Keeping optimism alive

The advantages of getting injured during Chinese New Year (assuming that you're in a country that celebrates it).

1. You are guaranteed an ang bao.
If you're young, you'll probably get an extra large ang bao. If you're old yet unmarried and on the verge of no longer qualifying for an ang bao like yours truly, you get guaranteed one.

2. You can excuse yourself from any preparations.
This includes the spring cleaning, shopping, preparations for the reunion dinner and cleaning up afterwards.

3. You can excuse yourself from visiting any unsavoury relatives.
Don't like that uncle who has bad breath and asks for money every time the relatives get together?
"I can't go... my leg hurts."

4. You can guilt trip your parents into buying you anything you want.

5. All the tastiest morsels of food will probably end up on your plate.

6. You can order your siblings around like servants.
"I can't get up... get me some water!"

7. People will let you win at Mah Jong out of sympathy.

8. You get to sleep in late because you are "recuperating".

Well, i can't think of any others but feel free to add to the list. 8 is a prosperous number anyway!

Another reminder of increasing age

The new year. Another period to plunge into a regular existential crisis. Erhem. I mean, to review the past one year, to learn from one's mistakes and castigate oneself into the next century. *cough*

I mean, in hopes of improving oneself.

Resolutions? I don't make any. Stopped doing that in primary school. Why? Because i always come up with something that involves changing my personality.

Let me elucidate.

Procrastination has always been my forte. As a young student, i would aspire to be conscientious, to complete my homework and assignments ahead of schedule, and to study for tests and exams in advance. I swear in my 17 years as a student, that has never occurred. All that i managed to achieve was excellent short term memory (from countless last minute cramming sessions), questionable long term memory and a sizable amount of guilt and disappointment come the following new year.

I was 9 when the concept of  the new year resolution was first explained to me on new year's eve as my family camped in front of the tv watching the countdown fireworks. I gave up on it after 3 unsuccessful attempts.

So when i see someone my age twit something like "New year. Same goal. Renewed hope." I can't help but think that this person's IQ has plunged into the depths of the earth's core.

If one has had an entire year to realise a goal and was still unable to attain it, what are the chances that it's going to happen in the following year? 

Resolutions? I don't have any. Call me an unmotivated, directionless coward with no drive for self improvement. It's time for my free fall anyway.

A touch of death

Call for me once
And be comforted by my beguiling smile

Call for me twice
And you think you’ll feel better in awhile

As I tinker with your humours
You feel reassured of my skills

But haven’t you heard the rumours
That too much of my attention kills?

My presence is like a drug
Wondrous in small doses

Too much of it however
Encourages necrosis

So avoid me if you can
Stop wasting your breath

You don’t want me to linger
For I have a touch of death




i mourn for your passing, DW.

Updates

So... many new things happened to me this year. In no particular order:

1. New job... now a resident with 2 minions to boss around! I'm finally no longer at the bottom of the food chain.

2. New hobby... translating manga/novels for OSS.

3. New systems to hate: PICC lines for children forbidden in Land Of Setting Sun Hospital (hereby referred to as LOSS). Hospital in the home forbidden for children.

4. New demographic of patients... fatter, older, stupider, fouler but thank god i don't have to coddle them anymore!

5. New skill... smiling at people who are screaming at me.
Smiling condescendingly? Yes.
Wryly? Yes!
Infuriatingly? YES!!!
That's the whole point to begin with. The more i smile the angrier they get :D

6. New hate... physicians. In particular, geriatricians.

7. New routine... yet to be properly established: going to the gym.

8. New found disgust... fat women with abdomens dangling down to their knees and their bad odour from their inability to clean in between their skin folds.

9. New dislike... unaccredited registrars who don't have enough knowledge/cahones to make decisions.

10. New shoes... 2 inch work heels. I'm now part of the clickety-clackety tribe who announces their presence via sound before being sighted. Makes me look, feel and sound important.

Love Hate Relationship

The buzzing of my phone reminds me it's time to wake up. Except i've been awake for the past 20 hours.

A part of me groans at having to return for another 10 hour shift after having just left the goddamn hospital barely 8 hours ago.

My body, rife with snot, phlegm and an encroaching sore throat tells me that it's finally bedtime at 11am, having been on nights and late shifts ending at ungodly hours for the last 5 days.

The brain is in semi agreement, yet still whirring away, sustained on adrenaline.

The eyes must not close or i'll be toast.

My body clock is spinning around the different sleep patterns required to keep me awake during those ever cycling shifts. I hate that my life is now split between work vs non work.

Then again when has it ever not been?

Ever since i stepped out of my graduation robes and into a salaried position in the hospital it has always been that way. No, it was that way even in medical school. A good one third of my life is caught up in medicine. 8 f***ing years of it.

As much as i entertain hopes of leaving the field altogether, i realise the irony that it has very much become part of my identity. So deeply entrenched that i would be drifting in limbo if bereft of my occupation.

What else could i be possibly good at? The self doubts chew at the dichotomous nature of my ambivalent feelings.

I love the kids, i love the lumbar punctures, the suprapubic aspirates, the suturing, the pleural taps, all things procedural. Yet my loathing for all the surrounding bullshit drives me insane.

I am afraid.

Thinking is too dangerous. Time for a caffeine hit before i crash to the floor of the emergency department in a catatonic sleep.

The runs

Nothing works better as an alarm clock than having colicky pain, incredibly loud bowel sounds, a reflexive clamping of the anal sphincter and the alarming instinct that one must sit the ass down on the toilet bowl the very next second before the shit literally hits the fan.

I swear i have never gotten myself awake, tumble out of bed and scramble the 3 metres to the bathroom this quickly in any other circumstances.

The disbelief and relief is almost palpable when one actually makes it in time... again... for the xth time in the middle of the night.

Brilliant.

If dehydration doesn't incapacitate the person, then exhaustion and anxiety will. With the body in high alert mode 24/7 for massive explosions, it's not a wonder the fight or flight response has run the system haggard.

I've noticed another interesting fact over the years of experience with gastroenteritis. Normally, faeces just smells repugnant, but when one has the bowel runs, the smell actually induces nausea and sometimes vomiting as well.

Another miraculous way our body has designed for us to purge all toxins from the body, be it from the top or bottom end.

Enchanting.

So Lai, if anyone asks how i dealt with your departure, you can say that my body became to wrecked with grief that i had to take 3 days off to recuperate. ;)

Humour me

As i'm currently trying to get back into night mode for ED, i unintentionally began to recall the times when i would stalk the dark hallways of the hospital, file in hand, humming a tune.

During daylight hours, there are at least a couple of hundred medical staff around the hospital, but once it hits night time, the numbers dwindle down to a handful. 3 in emergency, 2 in ICU and 4 on the wards.

It is isolating, lonely, somewhat unsupported and it can get scary very quickly. When a patient is crashing, there is only so much help available.

Lady Antebellum's Need You Now never sounded more appropriate:

It's a quarter after one

I'm all alone and I need you now.

I said I wouldn't call but I lost all control and I need you now.

And I don't know how I can do without

I just need you now.

That was the theme of many of my conversations to my registrar during those 8 weeks.

Enjoy the song :)

Soul squasher

Our thoughts and conversation meander at night before bed.

On one sleepy evening as we lay in bed slowly giving in to the comfort of a warm blanket and full stomachs, the topic of not wanting to work came up followed closely by the notion of eloping into the wilderness and subsistence living, succeeded by the thought of living in trees and a sudden abrupt realisation:

I have not for the last 2.5 years thought about my dream of living in a treehouse.

I had always been enchanted by tree houses ever since i was a kid influenced by readings of The Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton, then by stories of elves building whole communities among trees most notably in the worlds of Raymond E. Feist and J. R. Tolkien.

So imagine my excitement when i actually visited a real one when i was in Vanuatu with Liyong all those years ago. I have now forgotten the name of the tree.

My astonishment lay in having forgotten all about it. Even watching the amazing computer generated graphics of home tree in Avatar twice did nothing to trigger this memory. Upon further recollection, it all began when i commenced my job hunting in final year.

Despite the sudden realisation and remembrance of my dream of living in a tree house, the greatest despair lies in the fact that i am no longer able to generate the same amount of passion and excitement at the thought of it. The brain immediately rejects the possibility of such an occurrence.

Medicine has become the destroyer of my dreams, the squasher of my soul, the leacher of my life, to have taken this away from me.

And yet, i cling desperately to my profession, being the coward that i am, unable to unchain myself from this chronic cycle of work.

Perhaps next year... or the next year... or the next year...

I am being moulded into an adult.

My Weight Loss Secret

Hurray for the end of my arduous 8 weeks of night shifts.

Here's my recipe for losing 3kg in 8 weeks:

1. Eat 2 meals a day.
2. Spend a good part of 12 hours walking.
3. Stress about patients trying to die in different ways
4. Stress about getting a job for next year
5. Turn your body clock upside down every 5 days

That should do the trick. Don't bother about the Atkins diet or exercising.

The plus side. Now i look good in jeans :D

Admittedly, there is much left to be desired. The lighting is pretty ordinary as well. But hey, at first glance it's eye catching enough, until one decides to take a closer look.

Now i just need to churn out more of these in place of buying presents before i return home for annual leave.

I guess i can't exactly bring my whole set of beads and tools with me on holiday either so it has to be done before i get onto the plane.

You can see the joy spilling out of my ears at the thought of going on holiday.

Where the heart belongs...

As my annual leave approaches, my thoughts meander around sunshine, warm balmy nights, the fragrance of freshly baked bread wafting tantalisingly from a bakery, smiles on familiar faces, a fervently wagging tail, swapping stories late into the night, gallivanting around town, speaking clumsily in a foreign tongue.

Ah... 2 weeks... so near and yet so far.

It seems strange how up to 5 years ago i was struggling with a sense of being uprooted. No longer tied to singapore, never belonging to malaysia and not remotely considering melbourne home. Being a student bestows a sense of transience, never really needing to think about the future beyond the coming year. Yet, as my student life has ended, the flow of events has led me to the present and my roots are getting progressively insidiously entrenched here.

I am no longer able to envision myself returning to singapore to further my career, even though whenever i return i'm hit with the strongest pang of homesickness. Thousands of what ifs flash through my head despite having gone through them multiple times in the past.

There are undoubtedly thoughts that are meant to left alone. Warm balmy nights, brilliant smiles and a wagging tail...

Hand me the crown would you?

So i've returned once again to brag about my procedural prowess. My technique with long lines is down pat and i've managed to maintain a 90% success rate of first stab success.

*massive undeflatable ego expanding exponentially*

So while i'm not at work and dying for procedures or surgeries to preoccupy my hands with because i haven't stepped foot into the OR for a year, i made these:

Got to channel all that digital dexterity somewhere!

Hopefully there will be more completed works arriving soon. I've got a design sketched out on paper for a necklace but can't seem to pin down the best material and technique for it so it's still on the drawing board.

On other inane random musings, i realised that i work in a hospital that peddles hope. The irony of having a cynic such as yours truly work in a children's hospital does not escape me. Perhaps deep down in the dark untouchable recesses of my sub-sub-sub-consciousness i'm an optimist afterall.

No matter how annoyed i get with nurses, parents, sometimes patients, at the end of the day if i see a cute baby who smiles at me, i feel that it's all worth it. Now i can say to my sis, "I can cuddle my patients too!"

Listening to Adam Lambert's album, his voice has versatility abound and the star power to evoke emotions. Pam's lewd graphic spiel about his "soul sucking" national tv pash which spawned legions of PWP aside, i find his songs addictive.

I guess another reason why i find him endearing is because he reminds me of a good friend/colleague/uni mate who is also tall, broad shouldered, hilariously witty and perhaps somewhat gay. Oh S, you make my life more colourful. :D

Hanami

As the rays of the sun extends it reach, encroaching insidiously with time, the winter breeze reluctantly relinquishes its grasp. Blooms tentatively peek from their buds before ecstatically erupting in unison, dancing and swaying in celebration of the departure of the frost. The worst has come and gone, it can only get better from here on.

Another year, another spring, another place, another cherry blossom.

Knock knock

Nobody is home in the space between my ears. So bear with me while i take a small hiatus.

The only thoughts that fill my mind are of sandy beaches, glorious sunshine and no work vs an empty bank account. It's almost time for my annual leave. Almost.

On other random stuff, it was the genial one with the silver white hair's birthday yesterday. I called home but i wonder what i should get her as a birthday present. Suggestions?

It always sounds better in song

If i lay here, if i just lay here, would you lie with me and just forget the world?

If this instance lasts forever and we would never grow old or hungry. If we never have to worry about eating to live and working to eat. The world beyond you would become irrelevant and i'd contentedly, finally, blessedly lose myself in you and only you.

I await oblivion eagerly. Come release my mind from its shackles. I shall revel in emptiness and fade away in the eternal sleep.

Paris-esque

Pardon me for the upcoming deluge of bimbotism. MOAO and i found a pair of comfortable $20 stretchable jeans at a sale!!!

*Kya~~~!*

Now i have 3 pairs of jeans.

Finding a cheap bargain for good quality clothes is my equivalent of a shopaholic experience. Hopefully, this trend of buying new clothes every month will cease, or my pockets will become significantly more empty.

On other matters, i have finally done my laundry, changed my bedsheets, vacuumed the entire house, and cooked an entire week's worth of food with the help of MOAO. I feel so accomplished. Anyone who knows me well enough will know that it will be at least another month before i repeat this process.

It is a well known fact among my bosom buddies that i detest house work. I do try to avoid it as much as i can. That's why i miss living with MOAO so much. Gone are the days of my magic sink and disappearing dirty dishes. Sigh.

When i become rich, i am so getting myself a maid so that i don't have to do an ounce of chores. Originally, my sister was going to be my super slave while she was staying with me for free in the country. But she couldn't take it for long and promptly flew back to Singapore and got herself a job within hours of getting off the plane.

So if you know someone who is bumming around, refusing to do a decent day's work, send them to me and i'll get them reformed pronto.

It's always too much or too little

Now that SBS is not fuzzy on my TV screen any longer, i've noticed that i end up watching more programs on it than any other channel. That's all the non-medical exposure to educational material i'm getting.

Well, that's more than i can say about my current exposure to medical education. I've not learnt anything since i started working, other than how to push paper, but that's another topic for discussion.

MOAO and i realised that especially at night, there are loads of foreign films, documentaries and thought provoking material that involve adult themes like homosexuality etc.

Tonight as we were flicking through the channels on one of those rare blissful evenings we get to spend together, we chanced upon a documentary on women who have are unfortunately too well endowed to the point of neck, shoulder, back aches.

Socially, the breast becomes the defining feature, and the first and foremost impression in a person's mind is of their huge mammary glands. It's so much harder to attain credibility in the work place because most people just assume that big boobs are equivalent to empty brains. But, somehow i envy them just a little, not for the aches and pains but man do they look good in their clothes when they are skinny elsewhere. It's like every man's dream to have a girlfriend with massive jugs.

It's the first time i've heard of a K cup.

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K.

A good 10 sizes up from me. Lai, i feel so puny and inferior.

The world is filled with cases of excess versus deprivation, such as the drought in melbourne and the floods in queensland, fat people dying from heart attacks, strokes and diabetes versus malnourished people living on less than $1 USD a day. There are women who have excessive breast tissue and then there are those who are like airplane runways like me.

If there was a higher power, why is it that there is such vast inequality and imbalance in the distribution of resources?

If only i could pair up with one of them and balance out our inequalities...... fat hope.

Note to self

You'll be amazed by what happened in a span of 1 week. My skin is so thick now, i can compete with a rhino.

I survive by making lists. Lists that i have to cross off or else i will get into serious trouble. Can you imagine what happens if i was meant to order a test but it didn't get done and then the patient deteriorated?

More updates this weekend. Looking forward to it.

Cold Feet

During the final semester, i prayed so hard for med school to be over. I was ready to be an intern.

I can admit patients, do referrals, order tests, write discharge summaries, put in IVs, do PR exams on alert patients. I was ready.

I was going to be the best intern in Said Country Hospital (SCH)!

Now i'm 2 weeks away from starting my job and all of a sudden i realise that i have forgotten all of my medicine.

Ask me anything, my most likely answer is "I don't know!"

I have the sudden inexplicable urge to study! But all of my books are packed into boxes.

Am i going crazy? Me, actually feeling a need to study!? This is insane! I'm must be going nuts! Why do i feel strangely inadequate?

Self Doubt is one of the greatest ghosts that haunts me.

Wii Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy Game!

Recently heard from an anaesthetist that the Wii game Marble Mania was shown to improve surgical laparoscopic/endoscopic skills in surgical trainees.

If that's the case, why not invent 3D simulation games of all laparoscopic/endoscopic procedures? That way we can all try our hands at "operating" at home and the worst we could do is to kill the "patient" and restart the game.

If there was actually such a program, i think that hospitals will incorporate that into the training program, just because it'd be a realistic substitute that poses no risks to flesh and blood patients.

I can just imagine myself doing a Lap appendicectomy and going, "Oops. Perforated the caecum. Oh crap she's haemorrhaging into her peritoneum. OMG what should i do? Shit... She's dead. Dang. I need to start from level 1 again. What? It was only mesenteric adenitis??!!!"

You can already appreciate the beauty of a simulation game.