Aftermath

Right.

Last time I posted (note to self - don't post drunk. Alcohol provoketh the desire but taketh away the performance. And causeth the lisp) I had just found out that this guy I went through medical school with had died in a helicopter crash overseas. Some foreign aid mission thing. He's got a web-page somewhere, like all of these things it gives no real impression of who he was or what he was capable of.

here it is, I think - http://people.mydesk.net.au/~mdavey/

Anyhow. I haven't told anyone at work about this, which may seem wanky, but .. I don't know. I don't want to be seen as the bereaved at work. Public grief is something I don't know that I'm comfortable with. Expressions of public grief (and this is another of the fifty or so reasons why practically no-one I work with knows about the bipolar) aren't - how do I put this into English? - they aren't solitary phenomena.

It's as if when along with saying you are grieving you say a lot of other things. You say "pay attention to me, cut me some slack". You say "I knew this man deeply, I had a special and intimate bond, I am wounded in a way that you canot understand but must respect". You say "I am entitled to these things - extra consideration from my fellows, someone to pat me on the back and ask if I want a cup of coffee, people to understand if I don't pick up as many patients as normal, maybe slip off a few minutes early." I imagine myself doing that and I imagine this cartoon of me all miserable, a coffin with a flag draped over it somewhere in the background, and a caption underneath saying "I'm the real victim here". I am not going to do that.

Anyway. Enough on this. Matt's partner Rachael made some really nice hats, go buy one.

In other news. I am back at the ED, which is great. I came back from the exam just completely exhausted, and even now the thought of study makes me slightly sick, but it is so good to be back.

Day one was fairly low key. I saw a woman who might have had anti-histamine poisoning, along with her other problems, and who while I was talking to her kept reaching out and picking up an imaginary glass of water. And more "punched in the head" men, and some renal colic (they call it male labour, one of the top five causes of pain).

After the exam, by the way, when I was deeply ambiguous about continuing on, I was at judo and some girl dislocated her finger and I had to relocate it. And then a few nights later driving back I saw this over-turned car and police and fireys in attendance and no ambos, so we had to pull over and go and stabilise some guy's neck until the ambos turned up. This guy had been turning a corner around midnight, late model sedan, and kept saying he had been travelling "fifty, sixty max" (kilometres an hour). I kept nodding and checking that he had a pulse below his fairly badly dislocated knee, but the car was upside down with only one front wheel, the bumper was five metres back and separate from the car, still wrapped around the light-post, and five metres further on there was the other wheel.

This friend of mine used to get all these photos of obliterated cars that the ambos brought in (they bring them in to give us an idea of the crash: speed, impact zones, any driver's compartment protrusion, that kind of thing), and he'd put the photos up in the doctor's station with messages undeneath that'd say "For sale - needs some panelbeating" or "One careful owner".

Anyhow. Next post no idea, maybe about the radio sex show we were on.

I have tried to fix the thing here so that I can get comments, don't know if it works. Now if only I could work out a way of telling people this blog exists without trumpeting "yes, it's me, I'm clinically nuts, and here's some confidential medical information about people you may well recognise!"

John