You Should Blog.

This is a blog about ‘how not to hit a golf ball… and other things I’m learning.’

People talk about the learning curve that is internship year – the steep exponential curve of the first six months. I remember exhaustion, uncertainties, frustrations and feeling so, so inept. Stupid things I did. The madness of my first weekend shift. Most of all I remember the security of having colleagues I could trust – nurses, clerical and allied health staff, and more experienced doctors – who helped me find my feet and not screw things up too badly.

I was lucky enough to have the first five months in my home hospital. Starting a stressful new career was made so much easier by not just the familiarity of my surroundings, but by having The Girl there by my side every step of the way. Making me coffee every morning, and dinner every night. Amazing, wonderful love and support. None of ‘all this’ could or would have happened without her.

Which brings me to something I’m still learning, which I can’t really wrap up into a neat set of words. It’s something about family. I’m just writing and deleting words from this paragraph, none of which really make sense, so I’ll leave it there and hope that something coherent unfolds at some point in the future of this post or this blog as a whole.

My grandmother died suddenly in February this year, in my father’s arms, a few weeks short of her 90th birthday. I spent some time with her in December, and I’m so glad I did. She had a wicked sense of humour. I wish I’d written more about her.

I was late to the funeral. I expect I will be late to my own.

That’s enough for now.

Not A Cinderella Story

Did I mention I am home now? Hopefully for good, minus the odd week here & there when I have exams and such at the mothership. This weekend I am in fact home alone, with nothing but the company of various mammals, fowl and underwater creatures for company.

This afternoon I took the hound to the beach. He is, after all, a Beachhound. It was a hot day, but being late in the afternoon, a wind had arisen and driven most people away. Nevertheless, there was a clump of people deposited directly at the entrance to the beach, flopped like seals on an icefloe.

I kicked off my trusty Havs and strolled down the beach, dog lead over my shoulder, footwear dangling from my hand. The hound waited all of thirty seconds to poop on the sand, and as I pulled a plastic bag from my pocket in order to pick it up, another bag flew out and billowed (in a small and rapid way) toward the dunes.

Being an avid environmentalist, I sprinted after it, and thanks to a convenient clump of dessicated seaweed, caught up with it in less than 100 metres with only a minor twist to my ankle.

Luckily, the wind was strong enough to mean my journey back to the origin of the poop was a straight line. Although the hound had cleverly camouflaged his excrement to exactly match the sand, its unmistakable cigar-like form remained, enabling me to locate it and employ the miscreant plastic bag.

Not much wanting to add a bag of poop to my stroll, I tracked back to the dune-grass line, and left the bag in a prominent position, carefully noting its location for collection on the return journey.

Back to the walk. Strolling back down to the high-water line, I found a cuttlefish bone the size of a MacBook Pro. I picked it up to marvel at the size of the calamari rings its owner would have produced. As I marvelled, I wondered whether chickens like cuttlefish bones. Now that I am A Scientist of sorts, I decided I should put this to the test.

I returned to the poobag at the dune-grass line, and added the giant cuttlefish bone to the To-Be-Collected pile. I cavorted with the hound somewhat, thus distracting him from a miserable Retriever on a Halti lead, and we continued our stroll. Before too long, he pooped again.

I congratulated myself on having made the effort to chase the second plastic baggy. Knowing myself as I do, I decided I would be unlikely to remember the location of two bag-drops, so the second offering joined us on our walk to the calm end of the beach.

The water was deliciously warm, and on arrival at our destination, the hound and I disrobed and enjoyed some salt water time, much to the amusement of passers-by. Waves excite and repel him. He made all sorts of friends while I got thumped in the back by the chaotic distant cousins of a tsunami. I dried myself on my shirt and we headed back down the beach, poo-baggy and cap in hand.

About half-way down the beach I was enjoying my bare feet, when I realised that I had arrived in my Havs. Bugger. I searched the windswept landscape of my recent memory. The sprint. The Retriever. The second poop. A fishing float. When had I discarded them? No clues.

I was reasonably sure I’d have noticed them in the re-clothing part of the adventure, and decided against retracing our steps to the swimming end of the beach. Peering about the beach as we continued the stroll, I stopped to ask the hound’s new best friends if they had seen some missing silver thongs.

Sadly, they were of no help, though they did manage to crank out some jokes about Cinderella and a metal detector. They had a variety of northern hemisphere accents, and I’m not entirely sure they all knew we were talking about footwear. Shudder.

Bemused at yet another irrefutable example of my intractable vagueness, I resigned myself to the barefoot drive home and headed toward the clump of seal-people and my treasure-pile of poop and flotsam.

Behold! There beside the cuttlefish bone were my trusty Havs, stuck criss-cross fashion and heel-down in the sand.

Maybe it was the seal-people. Maybe it was Halti-woman. Maybe it was me. I have absolutely no idea.

Not Nearly So Nekked

Once is funny. More than once is still funny, but starts to look oddly deliberate. Thus, my main goal for the first day of 2011 was to not make a New Year’s tradition of getting myself locked outside naked.

In preparation for this challenge, I made sure the laundry was stocked with a clean, dry shirt and a number of towels. Words were spoken with my beloved co-habitant regarding appropriate house-departure procedures. I sourced shorts with pockets for my keys. I left the bathroom window open.

Waking, as usual, at a geriatric New Year’s hour – that is, the time usually reserved for actually going to bed after New Year’s Eve – I resisted all urges to make breakfast and deferred doing any laundry until I could be assured that no-one was home to lock me out. Instead I dressed in my key-holder shorts and a t-shirt, and set out on a merry morning adventure to walk the hound.

While perambulating with the Yellow Dog of Happiness, I encountered many elderly people also walking their dogs. All other folk under the age of sixty-five were either at work already, or snoring, or still on their way to bed, drunk as skunks and reeking of fireworks.

Several of the elderly citizens made conversation with me as we enjoyed the last vestiges of sunrise over the river. Had I been less clothed, I doubt I would have had the pleasure of such conversation.

When I got home, I brought the rabbit inside, made a coffee, and wrote the world’s second-most boring blog post.

I managed to go the whole day without getting locked outside in the nuddy.
However, I am so thoroughly bored with myself that I think I am changing my mind a little about the whole tradition thing.

Maybe just every second year…

If Wishes Were Fishes I’d Have A Rainbow Trout

After loving psychiatry so much, my rotation through the maternity ward reminded me of all the things I will miss out on if I follow the psych pathway instead of rural general practice like I had always planned. So the seed of doubt is planted.

Luckily I have a good few years to figure it all out and see where I best fit. That’s assuming I pass everything… Exams are more than seven months away but I’m already starting to feel some niggles of apprehension. I think this is mainly because of my intractable lack of organisation. Grand intentions and massive failure to follow through.

I feel like I need a system and I don’t have one. Bits of mind maps, bits of flash cards, bits of handwritten notes, bits of typed up ones. I doubt I’m the only med student in the world who struggles with this, but the balance of evidence suggests that the majority have neat folders, stacks of home made flash cards, and reams of tidy notes which are complete and cover a single topic per page.

I basically have a couple of lumps of blutac, some string, and a dog-eared spiral-bound pad of coloured paper covered in multi-coloured random scribble and semi-logical diagrams. Couple this with a misshapen muesli bar, a paper clip attached to a blue rubber band, a petrol receipt and one of those individually-wrapped tropical fruit Mentos you get at conferences, and you have my study compendium.

The electronic equivalent is presented below.

How about that… Informative and colourful.

( … help me … )