The Ironies of Life

I ended my last post questioning the futilities of life. I even made reference to death... and about 30 minutes after I wrote that post... I was called to declare someone dead.

It's moments like these you need Minties.

I joke about death... and then have to face a distraught family whose mother and grandmother has now passed away.

Isn't it funny how we sanitise and anaesthetise death?

We dress it up with euphemysms like "passing away" and "going to a better place" rather than say it...

DEATH!

It's such an awful horrid thing that we ignore. We don't like death so we stick our sick ones away from sight in hospitals so we don't have to see them until they're gone.

It's pretty awful to have to go up to the wards at 5am and go into the room with this dead body. Someone who 30 minutes ago was living and breathing is now a cold, lifeless corpse.

I undrape my stethscope and unfurl the black tubing to listen to her chest.

No breath sounds...

No heart sounds...

I felel her cold wrist and put my fingers to her neck...

No peripheral or central pulses.

I slowly pull back her eyelids, retracting them so that I can see her cold blue eyes.

Pupils fixed and dilated.

She's dead.

I fill in the certificate and hang around for the morning team to arrive and fill in the proper cause of death information. They had been expecting this. She had been fairly sick for a while. but still... one minute she was there... the next she was not.

And with that happy thought, I left the hospital, having survived a week of nights which seem to have been the quietest set of nights ever recorded in the history of Whoop Whoop Hospital.

The other irony that occured later that day was that after my discussion of 'old British gentlemen' I went to visit my nearby grandfather and step-grandma.

Now my grandfather epitomises "Britishness"... he still sees Australia as a part of Britain and nothing you can say will convince him otherwise. I joked with him about Australia becoming a republic and I almost got cut off from his inheritance.

I mentioned to him that I had never been to Queensland in my life so he decided we should go on a trip to see Qld for the day.

So off we drove listening to ABC radio with my grandparents wearing their old people's hats and driving way below the speed limit. We drove for almost 3 hours to get to the Gold coast. We stopped at the border and did the extremely touristy thing of standing with one foot on either side of the border (apparently this is often utilised by Mental Health Services who will transfer pateint's between states by offloading them at the border crossing and making them walk across to Qld who then pick them up in the paddy wagon and shoot them off to their own dungeons).

When we finally hit the Gold Coast, Grandad proceeded to say how tacky it all looked and how he thought it was awful (so why were we there?) and then we got out for 5 mintues (after 3 hours of travel) and we stood (not swam) on the beach whilst he berated how many Japanese tourists there were (interesting though how those 'Japanese' were speaking fluent Mandarin)
Then without so much as touching the water... we hopped back in the car and drove all the way back.

I know they're old so I'll excuse them... but seriously... who drives 3 hours to go to Australia's biggest beaches and then only stops for 5 minutes on the sand? Argh!!!

Since I finished nights I haven't been able to sleep properly... my cortisol keeps firing off too early and waking me at 4am... I had to drag myself through today and fell asleep as soon as I had eaten dinner.

But then again... it's good to be home... good to be back in the dungeon with my little funy farm.

I have my old dementing crazy ladies who do laps around the ward.

I have my psychotic Aboriginal men who claim racist abuse everytime we don't let them out.

I have my drug induced delusionals who just wont stay off their THC smoking.

And I have my eccentirc family of nursing staff who strangely enough, all missed me last week and were so glad to have me back (nothing against the relief intern).

Only 2 more weeks of this bliss left and then I have to turn into a surgeon... I can't think of any extremes more set apart than psychiatry and surgery... but then again... it shall be nice to be doing something as opposed to bludging all day.

Finally, I received some flack for my last post because I said I was dancing to my iPod (etc etc) and I would like to set the record straight:

1) It was hyperbole - there was an iPod.. I ate some chocolate to keep me awake... there was Coke.. but there was def no dancing... I was more an expresison of my mood than actions!

2) Even if I was dancing, that doesn't diminish my WASPness (White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant)

3) "I'm a man who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn. That's what kind of man I am. You're just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It's science"*

Stay classy San Diego! (will put some pics of my border run up when the computers will let me)

* Ron Burgundy (Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy)