Sunday, December 05, 2004
Unpaid labour!!!!
I am STILL penniless! Even despite receiving my first paycheck. Apparently the bank never received that transfer from my employers after all!
I feel so cheated.
And so poor.
Spare change? Hungry. Penniless. Not yet homeless.
*****
So here I am at 2 am, the day after my on-call from hell (no specifics, save for a brief mention of bleeding GI tracts, ruptured ectopic, and blood, blood, blood all night) preparing a case for discussion tomorrow.
And I'm not even being paid for this.
GRrrrrr. Why DO I do this again?
*****
There's these giant christmas tree thingies along orchard road that shaft slowly up and down on hydraulic poles. I just don't get them, and I have this vague uneasy feeling there's some form of sexual inneundo behind them...
*****
I don't get the weird Giant Christmas Tree setup at Orchard.. park? (near the MRT) tonight either. A Beauty Tree? Sponsored by some beauty product manufacturer? Riiight. Think we're losing the plot here, people. Christmas, fat man, reindeer, goodwill to everyone yadda yadda? Oh heck, let's just get with the times. *sticks fingers down back of throat*
*****
It's all very strange in retrospect. I looked at the insides of a young lady last night, and even dabbed at her reproductive organs a couple times with a piece of dry gauze, and I didn't even flinch. I guess the litres of blood in her abdominal cavity kinda change the picture a little, innit?
Before any of you get deviant thoughts, this snippet was inspired by a female friend describing the sheer horror and tense unpleasantness in the air during the dreaded smear / swab test young women are regularly subjected to by their gynaecologists / GPs.
Well, let me tell you that it isn't that pleasant for the doctor either (although it does become routine)... and I can't for the life of me imagine why any red blooded male would want to become a gynae. All that stuff about looking up women's cracks is a load of bollocks... I think the twits who say that inspired them are just trying to cover up their crass love for money with a supposed obsession with sex. As if that's going to make them more attractive to anyone... err. although it does seem to work. bugger.
So yeah, looking inside young ladies isn't really that great a thing. And somehow when they're on the brink of death, lying splayed out on that operating table in all their stark naked glory minutes before being given a shot at life - the last thing on your mind, if you're a normal person, is sex.
*****
Women are simply unfathomable.
You explain (in an unfamiliar tongue... ugh) to the young woman that she's critically ill and that she needs an operation to save her life, and she nods to indicate that she understands.
And then she asks you if there is really no other way... maybe some kind of medicine?
(Your registrar has just told her the full extent of the problem, using scary words that mean internal rupture, bleeding inside, almost certain death...)
You repeat that there is no other way.
She asks what if we don't find anything wrong?
You tell her that given what we suspect is wrong with her... that would be a blessing. You remind her that what we suspect is a condition that will kill her.
She pauses as something - ? realisation? finally begins to dawn in her eyes.
Pause.
"Is it going to be a big scar?"
...
...Women.
*****
On the bright side, clinical acumen finally shone through last night like a beacon in the darkness of tides of protocols and unnecessary investigations performed more for the sake of litigation or academicia than anything else.
Time to theatre was almost immediate, and no time-wasting and potentially fatal, unnecessary Ultrasound scans / CT scans or even DPLs were performed. It was open-and-shut, and actually fairly straightforward (except perhaps to the medical students who were clustering around us and making me feel rather claustrophobic)
Thinking back to the talk given by an orthopod recently about a woman who had a fractured pelvis, clinically unstable with low b/p who went to CT (accompanied by magic HO) and (still managed to) ruptured a retroperitoneal haematoma (and therefore died)... one reflects on the aptness of that wonderful term we use in the UK to describe CT scanners (and unstable patients) :
"the Doughnut of Death"
*****
I walked out of a ward today to find an AGV trying to converse with a dustbin and sounding rather surprised that the dustbin was ignoring it. It was rather funny.
"Hello? Hello? Hello! Hello? Hello..."
Heh heh heh.
I feel so cheated.
And so poor.
Spare change? Hungry. Penniless. Not yet homeless.
*****
So here I am at 2 am, the day after my on-call from hell (no specifics, save for a brief mention of bleeding GI tracts, ruptured ectopic, and blood, blood, blood all night) preparing a case for discussion tomorrow.
And I'm not even being paid for this.
GRrrrrr. Why DO I do this again?
*****
There's these giant christmas tree thingies along orchard road that shaft slowly up and down on hydraulic poles. I just don't get them, and I have this vague uneasy feeling there's some form of sexual inneundo behind them...
*****
I don't get the weird Giant Christmas Tree setup at Orchard.. park? (near the MRT) tonight either. A Beauty Tree? Sponsored by some beauty product manufacturer? Riiight. Think we're losing the plot here, people. Christmas, fat man, reindeer, goodwill to everyone yadda yadda? Oh heck, let's just get with the times. *sticks fingers down back of throat*
*****
It's all very strange in retrospect. I looked at the insides of a young lady last night, and even dabbed at her reproductive organs a couple times with a piece of dry gauze, and I didn't even flinch. I guess the litres of blood in her abdominal cavity kinda change the picture a little, innit?
Before any of you get deviant thoughts, this snippet was inspired by a female friend describing the sheer horror and tense unpleasantness in the air during the dreaded smear / swab test young women are regularly subjected to by their gynaecologists / GPs.
Well, let me tell you that it isn't that pleasant for the doctor either (although it does become routine)... and I can't for the life of me imagine why any red blooded male would want to become a gynae. All that stuff about looking up women's cracks is a load of bollocks... I think the twits who say that inspired them are just trying to cover up their crass love for money with a supposed obsession with sex. As if that's going to make them more attractive to anyone... err. although it does seem to work. bugger.
So yeah, looking inside young ladies isn't really that great a thing. And somehow when they're on the brink of death, lying splayed out on that operating table in all their stark naked glory minutes before being given a shot at life - the last thing on your mind, if you're a normal person, is sex.
*****
Women are simply unfathomable.
You explain (in an unfamiliar tongue... ugh) to the young woman that she's critically ill and that she needs an operation to save her life, and she nods to indicate that she understands.
And then she asks you if there is really no other way... maybe some kind of medicine?
(Your registrar has just told her the full extent of the problem, using scary words that mean internal rupture, bleeding inside, almost certain death...)
You repeat that there is no other way.
She asks what if we don't find anything wrong?
You tell her that given what we suspect is wrong with her... that would be a blessing. You remind her that what we suspect is a condition that will kill her.
She pauses as something - ? realisation? finally begins to dawn in her eyes.
Pause.
"Is it going to be a big scar?"
...
...Women.
*****
On the bright side, clinical acumen finally shone through last night like a beacon in the darkness of tides of protocols and unnecessary investigations performed more for the sake of litigation or academicia than anything else.
Time to theatre was almost immediate, and no time-wasting and potentially fatal, unnecessary Ultrasound scans / CT scans or even DPLs were performed. It was open-and-shut, and actually fairly straightforward (except perhaps to the medical students who were clustering around us and making me feel rather claustrophobic)
Thinking back to the talk given by an orthopod recently about a woman who had a fractured pelvis, clinically unstable with low b/p who went to CT (accompanied by magic HO) and (still managed to) ruptured a retroperitoneal haematoma (and therefore died)... one reflects on the aptness of that wonderful term we use in the UK to describe CT scanners (and unstable patients) :
"the Doughnut of Death"
*****
I walked out of a ward today to find an AGV trying to converse with a dustbin and sounding rather surprised that the dustbin was ignoring it. It was rather funny.
"Hello? Hello? Hello! Hello? Hello..."
Heh heh heh.
