broadcast me a joyful noise

Has it really been two months since I posted here? The year is FLYING by, which is terrifying, but I am also gathering up my building excitement about next year, for a variety of reasons:

1) I'll be back in Canberra, which...look, I LOVE the place I'm working at the moment, I'm going to cry horribly at the prospect of working in a place with a less incredible set of people, but at the same time I'm rapidly losing patience with the whole small-town life thing. I miss shops, I miss the theatre, I miss even the modest Canberran version of city crowds, I miss restaurants and cafes and art galleries. I miss my family and my friends.

2) My apartment will be built and ready for me to move into. I don't think you realise how excited I am about the prospect of MY OWN PLACE, my own teensy one-bedroom third-floor apartment with a shitty view and an easy walk to my favourite Chinese takeway place. I'm going to hang art on the walls, I'm going to buy three enormous bookshelves, I'm going to have a fucking kitchen colour scheme, I'm going to have people over for really tiny dinner parties. I'm going to whine about having a mortgage at every opportunity. I already know what my housewarming presents to myself will be.

3) I got the part-time job I was hoping for at the medical school, which will mean I am doing two days a week of research and teaching as well as two days a work of clinical patient contact. After years of running in the other direction so as not to be exposed to the faintest whiff of research, I'm coming around to it, mostly because I love teaching so much and no university will let you just bum around designing curriculums and running clinical tutorial groups, which is my ideal professional life.

Work. Okay, let's talk about work.

I haven't been posting about my work much because it's overwhelming and draining and annoying and incredible and humbling. Being a GP is very, very different to being a hospital doctor; being a registrar and working largely independently is very, very different to being the paperwork and blood-taking monkey at the bottom of the medical pyramid.

I make decisions all day that have potentially immense consequences. I am learning to tell people things they don't want to hear. I am learning to talk about everything and to listen to people say everything to me; I am frequently cried on or yelled at; I've told people they have cancer or that I'm taking their driver's license away from them; I've been manipulated and lied to and resented. I talk to people of all ages and backgrounds about their sex lives, their abusive relationships, their jobs, their fears, their embarrassing symptoms, their pain and their pregnancy, their genitals and their hallucinations. I'm a psychologist and a life coach and a teacher and a social worker.

Which is not to say I'm particularly expert or wonderful at being any of those things. I spent four years of medical school learning the coagulation cascade and the causes of cardiomyopathy, and then spent two years as an intern/RMO learning how to talk an urgent CT scan out of a grumpy radiologist and how to fit twelve hours worth of ward jobs into an eight hour shift. Nobody teaches you how to sit with a straight face and a sympathetic voice and recommend that your 60-year old patient buys a copy of The Joy of Sex to read with her husband because penetrative intercourse has been impossible since his prostate surgery and her response to a gentle suggestion about exploring non-penetrative intimacy was, "I don't think he knows about all of that."

It's so challenging, and so tiring. But I tell you what, it's the best education in the breadth and depth of humanity that anyone could ask for.

That's it! Done! Four academic years after the creation of the 'dr fahye' tag and it's finally sort of applicable.

(There is little point in me doing that Time Lord meme now, really, because I'd just be The Doctor, and where's the fun in that?)

Soooo much drinking. We started at 3:30pm, and someone had won a $2000 bar tab. SO. MUCH. DRINKING.

Oh, universe. You heard my agonies of indecision between Canberra and Sydney, didn't you? HAHA. HILARIOUS.

My NSW intern offer is for Wollongong, which is an hour south of Sydney and therefore a fair way north of Canberra (2.5 hours by car). There are lots of good points about it -- the training program itself looks great, I must say, and it's a very pretty little coastal city with muuuuch cheaper rent than Sydney itself -- but Facebook is full of people cheering about their city placements, so I'm retaining the right to feel a bit sullen.

Second-round offers from Canberra haven't come out yet, either, so I have nine days in which to sit on my hands and play the waiting game.

Fear not, Sydneysiders -- I'll be heading up most weekends for food adventures and socialising, I'm sure :)

New book review: Annette Curtis Klause's Blood and Chocolate.

The book I'm now lugging around hospital and reading during breaks is Brave New World, and I'm not very far in but I already have a collection of sentences around which I want to scribble sparkly hearts. I'm trying to read all of those seminal scifi books that I have been vaguely meaning to read for years, and although the Orange Library has so far been very helpful (epic amounts of Le Guin!) they don't have Farenheit 451 :(

Med school news: bluh. Med school is med school. Most of us have the final-year equivalent of senioritis, which is equal parts apathetic burnout and sheer panic that we're going to be expected to be real doctors in a rapidly shrinking amount of time.

Today there was a paediatric surgery list and I got to see what a testicle looks like. (A: white and squidgy.) Medicine makes you blase about almost everything, but there are still those rare moments when you're pressing down on the groin of a sedated child and someone is standing by your shoulder crying "Milk! MILK the testis into the scrotum!" and you think, my profession is a bit weird.

12 hour working days should NOT BE PERMITTED ON FRIDAYS. I left the house at 6:50am for a 7am radiology meeting, scrubbed into a massive pelvic reconstruction in the morning, ate lunch at 2:45pm, scrubbed into a total knee replacement, went on a ward round, and was home at 6:50pm.

My legs want to kill me. My hips want to kill me.

Wow, yeah, I am so looking forward to internship.

I have survived my first overnight shift as a medical quasi-professional! It felt very adventuresome, what with pouring coffee down my throat and setting off for the hospital at 9:45pm, and the two doctors on the NICU night shift were really nice. I went to a couple of deliveries in theatre and collected cord blood samples, and in between I shoved my skills logbook into their faces and said LET'S HAVE A SIGNING-OFF SPREE and the registrar retaliated by asking me difficult questions and making me assess sick babies ALL NIGHT, which was awesome, but also sort of like running a marathon.

Reg: Now set up this ventilator.
Me: *staring* I have never used this one. I have never used one that LOOKS like this one.
Reg: No help from me! Work it out. Follow the tubes back to the wall if you have to. And tell me some more about jaundice as you do it.
Me: IT IS FOUR IN THE MORNING AND THIS IS CRUEL AND UNUSUAL

Keeping my brain busy really helped when it came to making time fly past, though. I had one dip at 2am (treated with instant coffee. as I was wearing scrubs, I looked exactly like this icon.) and another massive one at 7am when the morning shift staff were arriving and there was nothing to do and all of my tiredness sprang out from whatever rock it had been hiding beneath and punched me in the chest. Luckily one of the special care unit nurses took pity on me and sat me in a chair with a tiny tiny baby and his morning bottle. I think my ovaries expanded to fill most of my abdomen. TINY. TINY. BABY.

Aaaand then I went home and slept all the way through lunch, so I guess now I'll have to go and get tofu pad see euw with chilli or something. WHAT a pity.

DEAR PEOPLE WHO ATTENDED COMIC-CON: I HATE YOU ALL. AND YOUR STUPID FAR-AWAY CONTINENT. HATE.

~

Guys, guys, today we went to the neonatal ward and got to poke a baby! It had teeny tiny feet!! We are also having lectures shoved down our throats at the speed of light and my head is spinning with new concepts and new vocabulary (you don't want to know the number of ways in which you are required to describe the position of a foetus. or the number of mechanisms of labour.) but it's fascinating, and I think if this block doesn't end up killing me through the sheer number of ward and clinic and theatre hours I somehow have to combine with studying for Barrier, I will enjoy it a lot.

BABIES.

SO TIRED. These 7am starts are only acceptable if, um, no, actually I can't think of anything. I have taken to napping! I have never been a napper! And I am trying to be in bed by 10:30 but that isn't working too well either because of my assignments.

Today I spent 4 hours watching someone have most of their stomach removed*, and tomorrow apparently there is a WHIPPLE so my entire Upper GI Surgery team will be crammed into the theatre having a look-see. Which means I probably won't have to scrub in. Which means I will be able to STRETCH MY BACK and go for TEA BREAKS and all the good things denied you when you are assisting the surgeon**.

(Today I also had to wear a lead vest and apron UNDER my gown and gloves and mask, holy hell, that was hot. Luckily the procedure was very short.)



*And now I will have to spend at least another 4 hours frantically putting together a 20-minute talk on it, complete with prognosis statistics and diagrams of the Roux-en-Y technique. Woo.

**In case you can't tell, I am not very keen on surgery.

Dear America,

O_O

I -- WHAT. I mean, I knew it was a ridiculous system, but not that ridiculous.

(I didn't know Hillary Clinton had been pushing for universal healthcare during her husband's presidency. Good on her. And I think I need to reread the details of the recent changes more carefully.)

Also, that British doctor they interviewed was adorable <3 Adorable and loaded. I WANT A JOB IN LONDON AND A HOUSE IN GREENWICH.

...actually, I want to get my British citizenship renewed and then work in France and be a SUPERHERO NINJA DOCTOR in a zippy car who drives around Paris at night.

More seriously -- I think this was a good time for me to watch this documentary, manipulative though it is. I've been feeling kind of demotivated and apathetic as far as my course is concerned, and I think it's because my last couple of placements have involved a lot less talking-to-patients. Patients are awesome. (Mostly.) And getting someone's life story is always rewarding: you realise how much of an impact sickness can have on a person, or a family, and you realise how resilient people are. It's humbling. I'm in the right profession, I am, I just sometimes get so snowed under by the paperwork and the assessments and the constant stress that I forget this fact.

So, um, huzzah for socialised healthcare.


Love,

an abnormally patriotic-feeling British-Australian.

...and that's a wrap!

I'm halfway there, guys; in two years time I will be right on the verge of true gainful employment and writing Dr Fahye on official paperwork.

Today was lovely, too, once the final paper was over: traditional post-exam yum cha with the girls, lounging around watching TV in the afternoon, and then pizza & gelato with my choir friends as an early birthday/sorry-I-can't-sing-at-Carolfest thing.

Plans for tomorrow include packing up most of my belongings in preparation for the great return to Canberra, hopefully getting a fair bit of writing done, dashing into the city to buy my brother's Christmas present, and then the official Halfway Dinner with the rest of my cohort. Swanky dresses and sexy shoes ahoy!