pause. smile. leaves.)

(err. okay. checks self. Do I look gay...)

*****
Cathartic moment # 310519024189 :

I don't think I love You anymore. But I do miss You.

I guess that's what happens when you go ahead and fall in love with a friend. Or maybe become friends with someone you've fallen in love with.

Maybe I'm writing my epics the wrong way around. Or maybe I've just got the basic principals wrong...

Okay, so I nicked the topic from someone, rolls eyes. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I'd rather just say it was the best I could come up with at 2330 hrs, after a 12 hour shift and 1 hour of auditing.

I have a lot of blogs. And I mean a LOT.

One of them is a jumbled collection of memories about two kids from my past, one of them bizzarly enough, myself, openly viewable to the public.
Another is a a more select form of reminiscence, viewable to a very select few individuals whom I've shared the URL with. At the moment they still number fewer than 10.

One is just a release for pent-up humour and currently holds the preliminary chapters of a short-story that's fast developing into a full-length novel. (a doctor, and a writer! maybe i should become a psychiatrist, I'm clearly insane.)

The last is a very, very private journal known only to myself that ties all the others together - One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them - and the one individual who somehow found it by accident and visisted it only the once, probably by keying in an incorrect URL.

Reading some of my recollections of the lost magics from my past - of Her, mainly - and I don't do this very often - I feel.

I remember.

And I know what I want in this life. I know I'd rather die waiting for it, than to fritter my life away with a pale shadow - or a mockery - of it.

But dammit, I really do what it - that - again. And maybe at the end of days - that would have been the most important of everything. (besides God of course.) Career? One of our staff grades is a rabbi, and he maintains that medicine is really a sideline for him.

I suppose I'm just a die-hard romantic, under the guise of a grizzled cynic. Or maybe the other way around. It gets confusing, sometimes.

But reading snippets of what I've written, and temporarily reliving those days (flashbacks really DO happen, and not just in the movies. Or maybe it's just time for my tablets again...) I know what "it" is.

It's the epic.

It's something I can write about, something I may not want to write about, but one day will read about again - that will move me. That will cleave its way through the impregnable defences of the inner cynic within myself, and draw my eyebrows together with the effort of keeping my mind at peace, and my eyes... focused. And my lacrimal ducts impassive.

And God willing, something I'll be able to read - in the company of The Person I've written about, and put an arm around her, smell her hair, and laugh together with her over it.

And maybe even one day sit old and doddery, reading alone in the silence of my (?nursing?) home and remember Her (whoever Her may be - not necessarily the Her I've spent a third of my life remembering) and what we were like together, and hope that we may be together once more.

It's the epic that I've lived, and written - that I want to read about again. Not the prelude that never went anywhere, that I'd much rather forget.

There have been a few of those, many spurious, spur of the moment snippets born of a moments flippancy - trying desperately to recapture the spontaneity of before? And not a few of the females in those stories were attractive to me for their personalities.

One was, cough, I admit, attractive to me quite possibly for her looks. Although I maintain we had a lot in common, and I mean MORE than two eyes, two ears, one nose...

These make for entertaining recounting - but they're not stories I particularly want to revisit - for myself. They're pieces of my past I'll always remember, many fondly.

But what I want - what I truly, from the pits of my gut and the depths of my subconscious - burn for is The Epic.

Not just love, not just someone to love, or even someone to love me, nor even to dote relentlessly and obsessively over me. I've seen pieces of all that and they're not enough.

I want words. Words that don't have to be written, or re-read on paper, or media -- just in my head. Words of power. Words of magic. Words of immortality, till time, and God takes me.

Well, bugger it, I'm now officially unemployed. Or, at any rate, will be soon. Better rush those locum applications in quick.

I hate the way they always tell you that you were the next but one candidate, ie if there were two places, well you did so, so well, you interviewed perfectly, and I personally really really wanted to appoint you, but you came third, and...

I'm either really unlucky, or they say that to everyone who doesn't get the job. I mean, come on, four times in a row can't be coincidence can it?

One can't help but notice either that there're always the perfect number of internal candidates to fill the vacancies. hmm.

Today didn't really start out very well. For one, I realised that the job I was interviewing for wasn't the job I'd been sent the specs for. I should have smelled a rat when I discovered Rochdale, while in Manchester, was really in "Greater Manchester".

Manchester's sort of like a mini London (It looks almost identical to it) complete with its miles and miles of suburbs lying haphazardly about the city proper.

Forty minutes by train away from Manchester and I began to wonder... why on earth are they interviewing for a manchester hospital so far out from it?

A chance comment from another candidate made me snatch his job specs (he was the only one of the 19 candidates vying for 2 places who'd thought to ask for the specs) away from him in a frenzy.

Well, suffice to say that all the candidates were, with the exception of myself, from mainland india, desperate for a job, and prepared to work at those rates.

But dang it, so was I. My one and only interview in this six month block (err are You trying to tell me something?), even if it was at a crumbly little hospital with a dismal payscale was still an interview. Job security. 2 years of not applying for new posts (even if another 6 mths A&E. shrug) It's the question of a known evil vs a dark uncertainty.

I didn't put a foot wrong in that interview, and as a seasoned SHO found all their silly questions about audit, clinical governance and basic postop complications insanely easy. And they knew it too.

And I still didn't get the job. Moan. The A&E consultant who'd been assigned the forsaken task of breaking the bad news mano-a-mano had the decency to at least not look me in the eye as he said that I had interviewed perfectly, and that if it was up to him I'd have the job, blahblahblah, but there were only two spaces... and...

(They really should invest in thicker walls. Okay, so I really did come third, after the whittling down process. Funnily enough, their two internal candidates came first, and second...)

So I'm back to square one now. Jobless in a big city.

Where do I go from here?

1) stay and locum, get paid exorbitant registrar rates, and earn a big black hole on my CV. And surely my application for MRCS I should have been acknowledged??? I put a huge cheque in the mail dammit. And it was on time. Where's my letter of confirmation?!?
have nearly infinite time to myself. Learn to play the flute. Fence. Join medicine sans frontiers. God knows.

2) go home to my mum and dad. Become a stranger in a strange land. Learn how to practise hospital medicine in mandarin (eh??) and maybe even hokkien (but pea sized brain will probably overload). Hmm. Probably receive subtle hints from the mother every day about procreating with some vetinary science graduate or summat. Shudder.
Prostitute myself to the national team so they can turn their noses up at me for a while. ? break out that nimbus 2000 and, maybe not play quidditch but mebbe hit someone onna head wi' it.

I wish there was an option :

3) wander the world, at leisure. Backpack. See things. Watch sunsets. Maybe locum in interesting places around the world. Or mebbe just in australia.

But that's what really, really sucks about medicine. We can't. We can't take time out and find ourselves. There's always this phenomenal pressure to work, work, work. Otherwise you get black marked by this hole on your CV. You'll potentially forget things, and be an unsafe doctor when you return to work 6 months later.

Sigh.

*****
Watching the world fly by from the vantage point of my comfortable armchair on a Virgin train (all of 8 hours ofa beautifully sunny and warm day wasted) I realised that England is very, very ugly.

Concrete is left grey and unfinished, and unpainted. The garguntum nuclear reactor that the train glides by, grey and forbidding.

Train lines run starkly and unaesthetically.

Garbage litters the train tracks.

But for all that, it's also very beautiful. In it's haphazard urban ugliness - it is charming, and endlessly interesting. Litter and all. And even beyond that, in its countryside that looks like it's stayed the same for eons. Cows grazing alongside sheep; distant mounds dot the skyline - clearly manmade, but so old now that tall trees stand upon them as if since time immemorial.

Should I decide to go, I will, bizzarly enough, miss it.

The thought makes me feel a little bit breathless. It's scary, all so scary to me. To think about leaving this place that HAS somehow become my home. To build a new home in a country where language and accent may pose a problem. To have to pack all my stuff up (and tidy my flat one last time!) into boxes to fly home. Where will it all go anyhow. I guess it could all easily fit into my room... my flat isn't so big and most of what I have are books. Putting the flat up for sale...

sigh. Scary stuff.

...shift work can really mess up your physiology.

I had one square meal yesterday. Just one. It can't possibly have been good for me, what with going to the gym and all

(2.4 time down to 11.05! yay me)

but... shrug. All the times get messed up - you just lose your appetite - well, I do anyhow. And I absolutely refuse to eat when I'm not feeling in the least bit hungry. That'd just be... weird.
Girls, if you're looking for a great way to lose weight, and your social life, all in one go - do something worthless with your life. Be an emergency doctor. heh.

*****
Random thought while running on the treadmill (some weeks back it was "I wish I could have been a hamster") :

Am I waiting for the impossible? What am I waiting for? (And what was all that about?)

*****
The One Interview tomorrow. The fate of my little earth hangs in the balance.

Mood : worried.
also still in two minds.

I want to do well in the interview, of course. And I want to get a job.

But... part of me also wants to go home to be with my parents :

*****
Reflecting briefly while staring out the train on life, specifically someone else's brush with the lack thereof (her father's CABG post MI) I can't help but think that I may not be getting any younger, but neither are my mum and dad.

I'm surrounded every day by death and illness. One gets slightly immune to it.

But pausing for a moment to think that maybe one day that umpteenth patient who's collapsed suddenly with chest pain might just be... well it doesn't bear thinking about.

Does it?

If there's one redeeming feature about working shiftwork, it's the way a long night shift is followed by a pleasant break from work the next day, and beyond into the day after as well before going back to the grind. I haven't really sat down to work out the nitty gritty details, but it feels like I'm getting extra time off, and that sensation of first waking up after a shift and not needing to worry about heading out to work again is simply indescribable :)

*****
True Love

I'm a little disappointed with everyone coming through here. I post a picture of my one true love - my beautiful black sabre, and nobody comments! Pah. I mean, come on people, this is much more important to me than mere love, or some silly woman! Comment, dammit, comment!! heh.

*****
Medifraud

I've been wandering across links to my site listing me as a "medical blog" and it's all been a little overwhelming (help. trapped. spotlight. oncoming car?) and also it's making me feel a bit the fraud.

I mean, yeah, sure I'm a doctor. But I don't really like to write about work, yknow? It takes for something truly upsetting or remarkable to make itself bubble to the surface of my brain, especially when I'm writing. So I won't write about the rather less pleasant moments, eg being racially harrassed by a drunk patient's drunk spouse, or being hit in the chest (even if not very hard) by a drunk, unpleasant, ? IVDU patient with a huge hole in her calf (although the interesting bit was I automatically caught her hand and was about to start twisting subconsciously before I caught myself, backed away, and said that fine, if she didn't want my help she could go hom. heh. with her arterial bleed from her leg... my very first strop! whee.) or the less than memorable countless sprained ankles I have seen ("but it really hurts doctor") or the million defensive patients who come in already expecting to be harangued for wasting the hospital's time before I've even opened my mouth, and being pre-emptively unpleasant to begin with.

I dunno, I prefer to write about the funny moments in life (including the beautiful mexican girl who walked into A&E back when I was a med student with shortness of breasts err breath I mean - our house officer told us, right you clerk her - pointing at me - and you examine her - pointing at the other med student. What followed was the former whinging "how come you always get to examine them" and the latter smirking, till her huge mexican boyfriend rippling with muscles showed up. heh heh heh.) and when life's not really doing anything, like today for instance - I guess I prefer to wander outdoors or go to the gym or fritter the time away meaninglessly, than to write incessantly about work, work, and more work.

Still, to everyone who's wandered in here expecting to find a medi-blog, well I'm really sorry. Shrug. Check out the links on my left under "Referrals" (especially lingualnerve!) - those're the real mediblogs. None of all this introspective existential angst there :)

This evening, I bought this.
How cool is that???! 
 
I had to rush after my shift to catch the shop before it closed, which was nearly impossible. I arrived with 5 minutes to spare.
 
And so, now, re-minisce is a proud owner of a sabre with :
 
1) a German pommel
 
and
 
2) a Russian-designed blade
 
bought at
 
3) a French supplier
 
based in
 
4) England

(click to enlarge)
Only in the UK...
 
The blade felt heavier than I was used to once assembled, but the more I handle it and adjust to the new balance, the more I like it.

Armed, and dangerous.

Smile. :)

*****

Did I mention that sabres sing as they're drawn? I've got a makeshift plastic scabbard, and when i draw my sabre from it, it sings.

My previous Uhlmann blade was a thing of legend; the first sabre blade I ever bought, that kept my company on many stressed-out days back in RJC preparing for exams. Strike, strike. Parry, strike - that old fencing dummy never knew what hit it.
I polished it lovingly and lavished a great deal of attention on it and somehow it ended up with a reflective white sheen to it. When I drew it, it rang out in a fluting feminine voice, which continued to breathe till it gradually died away.

This new blade has a much deeper voice, and for some reason it seems to go on sounding long after the actual noise has stopped.

I'm convinced that the weather hates me. The weekend was mostly cloudy with occasional fits of sunshine, and the occasional downpour (read : thunderstorm).
 
I went out saturday and got rained on four times. The second I got home, the sun came out. I didn't bother going out again because I knew it'd probably just rain on me again.
 
Well, now that I'm back at work, typically it's dawned a warm, sunny day with nary a cloud in sight.
 
:(
 
(that really, truly sums up how I feel about the weather.)
 
*****
Had an unexpected meeting with an acquaintence I didn't think I'd see again (err not since she stayed over at my place).
 
How's this for an impromptu meetup. Email in the morning saying that she's just happening to be swinging by for a few days, just touched down this morning.
 
Email received, pm.
 
Meeting - dinner.
 
So that is why I had a nice lobster dinner at Belgos yesterday instead of the anticipated takeout pizza.

*****
While we're at it, let's talk about Belgo's fruit beers.
 
I'm not a beer person. I've never really been, and till I arrived in london I was (more or less) a beer virgin, having survived the NS ordeal relatively unscathed.
 
I remember trying beer in first year med school. Vile stuff. But it was what conversations and friendships were built on so I persevered for a while before giving up. Instead, I drank expensive shots and got funny looks. Sue me, I like bacardi. (Although the poison of choice back then was Archers.)
 
I remember trying the fruit beers at Belgos and feeling faintly nauseas. All I could taste was the awful beer aftertaste, not-quite masked by the fruity overtones overlying them.
 
Seven years later, I've tried and fallen in love with an astoundingly refreshing and subtle australian beer (can't remember the name. There's a fox head engraved on the bottle. I drank a couple of those at sunset watching an open air film fest thingie in the park next to the opera house) and decided I can sorta tolerate Kronenburg (which is not at all subtle) and, with some effort, most other beers (Although moscato d'asti is still in a class of it's own).
 
It was quite an experience last night, having peach beer after a break of... five years? Or possibly more.
 
I couldn't taste the beer at all. It was lovely. Laughs.
 
(Although again, moscato d'asti is far subtler and clearly superior, at least to this undiscerning, uncultured, uncouth palate.)

Okay, someone explain this to me.
 
LOTR return of the king (for PC) sells at HMV for £9.99
LOTR The Fellowship of the Ring sells at £15.99
 
er. the older game is going for more, and having tried them both myself, i can safely say is also the poorer of the two. FOTR wasn't written based on the movie, the graphics were mediocre, and the game was buggy and irritating as heck to play. 
 
ROTK on the other hand feels like playing the movie, and graphics are stunning. Why only £9.99? Must be a mistake. they probably meant £19.99

Event : National day 2004
Location : somewhere in the south china sea. or thereabouts.
 
*****
okay, so here's the buzz about it :
 
http://202.157.151.15/main/index.asp
http://202.157.151.15/blogger/home.asp?uid=24B236D7-96D0-49CB-9BEA-2158F785270A
http://202.157.151.15/main/index.asp
 
Now I don't want to sound unpatriotic or anything, and if you're the ultra-patriotic sort who just can't stop humming "Count on Me Singapore", then don't read on. This article will offend you. Which it really isn't intended to. Well, okay it is, but it's also meant to make you think. Whoever you may be.
 
Someone explain this to me. A "national education" day, attended by primary 5 students across the country as a runup to the big day itself. Complete with bombadiers firing their howitzers an' all.
 
eh? The point being...? And why do they call it "education"?
 
National Day never really did it for me. I actually attended one once, and got the big foam finger thingie and all, and had to wave it around, i think. The memories have kinda been repressed now.
 
But seriously, it's a great day out and all for the celebrities and the ministers, and i suppose for most of the sheep, but what's the point?
 
In a nutshell :
 
military formation marching
dance act thingie. cute kids sing under obnoxious conductor.
more military formation marching
prime minister arrives, late
more military formation marching.
Inspection of the troops, by prime minister.
Prime minister leaves.
More marching, more dance, aircraft flyby, Gun salute. Cannon salute. Fireworks, grand finale. Finish, post-event party.
 
Excuse me... aren't we losing the plot a little? In what way does all this constitute a "national day"?
 
I'll give credit where it's due. It does take a lot of blood, sweat and effort, and countless rehearsals upon rehearsals. Even the kiddy-audience have to go for rehearsals, in my year it was to make sure we waved glo-sticks in unison or something. I remember the year when they had to flip shiny metallic things over in sequence.
It's all very admirable, and it looks great on television, uh, except who really watches the NDP on TV?
 
But, and we're talking big butts here (I like big butt... cough, sorry.) I think the organisers have got it all wrong.
 
National day in Singapore is just another public holiday. There isn't really any national pride in our people. There's just the effigy of it, one day a year. I can't help but feel overwhelmed sometimes, in this strange land I've taken up residence in, when everyone's flying their little red and white flags on their cars. When you can tell that England just scored a goal, because a great roar sweeps across the entire country. When an entire emergency department (90% of whom are wearing the england T-shirt) grinds to a halt - and an entire nation holds its breath - then groans in despair as beckhams golden boot, well, pardon my french, fucks up. Sure, sure, it's only football - but there's so much pride there. So much at stake. There's a strange solidarity, between the white men and the dark man, watching england do battle yet again. Us yellow people just stand around on the side, and if we cheer at the right time, mebbe sometimes we get a free drink. heh.
 
I reckon National Day ought to showcase the people.
 
Not the stars and ministers - that's our national mindset, innit? The stars are Da people -- but they're so, so not "the people."

*****
Music
 
While I'm at it, why don't I slag off the national day songs, too?
 
(excerpt from) We Will Get There (Dick Lee)
Remember the days,
we set out together with faith?
Remember the times, so fine,
when we thought thatNothing could stand in our way
 
REMEMBER THE TIMES SO FINE??!? GEEZ! Honestly. shakes head.
 
howabout this?
(excerpt from) Where I Belong (Tanya Chua)
Morning comes around and I
Can't wait to see my sunny island
In its glorious greenery,
whether rain or shine, it's still beautiful
 
Err. Yes, quite. Moving swiftly on.
 
How many struggling songwriters do we have out there anyhow? I bet there's a whole army of them who aren't celebrities, or well connected to parliament. I bet there's actually some real talent out there.
 
Maybe we could have a website dedicated to them, for them to post their contributions to. And showcase them ALL. Good, bad and ugly.
 
Sure, we need a national day song. We're so pavlovian it'd probably feel funny if we didn't have one.
 
Well, we could pick the song the public loves most... have a head to head amongst the unknowns -- and between the unknowns and the bigwigs. And if some unknown kid won - well so be it. Tomorrow, he'll be a celebrity himself. Today, he'll be some unknown kid with zits who hasn't had his makeover yet, singing the national day song on stage with his guitar. Or piano. Or band. Or whatever.
 
And please, please, please pick people who sing with some sincerity. National day songs don't have to be about how clean and green our country is. They can be about love. They can be about relationships. They can be about loss. They can be about memories.
As long as it reached out to the nation - it'd be a kick-ass national day song.
 
*****
Words

National day ought to be a day when the people are proud - of the country. Of the humble, faceless layman. Of our past, and our present - and our futures. Our one minute of glory to the people that make the country WORK. And not just the men in white - without the support of the sheep, the system would collapse. Celebrities mean nothing to the economy. And Jack Neo's little piece on perpetuation of the arts is... cough. I'll reserve comment.
 
Sure, that moblog thing is an interesting idea.
But honestly - go click the links above.
 
How many of them can actually write?
What is the POINT of a celebrity moblog when all the pseudo-celebrity writes is "I wish I could update more often, but I'm too busy."
 
I cast my eye around the web, and behold - there are SO MANY singaporean blogs out there. Hundreds upon thousands. Some of them can actually string words together into mini masterpieces.
 
Shouldn't national day recognise these usually hidden faces behind the pearls they produce out of their everyday, mundane lives?
 
Instead, we have the winner of the mydreamd8 competition (no offence, Janice) doing her best to represent the blogging community at large - and well. She's sweet, and she's trying her best, and I'm sure if I knew her in real life I'd be charmed.
 
But there's more to Singaporean bloggers than Janice.
 
I think the organisers got it all wrong. They shouldn't have "handpicked" top-blogs (through whatever social network they used to form their pool of candidates) which, quite honestly, are mostly rubbish, or just cute piccys of housepets or other snippets of celebrity life which, well, are interesting enough but not enough.
 
They should have set up a team to search the web for Singaporean weblogs - as many as possible -- and linked them ALL.
 
They could have categorised them, into advanced writers, and into daily bloggers, into reads of merit, and reads of substance - whatever. They could have done so, so much more.
 
Instead, we have a pale reflection of mydreamd8, with every "blogger" using a standardised template, and comments functions becoming blatent money rakers for Singtel. Every "blogger" there is really just Singtel's whore -- I wonder how they came up with that idea?
 
So some people will still read them, and ooh and ah.
 
But where is the pride? Where is Singapore??
 
Likewise, the whole National Day Parade thingie.
 
What's with all the boys in uniform twirling their big weapons around? And kiddies walking around a 400m track??
 
Is that meant to be some brazillian carnival idea gone horribly wrong? Let's make it secure. Instead of having floats and a carnival meandering down the streets, let's make it simple - we'll put it all in a stadium. Make them walk around a track a few times.
 
I do think there's a role for a parade, and if the best we can do is a hemmed-in stageshow, then well and fine. Every country has it's parading of the colours. The Queen inspects the guard.
 
But the NDP shouldn't BE national day. It should just be one of the many things happening on national day.
 
*****
Sights
 
There should be other things happening elsewhere, alongside it. At the SAME TIME.
 
If you want vibrancy and creativity, then national day ought to be chaotic. A cacophony of culture. Fireworks blazing across the little dot on the map we call our home.
 
I've been away a long time now. I dunno if they're already doing this. But national day could culminate in the parade - and film fests - and concerts in the parks across the country. With fledgeling bands and amateur emcees wowing the crowds, instead of the usual boring, perfect, ephemeral faces. It could be so much more than a few pilots in stupid little super skyhawks (WHAT'S WITH THAT?? Crappy little airplanes the size of hatchbacks?? Break out the F16s! and F15s! not that we have any of those.) trailing pretty coloured smoke behind them, and a lotta fireworks.
 
Heck, scrap national day itself. Have a national week.
 
Have roaming cameramen on the street, capturing the everyday moments of life we take for granted, and are blind to. The way the people course in waves, en route to work. The old man doing his tai-chi in the serenity of a park. Children at play in a playground.
 
And have people voicing their thoughts about the land. And not just nice pink thoughts - cynical thoughts. Dark thoughts. Pessimism -- the whole lot of them. Honest, everyday thoughts.
 
And for chrissakes, don't do it the way we always do, cameraman and boom-mike becoming mini foci for attention, wandering up to the layman to ask his opinion about something. Turning him into a little trapped creature fumbling on the spot for something clever to say, and turning out something like "I dunnola" or "I tink ees a good ting la."
 
The layman can't speak in Singapore. But he/she does things that the cameraman, with a touch of artistry, can capture the beauty of. The country itself has the same - the way the sun comes off the shiny city-buildings in the morning. Lucian captures many of these moments, in still shots.
 
So, blend. Have that silent shot of an old man doing his tai-chee, and maybe a voiceover. A poem. Local, or not - as long as it's beautiful.
 
Action shots of (bleah) national servicemen at training, with sound removed and replaced with a soundtrack of an a capella group. Or maybe someone reading anthem for the doomed youth. hehe. Or some kid (who can speak relatively coherently please) telling it as it is - how he's always afraid he'll sign extra, or break his leg. How his sergeant effs and blinds at him... but how he's making friends and learning to depend on the people around him too. And how stupid the doorless showers really are.
 
I can think of a particular poet who'd fit the bill nicely - alfian. He's turned into a mini-celebrity of sorts already, our best and brightest -- though truth be told in the world arena he'd be pretty good - just that. Not quite liquid gold. But there must be more of them. There must be other alfian's out there - use them.
 
Short silent clips of... hmm. national teams at training, taken surreptitiously, capturing the effort they're putting in. Football. Swimming. Fencing. Gymnastics. Whatever. Loving closeups of the sweat falling off their brows as the insane china coaches put them through their two thousand burpees. Ug. Sorry, bad memories. Frontline medical staff - paramedics included - saving lives. Hawkerstall uncles driving their mercedes benzes. Policemen taking down criminal... oops we don't have any criminals in Singapore, do we? People at the beach just chilling out.
 
Sure, it'll be expensive and involve a lot of work on the part of the media to put out huge numbers of camera crews on the streets.  And I guess they'd have to get past the mindset that everything needs to be planned in advance.
 
But isn't that the whole point? To do it big, for a day - or maybe a week?
 
I was just thinking all this today, standing in the crowd in Covent Garden watching a street musician making burning cigarettes vanish into thin air - and reflecting how most of the time TV crews in Singapore set things up... there's always a rather artificial feel to it all, because people have arranged to be filmed. And they ham it up for the camera. There's no spontaniety.
And while I was mulling over everything I've just written - about daily snippets of the mundane working so much more on the psyche of society than silly shots of the prime minister waving benevolently at his assembled flock, and celebrities, well... shepherding the sheep into doing the pre-rehearsed things right -- when this cameraman appeared out of nowhere, and stood next to me with his camera rolling. And the (inevitable) guy with the boom mike appeared behind him. The street magician guy looked up, surprised, for an instant, but didn't miss a beat and went on with his routine (and these guys, the buskers in London -- some of them are really talented) and went on cracking awful jokes about parliament as he ripped some poor sap's 20 pound bill up (it was mysteriously restored at the end of his routine) and they went live. Just like that.
 
I glanced down, and saw their tag - BBC.
And after the routine ended, they just wandered off and filmed someone else, equally surreptitiously.
 
National day shouldn't be about giving people what some executive in his nice suit and ivory tower thinks they ought to want -- it should be about giving people what they want. And I might be wrong, but I think Singaporeans want to really be proud of their country, and themselves.

bugger it.
I think I'm  having me a start-life crisis, except that I'm fast approaching that horrific and unspeakable thing called middle-age.
 
Sometimes writing just doesn't feel like enough.
 
Self-centred me. I heard out Her start-life crises. And other people's, too.
My turn, and I stand against it, hackles raised and fur bristling, in the silence of my own mind.
 
anyhow. enough self-indulgent whinging. To do list today :
 
1) haircut, covent garden. Must Do before interview.
2) jedi mind-trick fellow SHO into doing tuesday shift for me. If he wants to swap two days for one, who am I to stand in his way. Why, oh why didn't I leap on it yesterday?! Why did I have to be all nice and keep asking him if he was sure he wanted to do it?!?!
3) post job app
4) fill in locum forms
5) go gym
6) fence bugger. technically impossible without a fencing club. or even a whole blade. Maybe I'll wander down to LeonPaul and buy an inferior quality sabre blade. sigh.

Have you ever had one of those days (or maybe a few of them) when it feels like you're trapped in limbo... and nothing, absolutely nothing is happening? My life's like that sometimes. It's like it passes in fits and starts, with a disproportionate ratio of fits to starts. Living alone in the middle of cosmopolitan London, it's easy to feel isolated, and rather lonely when your life grinds to a gradual halt. That's when having discovered the pleasure of one's own company comes in useful. Still, like everyone else, I prefer when the unseen driver puts his foot down on the pedal, and the great bus of life cranks itself back into gear.
 
The nondescript brown envelope at the foot of my door today came as quite a surprise.
 
So it seems I might have a stab at getting a job after all. I've been offered an interview for a surgical rotation, as it were, at the eleventh hour - days before our jobs wind up.
 
This weekend isn't going to spent lazing in the sun after all. It's going to spent lazing in the sun, trying to ready my mind for the enormity of a one-shot chance at securing short-term career stability.
 
I guess my choice has been made for me. Truly, He doth work in mysterious ways. And He hath a warped sense of humour. Guess I just gotta live up to my end of the bargain now and come through.

Somedays, one has to wonder why anyone with an iota of common sense would sign up for this job. Especially in the UK, rather than little old Singaland, it's an endless cycle of seeking re-employment every six months, somewhere in the great, massive lump of opportunity and uncertainty. It's a nomadic lifestyle of move, after move, unless one leads a charmed life and lady luck deals you a straight. I've never really believed in lady luck, all the more's I suspect she's been dealing me jokers of late. And if you're lucky, you get a wild card - the rotation, and for three blissful years, your future is temporarily assured. And then you maybe become a registrar, complete your higher training (back to that six-monthly minstrel's life) and finally become a consultant when, hopefully, the hairs at one's temples are graying tastefully.
 
I suppose it's different back home. The country, and community are minute. No secrets, no chances of freak occurrences. No such thing as luck - everything's tightly regulated, and there is a form of security - tomorrow, you'll still be in the same place, living under the same roof. You might be taking the train slightly further, or driving to a slightly new location - but it's more of the same, over, and over again.
 
It does grate on one's nerves sometimes.
 
And yet, today :
 
being surrounded by the hustle and bustle of the arrest team working on an old man brought in with a cardiac arrest, and hearing the occasional crisp crack as another of his aged ribs broke... it just feels right. It's not necessarily pleasurable - but I wouldn't give this up for the world. Even if I were to suddenly and miraculously become irresistably sexy to the press, or the literary world, or even the cine-circles (which isn't going to happen) - this is where I belong. Understated, credit-less, soldiering on through the extraordinary, that constitutes our mundanity.
 
*****
Fear leads to Anger...
 
He snapped twice today, tending to a young kid who came in cussing and blinding with an open tib-fib fracture.
 
After the initial barrage of "get off me's" and "f*ck you, f*cking get f*cking off me" he stopped being Mr Nice guy and leaned over into the frightened kid's hard-collar-immobilised field of view, narrowed his eyes, and growled :
 
I know you're frightened, and you're in pain. But we're trying to help you, and if you keep swearing at my team and scaring them they'll mess up. So you just calm yourself.
 
In retrospect, that wasn't as bad as I thought it was. Heh.
 
Then, later as the kid got set off again at the prospect of being catheterised, he snaps again.
It's a bit nastier this time :
 
We're going to have to put this in either way, so you might as well have it now while you're full of morphine, rather than later when it's really going to hurt.
 
World-weary bluster turns into wide eyed agreement.
He looks around and the nurses are staring at him wide-eyed too.
 
What? What did I say??
 
"We want the nice re-minisce back..."
 
laughs. Oops. Sorry, I've been storing this up for years, being Mr (Ok, Dr) Nice Guy. It has to come to the surface, sometimes.
 
*****
Train-staring
 
Over the years, I've learnt that there are many different ways of pensively staring out train windows. It's probably something to do with the refractive index of the glass they use, which means that from a certain angle you look out on the world through a ghost image of yourself. Looking in, and out, all at once.
 
There's the prospective watcher-mode. Eyes alert, drinking in the scenary, darting from interesting sight to sight, tracking the bare naked beauty of the English countryside, and the myriad horses and cows as they whiz by, and discovering that horses sometimes sleep on their side (looking remarkably dead) and once in a blue moon, one gets a joker of a cow that sleeps upside down with its legs sticking up into the air. (but bent. like a dog.) Mind racing to keep up with the precious moments of the now, hurling by in an instant, into the past, trying desperately to distill some humourous meaning from it all.
 
There's the happy-wanderer mode. Eyes alert-ish, flitting distractedly from the odd interesting thing to the other, lips twitching slightly, thinking about something, or someone else. Standing, or rather sitting somewhere between two worlds. Contentment, somewhere between now, and remembering a short while before, which one expects to revisit, in a short while more. Here and now is just a space filler, but that's just fine.
 
And there's the retrospective mode, eyes dull and fixed, forehead resting lifelessly against the glass, staring somewhere into the past as the world flies you by. Straining to see, and ears straining to hear echoes from the past. Echoes that you've come to miss dearly because those were the days one was happy, and carefree, echoes that time never quite succeeded at erasing. Echoes from another world, and another time. The retrospective mode occasionally makes you lose track of time, and miss your stop when the crucial moment arrives.
 
I guess it's very much akin to the way we live our lives, isn't it?
 
*****
Retrospective
 
Whatever happened to you, Anna (intint)? And the hundreds of other people I used to know, once upon a lifetime ago? I suppose it doesn't help that I haven't told many people from my past about this blog, eh?

*****
Faking it
 
One of the things I've always known about myself, is that I'm capable of being many different people. It's a bit like the old debating days, when I could debate on every chair.
It has something to do with faking it, and a larger part to do with faking it so well even you begin to believe it. Or maybe just a tenuous grasp on reality. laughs.
 
The thing is, as solitary and unfulfilling a life as I lead; as many people I have lost, as I have shut out - I have chosen this life, and it is mine. And there's a reason, somewhere in here, inside this rather thick head.
 
I just wish I could pry it out of me.

*****
I, Poncy Git
 
Going back to my Littman Classic II from my cardiology master today was like switching from asti to house white. Or mercedes to proton saga. I had this constant nagging feeling that I'd gone suddenly deaf. And heart sounds aren't meant to sound like that surely? Surely there's meant to be more reverb... and a bit of a physiological diastolic murmer?? err. i've gotten spoilt.

To be completely honest, re-minisce without his spectacles is as blind as a hawk. Granted, a slightly astigmatic hawk. Day-vision is pretty much normal, thanks to the effect of contrast and brain suppression of ghost images. Night vision is when the specs come into play. But spectacles are spectacles, are spectacles. They're habit-forming. Put them away into your pocket, and the next thing you know they're back on your nasal bridge of their own accord. My mum used to worry that I was wearing my specs too often - it'll leave a permanent groove on your nose she said. Or summat like that.
 
Anyhow, I ate dinner on the Thames last night, sitting across the river from OXO tower (yes, Oxo as in oxo cubes)  with a balmy summer's breeze (yes! summer returned. for a night, anyhow) ruffling my hair and cooling my mc-fries, and a romantic couple to my left obliviously doing what romantic couples do by waterfronts. (For a full thirty minutes. It's a wonder they didn't wear out their tongues.) 
 
There's a blissful serenity to the Thames by night. A perfect solitude, for the person who sometimes just needs to be alone in his own head - while still surrounded, or rather, with his back to the busy sounds of the city. It's a mercy so few people wander by after dark. I've only been twice now, but these are the memories I hope not to forget in a hurry.
 
The walk to, and from the river was magical - For one, I didn't bring my specs. And so, as the light faded, the sharp, brutal clarity of the citadel by day was gradually replaced by a softer, gentler, more feminine london, complete with slightly off-focus halo-effects around the streetlamps. (Which I noticed for the first time are extremely ornate indeed around the Old City.) Everything looked slightly kinder, slightly more magical.  Slightly more like the movies.
For another, I did what I love to do best - I chose a random direction, and walked. Okay, so maybe not completely random. I knew I was heading towards the river. Sorta. I love getting lost in central London, and walking past. Just past. There's so much to walk past - beautiful fountains in tiny alcoves, ornate pubs with quirky people getting pissed inside, or dancing, (or beating each other up) run-down council flats with the look of utter dreary desolation about them, smack back next to elaborate churches and public parks. Lifelike statues of angels, and effigies of cats, with children footing balls around them. I walked down Portugal road, and Bell Yard, and places I didn't really recognise at all - till on the way home, I walked past their fronts and realised I did know them after all.
 
There's an infiniteness to London that satisfies the wanderer in me, there's always something new to see. I could spend a lifetime taking random walks through it, and I'll never really know every part of it - I suppose, metaphorically at least, that's what I'd like in a partner. Laughs.
I had this same feeling in Sydney, the Big City, although to be fair there weren't quite as many decrepit pieces of historical interest as there are in london.
 
I don't get this back home. I feel like I know every inch of the rather sterile city. There's only so much appeal to well-spaced out skyscrapers.
I don't think it's simply because I grew up there. I think it's because the powers that be planned it too well. New York holds the same barren lack of appeal to me as does Singapore - everything's on a grid. There's more to see in new york, little jazz bars on the bronx and, of course, Lady Liberty, than there is in Singapore. Which makes home even less... satisfying for my innate wanderer.
 
And I thought a lot. About my imminent unemployment (still desperately applying for surgical jobs, with less hope for each passing day) and about my mum and dad's requests for me to go home to work, and well, about the fact that they're not getting any younger.
 
And I realised that if - no, when - I do decide to leave - I will miss all this so, so much.
I feel that, till now unthinkably distant time for making final decisions creeping up on me, a day at a time. And it brings with it a host of mixed emotions.
 
Life can be so strange.
 
But, sitting by the expansive waterfront feeling the warm breeze in my face, and staring out at a muted, open  skyscape with the London eye glowing purple (for some reason) in the sunset far, far to the right, I couldn't help but feel that if ever one day I have kids, I'd want this for them. Not London, per se - but this strange "freedom" that I enjoy today. It's not a liberation from rules, although that I must confess, is appealing in itself (singapore is a Fine city...)... it's a freedom, within my soul.
 
Don't get me wrong, I am no bastardised ingrate, and I did spend my time growing up in Singapore pleasantly enough, I suppose. But something about me - or was it the influence of the GEP? came to treasure freedom - of thought, of expression, and of... life. And while I'll pass the time back "home" well enough - and soon, I suspect - in the company of my ageing parents : one day, I will be back. Back - to this place in my mind. Not London - it's far too cold and depressing - but somewhere. When I am old. To stay, and to die.

*****
Paid labour
 
oog. apparently my year's worth in A&E enables me to be paid locum registrar rates. Maybe unemployment wouldn't be such a bad thing after all... heh.

*****
In Two Minds
 
There're so many ways of interpreting that phrase.
 
A very long time ago, when I used to mull over things in my head, I sometimes heard Her voice. I don't know why... it just happened. I guess I was just nuts about Her.  And maybe it was because we spoke on the 'phone a lot, discussed each other's lives, criticised and poked fun at each other, and laughed a lot, from across the world.
 
I spent the longest time erasing Her voice from my mind - and from my own patterns of speech. Eventually, the australianisms faded, to be replaced by slightly gawky Grant-ish English-icms. I'm told I have a neutral accent slightly tinged by Brit, but believe you me, when I'm at work I have a much, much heavier accent. It alters with who I'm speaking to, and in the presence of a voice from home, the Brit bit takes second seat as I relish the singaporean-ness from my past bubbling to the surface. But the voice in my mind... is different now. 
 
It doesn't have an audible pitch, but it's deeper than that long-lost voice.
It doesn't really have an accent, but it's only occasionally, and generally in play, just the slightest bit australian.
It doesn't really have form, but it's not quite as fluid as before, slightly more clipped. Sharper about the edges. Slightly less pretty.
 
It's my own voice I hear now, inside my head.
And sometimes it tells me the strangest things, walking alongside the walls of green fringing Queen's Square, en route to home on a warm summer's evening. laughs.
 
More commonly, the phrase in two minds connotes indecision.
 
Part of me wants to go home, and be with my parents. And... who knows? Maybe take that broom out of the closet and polish it off. That would be... interesting.
 
Yet part of me desperately wants to stay, and that part will fight to stay, body battered and blade broken - the way I have been, for a while now. Metaphorically, at least. And literally, in a way - my sabre was shattered by the ex, a while ago. She didn't so much fence as swipe, and the day she cut through my - adequate - parry, through my sabre (the sabre that I learnt on in college, my prize and joy - the sabre that accompanied me across the UK with my uni team; the sabre that followed me across the world to australia even), something inside me broke. And my eyes opened. (And I will confess, I stopped fencing - with finesse and skill - and started clubbing her back. The caveman was awakened, and he was ANGRY. laughs)
 
It was so easy before; I never had to stop to think. I always landed the jobs early, I always had purpose in my life - purpose that wasn't quite decided by me.
 
Now my roads lie open ahead of me, and I don't know what I want. Or rather, I know what I want - but I want so, so many things.

*****
The Wonders of Technorati
 
Finnish has never been my strong suite. Uh, could someone translate this for me, pretty please?
 
"Heppu ja The Lingual Nerve - hepun tositarinoita potilaista."
 
from : http://opisto.alkio.fi/~atsuopan/paivat.html

Things I forgot to bring to work today, in the Mad Rush Out The Door (complete with 10kg of patient's notes on my back, and a 400m sprint to the train station. Thank you, National Audit)

1) Mobile phone
Probably not such a bad thing. Some lucky sod in resusc is going to live today thanks to a quirk of my absent-mindedness. Dammit.

2) Spectacles
Yeee...ess. This is definitely going to be an interesting shift.
"Don't move sir, while I remove that fleck of metal from your eye..."
"That's not my eye."

We had an ER day today.

I haven't felt like this since I was a med student. Back then, tailing along at the rear, sorta from the cameraman's positition, it was exciting and interesting.

Today from the perspective of one of the soldiers in the trenches, it was vaguely terrifying.

Everything hurled itself at us today, and the seams began to buckle at the edges.

1) The missed barn-door MI - how could that possibly have happened? The rest of us wondered. But, no doubt the department was heaving, and we all have our, cough, model moments (phrase stolen shamelessly from a model, hmm must butter her up or she will get angry, gorgeous, intelligent model who rates perfect girlfriend on some random poll thingie out there) so we all empathised, and heck, empathy is our bread and butter.

But I think we were all secretly wondering - when will that happen to us - making a major mistake out of... fatigue? Overwork? Stress? And hoping fervently that it never does. Stave off the odds, dancing on the thin razor's edge a little longer.

2) And then the "MI" that was thrombolysed - due to language failure. My colleague showed me some ECGs and asked me what I thought (I was so engrossed that I didn't notice the really pretty blonde medical SHO sidle up next to me and stare at the ECGs too)
I wasn't terribly impressed - they didn't *quite* look thrombolysable to me. Borderline, maybe with the eye of faith just meeting the criteria. I said so, and he replied that we'd already thrombolysed.

Shrug. Oh well, okay. The med SHO shrugged too. She's so pretty when she shrugs. laughs.

Then I found out they'd done it on a very weak history based on what they had gleaned from hand-signals - language difficulties. "No english". Ooo. The hairs on my neck stood up a little. I went and saw the dear little old man - a dear, little old chinese man.

Who couldn't understand my faltering mandarin, and only shrugged when i asked him if he spoke cantonese, in my pidgin cantonese.

I told them he couldn't understand me, but came back later to try again, and realised that he was actually a bit deaf to boot. So I shouted at him in mandarin, and he replied in cantonese, and eventually I elicited this history :

never had chest pain

had bad back pain

called GP, GP sent to hospital.

Oooo. hairs on neck start wilting in fear.

The med SHO comes up to me with the Chest X ray and says, guess what?

There's a widened mediastinum, and the cardiology consultant's opinion is this truly is a dissecting thoracic aneurysm.

oops.

I wondered when my turn would come.

3) It came with The Cardiac Arrest.

an elderly gentleman who suddenly had chest pain and collapsed at home, downtime 30 min, went into VF nine times in the ambulance. a no-hoper from the moment he trundled in the door. The call was taken by my senior, with another senior intubating (I wanted to do that!!) and myself as the supernumary SHO establishing access and doing all the superfluous stuff that we do.

It was a flawless exercise in futility - it was one of those calls when it all clicked together. The senior at the head end slid the tube home, I slammed first one, then another venflon home with almost unreal accuracy, and then needled a pulseless femoral artery with uncharacteristic accuracy (eh? first time lucky??) and the lead nurse defibbed the pulseless VF he came in with. Everything went like clockwork.

Then, just as we were about to call it, the last thing we expected happened - the patient came back.
The senior, standing at the head of the bed - "I've got output with this rhythm". I corroborated that almost immediately.

We paused for just an instant.
Then went into the realms that we rarely do - external pacing, and all sorts of weird and wonderful things I only remember from my med school days.

After five minutes he went off again. And this time we couldn't bring him back. I did get enough chest compressions in to completely ruin my gym session (much) later this evening. I won't write that I spent my evening plucking petals from a flower staring at the phone. laughs.

Quite literally an ER day. Too many things in my head, all at once, and nobody to tell them to. And writing just isn't the same.

Also, running just isn't enough. I don't get no satisfaction... need to feeeennnnnccceeee.

I haven't really had time, of late, for myself, what with trying to write chapter 5, applying for a new job (still no job, sob), a horrible chain of shifts (weekend 1400-0200, mon 1500-2300, tue 0900-0600) and writing for lingualnerve.com. (heh. at least I don't have to plough through any epic emails at the moment. strange though, i liked those epic emails... I, masochist)

I don't really know when I started becoming an "expressive" individual. The armchair psychologist in me thinks that perhaps it was a response to all the bottled-up thoughts in me post Her (never got the chance to say what I wanted to, being estranged and -voluntarily- excommunicated all-in-one) and the last ex, where my caveman genes reared their ugly heads.

Anyway, here and now, the next twenty minutes before the daily sojourn to work is for me, myself, and my bowl of honey nut cheerios.

*****
The Inner Boozer

There's a folk-saying that goes like this :

Beer and wine - you'll be fine.
wine then beer - you'll feel queer.

Everytime I clerk a patient, I ask them how much they drink. I think it's a leftover med-school reflex that I never lost, and it just bugs me if my clerkings don't include an alcohol history. I'm sure anyone who reads my minors clerkings get irritated by it. Most A&E doctors have their minors clerkings down to two lines. (eg - fall, tender lateral malleolous, Xray fracture, backslab, home, fracture clinic review) Me, I still write mini essays (how much do you smoke, how much do you drink?). Sometimes I even make kids feel guilty about their smoking habits, heh heh heh. Anything to give me a buzz.

The thing is, how many of you (ok, you doctors anyway. non doctors, this is another insight into our tiny little doctory brains) take an alcohol history, then summarily multiply it by two?

"how much do you drink?"

"oh, not very much doctor."

"how much."

"uh." pause.

longer pause

"a couple of pint weekends?"

document - 7 u ETOH per week, binges, weekends.

I do it so effortlessly now I'm barely aware of it, and in my medi-arrogance, I know I'm right. It stems from taking lotsa histories when girlfriends / wives are present. Human psychology 101. When confronted with a nasty question, pause, think then lie. And on my part, well... guilt stops me pushing the question. Guilt that that queue to be seen is still steadily growing, get a move on with it. Funny how guilt increasingly seems to be blonde and wear a dark blue uniform, and poke me in the ribs whenever she's walking past. Cough. Or worse.

It struck me that I can casually attribute 7 units of spirits to some high-spirited girl's inebriated state (it's not a pretty sight, believe me. They often come in flat on their faces covered in vomit and for some strange reason, distressed and crying) and I often snigger internally when their rellies reply

"She/he hasn't had that much to drink, only 7 shots of vodka!"

(Yeah, right. of Course she's not drunk, her drink must have been spiked, right?)

Thing is, looking at my own life, err well.

That recent Italiano fiasco (Oh, it's such a shame that you won't get to... laughs. i'll spare her blushes.) I had everything I wrote in that short snippet, and ah, a glass of fine champagne before hand.

Counts on one hand. Oo.
Counts on two hands. let's make that about 7 units. Heavily mixed alcohols.

So I tell myself, it must be slightly different, see. I guess I can hold my drink - I've never actually gotten pissed, and certainly never wound up lying on my face in a pool of vomit.

Why this should be so I have no idea, since I don't drink very often. I ought to be a flyweight in the alcohol arena, considering I often go months (up to six!) at a time without touching any of the stuff. It all depends if anyone's asking me out, you see. That and the stuff has to taste exquisite on the palate. I'm a snobbish pisshead. laughs.

I wonder what would happen if I took my own alcohol history.

"How much do you have to drink a week"

"Oh, I don't drink every week. I only drink about once a month if at that at all."

Frown. "Okay, well give me an average".

"Err, well when I do have a drink I have about. err. um. ten to fifteen units."

Impassive. Document : thirty units a week, binges weekends.

But, but, but it's not like that at all. Whimper. Honest.

Anyway, I'd like to end this meaningless rant with a favourite quote.

I think it was George Burns, God rest his soul, who said :

"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me, than a full frontal lobotomy".

Last night : my demented ++++ patient with a ? fractured neck of femur, who was constantly calling out in pain suddenly said "I think I am going mad!"

I barely made it out the cubicle before I started giggling.

Overheard on the train today, as we pulled into Stevenage station :

One old lady to other old lady : "Stevenage is a nice place to get off in"

snigger.