Of mice, men, chimps and chumps

*Post contains profanity.*

I have to say, Happy New Year to all first. Because the rest of what I have to say sets the tone for a fairly crappy blue year.

The score of Dave vs the Axis of Women now stands at a neat 0-8.

One of those fun defeats was another cute Thai waitress who positively beamed when I told her, "I think you're cute, can I take you out to coffee?" She unfortunately had a boyfriend and I'm unfortunately beginning to think I must have some kind of fetish for the hospitality industry. Seriously, if you ever find me cruising and hitting up MacDonald's Drive-thru's I want you to shoot me, then cremate me, turn my ashes into a mud brick and then smash the brick...with a Humvee.

The other defeat is, in the big picture, much more significant to me for many reasons.

I met this wonderful girl at a Christmas party recently. She is, easily, the most interesting person I've met this year. Spontaneous, cute, artistic and articulate...phrases like "point of consciousness" roll off her tongue as easily as a Lupe Fiasco rhyme, yet peppered with girly giggles...the adjectives don't really convey what an intriguing mess of contradictions this girl is.

Such an adorable mess at that, too.

We had a couple of pseudo-dates with other people tagging along which went alright. I decided to push the agenda by offering to make her dinner at my place.

I think I drove my friends and family nuts by getting very neurotic and nervous about the date. All the typical hang-ups got dusted off and thrown about,

"What do I wear? What music do I play? What should I cook?"

I mean, I haven't been on a proper date in years, so really all that can be simplified into,

"What the fuck do I do?"

And the zen-like answer I got from all corners -

"Just be yourself."

(Is everyone else hearing Robin Williams as the Genie from Aladdin? Beeeee yourselfff)

In some people's eyes (my brother) it was slight overkill. He said, in his wisdom,

"Man, you've upped the intimacy level way too quickly. If you're not on point and the chemistry isn't there, you've got nothing to fall back on. Nothing to distract her. You're McFucked."

That's my new curse for the year. McFucked.

My friends had only one thing to say when I said that I'd tried to be adventurous by inviting the girl to pick six ingredients which I'd use, Ready Steady Cook-style.

"Dude." (Shaking their heads)

When the ingredients came back as salt, pepper, garlic, pork, tomatoes and ice-cream, and I said that I'd try and be even more adventurous and make tomato ice cream you can imagine their response.

"Dude, you....are so McFucked."

"Just be yourself."

I've decided that that is the single most useless piece of advice ever.

Anyway, come date night I had, like a typical medic, prepared and over-thought the situation enough for me not to be too nervous. And dinner went alright. Nobody died from tomato ice-cream poisoning, and nobody choked on undercooked pork.

Maybe something I should say at this point is that the girl had already forewarned me that she wasn't looking for something serious, particularly not with a doctor (aha! the "doctor" card is absolute bullshit - see?) because she had had a disappointing relationship with a doctor in the past.

I think I surprised both her and myself by forging on nonetheless, optimism in one hand and a firm belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny in the other.

McFuck it! I'll just BE myself and she'll see that it'll be different with ME.

I think it's clear from my tone that I did indeed get McFucked.

Somewhere around the halfway mark of the dinner date the conversation got serious. Serious talking about her not being ready to have a serious relationship. With a doctor?

No, with me.

I live with self-doubt most hours of the day and one gets used to hearing one's own voice drone on about one's own inadequacies so much that functioning is not so hard.

However, when someone beautiful and intelligent is sitting in front of you and deduces it all, and reflects it back to you in words almost stolen from your own head...

The feeling of vulnerability is like being dissected open to your soul on an operating table without proper anaesthesia. You're aware that something painful is happening to you but have no control over it, and for some strange reason it doesn't feel wrong. It just hurts.

I hear (not in these exact words, I'm paraphrasing) "You're passive, serious. Not relaxed. You're not assertive, you're not quick."

Just be yourself?

Guys (males), all of you *know* what comes next.

"I Still Want To Be Friends."

This is where you feel like a dog that's been steamrolled into a worthless (and very flat) carcass but here she is, waving a bone at your flat, sorry ass.

And I'm sorry to say it, but I'm a sorry sucker for it too.

So, just be yourself?

Be a sucker? Be a passive, serious, non-assertive slow bastard?

That chestnut of wisdom "Be Yourself" does not live with the other classic axiom, "Change is a Good Thing".

It's the season of change. I've been living in this skin for a year and it's brought me to my knees in front of women that have either been Christian, psychotic allied health or a seductive force of nature, as in this case.

I'm really feeling that if Oh-Seven is not kind to me, I will break things.

I want to thank Marcus and Sid for the drinks, and apologize for not taking their advice more to heart.

I want to thank Fi for the song we recorded - I am going to try and hang my memories of this week on that, rather than on this.

And to the significant two others involved in this situation: I realized after writing all this you may stumble on this post. This post is not meant to upset the balance we've negotiated and I'm not looking to cause any trouble. Go about your business and don't underestimate my capacity to be civil. I am a public servant, after all.

***

As Oh-six turns away for the last time, I want to wish much love and happiness to all my friends and everyone who has made this year alive for me.

Faithfully yours,
!dave~

Closing out the year

*edit*:

1) When I say "old" in the next paragraph, I mean - "longtime", not "aged" or "geriatric" or "crusty"
2) Said "longtime" friend is Fiona SNARE nee Wong - my apologies for naming the sound file incorrectly (old habits die hard!)

Tomorrow I'll find out if I really close out the year on a win (this will mean something to some, and nothing to others), but I received a beautiful gift from an old friend when I got some people together today to jam in my garage.

Just listen:

Fi and Dave - All my life (K-Ci and Jojo cover).

Fi thinks K-Ci and Jojo sound wishy-washy on the original track (blasphemy! "All my life" was one of the defining songs of my San Francisco trip in year 10); I forgave her totally after we recorded this.

Happy new year to you all. I hope 2007 brings much love and no more squalor than is necessary.

Pep talk

Headspace is a little scrambled right now.

Emergency medicine has been keeping me busy lately, but after work I get home and bash my head against metaphorical brick walls in the vain hope of creating 'music'. Eventually some bricks fall together in not-horrible ways and I sit, slightly satisfied that I've got a nice beat track. The only problem is that that brief euphoria dissipates when I realize I've got no melody, no lyrics to drape over it, i.e. no *song*. I sit there, struggling to be inspired by myself.

Not dissimilar to my current social situation, really. Struggling to be inspired by myself.

I've been going to salsa classes recently after my mate invited me along. I figured it'd be fun, and a good chance to meet new people outside of medicine.

So I'm there and somehow manage to score a dance with a cute little asian girl who is all the more cute for being able to dance. I, unfortunately, am not blessed likewise, in either category, and the combination of trying to make conversation and dance at the same time renders neither functional.

The music stops and it's been such a poor showing that I don't even bother trying to offer her a drink. There's an awkward moment and we walk off in opposite directions.

I told my friend esme about this and she laughed (it *was* funny in an awkward-Jason-Biggs-having-sex-with-an-apple-pie way) but when she said, "the picture of a deflated Dave is getting familiar" I thought Things Really Need to Change.

Both my salsa mate and a new acquaintance told me this last week that the power lies in positive thinking - in not taking these hits personally and staying positive in of myself.

Struggling to be inspired by myself.

I do, however, remain surprised by my ability to jump headlong into a situation in which I'm completely out of my depth. Last night I tried to ask out a gorgeous eurasian waitress (degree of difficulty - 5.0) and to cut a long story short, my opening salvo was,

"Hi, can I have two Jack and Cokes?" - trying to flash the most cute smile I can muster, although it probably looked like a grotesque cubist painting...and the dismount, an hour or two later -

Trying to beat the Last Call for Alcohol, I front up to the bar, hoping to catch her again, I get hit by a different waitress who says,

"Sorry, we're closing."

I've come too far. I have to dig deep.

"Um, I just came up to ask her" I point, "to coffee." (EMBARASSING!)

"Well, she just started her, maybe you could ask her another time?"

What? I can't get stopped by that. I'm committed. I'm Jerry Maguire with the memo.

"Uh, look, could you just, please?"

She asks the girl over. My heart is about to rupture in about ten different ways and so out comes,

"Uh, hi, I'm Dave...I just, actually, um, came to...

"...to like see if, to ask you..."

"to coffee."

She smiled, (I think), but said

"Sorry, I have a long term boyfriend."

Somehow I manage to apologize and leave, despite my legs feeling like an amorphous blob of caffeine and energy.

The upshot of this all, is that, despite being deflated Dave yet again, I have to thank the sympathetic nervous system for reminding me how it feels to be alive.

But, of course, being far too self-analytical, I know there are a multitude of ways that that scenario could have been run better, smoother, flirtier.

Honestly though, I'm scared of smoother, flirtier. Why? Where is that line between smooth and flirty, and sleazy? I've talked to a couple of different people about this lately. I open it up to public forum.

Go. Inspire me. Struggling to be inspired by myself.

My people

I figure some multimedia might make up for lost words since the last time I posted.

Wim is a very talented and entertaining gentleman from Canberra who I've had the privilege of jamming with on guitar every so often. He's also a devil on the tango floor, but that privilege he saves for the ladies. Hear him in lo-fi here:

Wim - Georgia on my mind
Wim and Dave - So what

The happy couple Adrian and Lei-Ching are a couple of workmates who kindly invited me to their beautiful wedding a few weeks ago - (where I found out the origin of the phrase 'tie the knot' is from a Celtic marriage tradition where the bride and groom were wed by literally having a knot tied around their joined hands)



Jaz popped down on annual leave - and we found the lighthouse that was used on the set of the TV series of Paul Jennings' Round the Twist (Australian children of the 80s throw your hands up)



And lastly, the Western hospital ball - where my registrar rolled up like William Wallace in his kilt, my co-intern drank enough to kill both our livers, and I met my crush's boyfriend. (sigh.) And before anyone asks, I'm not meant to be a cowboy, but more like Alan Moore's pulpy comic character Greyshirt (have to get the nerd referencing right).




Shout out to the final year UNSW med students who finished their exams today, peace!

Tuesday

I'm on a day off. The sun is shining and although I am indoors, I have the windows and blinds wide open. The afternoon rays are tickling my feet.

The day has been strange. It started out as I planned: I woke up with the full intent to try (again) to write some music. As usual, it progressed to me aping John Legend hooks and then giving up for a couple of hours while I watched episodes of Entourage and wished I was a handsome movie star.

I called my co-intern because we're supposed to have dinner with our registrar tonight. He informed me that one of our patients died today. Unexpectedly. This, unfortunately, makes two in the last week.

Both patients were quite old and any sort of physical insult would have been enough to tip them past the point of no return, but that said, both of them were the sort of patients that you think will inhabit their hospital bed til the end of forever before dying.

It's no secret this term has been tiring for me, and I wonder if I, or we, as a team, got complacent.

Three more days in the rotation. Three more days to straighten up and stay sharp.

***

I'm still drafting that letter to the newspaper. It has been difficult, trying to find the right voice, and tone - trying not to sound condescending or righteous but trying to still capture the vitriol. I'll keep you posted.

***

I was invited to dinner by this girl I met at work who I think might be interested in me because I'm a vertically endowed Asian doctor. It didn't go so well. Dinner was lovely, and her friends were nice but there was a fairly gaping cultural chasm between these actual Asians and me, the banana. Probably didn't help that I couldn't follow the conversation most of the time and was too embarrassed to say anything about it.

(Suyen: I therefore did not cause a ruckus. Let's see about this Saturday, at the Hospital ball)

Smile

I got a call from my lovely friend Jaz tonight as she was concerned with the trend my posts were taking lately. I conceded that despite the blogs, life was all in all good - and in fact I could do a lot worse than to be catching up over the phone with an old friend. So, if I may return to my numbered list format for another time (and David Letterman be damned)

TOP TEN THINGS THAT MADE ME SMILE IN THE LAST TWO WEEKS

1. Jaz's phone call
   
2. More new pop music than you can throw a pre-fab Girlband (TM) at: Justin Timberlake's "FutureSex/LoveSounds" is, particularly in the middle section spiralling through "My Love", "LoveStoned/I think she knows" and "What Goes Around/Comes Around" a deliriously ambitious and entertaining opus; Beyonce's new "B'Day" is an efficient and slightly forgettable effort excepting the dirty blues of "Suga Mama"; Xtina's double CD "Back to Basics" is a bloated mess with so much "whoa-ooh-ooh" that you forget she actually got a nice voice (see "Save Me From Myself"); John Mayer's "Continuum" has, in "Heart of Life" and "Stop This Train" a beautiful return to "acoustic John", but the other tracks, while polished, lack the live, bluesy urgency that made "John Mayer Trio: Try! Live" such a revelation.
3. Visiting my friends Mr and Mrs Nickless who are expecting their first child in February - I'm glad there are some grown-ups in our group down herealthough I almost lost continence when said Mr Nickless decided that the layman's definition of "anal tag" would be what you swipe pass the barcode reader for the price of an old person (thank God for people who've worked retail)
4. When my med students looked at me like I was nuts but still cannulated me successfully on the first pass - so well that I had to forgive her for forgetting to take the torniquet off and letting me bleed over the table
   
5. Being approached at the hippy festival "Earthdance for Peace" by a girl selling No Sweat shoes made to protest sweatshop labour and having to shamefully admit to wearing a Converse T-shirt at the time
   
6. Elana Stone live at Bennett's Lane - if you're in Sydney you should try to catch her shows -see www.elanastone.com
7. Elixir live at Bennett's Lane - Katie Noonan's voice is so pure and so fluid that even when she's bending and contorting the words of a random poet into a folk tune it's a beautiful mess
8. Me and my brother laughing our heads off at the ridiculously brutal sound effects in the XBox boxing game Fight Night: Round 3
9. Australian Idol contestant Ricky Muscat's unbelievably HELTER SKELTER SERIAL KILLER EYES
   
10. Wondering each day whether the cute Eurasian Aged Care reg thinks me and the other intern on my unit are idiots, and wondering whether this might have proportional repercussions on any attempt to ask her to coffee (I know this is slightly sad, but I find I laugh at ridiculously sad things much more often than I should)

Oh, and the other thing. The things I posted about in the last blog are not unique to me. Many people are grinding away at it a lot harder than me. I've resolved to write to a newspaper, not just for me, but for all of us, and not for any special recognition, but just for a little bit of peace so we can get on with a job that is busy enough as it is. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks to everyone who has commented on this blog so far, particularly in the last few weeks. It's appreciated. And Jaz, stay wonderful.

Good luck to final year med students sitting exams soon, and I hope the interns got their jobs back.

Smiling, even though I've got to work tomorrow. :)

Worn

I am wearing thin.

It has continued to be hectic at work with much of the same old routine. We've had a roster change meaning that we work slightly less, and get paid less, so that we have enough money to pay for an extra registrar which on the whole is a Good Thing.

So I've not been worn down because of the usual scut, but by a rather malign reversal of the dictum that doctors need to empathize with patients and their families and "walk in their shoes."

The last couple of weeks have been characterized by demanding families belittling, insulting and otherwise degrading medical and nursing staff.

Amongst other things, events came to a head a few days ago when I had to try to obtain a Not For Resuscitation (NFR) order for one of our patients. A NFR order is a decision by medical staff to not use aggressive measures like CPR or ventilation machines on a patient in the event that their heart or lungs stop, with the reasoning that the potential benefits are miniscule and that the quality of life after such a resuscitation is extremely poor. We make this decision in consultation with the patient or the family of the patient.

It is NOT a decision by the staff that we do nothing. Non-invasive and conservative measures are all still applied as appropriate.

I had been warned by my registrar that this particular family would be difficult to convince of the validity of our position. I sat down on the phone with them, and over the course of an hour I tried to explain that our position on NFR for their relative came out of a desire to preserve quality of life and to avoid doing harm. I did my best to assure them that we were still committed to using all other measures at hand. I asked them to think about it and discuss it with me when they came in later.

When they came, I asked them if they understood our position. The grand-daugther replied to me,

"Basically, you're saying my grand-father's an old piece of shit and no-one wants to do anything."

She went on to complain at me about the nursing staff, who had just been trying to salvage a intra-venous cannula but who had unfortunately caused the patient some discomfort.

"Basically, everyone's the same, so many sick people you just don't care and it's just a job to you people."

I stood there with the nurse unit manager and we were both speechless. There are just so many things you want to say when somebody accuses you of not giving two shits, but when you're the representative of a hospital you kind of have to sit there and take it in the face. Or, more realistically, in the ass.

"I think it's really unnecessary that you just inflict pain. It's unnecessary that you just use him as a pin cushion and stick needles into him."

My mouth ground shut. It boggled my mind how this person could reason that we would be failing in our duty if we didn't jump on her grand-father's chest (and in the process of CPR probably break all his ribs) or shove a large tube into his windpipe in the event of an arrest, and then turn around and complain about us trying to put needles into him that deliver vital fluids and antibiotics.

No, it's not unnecessary that we stick needles into him. What would be unnecessary would be me, sticking a needle into myself.

So that's what I did. The next day I got my medical students to cannulate one of my veins to remind myself of what it feels like. The med students looked at me like I was nuts, but they did it anyway, because for a med student, a chance to cannulate is a Good Day. For the record, they got it, first pass, too.

And yeah, sure, it hurts a bit. But life hurts. In the recent push to make doctors drop their God complex people forget that doctors were never god in the first place:

A hospital is not a magical place where the laws of physics and reality stop. A hospital is not a magical place where the laws of economics and taxes stop.

When I say that I'm sorry that I couldn't get there sooner or that a nurse couldn't get there sooner it's not because I left my Sonic Hedgehog Running Shoes in my other pants and I'm lying to your face.

When you ask me "Why aren't there more nurses and doctors?" you forget two vital things. For one (If I may paraphrase Dr Bones McCoy from Star Trek) I'm a doctor, not a politician, nor a font of unending financial resources or the silver bullet to a flagging health system. If you've got problems with our health system, use your DEMOCRATIC RIGHT and tell your member of parliament. Don't tell me things I already know.

The other thing: The end of a 14 hour shift is ALWAYS the best time to tell a doctor that they don't care about their patients, it really is.

Swallowed

Gen Med is still running me like a bitch. I hesitate to really scream because it sounds like it was much, MUCH, worse the rotation prior to mine, and also because I just read esme and Dr J's blogs and the poor bastards are going through worse. But, like last post, a quick summary, in numbers:

1. 5 registrars in 2 weeks sucks hard. Less continuity and more dead-air time than a David "Mullholland Drive" Lynch movie. HOWEVER,the only thing that sucks harder than 5 registrars in 2 weeks is...
2. 0 (ZERO) registrars in the last 2 days.
3. 2 cute registrars (on other units), 1 cute physio and 2 cute nurses; however given the sleep-deprivation and general time-stress I've taken to smiling nervously and bowing my head like a pleb to their goddess each time I pass them in the corridor.
4. 2 young and very pretty female consultants, 1 of whom I confused for a medical student on the first day of the rotation (luckily I didn't say anything out loud). Seriously: this petite, slim Asian girl/woman strolled into the handover room wearing this woollen grey bob one piece skirt/dress, grey matching nylons, huge puffy handbag (I mean huge by "cutesy Asian" standards) and white heels. What else was I supposed to think?
5. 5 other cool interns (1 colleague on my team, 4 on other medical units)

It's not too bad, but when you get back home at 2200hrs and you find your similarly-aged neighbour is breakdancing in the car lot in the full moonlight just for the hell of it, you start to wonder where the fun is going in your life. Then, when he tells you he's already bought a house on a hill in New Zealand and he's going to move back there when he has a family, you wonder how some people managed to get smart. Not book smart. Just real smart.

Hit the ground stumbling (aka the Ketone Express)

It's been a hectic seven days. I haven't blogged recently because I'm tired. I tried to blog the last weekend but it became too wordy and hurt my brain so let's do dot points. The facts:

• finished in the bush by telling a lady she had ovarian cancer...and almost missed diagnosing a lady with an already partially ruptured ectopic pregnancy. Very Bad.
• New rotation. General Internal Medicine. Haven't finished before 2100hrs (9:00pm to normal people, or halfway through Grey's/Housewives/OC/House) since starting. Is it my woeful inefficiency, or is it the job? Very Bad.
• Hollow Hallmark: I've pronounced people dead before but I've never had to do it in front of the family while this patient died in front of their eyes. There are no words for those moments, but you say them anyway to fill the silence, as if it will fill empty hearts.
  
• Too many one meal days, but as any paediatrician knows, it's the dehydration that'll get you. Lips feel like sandpaper. Need IV.
• Was told the previous intern took one week off on 'stress leave'. Does not bode well. Apparently the boss nurse is a power freak. Bring her on. Starting to feel like a fight. If she gives any of the interns shit I preparing a nice, Hollywood style soapbox Samuel L Jackson holier than thou speech.
  

That's about it for now.

Oh, and I discovered Fiona Apple finally. My waif-singer-songwriter of the moment.

That girl is poisonnnn....

I staggered back out to the bush on Monday morning, still recovering from an unaccustomed night out on Saturday (a good whopping 24hours after) and in fact I'm still going to blame Saturday night for slowing down my neurons today. Today...being...Tuesday...

I will remember two things from Saturday night:

1) The gorgeous bartender Anja (not her real name) who graciously smiled when I told her that she was...quote-unquote "very pretty" - if truth is the first casualty of war then eloquence is the first victim of Jack-the Ripper-Daniels...

and 2) The gorgeous Asian bar skank who smiled, shook her badonkadonk and then used my mate for a drink...

Let's beef. I'll paint the picture...

The floor is bangin' - Usher's Yeah! still packs a whallop when it's dropped at just the right time and I'm feelin' the bounce. Me and my mate are also feelin' our livers catch up to us, but we're happy and still vertical, so we bounce bounce bounce on down to the bar for "sustenance".

At this particular bar they let people dance on the bar itself (a la Coyote Ugly). When we got to the bar we looked up and found this lovely young Asian girl, sleek in a ponytail and a dress that was a flash of pink and orange, working it so well we decided (read: livers decided) to show our appreciation with a bit of respectful ruckus. When she invited my mate to get up on the bar and dance with her I thought we'd hit the jackpot!

I respectfully removed myself from the vicinity and gave my friend Maximum Operating Room. Why not? He's a good bloke, not too hard on the eyes - I could be without a drinking buddy for a little while. Out of earshot (in a club I guess that's not more than 20cm) I glanced back and found that they had come down from the bar and were talking. A Good Sign.

Things were Right With the World.

...for about five seconds.

It was almost like I blinked and then suddenly my boy was next to me again.

"What happened??"

"Mate...she used me for a drink!"

"What??"

"Yeah, I got her a drink and then she disappeared..."

Okay - so my boy was somewhat intoxicated and he's no Usher at the best of times, but this turn of events angered me. It was Unacceptable and felt like a violation of the Geneva Convention on Pretty Girl-Ethanol Tariff.

It's expected that a guy will offer a girl a drink if he likes her. Sometimes even he's just trying to hit on your hot friend he'll buy you a drink. While he's not doing it for free, he's not doing it as currency either. My understanding was that the drink offer is Code. Correct me if I'm getting old:

"Would you like a drink?" or "Can I get you a drink?"

EQUALS

"Will you hold a beverage in your hand long enough for me to try to put my best foot forward but ultimately embarass myself at which point you are free to leave?"

So if you don't want to even know what the guy's offering, just DECLINE the drink.

This is not revolutionary in any way.

So when my mate told me what happened two interpretations can be seen here:

a) She actually did hold the drink long enough for him to embarass himself; OR
b) She broke the rules and was a GOLD DIGGER.

I had to investigate further. I hunted her down (not a hard target while standing on a bar looking sexy) offered her drink myself and she accepted and invited me up onto the bar itself. At this point I had to remind myself of my Mission, because when you're in front of a hot girl and you're elevated on a bar under the influence things can go...woozy.

"I have something to confess," I say.

"What?"

"I wanted to know why you blew my man off - he's a good bloke -"

"Who? Oh...I didn't blow him off...I - I dunno, I just guess I don't go to clubs to meet people, I just go to have a good time and then move on."

"That's pretty pessimistic - you ought to rethink that -"

She shrugged. I was sobering up enough for my cynical detective reasoning skills to kick in. Here is a dissection of the case in front of me:

1) Gorgeous Asian girl
2) Drinking Smirnoff Vodka (Weak) -
3) Sober - too sober to be dancing on a bar JUST for FUN
4) Probably young...20?
5) Doesn't come to clubs to meet people...hmm. To meet corpses maybe? Goes to clubs for the air? For the serenity then?

Conclusion: Attention-seeking Gold-digging Beauty who robbed my mate of money better spent on an after-party load of grease from KFC.

Yes, okay, that's harsh.

No, I don't *actually* know if any words were exchanged between my mate and this girl.

Yes, I could be all wrong.

No, I didn't think about whether I would be making her uncomfortable. (No wait, I did, I think that might've been the purpose.) At least she got a free drink out of me, too.

Yes, I probably could've been more engaging and less blunt.

Sigh. Somebody get me off this soapbox before I fall and break a hip.
***

thinking

watching the israel - hezbollah - syria - lebanon thing turn to crap. amused/angered that Condi Rice has been sent to get syria to back off when it was israel that kicked the shit out of lebanese civilians.

thinking that this will get lots worse before it gets better.

thinking that this is where this ends...wondering where this crap begins?

bulletin

More interesting things happening in the world than in my life right now.

Zidane vs that Italian guy

Israel vs Hezbellah

John Howard vs The Environment and the Greenhouse Effect and Peter Costello

One of the above is fascinating and terrifying, and the other two are funny because they're so ridiculous.

***

Miss Sydney. It always feels like coming home, each time I visit. It feels like I've never really left, probably because part of me never really did. Returned to work bleary eyed on Monday morning after a weekend supersaturated with old friends and the Emergency department waiting room was positively repellant.

***

Good luck to BST candidates!

***

Saw two girls making out the other day. It goes without saying that that was Pretty Cool.

I have been asked why it is that guys find the sight or idea of two girls kissing such a turn on. My simple-minded reply at the time was that it was mathematically a case of taking something that is Cool (a girl kissing) and multiplying it by two, thus making it Pretty Cool.

I have since been told that girls do not find the reverse holds true: two guys making out is Not Cool, nor Pretty Cool, but simply Gay Porn.

***
New music:

Justin Timberlake's new single is absolutely whack, from the grammatically retarded title "SexyBack", to the infuriatingly-repetitive-and-therefore-catchy drum beat. I'm not sure what the song's producer Timbaland is trying to do exactly - the composition, it is simplicity, is a polar opposite to their previous collaboration on "Cry me a river," which was a mini-symphony in its density.

It seems to take a page from the Gwen Stefani single "Hollaback girl", or even the recent Timbaland-produced Nelly Furtado singles "Promiscuous" and "Maneater" - all "songs" without much melody, driven on sparse, catchy beats and futuretro synth.

I suppose Nelly Furtado had to do something different after Corrine Bailey Rae took her spot as "songstress with lilting wispy voice."

Synchrony

Felt well bummed out for the first time in a good few months on Saturday. It was weird. I had lunch with my friends and Christian Work Friend which, at the time, went great. Everyone got along and we met my friend's new lady friend which was terrific. Everything was going fine until I was on my way home and started to play Analyze This.

(Let's be clear: Christian Work Friend is Just a Friend. (Same as Gorgeous Christian Med Student) So I really shouldn't have to scrutinize how the lunch went, but I did.

Maybe you shouldn't have done the whole "James Blunt can rot in purgatory for Goodbye My Lover" schtick. And the mimed forking of said Blunt was probably unneccesary too.

Maybe she doesn't need to know about how you and your mate used to belt out Backstreet Boys songs in the car.

Maybe...

By the time I'd arrived home I'd welcomed back that old friend, Insecurity, and all over a girl that I'd resolved NOT to pursue!

To top it off, Insecurity brought his drinking buddy, Loneliness, and by the time I got online and read esme and Dr J's blog entries about similar issues I was wishing that things could go back to a place where I was just a retard who couldn't get a girl because I was basically, well, a heathen. Or a Pagan. Whichever. Because that was fun, and it was new and refreshing to be able to have dinner or breakfast with a new lovely lady, religion notwithstanding.

I've seen the Insecurity/Loneliness double feature before, and it wasn't funny the first time. Or the second.

Anyway, I shook it off with a good drive down the highway with my shiny new Creative Vision:Mp3 player blaring Ghostface Killah*, but looking forward to the end of the week, already. Hola Sydney!

*free internet advertising for you Creative, now send me $$$

The wagon

Thinking about God lately.

As the stories roll in, and continue to roll in, from my intern colleagues about how swamped they are and how tired they are, I keep wondering when the wheels are going to fall off my wagon and when I'm going to be hit by "the REAL intern experience."

This is the third term out of five and somehow I've managed to dodge dipshit registrars, tyrannical consultants and even heavy patient loads. I've also managed to hide the fact that I probably know a lot less than my 6th year Medical Student.

Meanwhile my colleagues here in rural Victoria are struggling - one with doing essentially a registrar's job because her reg is a lazy know-nothing and the other is going so bonkers with her patient load that she thought it was a good idea to tie my shoes to the light fittings for fun and then drop chip fragments into my hair.

I have other friends and colleagues dealing with moderate depression and personal tragedy.

In some cases, such as with my colleagues here, I can give them a hand and offer my time after my shift and my severely limited expertise, but what I really want is to give them, and the rest of you, bits of this Four-Leaved Clover that I somehow stumbled upon. I know it sounds f**king hokey, but it's true. I'm probably just a little bit of a Communist Lesbian at heart.

You can have my luck - I think I've had more than my fair share, and besides, a little adversity builds character, right?

I don't pray, because I'm not a religious person (even though I've met yet ANOTHER gorgeous, lovely and single Christian girl just recently and it's driving me BONKERS), but I'm thinking about you guys, all of you. (That is, everytime except when I'm concentrating hard on not killing patients)

And so, I've been thinking about God. Not necessarily the Christian God, or the Catholic God or even Buddha, but just "a" God. I'm wondering whether he/she gave this blessing/lesson for any particular reason, or if it's just a random scatter of the fairy dust.

I guess it really doesn't matter what he/she planned, but what I do with this.

So if you suddenly discover money, food, or hot supermodels raining down on your doorsteps, you'll know I've figured out a useful way to send my luck your way.

Until then, thinking will have to do.
***
Addendum:

If God places anymore gorgeous and likeable single Christian women in my path I will be convinced that he is in fact, a she, because only a woman would tease like that.
***

Addendum II:

GO SOCCEROOS! Retarded British refereeing and rough-housing Croatians couldn't keep us down!
***

That is all.

Away

Started a rotation in Emergency in a country town two weeks ago. It's not the smallest country town by any means, but it's small enough that myself and the other interns have been starved of entertainment. It got so bad that the other night four interns, four MBBS-qualified and usually intelligent people were gathered around a small grate searching for a two-dollar coin using only the light from a mobile phone and we were finding it ABSOLUTELY HYSTERICAL.

***

Had some friends down from Sydney visit last weekend and among the various things we talked about over dinner was a hope that newspapers could cater to the busy medical intern and print little sidebars that help keep you up to date on any long running news item. It would be like a little "In case you missed" column, or like how your favourite TV show often has a recap at the start of the episode - like "Recently on Grey's Anatomy/Scrubs/the Conflict in the West Bank."

Basically, there are times I really want to get stuck into a particular world issue but simply need the salient facts and can't physically sift through the endless backstory. Medical people like dot points. I think I understand now the glazed look in the medical registrar's eyes when I present a patient to him - the look that means, "Just the facts man!"

This concept would easily be incorporated online. I don't think the major papers have "Related articles" links on their online publications.

***
CARS; Pixar Studios - 2.5/5

The first major misstep from an otherwise untouchable studio. An unfortunately rote storyline and uninspired character designs fail to meet Pixar's incredible technical prowess with CGI.

***

What's the male form of Bridget?

Somehow I had not one but *two* dates this week with not two but *three* women (I'll do the math for you in a bit). I don't know if you can tell, but I'm not as tickled as someone with my lame dating situation ought to be about the situation.

Frustrated with getting nowhere with She Who Would Deny Me and being the last week of the current rotation I decided some kamikaze-style dating effort wasn't entirely uncalled for - should I crash and burn at the hands of some lovely lady my ashes would soon be transported to rural Victoria anyway.

Kamikaze indeed - you might think I would try to give myself a good chance for the next one.

As they say in the NBA, you go hard or you go home.

I thought I would ask this other lovely health professional to coffee - a girl who I hadn't in fact laid eyes on in the last five weeks, and had perhaps only three verbal exchanges with in my entire medical career. Not only that, she worked on a ward that I had no medical reason to visit.

I strapped the bombs to my plane and took off in the direction of ward 15North.

As I approached her airspace she smiled at me but continued to talk to the health professional she was working with at the time. Needing to look busy I grabbed a portable phone and promptly paged my registrar.

She hovered by, files in hand, and said with a smile,

"Hi Dave..."
(She knows your name? Is this a sign?)

She continued,"...um, what are you doing here?"
(ABORT! ABORT! ABORT! DETONATE! DETONATE!)

I suddenly remembered the phone in my hand, and thinking it could be a good diversion, used the Force to make it ring. Or maybe, my reg just rang back at the right time.

"Oh sorry - I have to take this call, I'll talk to you later?"

Phew. I had a few hours to regroup, and paged her, mustering as much nonchalance into a text message as anyone ever could. She called me back,

"I'd love to have coffee, but I'm really busy today - what about something after work?"

This was problematic. I had already arranged with my high school mates to have dinner, but here I had an attractive, intelligent young lady on the phone happy to meet me. In my group of friends we've tried to foster a culture where we don't just ditch our friends for some dame, but surely - what else could I do - this cute woman was waiting on an answer from me. What else could I do?

I panicked. "Sorry, I have to have dinner with my mates tonight."

When I told this to my good friend Marcus later that night his face wore the sort of look that you have when you see a real ugly dude with a hot chick and you can't believe what's you just saw (or heard) - so, he probably would have had the same look on his face had I got the date anyway. He said,

"Dave, I'm about this close - " He measured out a the size of a bee's penis -"to slapping you up, you newbie! You're supposed to be out with this chick!"

I promised him that I would get her number the next day. And I did. And we had dinner and dessert. And I heard the words that no secular man wants to hear.

"I'd like my partner to be Christian."

Ah...drat.

Now let's not get all fired up about religion, because that's not the point of this particular story. It would have been similar, if somewhat weird, if she said, "I'd like my partner to have two heads." I'm not here to get on any religious soapbox - the only bad Christians are the Christians that think George Bush is a good Christian. The fact that this girl is Christian changes nothing about how attractive or intelligent she is, which is what makes this situation such a shame. But it's just the way it is sometimes - people are entitled to want what they want, and when it comes to faith and important values like this, I've learnt (sometimes the hard way) that you can't change someone just for what you want. That, and it would be slightly dodgy if I converted to Christianity just to chase some tail.

At the very least, I now know another lovely young lady, hardly the worst thing in the world.
***

The other date wasn't quite as enjoyable, and in fact made me feel somewhat like a piece of meat. A girl I know at work offered to set me up with her sister. Setups, as much fun as they are, are tricky things. They take some care, and whomever is doing the setting up has to be an invisible puppet master, so that the two people don't see the strings leading them to each other. Or, at the very most, only one person can be privy to the plan. Another nice pre-requisite is that the two people who are to meet should have some decent common ground.

Not, for example, as in this particular case for me, that the young lady was "young and pretty and tall" and that I was "a good doctor".

Can you guess the race of the people trying to set me up? I'll give you three guesses, and the first two don't count.

I was fairly reluctant initially, but my friend insisted, and I gave in. I agreed, with one caveat only - that my friend come with her sister to lunch, as a buffer. Who am I to turn down meeting a pretty, young, tall girl? No, really?

It was, however, all wrong. The sister was indeed pretty, young and tall. But she looked uncomfortable to be there, and I felt bad for her, not knowing how much she had been pushed into this meeting, and wondering what she thought of me - this random single loser swinging his MBBS around like it was supposed to be some sort of currency.

After a couple of hours at lunch, a couple of uncomfortable silences and long sips at my coffee I was really no closer to knowing who this person was that had been somewhat presented to me, and I felt sad. I think I had given it a decent shot, but it probably was a shot that should never have been lined up in the first place.

Dave: 0; Axis of women: 6

So there's this girl...

Let's get all Bridget again.

There's this girl at work who I've been trying to have dinner with for basically the entirety of my surgical rotation. It is now the end of the rotation and the outcome of ten weeks of mildly persistent flirtation is...nothing.

(Sounds a bit like a rash..."oh, it's just a mildly persistent flirtation, it'll probably go away by itself.")

I noticed her fairly early. She is pretty in a simple way - fresh features, nice eyes and a cute smile - more than stunning in a pick-your-jaw-off-the-floor way. She was friendly to get along with, and so I thought she might be someone to get to know better.

Opportunity was kind enough to stop by, and so after she bailed me out with a couple of patients of mine I decided to offer dinner as thanks, as my olive branch. Because I was on the phone (and to look more nonchalant) I scribbled on a piece of paper - "Owe you for your help --> dinner?" and passed it to her, just like in primary school. She laughed and replied, "Well, I think dinner's not quite enough to make up for it..." (settle down, it doesn't get exciting) "...I think *two* desserts might also have be thrown in."

Okay. We're thinking, in the moment, that we're Neil Armstrong on the moon, and made that first step for mankind. However, remember what I told you in the introduction - we're really much more like poor Michael Collins with his arse up in the orbiting module of Apollo 11 , going round in circles, going nowhere fast, and wondering when the party's going to head his way.

I spent most of that day expecting a cute page to say "Get dinner underway." 48 hours later I'm standing in the carpark hearing,

"Oh, you meant for dinner *then*?"

"Uh...yeah. But, um, don't worry about it, no big deal."

"Oh, sorry! Maybe next time?"

"Well, sure, but you know, this offer is for a limited time only..."

"Oh really? "

"Yeah, it doesn't have extended expiry." (Lame Group and Hold reference)

(You've got to try and bounce back with some witty crap. I bounce like a waterbomb)

Over the next few weeks we have several similar conversations in between making small talk on the ward. I throw around phrases like "this dinner is getting cold" and "this dinner is getting so old it's decomposing."

(I know, some of you reading this are probably thinking, "Dave, there seems to be a fairly logical reason why she doesn't want to have dinner - your lame-ass metaphors are about as funny as [insert funny metaphor here as I clearly don't have the knack for it] " I swear to you though, she laughed at the time).

Only one time had she tried to make a plan with me, which I had to unavoidably bail on due to an unexpected friend turning up with a mini-emergency. I ended up calling the girl back after I had finished with my friend (and this was not at an unreasonable hour) but she was by then busy.

Anyway, let's pretend we're in ICU. I've decided to pull the plug on this one. Apollo 11's running out of gas and I'm happy to let in burn up in re-entry. Slap a big NFR/DNR order on it. I've got nails, a coffin and I'm looking for a hammer. Flatline. I've got one more week at work and I don't want to care about this one anymore.

I won't get into the reasons why she had to bail so often, as that's probably a little more specific than it needs to be, but they were fair reasons. However, I think my friend Marcus summed it up best when he told me - the fact that this girl made no real attempt to reschedule any dinners was a fair sign it wasn't going to have good outcomes.

It's a funny dating scene these days where the etiquette is fairly up in the air. Is it proper for a girl to make the first move? Where's the gender equality? Why does a guy have to do all the legwork? Where's the pride-saving response to "Oh, I thought we were just friends"?

"Oh, the reason why I asked you dinner fourteen times is just that I have this incredible recipe for quiche and the chickens I keep in my backyard just happen to produce a hell of a lotta eggs."

I *don't* think so.

Let's not get confused though - we're nowhere near the frenzied intensity of "my only love sprung from my only hate!" or somesuch. All I want is a quiet half hour to maybe find out who this girl is, what her hopes and dreams are, and maybe get a sense of whether we're heading in the same direction.

Is that too much to ask?

Rumble rubble

The aftermath of the strike I blogged about previously was not much to blog home about. We got a light slap on the wrist, but business pretty much went back to usual.

This suggests to me that my reg (who we weren't real happy about last week) was probably just having an off week, as people have pointed out to me in person.

Big ups to Danny Bhoy, who we saw on the closing show of the Melbourne Comedy festival last night. I've long wanted to speak with a Scottish brogue...for some reason it seems to add 2+ charm to anything you say...

Rumble 2

Probably going to get a serve from the boss tomorrow.

I went on strike today at a doctor's stop work meeting, and didn't tell my boss I was going. I did hand my pager to another intern to cover but after that I just left.

I'll tell you why.

This week, as the previous posts have alluded to, has not been a Good Week. I've been bounced up and down trying to organize tests for my patient with PR bleeding who is such a lovely man that it infuriates me every time my boss flips the script and tells me to tell him we've got a new plan.

My fellow colleague was doing her best to be the advocate for another patient who our boss deemed to not have a surgical problem - so she had to go home. She was still vomiting and complained of dizziness. Physiotherapy was not happy to let her go home. My colleague had to fight to suggest that we at least transfer her care to the Medical team.

I was Not Impressed. Check that - We were Not Impressed.

It probably would have taken me two seconds to send my boss a page saying I was going, or duck into theatre to say so, but at that point in time I Simply Did Not Care Enough.

I realize that that action was very passive-aggressive of me. I should probably have the stones to say out loud to my registrar that he ought to pick up his game. Maybe I should have the heart to just shoulder this rubbish. Maybe I should have the brains to get a step ahead.

The tin man, lion and scarecrow rolled in one.

I envy you who aren't all that worried about being nice or polite. I really want to rumble and rage but I fear that just don't know how.

Rumble in the jungle

I've hit the mid-term hump. Monday was one of those days that got such an ass-kicking that Tuesday was still rubbing it's rear wondering what happened. Wednesday is fearful for the morning and I think Thursday is willing itself into non-existence.

We took in many patients on the last weekend, and for the first time in our spoilt rosters our unit was faced with a list that stretched over a page.

The almost knee-jerk reaction from our superiors was to tell us to spend the first half of Monday trying to turf these patients to other units.

I didn't like coming to work and then solely working to make someone else's work harder, even if that someone is a registrar who likes to point out our unit's problems.

I was starting to see the dreariness of paper pushing that I had been fortunate to avoid with such a light patient load. By lunch I felt disconnected from my patients, even more so the ones that I had successfully disconnected my team from by turfing them off.

Tuesday started badly when I forgot my pager, lost the previous day's blood results and came to work to find out one of our patients hadn't had an important colonoscope. This gentleman came in with rectal bleeding. He has mechanical heart valves which mean his blood needs to be thinned somewhat so that it doesn't clog up the valves. We had stopped his blood-thinners so that he wouldn't continue to bleed. We wanted a colonoscope to investigate the bleeding as urgently as possible so we could restart his blood-thinners and prevent him from having a heart attack, a stroke or some other catastrophic event.

I spent this morning shaking my tin for pennies at the feet of the Colorectal and Gastroenterology teams who do the colonoscopes. As apologetic as they were, Charity was not forthcoming. My colleague spent the morning getting crap dumped on her by the Haematology team for not restarting the patient's blood-thinners, and then had to endure further crap-showers from our registrar for apparently taking the Haematologists too seriously.

Again, by lunch we were feeling disconnected, and about ready to rumble.

We decided to let the man have lunch. He had been fasted for two days in preparation for this test, which was looking like it might materialize in the next millenium.

At 1500hrs I get a call from the Colorectal registrar who tells me that three (count them, 3) patients didn't turn up (punks) and my patient could be seen straight away.

Crap. We had let him eat. Or had we? I called the ward.

"No, actually he hasn't had anything to eat yet." Hurrah! Out of the mess that was today, there might be something to celebrate yet. I struggled through the rest of the afternoon, looking forward to seeing the scope report, looking forward to telling the gentleman and his frustratingly anxious wife, "There's nothing to worry about, and you can (both) go home."

At 1700hrs, with a fair batch of menial tasks still left to do I hopped on down to ward 1E to read the report that would help power me through the last of my busywork...

"Bowel preparation was unsatisfactory. Clear to splenic flexure. Colon not fully visualized. Suggest repeat colonoscopy as outpatient."

God.

Damn.

It.

Overtime

Twice in the last four days I've gone into hospital out of rostered hours to check up on patients of mine that were a little sicker than most. My reg and my fellow intern would probably roll their eyes if I told them that. We have this on-going joke that if it's my afternoon off, they know they can still hand me work to do at 4:45pm. I'm weird about taking afternoons off. My reg assures me that that is a passing phase.

One of these patients had been under our care for about a week. When she first came in she was a little wary of us, and we thought she was a little weird too. I think we had all pegged her as someone who might retreat into the sick role and give us some trouble in terms of refusing tests, procedures and just generally be someone we couldn't get along with.

We found that she was, in fact, a real trooper. It probably helped that she was getting opiate analgesia four times a day, but she was a good sport about our repeated failed attempts at getting intra-venous access and the multiple blood tests and radiology tests we needed to essentially tell her we weren't sure what was going on.

Yesterday, after a week of tests, fate pushed the agenda, and her bowel perforated. We rushed her to surgery yesterday afternoon. My fellow intern and I assured her that she was in good hands and that we'd see her after the Anzac day holiday.

Today I called the hospital just to see how the surgery went. The ward told me, "She's not here, she's just in recovery after her procedure and she's going to ICU soon." I didn't like the sound of that. What procedure? She couldn't have gone til today without having her surgery, which meant this 'procedure' must've been something else entirely.

I padded into the hospital, feeling somewhat naked without a tie or stethoscope, and far too comfortable in sneakers.

I found her in the recovery ward. She lay there with multiple arterial and venous access lines, and her breathing was assisted by a large ungainly BiPAP mask. Being a public holiday the rest of recovery was entirely empty, and the mechanical Darth Vader like hissing from the mask created a surreal mood.

I quickly flipped to the last entry in her notes.

CT Pulmonary angiogram: multiple pulmonary emboli. 1st and 3rd segment of some artery in some lobe or somesuch. Even if had known what they meant I had stopped registering the words after "multiple pulmonary emboli." They are, for the non-medical, blood clots in the lung, the same entity that drove the media wild back when they bayed about "economy class syndrome."

They are a complication in surgical patients we try to aggressively prevent.

I explained what was going on to our patient. She could hear me, despite the fairly heavy analgesia that was running in her veins. She seemed to take it well, the trooper that she was. I stood by her bedside for another 20mins while the nurses got things ready to move her to ICU. Before they moved her she looked up at me and I gave her a crooked smile. I was wondering whether I had done all the right things to prevent this, whether we could have picked it up earlier, whether she'd be okay.

She reached up for my hand and I gave it a little squeeze. It might as well have been the other way around.

Boy's club

Things you don't expect to hear a man say while fondling/manipulating another man's genitalia, even if it for a vasectomy:

Surgical registrar (losing traction on the vas deferens): "Prick!"

(coaxing it back): "Come here, you..."

(grimacing): "It's a little tight in there."

Matlock'd

People exert and display their power in different ways. My consultant has several tricks up his sleeve to let people know that He is the Boss.

He is, firstly, an imposing figure - by towering over most medical staff at at least 6'3" he can simulatenously give you an inferiority complex and create a vertical illusion that diminishes his middle-aged pot-belly. His voice is deep, controlled and also distinctly Australian. He is, I'm told, a incredible surgeon with tens of thousands of operations under his belt.

He is also a wily fox.

Yesterday he asked myself and my registrar to look up the results of a patient's test for him. The results weren't back, so we said we'd chase them up. Today he asked me, "Did you see the results yet?"

I said, "No, I haven't had a chance, I'll look it up as soon as possible sir." (I had actually forgotten).

I managed to check the results and hours later when I was passing him in the hall I decided to try to prove that I was a hard-working intern. "Sir, those results..."

"I already know. I already saw them. I just wanted to see if you had."

A few weeks ago my colleague attended his theatre list as our registrar suggested it would make this consultant happy. The registrar helpfully briefed my colleague on the sorts of questions to expect from this operation - it was an excision of a pleomorphic adenoma, so the anatomy of the facial nerve was the key information. My colleague studiously memorized the branches of the nerve and their relations. When she arrived at the theatre, she was met with,

"Which number cranial nerve is the facial nerve?"

She knew the right answer, "The seventh."

"....are you sure?"

(For the non-medics, imagine the previous exchange like so: After you've prepared for a high-level maths exam including imaginary numbers - "What is 2 plus 2?" "Four." "...are you sure?")

It reminds me of an episode of one of those legal shows back in the early 80s - I think it was Matlock. Tha Lock had some poor schmuck on the stand for brutally assaulting some other poor schmuck. Matlock didn't have quite enough evidence for a conviction, so he says,

"What if I told you that your victim has just died in hospital?"

The schmuck on the stand breaks down and confesses, sobbing, to the whole crime.

The victim then turns up, making a grand entrance into the courtroom. The schmuck on the stand, shocked, turns to Matlock and yells, "You lied to me! You said he was dead!"

Tha Lock quips back, "I only said 'What if I told you he was dead?'"

Wily. I'm still not sure what to think of my consultant. He seems to have sent a clear message: "I am two steps ahead of you - because I am one step in front and you one step behind."

The circle

I was invited to sit at the table in the nurses rec room today. I was only looking for a working tap to quench my parching tongue but it was nice to be included. The nurses rec room is a private sanctum, and interns don't intrude on tea breaks unless something Truly Bad is Going Down. I sat there quietly sipping lukewarm water and listening to amusing stories about wrangling maternity leave and having babies. This is the second time in a couple of days that something similar has happened. I appreciate that maybe this means I'm not messing up too much on the ward. The first time it happened, one of the NUMs had just made me a nice hot cross bun and said, after I thanked her, that it was because she "looked after those who looked after ours."

There are small things in everyday that keep you going and this was one of them. A small word from one person to another takes seconds but it's enough to give things meaning. I'm starting to feel at home on my ward and I feel ready to give that extra mile if needed. Granted, I'm not on a busy team so I have quite a few extra miles to give. I'll look after those who look after mine.

Make with the clicky

I've been heavily censured all round for the delays in posts. My "friend" Marcus likes to call me "Milo", because I'm not "Quik" har har har (not in regards to blogs, just in regards to life). And my other "friend" Carmen loves that joke so much that between them I can never again drink flavoured milk.

So I thought I'd give a shout out to some other noteworthy blogs from terrific people that you might like to read (all medical interns, btw) in lieu of my tiresome tardiness.

Chronic Vertigo - esme's blog is (much like the author) true grit and no nonsense

The Intern Experiment - Another well-written blog from the always amusing Dr J

my aimless ramblings - from the bubbly Themis

Peekaben - from the equally bubbly Ben Lee

So make with the clicky. In the company of such esteemed writers I have no choice but to lift my game. Or send their sites trojan horses.

Back in the game...but still losing

Humour me for a few minutes and let channel a bit of Bridget Jones. Somewhere in the last three months I had bought into the myth that as a fresh new male doctor I suddenly represented security, benevolence and good grooming to the opposite sex - the next best thing to George Clooney. My mojo, despite being battered through some abortive campaigns during uni, had been instantly rejuvenated! Bouyed by an inflated sense of self-worth and amnesia over past failures I headed back into the trenches of the dating battlefield.

Day 1; 2000hrs, Dizzy's Jazz club 6/4/06
I roll up to Dizzy's alone to see Axle Whitehead, the VJ on Video Hits and a former Idol contestant. It's an extremely crisp night in Melbourne. Dizzy's is a cute little club where the people standing at the bar are literally within spitting distance of the performer. It used to be an old post office, so what it loses in floor area it makes up for in history. It is so small though, that the poor girl selling tickets at the door is sitting outside the club in an equally tiny vestibule warming her hands to an element heater that might just be warm enough to heat her left pinky.

I pay for the cover charge, and she says to me, "I really like your jacket." This in itself is unfamiliar enough to make me bluster and bluntly change the topic to the weather. I excuse myself and head indoors. Indoors it's warm enough for the mojo to thaw out, which somehow gives me the chutzpah to head back out.

"Do you, um, want something to drink?"

She seems surprised by this for a moment, but goes with it and smiles,

"Um, a peppermint tea would be great."

"Uh, one or two sugars?"

"A dollop of honey, thanks a lot."

We exchange names. She speaks with confidence and ease and it doesn't surprise me when she says she's a politics/english major hoping to become a journalist. Her nature is easy-going and inquisitive which I find initally very comfortable until she stumbles on the fact that I'm a doctor which she finds fascinating.

I'm not particularly ready for this - she has a myriad of interesting questions to which I have boring answers (dropping the gory details of the latest failed faecal disimpaction is fun with friends but simply kamikaze with a stranger), and as anyone who's seen the 40 Year Old Virgin knows, you really ought to be talking about her, not you. I find myself trying every conversational tact but each somehow leads back to doctoring - parents: her father is a doctor, what's uni like: must be nothing like working as a doctor. It's like trying to play chicken, only you're driving a tram.

After the show I try to find her to say goodbye but she's gone. As I drive off I spot someone that looks suspiciously like her making out with a bald dude at a tram stop.

Scoreboard: Dave 0; Axis of women 1

Day 2; 2400hrs, Lavish nightclub 7/4/06
I go out for after work drinks to try and get to know some of my colleagues and end up trawling with two hotshots who dress big and talk bigger. When I talk about buying into the myth that young male doctors are the shit, I've only got options. These guys are majority shareholders.

Lavish on Fridays is an Asian club. I've been wary of trying to meet women at Asian nights, not just for fear of rejection, but for fear of getting stabbed, trolley-pole'd or otherwise violently beaten down for looking at someone's woman the wrong way. Tonight I swallow these fears with a few potent Jager bombs. For those of you not familiar with the Jager bomb - it's a shot of Jagermeister thrown down in half a can of Red Bull. It is essentially a drink that mangles your common sense by over-caffeinating your senses to the point where you gleefully allow the Jagermeister to sneak up on your inhibitions and stomp on them.

I'm wobbling somewhat, and decide that the previous night's trial of the "I'm a doctor" card was not rugged enough. Shamelessly I go up to a girl who caught my eye earlier in the night. She's got good game - well dressed in a slinky strapless, and stylish looking despite rocking the 80s hairstyle that's in fashion these days. I can't complain, because it means her hair is up off her shoulders, and she scores points for elegance.

Amateurishly, the words that come out do not reflect the situation. I hear myself say,

"Hi, I like your style. Let me introduce you to someone, this is my friend, he's a doctor."

I'm such a n00b. Now, granted, my opening gambit wasn't particularly clever, but my friend should have prepped me a little better - as it turns out this girl I tried to introduce him to was friends with a girl that he has this on/off thing with. She came back to me later,

"Your friend? He's a player. He's a doctor? You're a doctor? You know, I don't trust doctors. You and lawyers, you're all full of shit."

So much for elegance. And please, don't ask me why I tried to introduce this girl to my friend, when I had my own eye on her. I blame the Jager.

Scoreboard: Dave 0; Axis of Women 2

Day 3; 2300hrs Unk cafe, 8/4/06
I'm at a 25th birthday party of a friend of a friend. I'm telling my good friend what I have just told you, and he's talking out of his ass, the sort of talk you can talk when you are fortunate enough to be in a stable relationship. He's goading me into chatting up the waitress. There's no alcohol on board, but he's talking just enough to make me do this so I can shut him up.

His girl offers me a way in - this waitress has an accent. Why not ask her where she's from?

Some of you might know that I've not had a great record at chatting up foreign waitresses. The most famous knock-back I've received was, "I'm sorry, I don't speak English" followed by an immediate exit.

Still, let the fact that I continued impress on you my immense desire to shut my boy up. The cute waitress turns up with some appetizers, and I take my chance,

"I notice you have an accent..." (again, no points for an elegant opening) "...where are you from?"

She's from Germany, on a working Visa. In a couple of weeks time she's heading off to New Zealand. I recommend the South Island, having *never* been there, and desperately try to dig some high school German out of the dusty crate I call the hippocampus. Banishing the long repressed memory of Frau Graham's tobacco stained teeth and oddly masculine voice I sheepishly utter,

"Um...wie heissen Sie?"

She laughs at the stilted formal grammar and answers,

"Katie"

and walks off.

Scoreboard: Dave 0; Axis of Women 3

Circadian again

24 hours after I left my final night shift I stepped back into hospital and it was, once again, a strange place. I joined my new surgical team at 7am and by 8am I could feel the physical pressure of having people around me again, palpable and almost measurable with a barometer. In amongst the throng, I am once again a lowly intern - answering a page with simply "Hi it's Dave" is no longer enough, but I have to include my full branding "Hi, it's Dave, General Breast Endo Surg Intern number six-one-five."

The compensation to anonymity is the relative abundance of pretty young things wandering about. In one day I almost managed to walk into two IV trolleys after my retinas re-registered what a cute woman looked like. Go Pharmacy! Go Physio! Go hot older NUMs! Go! Go! Go!

Big ups (or downs) too, to cute medical students too, who wear totally impractical clothes to hospital! Girls, you look cute enough to make my brain temporarily dump the definition of heart sound S3, but if you brought handbags big enough to fit a Talley O'Connor in there you wouldn't have to ask me, would you?

I decided to send them to see my favourite patient, who wasn't surgical in any way. He was initially seeing our surgeon for a lump and they found he was anaemic. I was the one who admitted him to hospital and it turned out his anaemia was haemolytic, a condition where the immune system breaks down red blood cells. We turned him over to the haematologists and a few days later I spoke to his wife who told me that he was disappointed that I wouldn't be looking after him personally, which warmed my heart and made my day.

There's a general feeling that surgeons just like to cut things, and don't really care about their patients. I think it's more a product of an overloaded public health system. If you've only got five patients on your list (like I have), then you can afford to take a few more seconds with a patient and make them feel unique. If I've got a light list, then it's not just a privilege, but a responsibility to take those few extra seconds.

I have to thank Caz and Paul, friends of mine who were holidaying and staying with me this week. It made the transition to surgical internship much more enjoyable knowing I had something to come home to in the evening.

Two small plugs:

1) Masala Magic in Flemington - great, affordable Indian food.

2) Hyde bar on Russell St - managed by my fellow intern Marty, who was nice enough to hook me up on the guest list for the grand re-opening on Thursday. The decor was eclectic - plush couches sat next to thumping RnB, while Terracotta warriors sat at the bar either reading the random books about the place, or checking out the gorgeous bartenders. Caz, Paul and I turn up to see Marty sitting in the back corner with his posse looking like he's this town's Jay-Z and I think to myself that sometimes a little bling ain't a bad thing.

Jaz made me do it

The last post managed to generate THREE replies, which is a record for the Lone Banana.

The first was from Jaz, who I named in the post. I should clarify that I wasn't picking on Jaz when I singled her out for saying she was often too tired to read a post that didn't grab her immediately. Although it was funny that in her reply she should say the mention of her name in the third paragraph was enough to get her attention. (I should use name-dropping more often). Anyway, for the record let it be known, Jaz Is A Lovely Lady. She brought this up:

"actually my thing about blogs is.. is there a point if no one reads it?"

My buddy Meng followed that up with

"does a tree falling in an empty forest make a sound?"

The general consensus was that each writer needs to create their own goals for their blog, just like any other creation. Oh, and that photoblogs are better. But I am Poor, and cannot afford a digital camera.

In other news, JESSICA ALBA still stalks the screens with Latina good looks and B-grade acting talent. (Can you feel the name-drop hit the floor like a dope beat from Timbaland?)

JESSICA!!!

Does a name-drop in empty cyberspace make a sound?

Small fish in a big pond

I found out pop/blues/acoustic artist John Mayer blogs on his Myspace page. I've been thinking about the purpose of blogging a bit lately, and this latest development has me floored. (Is there anything this man can't/doesn't do?)

It's hard enough to read the newspaper these days, even online. The advent of Blogging, as with many things tied to the internet, expanded and exploded the reading choices of your average web surfer. In this age of the 2 second attention span it's almost impossible to catch someone's reading attention unless you've got a flashy animation/cool graphic or some mention of sex somewhere in there. Even that doesn't work so well anymore since any self-respecting email client will spam anything with "HUGE 36DD BREASTS PENIS ANAL" anyhow.

My friend Jaz said to me the other day that my blog had nice prose but she was just too tired to read the whole thing. Which was nice to hear, but it presents a new set of problems. We used to be taught in English class in high school that writing articles meant you needed to get 90% of your important information out in the first paragraph and a half. Which means most of you probably have opened a new browser by this point in this article, and that if you're still reading here I should send you chocolates.

That model of writing is like writing/assembling a movie trailer. You've got to get the best bits and cram them into a 30 sec spot, and to hell if you ruin the suspense or reveal the ending. It's not even like writing a pop song, where the catchy hook hits you hard about 1 minute into play. It sure isn't like writing a symphony.

My friend Shona has this neat trick she uses when sending travel emails: a short blurb and a long version that follows - a considerate and flexible format. Unfortunately it doesn't transfer so well into this blog, which is not so much about itemisation of the day-to-day events of a lowly intern. I have to work harder than that to earn your readership.

Which brings me back to John Mayer. I know many people read celebrity/gossip related blogs, but here is a blog one better - a blog *by* a celebrity. I'm guilty of a fair amount of celebrity worship, and I could probably be easily tempted into reading some mundanity that John Mayer ate Oreos for breakfast, or ties his left shoe first. But Mayer, the bastard, goes one up on that - he can actually write, with much of the humour and insight his lyrics suggest he would. His blog is pretty random, but very readable. There's a recent blog entry that posts a hypothetical response to one of those "HUGE 36DD BREASTS PENIS ANAL" spam emails.

I ask you then, what chance does a small blog like this have against a Goliath like that? Mayer already sings, plays guitar, has a swag of Grammys and now he blogs too. If he gets anywhere near a stethoscope I'm leaving and going to live on a mountain somewhere.

Bangers and mashups v3

The remix frenzy continues...I suppose it's easier to push other people's stuff together than to make new stuff of your own. *sigh*

Anyway - for your enjoyment, StudioGypsy presents:

Beyonce feat Blackstreet - Work it out (No diggity) and Beyonce and Amerie feat Jay-Z - Crazy in love - One thing (remix)

Pop music almanac: Work it out was featured on the Austin Powers 3 Soundtrack and originally produced by Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo of the Neptunes. Williams and Hugo initially got their start co-writing for producer/singer Teddy Riley, the founder of Blackstreet.

Beyonce's monster hit Crazy in love was produced by Rich Harrison, the man also responsible for Amerie's One thing.

I *am* a geek.

One can dream

I saw this in the mail room at my hospital



Re-hee-he-ally! And then, later:



Bootylicious?

Too left feat

"This is the part where you..."

I've been hitting up a few dance classes lately, on my weeks off. Apparently I'm one of those rare male cats that doesn't have a problem with self-awareness and dignity, and likes to flail my arms and legs around semi-synchronized to a beat. Last week I went to a Ceroc, or French Latin Jive, dance class, and it turned into a memorable night for more than a few reasons.

Ceroc is a partnered dance, part ballroom, part dirty dancing. It's fun for both the guy and the girl - lots of twirling, it's fairly open-ended and can be danced to anything in 4/4. The trouble with any partnered dance for the men, of course, is that they have to lead - so on top of remembering the steps, you have to improv on the spot what the hell you actually want to do. So after a while, a rookie like me starts hearing a lot of this -

"This is the part where you..."

I mean, it's hard enough for a guy to co-ordinate his mind and his mouth when in front of an attractive stranger, let alone spontaneously co-ordinate a series of elaborate physical movements in time and in reasonable style without repeating himself in close physical proximity to an attractive stranger who's paid $15 to learn how to dance.

"This is the part where you..."

But I've found Ceroc to be a lot of fun, so we persist. It's social - you meet different types. There are, naturally, a few semi-pro dancers who look like pure money on the floor. We try to avoid the dull glaze in their eyes when it's their turn to dance with us (everyone has to rotate partners around during the class). There are, thankfully, a few ladies of our age and dancing experience around too. We joke about tripping over own feet and the pros and cons of using your shoulders in a body roll. There is, almost inevitably, at least one older lady with latent exhibitionism, who tries to lead you, and we try to avoid her lunging and flailing limbs as she puts on her own one-woman cabaret show.

Then there's a couple of middle-aged ladies who've come for a good time, and they're living it up, giggling like schoolgirls about how "slutty" they can make their moves. They're having a ball, giving each other high fives, and it's fun to dance with them. I find myself dancing with one of the pair, we'll call her Mrs Robinson for now. She's got a slim build, and dressed tastefully in a green skirt that has just the right amount of swish for the twirl. The years show a little bit on her face but she's still pretty. She's enjoying the move we just learnt, a twirling, twisting move aptly named the pretzel, and we're about to move into a section where the lady freestyles a bit. I tell her this is the bit where she boogies (she knows this anyway, she's been whooping this section up with her friend all night anyway).

"This is the part where you sex me up," says Mrs Robinson.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. HOLD UP. What the hell did she just say?

I'm panicking. I'm not sure if she's just kidding around, or if she actually, you know, wants me to make coffee and get grindin'. I take a quick look at her hands. No rings. Crap. No help from that quarter. I almost wish I was dancing with the exhibitionist, I could probably stop dancing, go get a drink and she wouldn't notice. Crap crap crap crap what's a gentleman to do crap although it's been like forever since I've heard those words from a women never in fact and then I woke up and it was all a dream...

No. Actually, the song ended, and thank god for the finite-ness of the Sugababes meme-like "Push the button."

"This is the part where..."

On my way home, I wonder about Mrs Robinson - whether she was in fact Mrs Robinson, or just Ms Robinson, and why. In the end, I decided it's just nice that she had some fun on a Friday night. And it's nice that I almost suffered a small stroke.

"Mrs Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?"

Bangers and mashups v2

See the previous post on mashups.

Click here for two more remixes; "Try again" remix by Aaliyah feat Kanye West and Jay-Z, using the terrific instrumental from 112's It's over now; also find the "Jesus walks" remix by Kanye West feat Talib Kweli, using the instrumental from Talib's Get By.

Saturday soap: General hospital

For those who wanted a little bit of a trashy blog entry: fresh from the Gossip mags!

Night shift is not a real glamorous time of day!

The cute nurses tend to come out at the 0730hr handover, by which time you're so sleep deprived you might as well be wearing beer glasses. So who knows, really? (I don't want to slight or otherwise incense the terrific and friendly nursing staff I have worked with though - that's just death-wish material)

There are a few cute interns, but they tend to have weird growths called boyfriends. I will probably have to say though, to my UNSW ladies, that on a hotness per capita basis, you guys(gals) still have the upper hand. For the ladies: there is a registrar with a lush Scottish accent who I thought was fairly chiselled until I started thinking he looked a bit like Ruben. And, continuing on accents, there's another gentleman here if you'd like a Jamaican/Dominican for coffee.

For the fellas, nobody yet matches your unique blend of xbox-beating/inspired lunacy/golf club waving machismo.

The hunt continues.

Lit review: Maus + The Little Prince

Working night shift has afforded me the pleasure of stealing away into some literature when things settle down around 4am.

My friend Euni gave me The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery, one of her favourites. I'm not really sure how to describe it. The prose is simplistic, like a children's novel, the narrative is fantastic and full of wonder as in a fairytale or fable, but the meaning, while certainly not buried deep, really ought to mean more to adults than children.



The Little Prince tells the story of a boy from a planet so small he can walk across it in steps, and uses his broom to clean out his (dormant) volcanoes. He travels across the solar system and lands on earth, where he runs into a stranded pilot in the desert.

It's such a slim volume that to say anymore would be to reveal most of the narrative, but suffice it to say that it's principle charm is to present things from the wonderful, expansive and creative viewpoint of a child, unemcumbered by the compartmentalization of adult life.

It recalls a conversation I had with the young daughter of a woman I once worked with at a pharmacy. I forget, unfortunately, the little one's name.

She: Look at what I drew! Me: What did you draw? She: A cow. (proudly shows me a blank piece of paper) Me: Um, that's...um, where is the cow? She: It's eating grass, right there! Me: It's not there... She: It ate so much grass it exploded! (grinning)

***


Maus, by Art Spiegelman is the account of one man's survival through the Holocaust. Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize for it, and with merit - it is unique on many levels. It is a graphic novel, for one (that's a fat comic book, for any non-believers). Spiegelman cleverly renders the Jews as mice and the Germans as cats, which serves three-fold: it takes the edge off a somber tale without sacrificing sincerity, it ties neatly into a propaganda statement the Nazi regime issued against Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse (a symbol of America and democracy), and it also allows the writer to, in moments of heavier introspection, to break the fourth wall by presenting himself as a human wearing a mouse-mask. Spiegelman, naturally, has the Jewish speech patterns and neuroses embedded deep, and the voices ring out.

Above all though, it's the very personal and unfiltered story of the survivor (Vladek), and how this affected his relationships with his son (Art), his wife (Anja) and his second wife (Mala).

Highly recommended. Anyone else out there got some good reading going?

Loose ends

I mentioned a few things in some previous blogs that I probably won't have time to fully elaborate on now, but I'll put them out there just so someone knows.

Back to the future - 1984: New Australian Industrial Reform (IR) legislation was passed recently which introduced the Australian Workplace Agreement (AWA). AWAs, as my limited understanding allows, are contracts that employees negotiate individually with their employers - and these AWAs are not bound by any notion of "standard wage" i.e. each person is free to use lower wages as leverage to secure a position should they so desire. This clearly undercuts the aims of Worker's Unions, which exist to negotiate a minimum standard for workers as far as pay and conditions go.

Under the new legislation, the fact that any one person has negotiated an AWA with their employer is meant to be confidential, and should any other person openly expose this fact they are liable to prosecution and imprisonment.

I can see how this is meant to protect both the employee and employer, but at the time this struck me as frighteningly Orwellian. I understand now also the furore in the media that blew about when the sedition laws were also proposed - together they suggested ominous things for civil liberties.

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.