Head:heart ratio of people I know

Catrina: 60:40
Been: 95:5 
Me: 30:70

Guess who has the messiest personal relationships?

Interview weeks

It took my little car all it had to get through the gale force wind and rain lashing at it mid-afternoon. I don’t know how the sky got from overcast to angry grey but the world changed, trying to erase all definable lines. It was hard to say where the road lanes were, where one street began and another ended. I kept hurtling forward, hoping I was in the right place, hoping I was heading the right direction.

It’s been a strange week and a bit - Between last Sunday and last Tuesday I’d already been wracked with fever, met my professional idol Prof S. the following day, and been a patient of an Emergency Department quite by accident because I for some reason almost collapsed on ward round a few days after that ever episode. While trying to get some anti-nausea tablets, I somehow found myself admitted own there.

It all started with Sunday, after work, walking back to the car in with the frigid winter wind around me and arms around my stomach to keep warm. The red scarf around my neck was doubling as a second layer, the way I pressed so hard trying to burn the fabric into me. As if force could provide heat somehow. Already then, I knew something was wrong - the world wasn’t in focus, like trying to catch things with great detail but missing all the intricacies that made them clear.

By the time I got home, I spent an entire hour staring out the window of my parked car shivering. The sun went down but I didn’t want to leave and walk the 10 metres into the house, too afraid of the cold.

It was only 7 o’clock when I made it inside but I went straight to bed, put the central heating on - everything hurt, my back especially. I was burning up. The sheets on my skin scorched me, and the irony only occurs to me now how the time I was pressing my scarf into me to turn force into warmth was coming true; except it was the opposite. Everything warm pressed into me. I was hallucinating. It lasted all night and didn’t break, though I was woken up several times by phone calls from my father and a friend - long conversations I can’t even remember.

By morning it had broken. Nothing else was wrong with me. I was exhausted, as if I had survived some kind of exorcism. Maybe I had. It wasn’t the first time these random fevers had happened to me.

I drove to meet Prof S. at  11:30am, so I cleaned myself up the best I could and drove to the institution that he was the head of.

Sometimes I don’t appreciate my luck the way I should: There I was. 23 years old, climbing out of bed and walking into the office of a man who had seen careers make and break, who was known to all the doctors in Melbourne, who had seen the rise and fall of many careers, I had looked up to since I was 20, who had recently been awarded the order of Australia; who I had seen talk to a family about withdrawing treatment from their dying father, who had changed the lives of so many before him and left an impression so deeply imprinted in my mind that I knew I wanted to be a haematologist right then. It was Queen’s Birthday - a public holiday - but he was in his office at the Australian Centre of Blood Diseases, wearing a jumper and in the most disarming way, was wearing the lanyard of the football team that I also supported.

“What have you done?” he asked me, like a father. I missed him, sudden. My own dad.

I told him I was following the haem/thrombosis registrar, and he said with surprise “You haven’t done Clinical Haematology yet?”

“No,” I said. “But I did spend a long time in Haematology at X Hospital when I was in 3rd year. You were my consultant there for a week.”

He smiled suddenly, as if delighted. “That’s right,” he said. “I remember you. I had been wondering where I’d seen you before, actually. Well. It’s good to see you again.”

Then he gave me the most inspiring talk, including about how I should aim to be the head of something, about mentorship, about what to do to be exceptional - about being exceptional, and what that means. About how everyone is exceptional, and only some people really exploit it. I couldn’t find a more amazing person in the world if I’d tried. It made me want to work harder, do more things. Be impressive.

So of course I was terribly embarrassed to be sitting on the ground on Tuesday with my head in my knees and the Haematology consultant (Harvard trained or a few years!) looking on in concern, and my registrar being ordered to get me some water. It was a mistake going through Emergency to get some medication - I’m at a hospital that’s known for being thorough. I should have known I wouldn’t be getting away that easily (it turned out to be nothing, like I knew it would be).

It was the first time I’d had a drip in my arm, and I now know to be nicer to people who are having them because they do actually hurt.

I’m sorry I haven’t written but it’s been such hectic time, running here and there to different hospitals for five or ten minutes’ worth of conversation. I had a rude shock when I returned to the ward after one of them: there I was in a suit jacket, shirt, black skirt with my ward folder (black leather) in hand (stethoscope folded on top), lanyard around my neck, ID, pen torch, ballpoint pen walking through the corridors of one of the oldest and most prestigious hospitals..in the second most livable city in the world. I looked in the glass that lined the corridor on the ground level, between two blocks of the building and saw someone I hardly recognised.

So strange, I hadn’t worn my hair this way for a while in hospital - fringe down but sides pinned back. Pins in my hair, until this year, had been a relatively primary school thing.

How was I so…grown up?

Even last night in Fitzroy, having drinks with a bunch of people I hardly see anymore (medical school kids from my old year, who had graduated and been working for half a year already), it was amazing the lives everyone led.

Going through the interview process for jobs, I’ve discovered two things: sometime in the last 6 years, I’ve developed an intense discomfort for situations of scrutiny. Interviews never bothered me before, and I was fairly ok at them — but now they make me intensely uncomfortable.

The second thing is, I’m definitely not the same person I was 6 years ago when going through all of these things (the interviews for entrance into medical school). What you learn about the world is shocking in 6 years. As a kid I used to wonder why adults were so worried about children changing — how can people not just go back to the way they used to be? 

Now I know: once you know something, you can’t unknow it. Once you learn something, you can’t unlearn it.

I guess I’m trying to say that I miss simpler days, when nothing was too serious and I wasn’t suddenly on the verge of breaking into some incredible institutions of health. I certainly miss S., who is one of the people I will love all my life. I’m also saying, I’m grateful to be where I am, and to have such amazing people in my life like Been, Renny, Catrina, my family, all the doctors who’ve tried made me good at what I do. The shoulders of giants.

Being shortlisted for so many interviews when there are >850 candidates applying to some places and a few hundred interviews offered, I feel so lucky.

Whatever the outcome of my interviews,  nothing is going to change the kind of doctor I am and will try to be.

Badaduuuum

Job applications to Victorian hospitals are all in. Now it’s time to sit around and wait for interview offers.

I’m so nervous!

I keep thinking once this is over I’m going to go and make up for all the friendships I’ve neglected stressing over this.

P.S. Good luck for your exam Been! <3

We are lucky to be alive

Last night on a cover shift, in between my admissions, I found out we were going to palliate a child.

In the cubicle, I couldn’t concentrate. I just stared and stared at the piece of paper for a few seconds before I woke up from the daze.

This child (baby) had been with us a long time. We’d thought he was getting better until a few days ago and when I went to see him after a long period of not being involved in his care, I discovered someone fighting for their life. Or at least that’s what I’d thought privately, watching secretions occlude his little eyes, his mouth. Everywhere.

His mother was very kind. Someone who respected doctors. Who always says, “Whatever you think is best, Doc.” On Valentines Day, they’d given the staff a bunch of roses and chocolate and a note to say I’ll love you with all my heart, signed in the name of their baby boy (who had a heart defect amongst many other complicated things).

When I heard the news I was shocked. I kept thinking that if it was my own child, I would fight it. I would be filled with hate immediately, at the helplessness of the situation. I would begin to hate medical staff, the hospital, everything. How could you not save my child? How could you not do everything you could until the very end?

This I would do despite all my medical background, and despite knowing sometimes it’s more humane to palliate. Do no harm — the rule we all live by first and foremost.

Maybe in that way it proves that I’m not yet a mother. Because then I would love that child more than myself. And then I would know that it would be right to end their suffering, because I want them to be at peace more than I am afraid to be left alone, and to lose them. I’ve only loved someone that much once in my life. We were all very young then, with no reason not to. I may yet again.

Every day I see parents who give up so much of themselves for their children. Who feed them and change them when they have cerebal palsy, who mash and puree even when they’re 8 years old because they can’t talk or walk and smile or understand things other than pain and simple sensations.

There’s a saying — something about being redeemed when we love someone.

I always think about that when I see parents, because I wonder usually what life was like before the child came into their lives.

C. has moved on to become a Paediatrics consultant in Queensland. My new fellow is called K. I like her a lot. She wears comfortable clothes on the ward, and bright colours and spells her name in a eccentric way.

Once I asked K. about a neonate I had seen, who had been in care for a long time. It felt like we were harming her somehow. Or that’s how I felt every time I was in NICU, gazing at the swollen face — it is that baby who I had seen on my first day of Paeds — the one grossly swollen, intubated (the baby’s not changed much since then).

It felt like the right thing to do would be to do nothing. In this baby, more than the baby who is being palliated right now, who I thought deserved to be let go of more. >20 weeks of being comatose and tubed, and supported without much improvement..

“Are we harming this baby by keeping her alive?” I asked K one day. I think about this baby a lot.

Then I thought, it’s someone’s child. Of course you’d want to keep her alive. Of course you’d want him/her to go home - a place they have yet to know. I had seen the mother and father holding the child, stroking the oedematous cheek of the kid.

Babies in NICU often scare me, because of their fragility. They’re so easily comparable to a slab of butter at the supermarket - I’ve seen one weighing less than 500g. Imagine weighing as much as a block of butter. It’s heart breaking. At the same time the thought that they’ll live and become people that I might teach some day, or meet on the road some day is just amazing.

How did we come from so little to amount to so much?

I won’t write about the discussion K and I had, but she said that in neonatology these decisions were the hardest.

There’s a terrible satisfaction in Paediatrics, in knowing what to do - writing management plans on admissions and having them approved completely. The resident is often busy with the patients on the other team she is a part of so I do a lot of residents’ jobs.

It helps that the consultants are so nice. The other day we were all headed to a meeting and I had to dash back to the office to get some keys I’d left there. I came back into the long corridor halfway between the meeting room and the office just as Dr P.B. came down it and she asked me where I was going. When I got to the office, retrieved the key and eventually got back to the same corridor I saw the very bizarre sight her squatting on the floor against a wall in a sort of sitting position, reading through papers.

“What are you doing?” I’d blurted out.

“Waiting for you,” she said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. 

Life drifts by so quickly. I never want to leave. Perhaps I will end up in Paediatrics after all. Give up on Haematology, fall in love with this culture of joy and stay forever. It’s not an unreal possibility.

Valentines Day came and went. I came home to find four hand picked roses and a box of chocolate with a rhyming note sitting outside my door signed Admirer. It took me a few seconds to realise that it was Will, to whom I’m like a sister, being really sweet, thanking me for all the life advice I’d offered him as a child growing up or something and listening to him talk about his relationship stuff.

Is it wrong for my first reaction to be irrational fear? Who the hell knew where I lived?! I’d moved recently. I thought it was from a complete stranger (best case scenario - but a little worrying), or some deranged stalker (worst case scenario).

But thank goodness, no. Just a lovely friend.

(I have such lovely friends!)

To all the people I love, I wish I could send you chocolate and flowers Valentines to thank you for all your advice and support over the years. Thanks for being so lovely. Hopefully you had a good day with the people who your Valentines should really be coming from (wink wink). And to other single people — meh, it’s just commercialism anyway ;p x

Happy new year!

Last night some of Been’s friends and I found ourselves watching fireworks explode in the reflection of buildings, and the skytower, and over the skyline last night.

I love how in the crush of the city, bumping into extremely drunk people who look like they could beat you to a pulp could be resolved with a smile and shouting ‘happy new year’ at each other. And the people dancing in the street. And how beautiful Aotea Square has become, and the flags at town hall which had never been there before.

So bright and lovely to be alive!

Happy new year everyone! Let 2011 be AMAZING. :)

P.S. Wish you had been there Jenny, but I hope you have a lovely belated chilled out celebration on the 2nd! xx

Bright bright lights

It has been the most humid beginning to December this year - the wettest in the last 5 years I’ve been here. There’s a weight in the air unfamiliar to all of us, given the years of drought.

An absolute stranger died the other day, aged 23.  I heard about it on Facebook when mutual friends put up eulogies. I don’t know if it’s right to be writing about it here. Weird, how it impacted the life of a total stranger across the Tasman. Maybe I’ll erase this later.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about faith. There are so many reasons, if I were Christian, to question God. For instance, the death of a child, or people who die alone and in pain, starving, unloved; a 23 year old with hepatic carcinoma. My mother started going to church because she realised she couldn’t understand the world she lived in suddenly. Mostly I think my mother feels guilty about something and wants to make sense of it. I am blessed to have a mother who loves her children more than she loves herself, more than she loves the universe. It’s this love she feels guilty about - how inadequate it is in her mind somehow, no matter what we say or do or think. Because nothing in the world is perfect, least of all love. One day I want to love a child of my own that much. One day that child of my own will hopefully love me as much as I love my mother.

Unlike Mum, it’s these inexplicable things that make me think hesitate about God. A lot. More than I should for someone who has not stepped in a church for a very long time, and who wasn’t brought up religious at all.

How can you go through medical school and still have blind optimism that someone will pull through against all odds?

Besides which, hope is a dangerous thing.

About relationships, I used to wonder, isn’t love enough? About dying children, I used to wonder, isn’t hope enough? About myself, I used to wonder, isn’t being good enough?

Why isn’t it enough to be good?

And what if one is not inherently good, anyway? What if one is rotten through and through? Being forgiven is one thing — isn’t it better to change? Perhaps this was why I liked The Great Gatsby. Because people were rotten there, and it’s the same rotten-ness that I’ve been feeling about the world recently, inexplicably (and incredibly ungratefully, I hate to admit). I haven’t been the most positive person this year, contrary to how I usually am and it puzzles me more than anybody.

I asked a cab driver on my way to work (late, as usual — always late) if he believed in something and he told me that he was Buddhist. He then showed me a glove box compartment filled with Christan self help books and talked about spirituality. Hearing someone talk about their life was healing. He talked about reading, and his goal of 30 minutes a day, 1 book per month. The self-help books he was interested in, his buying habits on Amazon. Other people are so interesting — I lost that kind of fascination along the way over the last few years, too caught up in my own life.

Last night at the grad ball after party, C. and I were accosted by her friend S., who I’d briefly encountered in Frankston last year. Strange, I’d talked to him on and off during the year and gone to his birthday but I didn’t actually know him all too well. And now he (along with everyone else I didn’t really know well but would have liked to) was graduating and it seemed too late. I mentioned this to C.

“He’s a nice guy,” she said, “but he has so many issues.”

S. is an incredibly nice person, so it surprised me that he had any. When I said so, C. said, “I’m glad you agree that he’s fantastic. I wish he felt that way about himself too, sometimes.”

Again, surprise. Then it occurred to me I didn’t know C. all that well either. We’d planted strawberries together and presented them to an elderly woman in a nursing home; or rather, I bought the pots and dirt and seedlings and planted them in the back yard of a motel and we presented it together. S. had taken a photograph of us together before he left with P.’s camera.

I could have sat under the stars for a good while longer. Everyone was pretty drunk: a classmate was [eloquently but drunkenly] talking about love and trying to figure out where the roots of displaying love came from - how our parents showed love to us and how that translated to how we showed love to each other. We’d just met.

Later, we ended up at the after after party at a P’s house in Hawthorn, where I tiptoed to the patio, shoes in one hand to breathe in fresh air. People were smoking outside, and we had to shut the sliding doors because it was 4 in the morning on a Monday and the neighbours had opened the windows to complain about the noise. It was so warm and sticky, the back of my dress stuck to my skin. The men had unwound their black bow ties and unbuttoned their shirts. We were tired, but we didn’t want to go home.

M. kept talking about how his girlfriend would kill him for staying up late (she’s the sweetest thing). J. put his arms around my waist briefly, in a friendly way, as I lent over the host’s kitchen counter and D., who had been analysing the psychology of love earlier in the evening, mixed interesting shots with elderberry and god knows what else. They were sweet, and surprisingly good.

In the lounge, tired looking people wound themselves around each other, watching a few friends dance periodically. I’ve missed these kind of nights: someone’s house, really good friends; sometimes the roar of the sea in the background. Drunken and tired people saying and doing odd things that made sense in their own train of thought, and that made you smile when you saw or heard them.

They (we) belonged in a novel. It brought back memories of the times I’ve been pulled into random people’s houses completely sober on new years or on warm summer evenings are numerous though not, I realised, for a number of years.

I got home at 5:30 in the morning.  The cab had dropped M, J, and D in Carnegie and the image of the three boys (in tuxedos) crossing the street had been momentarily dashing. M. stood in the overgrown lawn of his place for a bit waiting for J and D went the other way, back to his own place. That was the last memory burned into my head. In Wright street the sun was rising. I paused on my doorstep for a bit to watch the street lights turn off and felt really good about the future. I don’t know why. :)

I have a lot to be happy about. And I am. :) So happy.

To I. who died — I don’t even know you, and I don’t have any right to say any of this but I will. I hope your family finds peace some day in God. Thank you for making me realise that I wasn’t really appreciating life the way I should. I hope you’ve found home on the other side.

A note

Dear friends who went to Mornington today,

Your photos look amazing. I wish I had gone — it turns out the friend who I was really waiting on to see the house with me didn’t show. Pathology lab vs. a topiary maze near the sea on the loveliest of early summer Saturdays — a no brainer.

I hope you had as much fun as your gorgeous selves look like you had in your photographs :)

xx

With love (and envy),
M

The weather is broken

I’ve not seen weather this crazy for a while. Howling winds, rain, hail, the sky clear one minute and black the next. I was woken up at 1am and couldn’t sleep again for the battering at my window — how unlucky to have the head of the bed there.

Instead I spent the night reading. Again. Like I’d done the previous day, just drifting in and out of sleep and ‘White Teeth’ (Zadie Smith), a promise to a friend a long time ago that I’d only half kept then. As in, I promised a friend that I’d read this book but I got halfway in but couldn’t go on for some reason. Back then the narrative had seemed too confusing, a tangle of words. It was too busy in my head as it was, without cramming this mass of thought in. It took me a single day to get through (when I wasn’t sleeping), and in the end it reminded me of the high school English class girls. Back then all prose had variations of the same greater voice — the voice of our English teacher. An English teacher who changed lives, I swear.

Last night in the storm, I read Murakami. Actually, it’s funny — I’d started ‘Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End Of The World’ a long time ago, but I couldn’t remember where. Was it while waiting for a plane at the airport? Was it a library book in New Zealand last summer that I had to return early, because of my flight back to Melbourne? I found myself thinking about it all year.

A book with that kind of staying power deserved to be bought. When Catrina and I came across it at Borders last night, it seemed like a sign. Usually Borders only ever stocked ‘Norwegian Wood’, ‘The Wind-up Bird Chronicles’ or ‘Kafka By The Shore’.

Around dawn, the birds started waking. It amazed me they could sing in such howling winds. So brave. I wondered where they were hiding.

It had taken me a day and a half to recover from the weeks leading up the handing in of my thesis. Due to a fairly hefty saga involving an old man, and an unshakeable belief in antioxidants (and possibly some corruption by drug company backing), my original project fell through in late June and I had to start again in July on something different, but still Thalassaemia related. The time had gone so fast, lost in late nights and times when I wasn’t quite certain if I was asleep or awake, adjusting graphs and tables and forcing myself to write my thoughts down instead of just thinking them in my head.

Thesis-writing is, in theory, not a hard task. Translating tasks to time, however, seems to require a vortex. Something that would easily have taken you 1 hour, you spend the entire day doing — and not because you’re slacking off. I spent all day adjusting graphs for some reason. In fact, I spent 4 days adjusting graphs. Graphs that I’d already drawn up. I don’t understand why it took so long in the end, but somehow it did.

Two (unrelated) things from this past week:

1. People are terrifying in a way that I’d never previously believed.

2. I have been a pretty awful human being this year.

I’m not going to explain either.

Big thank you to Dhanushi, Adil, Ginnie and Catrina for being the most amazing people in the world, and helping me with everything this week. Not that they read this, but I owe them big time for this period of my life. BIG TIME.

For a while now I’ve been thinking (almost deliriously, during the times I’ve not slept for working) of home. The concrete garden, those carefully spaced lemon trees that never bear fruit, the iron cockerel in the shade, climbing vines, lavendar. It’s always summer in my memory, because I only go there during summer.

Time to plan a trip home!

Looking forward to the last of the year falling away, and watching friends graduate :)