On the road: New York City (a retrospective)

Part I: Fight and Flight

I left home in the strangest mood on Sunday. Part lack of sleep, part confusion, part anxiety, part denial. J left at some random hour after midnight and I’d gone to sleep thinking of maps. An hour later, I was awake, zipping up the suitcase, memorising subway lines and terminals and streets in Manhattan. There’s comfort in cartography, weight in direction.

My head’s been so full lately.

It was 6 in the morning so I took a taxi. The cab driver was talkative. I was his the first sober customer all morning, he told me. He was glad for the company. There was something mystical about the way he told his stories. Somehow the people in them never seemed to have a motive to their actions. It ran like a honeyed trap - a story with a purpose that isn’t revealed until the end. A born Scheherazade, a moral in each one.

He was the first of five brothers, he said. They were sent from Afghanistan by the skin of their necks, and with a lot of invested money. There, family meant everything and everyone contributed - even cousins he’d never met. That of course, meant vice versa - he gave back to family members in need. Especially the unmet ones. Some were surgeons in the UK; one was a software programmer for Microsoft. Two of his brothers stayed with him, and the younger one (roughly younger than me) was the laziest kid I’d ever heard of.

There was some history recounted of the Afghani people. He told me of a King who took back a promise made by an ancient line, the row over sold gold palace doors stolen from India; and always, the strength of The Word.

“My people always keep the word,” he said. “We have a saying: a man is not a man if he does not keep his word.”

The airport was quiet for seven in the morning. Toasted sandwich and chai latte choked down, I stared into space, drank water; felt like a commuter. The plane too off. I slept. I woke up. I tried to sleep again. I watched films, I watched TV, I read the news. When the All Blacks won the world cup I clapped with the other New Zealanders. I went through so many albums, I can’t even remember which ones I picked out.

The rest of it seemed like fragments of a dream: sleeping. LAX. It was grey in LA. While the plane awaited clearance, I stared sleepily out into the tarmac. The heavy fog made it seem like a dream world, and it reminded me of that Louden Wainwright song. Will told me later that if I’d looked I would have seen a lego city - and later, on the way back, when all the lights hit it I thought it was just a jumble of things; a poverty divide between the hills and flats. Sunset over New York - the delta and rivers, gold, most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. JFK - following signs. Penn Station, and waiting. Transitions from airport to airport, from airport to train, train to train, train to subway. Thinking about J. Meeting Mandy as she gets off the bus from Washington (6th and 23rd), following her home to Queens. Sleeping, always sleeping.

Everything goes in circles.

Then I woke up…in New York City.

Part II: Why I left

36 weeks of work, straight. Promises to friends. An unsteady peace. Must there always be a reason?

Part III: Manhattan

You never know what kind of traveler you are until you go to some strange city; this isn’t even the biggest test. New Yorkers, at least, speak English. You also never know how you are with loneliness until you go to a foreign country alone - this at least, I’ve previously assessed. Moving to Melbourne was the biggest test.

I wander around with J’s camera - sometimes purposefully. The subway is my best friend. A man prays for me (out loud, in front of me) in Times Square and I don’t say it to him, but it makes me want to go to church, find God. I go to mass in St Patricks, I go to Trinity and St Thomas. Towards the end I’m just looking for deep, quiet places, like always. I long for the sea.

By day 3, I’ve come down with Bronchitis and I spend the rest of my time in America infecting everyone.

It doesn’t stop me from going places though: I find Central Park on the most gorgeous day; I take a photo of the Flatiron Building (remembering Steitchen). I eat at Shake Shack. I see Mat Kearney at Webster Hall (and touch him, briefly); I meet Diane Von Furstenberg; I see Samuel L Jackson and Angela Bassett briefly as they come out of their Broadway show. I love the flowers in Bryant Park; I love pretty fairy lights, and gold in the buildings (so much gold detailing!). I see sold out Broadway shows. I do the museums (MoMA was ruined by a fever, and a 30 min wait in a snow storm).

Natasha is there a few days, waylaid by a cousin’s wedding. Nights with her are so warm, with dinner and the yummiest tea and wine cocktails, and cheese fondue in the Village. To get there, you have to pass by some famous musical places - Blue Note; Velvet Underground. I’m in awe, and I want to go to everything, do everything. Her little party before I leave is magical - she invited a few friends, and a visiting Kiwi over and it felt like a real New York gathering, so unlike the single, solo life that Mandy lives.

In contrast, nights with Mandy seem lonely. She’s busy with work, staying in and sleeping early. The cold makes her hibernate with take-away, which I have several nights a week, and I don’t blame her for not wanting to brave a snow storm to go out with me. On weekends her boyfriend comes over or she goes to DC; they’re in love, anybody can tell.

It’s so gratifying seeing your childhood friends live out their adult lives.

By the end I feel like a local: tourists ask me for directions and I give them accurately; I help others buy Metcards, direct them on subway lines. I no longer have to check a map to see where I’m going/which lines I should take. I jaywalk like a pro. Sometimes I fall asleep on the subway and jerk awake only to find I’ve, half asleep, made the right transfers. I know the way home by heart, from station to station to station.

The entire time I’m wondering: how come the streets on the map are so far apart, when in reality they’re so close? When I get home I find out that it is the opposite - most people who went to New York here found the blocks disproportionately huge. In my mind the world is bigger than it is, I guess. I’d never thought of it like that.

Part IV:  Massachusetts, and the weight of years

Dawn in Connecticut, snow in the trees, autumn leaves still hung - fog off the lakes, fog off the rivers; and the steam from the morning.

A South African man in front of me at the line to the bus that morning struck up a conversation about how they always say it’s only 10 minutes longer. Why 10 min? Short enough for people to be happy to wait; long enough to mentally prepare them to stand in the cold a little longer, fumble in their pockets for longer, smoke a cigarette in an empty lot. We made friends based on the fact that he thought my accent was English, and was completely appologietic because most New Yorkers think his accent is English and it usually infuriates him.

We had a long conversation about life overseas, his visitation down under, my home town (Auckland) and his (Johannesburg). Both cities, we agreed, were places people went only if they had a reason to go. He describes himself as one of the other types of people - people who moved to New York just to be in New York, as opposed to the ones who came for a reason. His life here was to look for purpose to justify this move.

Whatever I expected from Boston, it probably wasn’t the boredom I felt. The city was quaint, but I knew quaint from my time in Auckland. The Freedom Trail was soaked in death and graves, and old buildings that now looked renovated and modern. Even Revere’s cottage had a generic kind of feel to it - just another historic house, like anyone’s could have been.

Harvard Square, Harvard, the old bookshop, North church…

— all places that I thought would mean something to me but didn’t. It wasn’t lack of knowledge of American History either - I’d dabbled in that when I was a kid. Perhaps history needs to mean something to me for it to matter? America’s a young nation, perhaps the immaturity of its past was something I considered. No gravitas, no weight of years.

Don’t get me wrong: the place is beautiful; people are friendly. The houses are so quaint, and all the little flower boxes are to die for. Fenway Park was magnificent, even shut up in the off-season. I’d never seen so many Italian restaurants and Irish pubs. Clam chowder was delicious (so warm on a cold day). What was I expecting? A more Puritan feel?

On my last day there, I spent a considerable amount of time at the Harvard Bookshop, buying Siken (finally replacing that copy I gave away, so long ago, out of love), Northrop, Flynn and other poets that I’d years ago wanted to buy.

Harvard stood in the background, behind its gated walls. Houses of learning — I didn’t feel a thing. The campus was mostly known for its liberal Arts, which my life was so far away from. Debates and opinions about interpretable things…my academic life was nothing like that. The freshman dining hall did look like Harry Potter’s though - a considerable bonus to being snuck in. The freshmen looked so young though.

“Well of course,” Mandy had said. “We’re 6 years older than them.” She was in Boston on business, and I met her at the hotel that I was freeloading off her corporate perks with her. An Alumni of Harvard, she’d given me the quick once-over the night before.

“I miss my university days,” she added, with great nostalgia. “They were the happiest of my life.” Ironically, her business was to recruit Harvard graduates for her company.

Oh my God. Six years.

A sign on a highway read >2900 children had been killed by gunshot wounds in the States since 2010. Times that by three. Translate that into lines and wrinkles. Stick that onto a freshman’s face: the weight of half a decade, and then some.

Part V: The Windy City, and impending doom

I flew into Chicago as the sun was setting. The trip was unplanned - tickets booked a total of two days ago, and Michelle notified just a day before. The wind off Lake Michigan is the coldest I’ve felt in a while, although it’s comparable with snow in New York. I’ve never actually seen the lake and nor will I when I leave the city. On the way in I listened to all the Chicago related songs on my iPod, of which there are a remarkable many (more than there are ones about New York City).

Michelle is S.’s high school best friend, and it’s only now that I realise how unusual it is that I stayed with her. She’s at medical school now, a vastly different experience in the States than it is in Australia. The amount of stress she feels every day made me grateful for my own education. 

Her appartment in downtown Chicago is a blessing. Michigan Ave is right next to us, and everything is just a small stroll away. It makes a huge difference. I fall for the deep dish pizza, the food, the wider streets. Most importantly I fall for the Architecture: I literally spend my entire two days there dashing around in a cab to Oak Park, taking the L to the Rookery — Frank Lloyd Wright tourism. I visit Hemmingway’s birth house, I take photos of private property.

At the Rookery the good looking African-American doorman with the charming accent spends a lot of time showing me the original tiling, laughing at my enthusiasm. He surprises me with the offer: next time I’m in Chicago, I have to go there first and he’ll show me around.

Michelle keeps me good company when she’s not at medical school. I love her enthusiasm for the All Blacks, and all her memorabilia. We spend a decent amount of time on looking for ways she can try and find the limited edition Bvlgari All Blacks watch while waiting for a table at The Purple Pig.

The city is drenched with an invisible threat - Michelle keeps pepper spray on her at all times, and warns me where to go and where not to go in daylight to avoid getting mugged or worse. On the last day my nose bleeds and bleeds and I ruin her jacket so we dump it down the rubbish chute like a dead body.

Deep down I pick Chicago over New York - the bigger spaces, the broader streets. It’s a dying city, or so Been says, but I still love the echo of the industrial age apparent in its fabric.

Is it possible to feel nostalgia for a city that you’ve never been to? I missed the Architecture class girls so much, and all the times we’d daydreamed about seeing Wright’s great buildings (or at least just me because I picked him for my project; but it could apply to Gaudi or anyone else).

I could travel forever to see these buildings, to dream of a house that I could one day live in that is as beautiful as some of the ones I’ve only seen in photographs.

I’ve only ever dreamed of a home.




Part IV: The return

I return to New York in early morning - a cab called by the concierge of Michelle’s building and a sly sneak into La Guardia. Mandy’s still in Washington visiting her boyfriend, so I’m lugging a heavy bag around Koreatown looking for a storage place most of the time. The storage place is the 5th floor of an extremely seedy looking building but the girl at the desk is lovely and looks up doctors clinics for me. I’m coughing up my lungs like crazy, and the New York chill isn’t helping.

A last look at Central Park, a walk around the Met, some shopping — suddenly I’m on a plane to LAX, looking at the outskirts of a great city. I could live in this city, but I think I would be less happy than I am now. It made me realise just how happy I am in my real life.

But oh, it’s New York and oh, I’d give a few years of my life to learn the lingo there :)

J meets me at the airport with flowers, a little late, having gone to the wrong terminal. How strange, I hadn’t expected him to be there because I expected him not to check airport landings like I or other people might do, or figure out that it was a domestic landing.

He always argues that he is mature and grown up, and he knows how to do things - which he does. But he doesn’t do things with detail, always approximates which in my world is not doing something at all.

We are such different people, it’s startling…

But it’s flowers and it’s sweet, and I don’t care he’s late. I’m just happy to see him because I’m home and because he’s there, and I’ve missed him :). Because I said I’d try and sometimes it’s easier than others. Because he’s happy. Because he looks so charming with flowers. Because holding him feels right.

That night we fight like we always fight and I’m tired again but there are always moments like that and it never pays to remember the worst ones at any one time.

Because things worth having are hard work, so I’m trying.

The worst start to anything, but still. A start.

Driving to Fitzroy through North Richmond has always been the strangest exercise. The traffic there is crazy - Victoria Street at any time of night, let alone a Friday. People were out in lots despite the cold — and it has been cold, compared to the thirty degree heat of the previous days. I picture it and just want to stay in bed.

Recently I made a decision, the consequences of which I am currently trying to process. I think I lost a lot of people’s respect on this day - possibly a little of my own for being so weak. Too weak to save someone some serious grief, one could argue. Too weak to distinguish my own wants and needs from someone else’s superimposed, like always.

Possibly too weak to love someone and walk away because (at the end of the day) I know life gets in the way - older, wiser me. I should be the responsible one. Also, I love so easily.

Two weeks. Two weeks.

As Coral would say, is it actually love if it’s only two weeks? Compassion, empathy, the desire to comfort — all these are sometimes called love too.

But honestly, aside from the textbook answers to things, I was thinking that living a flawless life was dull. So what? Life is messy. People go for the things they want. Desire is messy - stains bedsheets, stains lives. I’ve avoided so much of life trying to stay mess free since the early years.

I did this. On my own. And I will deal with this on my own, whatever happens. I’ll see it through.

Love is still the dirtiest word I know.

Head:heart ratio of people I know

Catrina: 60:40
Been: 95:5 
Me: 30:70

Guess who has the messiest personal relationships?

So much to do

1) Baby socks x2 (done)
2) Send thank you card
3) Drop attendance forms to Peter James
4) Flight booking
5) Email the people I haven’t emailed back in the last 6 months
6) Laundry
7) Vacuum my room
8) Spring clean
9) Pertussis vaccination
10) Hand over my work
11) Actually go to work regardless
12) Pay rent

Transitions

I.

The visiting consultant, Nancy, is flying back to China again this week. She greeted me with hugs in her last week, since I’d spent the weekend helping with her research statistics. She was constantly feeding me too. We’d just gone to dinner with one of her previous residents, and a cardiology resident and I am driving her back. 

“You must be excited to see your son again,” I’d said, when I’d parked outside her house. Her street was dark, lined with trees and to turn around I’d three-pointed in the driveway of one of the larger, gated houses. Not that it was one of those kinds of streets. It was just a beautiful house, all silent and glowing from the windows.

Her little boy is all she talks about. He’s adorable. Handsome, too. I’d seen photos on his first day of school, when she’d been jittery on ward round and we’d asked why.

“Yes,” she said, hesitantly. Then she made to say something else, stuttered, and changed her mind. “I’m just…anyway. Yes. I just tried not to think about it.”

“Why not,” I asked.

“You wouldn’t understand.” She gave a sigh and waved her arms impatiently, brushing off the subject.

I shrugged. My little brother was 4 when I left him. It’s amazing he didn’t get stranger danger all these years, because I only go back to see him once a year. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what it might be. “Is it because you’re scared he’ll be different around you because he hasn’t seen you in ages?”

She suddenly jerked up. “Yes! That’s exactly it. —” Then she began to pour everything out — everything, not just this thing. Her fears about her son, about parenting him. How much she loved him. I unbuttoned my seatbelt and turned to listen. It was hard to tell if she was crying — the tree covered the passenger side in shadow but she sounded like her nose was blocked at some points. I tried to locate a tissue box but remembered it was in the back of my car. 

Her little boy intrigued me. It sounded like the kid’s a genius - one of those old souls who seems a little too good for the world. At the same time, his own reactions at age 3 and 4 and even at 7 remind me of things my mother used to say that I did. My attention to detail. Even my earliest memories are of small details: dipping my hand down in a crack in a trampoline, and the texture of tyre grease. The words on a sign (a book shop) that my mother and I were walking past. Dragonflies (at eye level). Oily fingers from those deep fried crouton sticks.

My mother had worried that the world would eat me up. She’d always say to me, “Toughen up, you’re too sensitive,” or “Snatch your toys back” when I’d cry in her lap at night about how someone took my things that way.

It seemed funny suddenly, watching Nancy wring her hands in love and frustration and fear. My mother, way back then — is this what she might have done to one of her friends?

If I could talk to my mother then, what would I say to her? I wish the old her could see me now to save years of worry. Of course, she’d worry regardless. It’s what you do if you have something to lose. As a mother, I’d be a wreck. To love something that much again - to have something from which the loss of I might never recover from…

I put my hand on Nancy’s arm. I wanted to say something reassuring about the future, but there’s nothing reassuring about the unknown as a doctor. So I told her the best thing my parents ever gave me was a happy childhood. Something to cling onto in the darkest, coldest days. That the internal life, when it was caging, would calm by the thought of that. That mythical thing called love, when things are forgotten or there appears no reason to believe it’s possible. It’s possible. We carry on.

Before she got out of the car, she hugged me - a long, relieved hug. 12 years difference - we were both born in the year of the dragon and we were very similar. She often told me that I was a lot like her, at least in terms of early career events.

She is flying back today. I hadn’t seen her since that night. Despite repeated assurances to visit if possible, I have a feeling that we’ll never see each other again. It’s strange, the people who walk in and out of our lives, and what they leave there. It makes me wonder if I’ve left deep imprints in others’ lives I’ve never been in.



II.

It’s later in the week. The night’s gotten colder, though this time no longer blamed on sea air. Outside the tea lights are blurred behind the glass.

I’m curled up in a chair, happy. Overwhelmingly so, really, at how well the day’s gone. Number one: Brighton had been lovely. A calm, peaceful few hours and I was surprisingly cheered up about it. Number two: someone else had driven, so I could have drinks (something I’ve not done for ages, having driven everywhere possible in recent memory).

I’d been to Brighton earlier that day, just as the sun set. C, a friend of S’s from school whom I’d met once at her house in New Zealand, had invited me to a beach property for a BBQ co hosted by S’s ex (Also an S), whom S had left me for. Athena’s a mutual friend of ours, and in the recent months Athena had been here I’d seen this girl a handful of times. I hadn’t seen C for a long time, and had always been meaning to catch up. She is doing 4th year now, in the same course as me. It’s the hardest year in the curriculum, and I wanted to ask her if she had any questions. More people fail 4th year than every other year, and averages get dragged down constantly.

I’d clearly moved on in life, but a stubborn part of me just wanted to segregate the past from the future.

Athena’s boyfriend, would later say when I explained that Athena had been watching the rugby with me the same night that she was meant to be at S’s place, with great confusion, “Have the two worlds collided?” He knew both S and S together through Athena, because they’d worked together for a long time, and were close. For a long time there was some kind of unwritten rule that made Athena feel the need to warn me whenever S would be at the same event as me, even though I never let it stop me going to things for friends. I actually had nothing to do with the rule itself, it was just something Athena seemed to invent for herself.

“I should go,” I’d said for the nth time that morning, while icing ninja-bread men (not a typo) at Renny’s place.

“Just go,” she’d said.

“It starts off with a BBQ,” I’d said. “It might be an off gathering next. But then you just passively absorb details about someone’s life over time and suddenly you’re just..in their lives. Or they’re in yours. Whatever.” I thought about all the details of S’s life that I’d known from mutual friends and S over the years. How she wanted to move to Melbourne two years before she did it. How her dream had been to study English at the university of Melbourne here. Some of her relationships after S (back when she was rooming with Gaayathri, a good friend of mine). All details that just happened to crop up in passing, not all of it intentionally told to me. It was ridiculous.

But all my whining was just whining about something I had already made up my mind about.

I’m at a cafe in Glen Waverley, and it’s freezing outside. The day had turned on itself, bitter winds coming inland - at first I thought it had been Brighton but even here it’s frosty. Jason, the kid from the respiratory lab, is with me. I shouldn’t say kid - he’s only two years younger than me - but it feels like it. Two years difference is an eon. Does time accelerate/decelerate at will? It makes me feel old.

He reminds me of a strange combination of people I’ve known in the past, including myself. Or perhaps his current situations just reminds me of something that happened to me once, that I wish had had a better outcome. We’re incredibly different in personality after all - in fact probably the exact opposite. Our moral compasses are way off.

It did make me acknowledge that I’m drawn to people with familiar sounding stories though. Recently at work I’ve been finding myself struggling with people who have been in similar situations as me. I feel myself wanting to wrench them by the collar, shake them, and tell them how stupid they are. Nicely. “He won’t ever love you.” or, “Have some self respect!”.

Probably an inappropriate way to feel about other people’s lives sometimes, but there you go.

I seem to be having similar conversations to this one with many people over my life. In fact, I feel extremely good at these kinds of conversations and cheering people up after break ups.

Then I realised: I’m a good at helping people through transitions because that’s pretty much how others have treated me in relationships. Someone transitioning them through parts of their life before they find someone they really want. Inadvertantly, obviously, because nobody does that kind of thing on purpose, but it’s what ended up happening nonetheless. 

Argh.

Epiphanies are few and far between these days. Why are they never good ones, like they used to be?

Tastes like sunshine

Having a slack rotation as the last rotation that I’ll ever do as a medical student has its advantages. When I leave hospital it’s around 3 or 4 and the sun’s still out. When I drive through the parking lot of the supermarket on the way home the horizon is painted in all the different hues of gold. People walking back to their cars become angels, light halos all around them as they laugh or gesture with their hands (also ablaze). It feels cinematic. Happy ever after. However much I love New Zealand, its sunsets have got nothing on Australia’s.

Spring is well and truly here: the white flowering trees have shed their blossoms in sparce showers and have redressed in lime green foliage. It’s with happiness that I accepted the clipped wildflowers that an old woman gave me during a Meals On Wheels run. On the same day, I named plants in a nursing home garden with a woman who perpetually thought she was pregnant. She knew a lot about plants - we went through all her old photos, kept in an old Kodak sleeve. Hydrangeas, she’d point out — hollyhocks (I’d never seen a picture of a hollyhock before, only in poems). “I was pregnant in this photo. About to give birth.” she’d say, pointing to every one. They spanned decades. She was thin as a stick in every one.

Dr. B., geriatrician extraordinaire, has a way with the elderly. Watching him, I suddenly understand how some people could be bewildered at why I love Paediatrics. Children and I just click. They like me. I adore them. It’s the same way that Dr. B. is with a 90-something year old demented man — something I could never be.

He smiles and tells me that I’ve done a good job, pointing at me down the corridor halfway walking away — one finger, one arm, one quirked eyebrow with his smile to show he was serious. “Good job. I like the way you’re examining your patients.”

Here’s looking at you, kid.

Having amazingly generous and kind registrars, consultants and residents has been something I have been extremely lucky and privileged in getting my entire medical training. It makes me embarrassed and ashamed - there are so many things I missed on examination, and it makes me want to work harder to fit into the shape of that high regard.

Here’s a scary thought: the next time winter ends, I would have been a doctor for just over half a year.

“You should do Geriatrics,” Dr. K announces, halfway through his conversation with a social worker. “You think like a geriatrician.”

He’s young, blonde - he could be one of those football players people idolise in his younger days but Diana (a fellow student) later pointed out that he was slightly too short. He’s another one of the consultants.

His enthusiasm is infectious, as is his perchance for strange offhanded comments. Another one of his bizarre pronouncements is, “Every time I see someone with you, they’re depressed.” — this was after 1 lady announced she was going to kill herself out of the blue, the next lady was so low she wouldn’t even talk to us and the third person (as if to prove his sentence about me correct) had the family secretly coming to us with concerns of her ending her own life if she were to go home.

Three out of three.

It’s afternoon, and ward round with Joyce and I. I’m fiddling with a folder, considering the old woman we’d just reviewed. She was also depressed. Anyone could see it in her face 10 metres away. Dr. K., who with each interaction, seems less like his body stereotype and more like a all round good guy, is always especially concerned with mood. 

Not just because it’s a medical issue. He genuinely cares, which makes me like him. He crouches at the feet of patients, hands on their hands, looking up into their eyes.

“What do you think?” he’d asked us, chewing his lip. As if he’s not sure, when in fact he definitely knows and wants to boost the confidence of trainees by asking a relatively simple answer. The sign of a great teacher, and a generous individual.

When he announces that my brain seems to work like a geriatrician’s, my jaw hinges open, like in a cartoon. It’s a tremendous compliment, but a strange one. Geriatrics is the least glamorous, least sought after medical profession on my list of medical specialties. In fact it’s on the bottom of a lot of people’s lists.

It’s certainly on the bottom of mine.

Dr K. studies me for a beat: “I’m going to entice you away from Haematology.” He walks happily down the hallway towards the next patient.

I look around for Joyce, whom the comment didn’t seem to include. She just shrugs. Another day in geriatrics, I guess.

I give into the blush that had been threatening to blossom over my face.

So. Geriatrics?

As soon as I considered it, I balked. Oh my goodness, never.

I’m driving home from a rehab site visit when I get a message on my phone. It’s only mid-afternoon, so I pull over, wind the window down and decide enjoying the sun a little longer is probably for the best. After all, I’m only going off to do more work in some dark and gloomy indoors place - why not take my time?

It turns out to be from Jason, a lovely boy at respiratory scientist from the lab. He’d messaged to say that a patient from when I was on Respiratory Medicine had come in to get some follow up tests, and while there had said that I was cute.

Confused as to who the patient might be, I was pleasantly surprised that it was a relatively young Masters student I’d met in outpatient clinic — the one with a German accent (I have a soft spot for quiet German and boisterous Irish and Scottish accents).

I’d been expecting it to be one of the cheeky elderly men - the ones who say these things with a twinkle in their eye. Mostly they would have mistaken me for a nurse.

“Thought I would make your day and smile :)” Jason messaged back, when I expressed how surprised I was.

I’d been expecting some kind of funny answer. Not something half as sweet. It made me realise how jaded I’d become — humour isn’t the only way to respond to things, after all. I’d just forgotten the rest of them. 

Twenty one: so young. So sweet. Saying sweet things to random people he’s only met a few times - it makes me jealous. I wish I could say be that careless. Rewind time, or retrain myself to open up again.

When forced to choose between a healthy, happy person and a damaged, cruel thing I feel gravitated to the latter? The person who doesn’t call, ever. The person who messages you at midnight to ask you over for “wine and conversation” out of the blue. The one who you know would never walk up to you and initiate a conversation in daylight if there were cooler people than you around. 

Things to wonder about in winter. But it’s spring now, and I’m gladder than I should be over everyday things.

Happy warmer climate to all :) x

The long goodbye

It has been an entire week of aged care. That’s 4 days of referrals for rehab vs. residential care and a visit to Alzheimer’s Australia. 

What I hadn’t expected about site visits was the element of field trip it had to it. The Alzheimer’s Australia office is in an old colonial house, one of 3 bought in neighbouring properties by the organisation and done up (or preserved). The gardens were spectacular, although the back had been converted into a car park. Inside, it reminded me exactly of the building in its sister organisation in my hometown. A stairwell, a resource cupboard converted from an old side room. The stained glass windows. Wooden walls. Even the smell was the same.

Back in school in New Zealand, I used to volunteer for Alzheimer’s Auckland. Sue had had me making up information packs and in this way, nothing I’d learnt on the day was completely new. In my spare time back then I’d read through them all. Alzheimer’s Australia used similar font and layout.

I’d been passionate about geriatrics then (I must have been 16, 17). My immediate neighbours were mostly elderly. I’d visit Gloria sometimes after school, for fun. She played scrabble every Tuesday. She had many photos in her home. I had grandparents, whom I loved. They hid chocolate in their room, and it was always a game to find it. When an elderly woman down the street moved away to a nursing home I hand wrote her a note. We didn’t know each other, but she would give me lily cuttings when I walked past her garden - a beautiful garden, with the prettiest white lilies. They demolished her house after she left.

Sometimes, I remember my great-grandmother from when I was 5, in China, and that room in the corner where she lived. She liked to comb her hair. I would clamber to her in the morning demanding hard salted crackers in return for kisses. 

It reminds me of House Of God - the book by S. Shem: I used to love old people. Now, I feel tired whenever I think of them.

“Never grow old,” one woman said this week. She was over 100 years old and as sharp as a knife, although her hearing had also gone a little. Her eyes were blind. She had reached up to me to touch my face but had found the stethescope prongs in my ears instead. She meant to feel me for age, I knew. She’d said, shocked, when she realised I wasn’t some nurse and that I was part of the medical team, “A doctor?! You sound awfully young to be a doctor.”

It’s true. I know I have a young sounding voice, although one of my family friends had remarked when I was 13 that I’d lost the baby quality to it. A woman’s voice. What I learnt over the years was that it sometimes took on a naive, guileless lilt and that knocked years off it.

There are only three times in my life that a patient has tried to reach for my face. This was the third time. All were elderly. First had been an old man in Emergency who suddenly cupped a hand to my cheek when I finished taking his history - I had been 19, taken by surprise. The second time had been years ago in Haematology, when the other lady had required sedation to undergo a bone marrow biopsy, deliriously joyful (an unusual thing to be delirious with).

The woman this week - the centurion - had looked so anxious. I was visiting her to assess her for discharge placement: rehab vs nursing home care. It’s at terrible thing to remove someone from their houses forever. On Aged Care I’ve had time to think about it more. What it’s like to give up all your possessions and live in a room. A little like my life - everything crammed into the bedroom. Except worse. They only have a few shelves, that’s it. A few shelves for all of their lives. Reminders, trinkets.

I tried to placate her with the truth: “When I’m your age, I only hope to be as sharp as you.” I said, bending down over her to listen to her heart. Her bedside cognitive score was completely normal.

She clasped her hands around both of mine. “Never live to my age.” she rasped, pulling me down. The conversation had been pleasant before then, but now she appeared to be tearing up. “It’s a terrible thing, to be old. To outlive your contemporaries.”

“Never get old,” another man had said to me the other day. “It’s at terrible thing.”

“Stay beautiful,” another had said once in outpatients, in front of Dr. L. “Stay a pretty little thing forever. Don’t age.”

Some people say that they cried when they visited the Alzheimer’s organisation. I had sat in the room wondering what about, until they put on that DVD, ‘The Long Goodbye’. It’s a documentary about people living with Alzheimers, and the impact it has on their families.

I teared up. Loving the ghost of someone - an echo of who they were. Carers are amazing people.

Perhaps all that’s left after that is our rawest nature. Sometimes I wonder, who would I be once the rest of me has been stripped away?

They always say that dementia is disinhibiting. People revert to underlying personalities, underlying instincts. I met a man once in a neuropsychiatric ward who was obsessive about clocks. In his younger days he’d always run his household like clockwork, fixing things, tinkering with odd jobs. Now he was here because his wife was being driven nuts by his constant taking things apart and putting them back together wrongly. He hoarded parts that somehow he couldn’t fit back and got angry when she tried to move them. Everything had an order, but he no longer understood it.

The second patient I ever met, Val* (not real name), had the biggest bluest eyes in a nursing home at the base of a snowy mountain. She’d cried and told me not to let them take her mother away in a little girl’s voice and I’d held her hand. She was in her late 90s. It was a sunny afternoon but it had chilled me to the bone. She had the look of a terrified child, and I had just lost my childhood. It was a strange moment.

Looking back, that visit had shaken me. I’d had an awful thought that I’d be just like her when I am her age, returning to the me that I had been when I was sitting with her. At that time, I’d been spending most of my nights crying either on the inside or outside. I’d loved someone a lot — too much. A kind of love that changes a life, in some way. I’d loved someone else in a different way. Both were people who couldn’t love me the way I wanted them to. I’d suddenly seen myself as a 90-something year old mumbling to strangers: “It hurts. I love you. Come back. Tell me you love me. You made a choice. You can’t say there was no choice. You chose her.” Helpless phrases. Helpless things.

‘What would I cry about at 92?’ I’d written, ‘What memory would I be stuck in? The time when I was 15, in the summer? One evening sitting in S’s car beneath the streetlamp? In the park with N on the grass, feeling well fed and lying on my front saying, “You always seem to know what you’re doing.” Or drying the wildflowers and weeds upside down off my door handle with ribbon? Would it be the night I was floored by this desire to cease to exist, simply (not morbidly)? I want to do something to fix myself up. (But what)?’’

It seems like a lifetime ago.

I’m glad things have changed for the better, with the help of some of the best people in the world by my side. :) I’m ever gladder that it’s Spring and that the sun was out today again. It’s always better to do the more difficult jobs  in warmer months. Then you have something to look forward to, like daylight when you go home, and sangria if you are like me and can hop off at any time really (I always seem to stay though).

Aged care is a hard job, and requires a lot of patience. I admire geriatricians everywhere.

A person, a nation

Spring crept up on me in the form of blossoms on the skeleton trees and mornings of not waking up freezing to the core. The first time it happened had been a dream. The second day it had been a wonder. The third, it had been joy.

I came home one afternoon to discover that the skeleton trees outside each house on the boulevard was in fact an apple blossom tree. I’d moved during Autumn and they had already been bare by then. A week later the entire place was filled with white flowers and petals on the driveways. The sunsets are later now, and when I come back the sky is molten gold, drowning me; drowning everything.

It’s almost a month since I last wrote anything but the time has passed by so quickly. I’m doing Aged Care now, which at this particularly hospital that I’m in, is actually a nurse-run assessment service for appropriateness to rehabilitate/place.

I’m so bored that I literally spend up to 4 hours of the day sitting and staring into space, waiting for the phone call to tell me when to turn put to the once-a-day Geriatrician ward round. Inevitably it’s at the end of the day and I’m expected to hang around on call until whenever he/she comes in.

Respiratory medicine has been … for lack of any word to better describe it… fun. Extremely fun. The consultants were all individually lovely - especially Dr. L, who had been my registrar three years ago. He’d had a reputation for being stand-offish amonst the students and most people didn’t like his service, but I liked Respiratory then and so I persisted.

It turned out that he was just one of those people who took time to warm up to people, and when he did open up he was extremely personable. He would become one of my favourite registrars. We had bonded over common hobbies. Even after I rotated off to another specialty he would sometimes come up to me in the corridor and ask if I had seen this or heard of that, all related to the things we liked doing.

I’d not expected to see him. In fact the surprise was evident in both our faces when I walked in one Radiology meeting and there he was - same person but in a grey suit. Coke Zero in his hand (there is never a time - not even on ward round back then - that he would be without this installation). When I left his wife had been expecting their first child within weeks. This time when I came on it turned out that he’d just had his second one within weeks too.

Watching him as a consultant — I felt so proud, even though I had nothing to do with it. He was a good consultant. Someone I would want my mother to see if she had a Respiratory/sleep problem. When I left we had both hovered around Outpatients chatting to each other, to the team about irrelevant things. I wanted to say something unprofessional and personal like that I’d miss him, but it could be misconstrued. Besides. You never hug or say you will miss your consultant.

But I would. Miss him, I mean.

It lead me to think about the registrars and various colleagues who I’ve had over the years, and the teams I’ve been on. Perhaps I have been watching too many historical films these last few weeks - the old English and Middle Ages ones, about loyalty and people dying for each other in gorey battlefields and on quests. It always made me wonder (because I’m selfish, and it seems ridiculous to my generation in general) - what sort of person could possibly inspire the kind of loyalty that would make people willingly do things like lose life and limb for them (in the Middle Ages) or go out of their way to do things for them (in the work place/in life).

Dr. L. made me realise that there are some people you meet in life, who leave some kind of impression on you that you can’t explain. Dr. L. himself hasn’t really inspired me to do anything/be anyone, and hasn’t particularly affected any event in my life. He didn’t do much teaching, trusting me to do my own learning. He taught me about MSLTs once and now whenever I think of them, I think of him. I wouldn’t want to die for him obviously…but I would just want to work for him/with him and do jobs with great enthusiasm and willingness even at some personal cost. He is just someone who I was happy to be around.

Dr. A., the Respiratory registrar also reminded me of that kind of person for his effect on others - his workers. Nancy, the visiting consultant from China, who has duties just like a medical student but with the experience and brain power of a consultant, specifically was saying that one of the things she had learnt was Dr. A.’s profound effect on his environment. His unique way of getting people to do things for him, and want to do it.

You don’t have to be a loud, rousing leader to inspire that kind of loyalty in others. Like a patriotism to a distant homeland that one has never seen.

I guess the more you’re exposed to the work place, the more you see it.

Perhaps there are these kinds of people in our personal lives too, but then I think it is called something else.

Either way, it’s a privilege. :)

As fatal flaws go

It’s been a while since I’ve been out to any popular venue in the Melbourne night scene, and a while since I’ve been out in general. Spice Market is definitely a venue worth going for - its decor was decidedly Asian, although it was advertised as Moroccan and Turkish. I didn’t mind. It was pretty. Candles lit a little slope of statues holding candle-holders.

I’d been a little disappointed about my job offer this week. Admittedly, it was a close second to where I wanted to end up, and it is an amazing organisation but…

…I still felt hard done by.

Hence, one entire week of self pity. I’m still unhappy about it now, but the gratitude of being employed next year is starting to flicker in me this week.

One day I had 4 glasses of wine, feeling like an institution had broken up with me. It’s not that I’m not grateful about my job, but I’d been disappointed. The hospital I really wanted to go to had rejected me, and it was gut wretching not only because I realised I had somehow taken a position there for granted.

My resident had been the sweetest all week, especially the first few days, offering me days off and saying while I was struggling to juggle stacks of files (because I was determined to keep turning up to class, regardless), that he understood.

I thought of him. I thought of the bone marrow registrar, the way he said I was beautiful in a round-about way, unintentionally (a slip). The way he told me it was ok to feel sad when something sad happened on the ward. The way he had made everyone smile around him, all the time, and his kindness. The way I realised that my fear of him was mostly because I liked him. The way I answered questions stupidly because I was nervous.

“I need to stop falling in love. I think I like people who can comfort me somehow. That’s not a good reason to like someone.”

Been said, “Ten points to you. No, make that a hundred.”

Then I rambled about some random other things that made sense only to me, probably.

The next day my mouth felt dry, and I’d had very little sleep. Getting up at 7am was abhorrent, but I wrinkled my nose and did it anyway. 

It was cold, so cold. An unnatural fog covered the entire shire. My car (which needs servicing) has started making strange fluttering noises when started on chilly mornings).

At work, I considered the resident. The initial itch of being drawn to him had faded as soon as the words left me the previous night, appeared on the conversation screen and flashed across Been’s computer monitor, a whole country away. Like indecision. Like fear that I’m being confused by a need that shouldn’t be there.

I shouldn’t like him, but I do.

I had a flashback to lunch at the previous hospital, the previous resident having run off to do a job and the bone marrow registrar and I at the table. The sun was in my eye so I leaned my head onto the coffee cup and let my fringe fall into my face. He was telling me a story, I was considering the world and how I could be him in a few years time.

So I asked him if he was happy.

Dust was falling from the big hall, the noise cut out. Yes, he said, I guess. I mean, yes. I’m happy. He answered in a different way to what I meant. Incompletely. But I suppose it was a strange question. When he smiled, he had smile lines around his eyes.

The moment ended. The current resident stood, handed me the morning list, said good morning sweetly. I said good morning back. Leaned on the door frame read the names of inpatients.

Kindness. Is that it?

The bigger question is, what is it that makes me so inconsolable, so devastated? All the time. And how do I make it stop?

I have a job next year!

:)

Water and earth

It’s 1:28am. I’m sitting cross legged on my chair, fan heater on beneath me (it’s too hot to lower my legs to the ground, which I do when I dash inside from my car). I’m listening to a song called ‘burning river’, by a New Zealand boy that a friend knows. An empty wine glass with red residue, papers, a coffee mug with a spoon inside (used for ice cream), a bottle lie scattered around papers I haven’t sorted yet.

Sorry for not writing. I’ve been sick. But more than that, in my last week of Haematology (last week), I didn’t quite have the heart to. Bone marrow transplant was too depressing in some ways; people’s stories were too personal. This week I started Respiratory in a different hospital. I still see Prof S. around, because he is also working in this new hospital, strangely. I’m so shy, I tentatively wave and hope he waves back, and I know it’s just rude not to talk to him but there’s always a little fear in love for me. Even professionally.

An old high school friend, A, moved to Melbourne this week to start her working life. We go way back, to the very first day, the very first class. To S., who I credit to making me grow up in a short space time, and later after my life came to be here, in this city, to the girl in red scarf.

To be honest, I had been nervous. Catrina put her thumb on it before she left for the UK: when you move to a place for the first time, you become territorial. It’s suddenly your city, to people back home. It’s safe. You go back to this place, live a compartmentalised and somewhat secretive life (secretive only in the sense that it’s impossible to talk about everything that goes on in your day to people back home).

This old friend happens to be the kind of person who has the amazing talent for taking something and making it her own. In school, I would recommend a book to her, then weeks later someone would come up to me and ask me if I had read the same book, because A. had recommended it to them, and that the whole school attributed her for such a fantastic suggestion. Even having dinner with her and her friends, taking them to some of the restaurants I had taken her her previous visit, it was amusing to see her still the same, making recommendations on the menu to the others who had never been. It always used to annoy me a little, but I’ve come to realise that it’s just that we have different personalities - I am quiet about my likes and dislikes, unless conversation happens that way. Even when pressed for a recommendation, I feel uncertain - how am I sure that the other person will like the same things I like? I always make recommendations based on what I think the other person would like, not what I personally like.

It’s strange to see A, and the friends who she knows here, and even girl in red scarf, and the New Zealand visitors going through all the uncertainties, the learning curbs that I had to go through at 17. Except they have each other, and at that time I didn’t really even have my parents (we were fighting that first year I was here, on and off - and we had never fought before, so it was even harder).

I wish I could say that the divide that I used to feel when I went to New Zealand between my friends and myself was removed with this event of immigration, but leaning against the wall or comforting A. (suddenly unsure of herself at times, eliciting rapid cries of encouragement from her peers who had come down to visit her), or offering advice about practical things that had helped me, and echoing the encouragement — finding a flat for oneself, for example — and watching her pick and choose because she was used to getting things with certainty and getting anxious when nobody was phoning her back —

I felt it more than ever.

It’s almost as if I were in a different stage of life. Five or six years beyond where they were. Ready to settle down, get on with my career. I’ve had enough of moving around, instability - the kind that comes from traveling, only spent sadly domestically.

Sometimes I’d even feel absurdly saddened, suddenly placed back to the early days when I was here, and feeling the aloneness. It’s happened. The thing I wrote about all those years ago has come true, so soon before my leaving my life forever for the first time (the first of many times I have left in some form in my life; the first of many goodbyes):

1:34 pm on 02-11-06

”We burn brightly, furiously, incandescently. There is touch - there is the immediacy of life, and its transcendence into the extraordinary. We are not human beings. We are immortals trapped inside these damp skins. Trapped by each cell, and each cell trapped inside a plasma membrane, living. We collide to break free - we yearn.

[…]

I am being torn away from this. When I come back everything that is burning now, that I am burning with now, will have evolved and cooled - become rock, stone. I want to burn here with everyone and become part of the same solidness. Be made out of the same things, and if thrown and blown around, still carry the same residue or the earth that we all made ablaze.”

I am a different person here. The same me, just different decisions. Different people, different jokes. Different stories and quirks. A kind of hardness that may be new.

I have a different life. It made me realise: A. moving here had no impact whatsoever, apart from distance. I had somehow completely separated myself from everything in my life here. Part of it was having no existing contacts when I moved here, unlike A. I guess it’s easy to slip back into the old circles - it’s so funny, R.G. (the primary school friend I had dinner with a while ago) was just saying the same thing. She felt disdain for people who just slipped back into their old crowds; she wanted adventure. She tried not to keep in contact with anyone she used to know.

Don’t get me wrong. I am so happy that A. is here now. That our adventures can be adventures together sometimes; always places to go, life to be created. :)

The city, and Medicine — they feel like it’s a part of me. It’s alive, in my veins, the way I dress, the way I talk. My mannerisms, the things I laugh at. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not made out of the earth here too, baked over the long summers, the indistinct times away from home.

The only things left to me is the strong feelings I have about certain people, certain things. Memories. A love of parks and waterways and a longing for the sea. Empathy, a love of things that grow, bad singing. The same laugh, I guess. I still like laughing. Those are unchanging.

Or perhaps these things were in me all along. A few people have told me I haven’t changed much at all. It always makes me happy to hear these things.

“If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?”

We used to ponder that question (from Fight Club) — always one of my favourite quotes. The answer is yes, you can. But not in the way you think. :)

Or maybe not at all.

There are days when I think it’s one thing, and then the other.