banana v2.1

I like having smart friends. Thanks to my buddy Meng, my banner no longer looks like it's trying to escape to a cooler blog. Cheers bro!

All tired on the southern front

I haven't seen the sun in four days.

This is, as some of you know, because I just started work as the night shift junior doctor at hospital. The days(nights) had started to blur into each other, and by Wednesday night I was so glad to come up for air and experience real human contact again (not to discredit the nursing staff I've been working with, who are lovely people.)

All this, and I have yet to experience the full seven-night working week that my roster calls for.

I've been told by my colleagues that they are being run off their feet during the day, the poor soldiers. Internship, for them, has been more or less what we were told to expect - lots of busy-work that is half what we've been training for, half learning new ways to cram more tasks into a working shift.

So I don't think I can complain about night shift. It has been so far uneventful - no catastrophes, no code Blues (an emergency where a patient goes into cardiac arrest). I've had to insert a few intravenous cannulas (5 from 8), some urinary catheters (0 from 2; damn prostates) and attend a few patients who had minor chest pain and chase blood results.

In between I wander the hospital, which is an eerie place at night. All the hustle and bustle of the day seeps away at night, the chatter of medical staff and air of purposeful if hurried movement replaced with silence punctuated by lone footsteps, or the moans of a patient in pain.

As poetic as I'd like to make it sound, though, there are things about working on nights that border on the absurd. I have to make a conscious effort to remember where the damn light switch is on the wall; Although patients have a light switch on the end of a remote, it's best not to grope around in the darkness for that particular button. In the dim light at five in the morning I managed to ensnare a patient's cathether tube on his bedrail as I pulled it down. and couldn't interpret his flustered gesturing for a good few minutes.

This gentleman I've attended to each night of my week, and he's a nice guy. He was unfortunately afflicted with a neurological disease such that he is virtually quadriplegic and has difficulty speaking. We get by on half syllables, hand gestures and twenty questions. We had a laugh at the Scud's expense a couple of nights ago together.

The lady in the bed next to him, despite being Polish, can speak perfectly in fluent english, and yet I can't understand her at all. She is old, much older than the gentleman, and is convinced it is her time to go. Granted, she has a fair few afflictions, but I doubt she's heading to the pearly gates in the immediate future. I doubt even, that she suffers as much as her neighbour.

The nursing staff have seen to her three or four times already during the night and tell me she's fine. I go to see her myself on the fifth time and run the usual checks. Pulse regular, within normal limits. Respirations within normal limits. She talking to me in full sentences without the aid of an oxygen mask. She complains that she's short of breath. Chest sounds clear. Heart sounds are unremarkable. I reassure her that she's fine, and to buzz if she needs anything. She buzzes within half an hour and we go through the checks again.

Despair is her disease, and I have nothing for it. It worries me, because I have no immunization against it for myself either. Everything I had been told about treating your patients with respect, everything I had tried to brace myself with against becoming jaded - they seemed a futile defence against the cracks I can see forming in my foundations.

I try a different tack on the second visit. I'd been reading Art Spiegelman's Maus, a graphic novel about Polish Jews and the Holocaust, so I tell her this - maybe we can strike up some rapport, and that'll help me reassure her.

Twenty minutes and the full agenda of the Polish Retirees Club later, I'm no closer to helping her relax and go to sleep, and frustration sets in.

A couple of days later now, I can look back on this episode and wonder about how people ever made it through the Holocaust sane. All I had to do was get through twenty minutes with *one* despairing patient - some people had to live through years where despair was what you breathed in every minute of the day.

If Roche ever makes a pill for Patience(R) or QuikEmpathy(R), tell me where to sign up. I'm scared I'll need them.

***
I'm off to see a buddy and see whether he survived his first week of surgical internship. In the next blog: part 2 of this meditation, gossip from hospital, The Little Prince, James Frey and egg on Oprah's face and Australian Workplace reform/facism. Let me know how you're all doing.

Going underground - Satanic verse - family values

Tomorrow I start orientation at my new job - which means I'm over at my unit more permanently, where technological basics like a phone line, ADSL connection and a working front door buzzer are still to be arranged. So I'm posting this just to tide the blog over as it might be a while before the next post.

Things I will hopefully get around to blogging about - the Australian government's new proposed legislation that will encourage/force couples to see family counselling before applying for divorce sounds like an interesting move. Need some time to think on it.

Salman Rushdie wrote an interesting article here and draws a damning link between the "corruption of language" and the corruption of morality by the Bush government. A few things came to me while reading this. Firstly, I realized the article raises similar concerns that were in the George Clooney film Goodnight and Good Luck, which I referenced in my first post. (Although I should have seen that coming, as many reviewers of the film pointed out the film's relevance to the current political landscape). However, secondly - and more importantly - amid all this valid criticism of the Bush government is the slightly depressing notion, for myself at least, that we're simply playing catch-up. I guess it's a fair enough plan for the critical press to uncover each and every dirty trick the Bush administration pulls - but despite how much certain journalists and writers scream to the wind, it's never quite enough shame to make them stop.

Maybe we should try something more passive-aggressive, that seems to work for me. (oops, too flippant? too candid? hmm. It's on my new-year's resolution list of to-eradicate-habits. Sigh. ;)

See you when I resurface.

PS: bite-sized review of Chicken Little - 3.5/5 - hugely entertaining and concise animation from a Pixar-less Disney studios; cute old-school style cartoon models rendered to 3D; positive but not treacly family values; continuous stream of pop-culture references for the adults; voices by Zach Braff, Joan Cusack; Steve Zahn and an awesome cameo by Adam "1960s Batman" West

Bangers and Mash-ups

A year ago I read about DJ Dangermouse's mashup project, The Grey Album, which was involved in an internet protest against EMI and in a larger sense, a protest for creativity. For those of you who missed it - "mashups" are like remixes of songs that mix genres to new, unexpected and vital effect. The Grey Album took the acapella tracks from Jay-Z's Black Album and chopped and cut backing tracks from songs from the Beatles White Album together to create an album that can be listened to on it's own merit, as well as for the novelty of it's punning title. The copyright owners of the Beatles material, EMI, attempted to ban the Grey Album and were met with derision and a 24 hour period were mutiple internet sites were offering downloads of the work. In more popular press, Jay-Z released a "legal" album of mashups with alt-rock band Linkin Park, which spawned the hit Numb/Encore.

I went a bit nuts on Limewire over the last couple of weeks trying to find more mashups, as I'm both a sucker for novelty and a sucker for finding new permutations on old material. Some choice cuts I found were -

Beyonce and Led Zeppelin - Crazy in love
Christina Aguilera and the Strokes - Genie in a bottle
Destiny's child and the Cardigans - Say my name
Usher and Axel F - Yeah (it's the cheesiest, catchiest damn thing I've heard in ages)

Anyway. This got me all excited to make my own - so for your consideration, click here to download the Studiogypsy remixes of Destiny's child - Say my name (In the end piano remix) and Survivor (Used to love u remix feat Jay-Z and Mos Def).

Feel free to leave comments - and for those of you who've wanted to but were put off by not holding a blogger account - it's free, you don't have to actually blog yourself and having that extra security helps keep spam off my boards.

Hotel Banana: you can check out but you can never leave

I moved into a new unit last week, which has been dubbed Hotel Dave and, in a nice piece of alliteration by Ben, Motel Mai. However, in the interests of continuity to this blog, I'm calling it Hotel Banana.

Hotel Banana welcomed its first guests, Dr Sheila Cheng and Dr Carmen Yip, who were in Melbourne on a cultural exchange conference for a few days.

I was taken aback by the look of wonder on their faces when they first saw the unit - I had only seen that sort of look when young children or large servings of chocolate were in close vicinity. I guess I have to thank my Scandinavian sponsors, IKEA (R), for helping Hotel Banana attain such kudos as "it's like a showroom" and "like my dream apartment ^_^". (That said, I'm most proud of my coffee table display, made out of two pieces of glass cribbed from an old TV cabinet: priceless)

Later, when my male friends came to visit they were similarly glowing, with praises such as "get some" and "you'd better".

The couch downstairs is now officially public domain, and you're all welcome to come and bask in the cosmopolitan crowning achievement that is Melbourne city - which would help me rediscover a city that I forgot about while I was busy being a nerd.

(That said, Carmen was busting my balls all week about not knowing my hood and she very nearly made it onto the new "banned-for-life" list, which also includes Osama bin Laden, George W Bush and Crazy Frog. So be nice.)

Check the pics.

banana v2

Playing with the template to personalize the site somewhat. The alignment is still a bit funky at the moment as you can see. Will hopefully have it all under control ASAP.

Oh Six

A fresh set of sunrises, a fresh set of challenges and a fresh set of chances.

Oh five, I will miss thee.

Oh six, come in and make yourself comfortable.

***

Happy new years everyone, I wish you safety and success with a sprinkling of mischief and fun :p