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?

Lousy odds and ends

It’s raining. A heavy, unrelenting rain that makes you wonder if it’ll last forever, but also the kind you know will let up in a heartbeat like it was never there in the first place. The kind of rain I love most.

It’s my last week of Emergency this week and I’m sad to leave it. Again, I’m too attached to the unit I’m on — to the people I’ve come to know a little bit. Everyone is so nice there. Sometimes they’ll page me over the intercom to come to a staff base as if I’d done something wrong or there was something important I had to do and I’d excuse myself concernedly from the patient I’m with only to discover a consultant had done so to tell me that there was something interesting for me to do: a lumbar puncture to witness, a wrist to help reduce.

I don’t think I’ve met a more generous department, on the whole. How blessed I am to have had two amazing rotations.

The last few days, I’d discovered that quite a few of the staff and patients who came through were from New Zealand. It doesn’t surprise me too much — Ringwood seems like such an unassuming suburb. The inner South and East are expensive, slightly niche-like places, and the outer south was too much of a straggle. It seems natural to gravitate to somewhere where there’s more of a small community feel. A less estranged place, perhaps — more trees, more of home.

A few of the visiting doctors from the UK have been over to New Zealand on holiday too. It seems like the thing to do if you’re in this part of the world: New Zealand, and south-east Asia.

It makes me want to go on a road trip of my own to the South Island, stand at the foot of glaciers and at stoney edges of deltas and stare at untouched land. Everything in Melbourne seems to be tampered with somehow, by human hands. I miss home, just a little.

There are certain things you give up or lose when you move to a bigger city. The clothes I well are slightly more fashionable than things I used to wear; I wear shoes at all times instead of running around bare footed all the while. Once, hungover in the morning, I was walking to the train station in heels and elected to take them off over sharp unpaved road and my companion had said he was impressed. The stones dug into my soles uncomfortably because my skin was unused to meeting ground.

“Why?” I’d asked, guilelessly — then I remembered that it may not be the norm to grow up climbing trees, bushwalking down the side of waterfalls in the middle of the forest literally 30 minutes drive from your house, growing up.

It made me miss myself.

I think there’s definitely been a lot of innocence lost in the move. Slowly, I’ve become shrewd in my interaction with others. I second guess people’s intentions, feel restrained in social situations by undertones not hitherto heard in conversations. The previous life seems so straightforward. For instance, I’d never come across a group of people whose humour was derived solely from subtle mockery of other people or subgroups of people in society. Or a group of people who exclude others on purpose by obscure conversation.

It’s impossible to say whether or not it’s because I’m in a bigger, more complex class-divided society or whether it’s the move itself (being in unfamiliar social circles, building life up from the bottom of the social ladder). It’s certain that I’m more suspicious of people’s motives, less zealously friendly because it’s strange to cross certain social lines that I’m not even sure the natives here are even aware of, so integrated they are in the environment.

Still, you adjust. Five, six years is plenty of time to blend into the background of a suburb or community, or familiarise yourself with the lingo of a place. I’ve been busy too, this year. Busy in a non-productive way, but busy nevertheless.

I do miss home.

I wish I could tell you more Emergency room stories, but there’s not much to tell this week. I see a lot of children with viral illnesses and concerned parents. Sometimes it’s more about treating the parent than the child, who will survive their viral infection with or without the laying on of your hands. It’s the laying of hands on the parent’s arm or shoulder that sometimes does the trick.

At work last week I heard the saddest story I had in a long time - a man had lost his wife a few years ago, and was sharing his loneliness. Forty-five years of marriage, and he was still lost without her even though it had been years. He had no hobbies, no idea of routines because his wife had always dictated what they did each day. He had no favourite places because all of them were places his wife liked to go. He was trying on and tossing off new lovers, looking for a remnant of his wife amongst them and not finding her at all. Worst of all was the utter un-awareness of it in his mind. He just kept going, traumatic day after traumatic day, like a wind up toy, looking for something he couldn’t put a name on.

“It’s terrible growing old,” he’d said. I later found out that it was his birthday, and he was alone.

By then my head was on the table and my heart was on the floor. It was just sadness. The both of us sitting there with it. I realised then that I’d been the worst kind of person - always trying to protect myself these last few months from the inevitable hurt. The worst kind of empath. The defensive kind. This was the first time in a long time that I just sat and held that kind of horrible feeling to be companionable with someone in their awful time.

Two things:
1. When I am old, I will start to train my husband and family to live a life without me, and start the grieving and letting go process early because I never want them to go through this kind of grief.

2. I’ll be a nicer person from now on. Nicer than I’ve been anyway. I’m always so selfish - you know that as well as anybody. I hate that I am these days. I’ve always been so mean.

Well now. I’m rambling. :) Time to go to sleep, I think. Update you all soon, I hope. Next week I’ll be doing General Surgery at a hospital I’ve never been before. Should be fun, I think.

Silly things

It had been a damp way to end the day - a cancelled tutorial, some bonding time with the other final years (whose year level I was trespassing on my way to graduation). As usually I filtered through all the Paediatric cases when I could, although all the cubicles were packed and I had to see them mostly on the waiting benches. The entire day had a kind of lethargy to it that came with boredom.

There were good moments, like the entire corridor giggling at the exact moment my heart melted: I had, in trying to make friends with a little girl who had head-strike, given her my stethoscope to play with and when I asked for it back she’d insisted on putting it around my shoulders. I’d crouched low like I was being crowned and she knighted me with my own instrument.

The worst part was asking one of the registrars to examine a child with me who I could have easily examined - he was crying hard, so I pretended ignorance about examining children just so I wouldn’t have to play the bad guy.

Before I left I saw a man with a suspected hand fracture, who had travelled a lot of places in Asia, and who (after I had explained to him what was going on) asked me a lot of questions about my heritage. “I’ve been to Beijing,” he said, “So seeing you makes me feel at ease and at home.”

He must have been about my father’s age, but his children had had children too, so perhaps he was more blessed than mine was.

It turned out his injury wasn’t as bad as I’d originally thought, so after filtering it up the ranks we decided just to be conservative with it. No excessive damage done.

I warned him that I was terribly messy at putting on plasters before setting about in what I hoped was a confident way. I disliked things like this because I could easily spend all day trying to make it just right. The same obsessive kind of streak about perfection seen most commonly when I am asked to clean glass.

“A pretty girl like you,” he said, “should be fighting off suitors,” to which I just laughed my usual kind of laugh - one that meant that I’d only been half listening and had, in alarm, realised that we were getting into uncomfortable territory and that I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t avoided it like I usually did. I must have been tired.

“One would think so,” I smiled, finishing off his plaster. “But alas, I’m alone right now. Just falling in love with Emergency room doctors.” Then having laughed at my own joke, thought belatedly to add “I’m only kidding.”

Which, of course, I was. In a sardonic way. I was really fond of one of the junior registrars, but I often mistake fondness for love. Except I’d been thinking about him all weekend, to my annoyance. Perhaps I had a crush. He liked children in heart-warming kind of way and he was so like a child himself.

I hate the moment that I realise I like someone - I become locked into myself around them. It’s like someone waved a wand over me and cast me into stone. I feel entirely unnatural. That, if I had to pinpoint a moment, was probably it right there because when said junior registrar came on for the evening shift, I lost any IQ I had remaining.

Because I had so distracted, I’d made the thumb patch too tight for just a wrist immobilisation and had to get the plaster saw out to cut a patch that the orthopedic-training registrar drew around the base of the man’s thumb. Most apologetically.

Driving home, the glass on my windscreen was smeared by a light condensation that the wipers couldn’t wipe off. Everything seemed blurry, like driving amongst stars. I can see how people tune out playing follow-the-leader in the dark at 80kph. A dangerous, soothing kind of game and one that I’m fairly good at, it turns out.

I kept thinking, this vicious cycle has got to stop. If I wanted to get serious about a relationship I have to stop being afraid of being seen through by someone. It scares me so much that I forget how to relate to people I had hitherto related perfectly well to.

How is it my enthusiasm for someone becomes so strongly tied to my enthusiasm for life? Discouraged, I’d driven home changing radio channels noisily and trying not to think about my own aloofness. A crush is a crush - they come and go. Being cautious doesn’t.

I miss my father suddenly. I want to go golfing with him. Isn’t it weird? After a decade of him trying to persuade me to play, and of all those driving range nights/afternoons and the hours and hours I spent hitting things out into the middle of nowhere… all those summers I was back and he would ask me out to the country club with him for 18 holes and I’d repeatedly decline. I knew how to hold a golf club before I knew how to do high school Algebra but I’d never ever been.

I think I just want peace these days. Peace and good company. And life advice. When you move out of home, stuff like that you begin to miss.

Earthquakes and revolutions

The ward’s been busy these last few days - after a period of no consults, new ones keep popping up. Child with parafalcine empyema, child with candida meningitis; serious, brain things.

The news is constantly on in the background of the ward - a room, chatter amongst the nurses, a headline. Images in a patient’s room, turning away and tearing up watching images of Christchurch, the crushed cars and worse of all the silence of ruined buildings that ominously mean death. As the night winds down I read international news sites and scroll Al-Jazeera’s blog for news about Libya. There’s a photograph of a woman, a trail of blood down her face with her hands in a backhand victory sign - a silent show of resistance floating around the internet. There is graphic footage of burnt soldiers who refused to fire on civilians lying on the ground.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had to think of the Ring of Fire. To those unfamiliar, it’s a term given to the ring of techtonic plates that New Zealand sits on, causing it to experience on average at least one earthquake a day of 4.0 magnitude or more - largely unnoticed. We learnt about it in Year 9 science - watched videos of volcanoes erupting, learnt that death was imminent (the volcano beneath Lake Taupo is the most dangerous in the world, and eruption would put the world into another ice age).

Ring of Fire can describe so many things though. Images of bloodshed, people running in the streets, that tide that’s sweeping through the upper African continent…those burning posters, burning bodies -

It reminds me of the power of people, and the power of nature - two opposing forces, almost. As powerful as each other somehow, in creating death and nations - lands turned over by tides and volcanoes and ground-shaking fissures; Countries are built and burnt by the blood/sweat/tears of men and women.

It’s strange the instances when nationalism wells up inside oneself. A girl on Facebook posted the words to the New Zealand national anthem yesterday in response to the earthquake and suddenly it made me want to go home and help out with the efforts. There is a Maori verse to the anthem and it was that more than the English that seemed to give strength to the meaning behind what it was to be a country.

At times like these I’m glad that I will soon become a doctor. I’m glad that I will be someone useful - that my parents understood more than myself when I was 17 that human helplessness is one of the hardest things to bear. That in disaster I will be able to comfort, to heal.

I miss home.

We’re a simple people. We don’t understand things like death and unhappiness, and loss.

Maybe that’s why I hate those images the most. Because I’m not there, I’m not doing something with my hands. Small, insignificant things like handing someone a bottle of water, or washing out a wound, or even cataloging the dead.

Up on the ward, baby X holds on to life. The door to the room is closed every day, nobody goes inside, nobody goes outside. They are soon to go home and I’m thinking, about time. I want to die at home too, somewhere familiar and loved even if I’m too not-with-it to understand (old age). Perhaps baby X will understand too, somehow.

Looking at all our infants, holding their hands as Dr. B. examines them on ward rounds, tickling their faces with dummies, touching them for selfish reasons - a substitute to comforting someone.

When I’m with children, or people who I love, it makes me want to lay my life down for them so that they will never have to be thrown out into the world alone, never have to make a choice between hunger and exhaustion for survival, never feel profound loss, never meet the people who their parents should have warned them about.

So I want to go home. I want to be sad with other people in New Zealand instead of being sad in Australia, and guilty that I’m not doing anything other than donating money to Red Cross and watching pictures on TV, reading the news anxiously.

Thoughts and prayers are with those affected by the earthquake.

Kafka on the shore

I came back to Melbourne in the midst of humidity thick enough to lower swim through, though that part may be due to the rain. A huge difference from when I’d left Auckland airport — a beautiful sunset which it felt like we flew into. Impossible, isn’t it? We were supposed to be flying west, unless we took off in the opposite direction.

Another year. Another place to call home, however temporarily. The same old me, however. I took a good hard look at my face in the mirror, pale with lack of sleep at having to get up so early.

Now, sitting at what I rate as the best room I’ve ever rented since coming to Australia, I’m a bit regretful that this is all temporary. This room belongs to another student, who through a breakdown of communication with the lease holder, forgot to tell her that he’d already sublet it when she let me move in. The student being a friend of hers who had been living here for a long time, it was clear that I would need to relocate.

Still, what a nice place. Everyone seems so friendly. The bed is so comfortable. There is a bookshelf. Why that is so important is a silly question.

I’m staying up late, trying to adjust my holiday clock. Unregulated, it means sleeping at 4am and waking up at noon in extreme cases. I’ve been much better since early uni years. Midnight, and then nine in the morning. Nothing to boast about.

That quote from Janet Frame’s ‘Owls Do Cry’ that I used to know by heart  — the one that describes the adult world from a child’s mind as a deepening of silences… it comes back to me every now and again. Times like this, really. Sitting up with tea, reading a novel, searching up articles, daydreaming outside, on the train, watching horrible pictures of the floods on television… all I can feel is silence.

A lot can be said about silence. A lecturer once said that the capacity for human beings to filter out white noise was infinite. Atom hitting our ear drums technically registers in our brain, but we filter it out. A willingness not to hear silence.

I remember those lectures amazingly well. Not because they were memorable, but because I spent hours in the basement of Hardgrave Andrew library with Dan and Alvin and Brian copying chapters of lecture notes by hand, sketching micro-anatomy. I learn best that way — the simple act of doing, and of touch. A muscle memory, as well as a mental photograph. Sometimes, when I’m alone very late at night and doing something incredibly boring I think of this.

And of silence. And of places I’d like to go someday, if I got the chance.

Recently I read ‘Kafka On The Shore’ by Murakami. Murakami always makes me think about deep places with hollow echos. In my mind those places seem almost synonymous with silent things too — only empty places echo. And emptiness always reminds me of notingness, which in my mind, swallows sound. A paradox, I guess.

The book is very old. I got it out of the Matherson library, home to Arts and Economics books of all generations. An Alfred K. Knof publication, New York, the mustard hardcover has nothing on it and is frayed. The binding (navy blue) is ripped and faded, and it’s bound in a way that books printed before a certain time almost always is. The edition date is 2005, which seems like a lie. Five years and it’s been destroyed. The title on the spine is barely legible. What wore it out so badly? I run my hands over the covers. It might be things like this. Hands like mine.

At the back there is a single page between two blank ones titled ‘A Note On The Type’. The text of this book was set in Electra, a typeface designed by W.A. Dwiggins(1880-1956). This face cannot be classified as either modern or old style. It is not based on any historical model, nor does it echo any particular period or style. It avoids te extree contrasts between tick and tin elements that mark most modern aces, and it attempts to give a feeling of fluidity, power, and speed.’

I read it all in one go, like devouring the heart of some small living thing. Outside wind roared and the shutters clanged awfully. I got up a few times to make more tea.

On page 148, he wrote this: “Kafka, in everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.”

Whenever I read Murakami I’m struck by the isolation of his characters. Their own inner world seems to exclude them in some way, even when they interact with others. Maybe it’s the translation, but there’s something disjointed about his narration too. The same appeal as listening to someone with strange way of ordering words speak.

Someone has drawn a line in the margin to underline that quote. After I read the whole novel I realise it’s the only passage underlined or highlighted in some way in the book. Maybe someone else was drawn by this too. It’s a warming thought.

Moving forward…some people are really good at it. Like a obstinate little engine just carrying boxes and boxes of stuff, never opening them, adding new crates at every destination. Others handle each of the boxes by hand, cradling them in their arms, opening each one. Feeling the weight of each thing, and the weight of the value they place on them — a physical weight in this kind of reality. Then all you can do is stand there and balance and focus on carrying each thing. 

That’s when you get stuck. It’s hard to know what to do.

Anyway. Just wanted to share some thoughts and say that I’m thinking of you guys in Auckland. Enviously, I guess. The weather here’s been dramatic. At work lots of people call up, upset by images of flooded Queensland and parts of Victoria playing over and over in front of our eyes. It feels like every year at the Australian Open there is something to hold a charity match for.

Uni is starting next week. Very excited to be working with children again. :) That happy magical place that is Paediatrics. More to come soon.