Category: Uncategorised

I’ve decided that amniotic fluid has a very distinctive smell, and one which I’d rather not be around more than necessary. It really is quite a unique and while not stomach turning, it does make you want to wrinkle up you nose in a futile attempt to block off the sensation.

Well I’ve been in the birthing suite since 10pm now, and have been awake since 8 or something yesterday morning, and while I am not feeling tired (yet) I am definitely feeling a little manic. It’s a little odd, because this is usually about the time that my stomach starts giving me trouble if I’m pulling an all nighter, but so far I’ve had no complaints from down below. Perhaps this mania will tide me over until I get to go to bed at 2pm this afternoon….

Someone once described giving birth as the equivalent of trying to get out of your mini through the exhaust pipe, and having finally seen a birth I am inclined to agree with the analogy.

As a followup to my above observation on childbirth, it seems to me that the whole thing would work a whole lot better if nature hadn’t insisted on using the reproductive input port as the reproductive output port as well.

Now don’t go getting me wrong, I don’t like Sadam Hussein, and I certainly don’t think that he was by any stretch of the imagination a nice man, but I can’t shake the feeling that he’s getting an unreasonably rough deal. First, he has his country trashed by what, if it was any country other than America doing the invading, would be acknowledged as an illegal war. Secondly he gets photos of him in his underwear published in major news papers, in flagrant disregard for his rights under the Geneva conventions. Then he is given a trial, but so far his defense team hasn’t been told the charges, hasn’t been given access to any of the millions pages of documents which may be going to be used in evidence against him, and can’t get assurances that the trial will actually be at all “fair” in any legal sense.

The only thing that justifies toppling regimens is if the invaders can show themselves to be better than those they are removing.

Before the American’s started meddling, Iraq had a health system, running water, rule of (admittedly totalitarian) law, and a productive economy. Now the country basically has none of the above, has dozens of people killed each week in unchecked random violence, and even the one thing that the invaders prize most dearly, their much vaunted “justice”, is being denied to those who they overthrew.

Personally I agree with an idea espoused recently by Saddam’s defence team: that Saddam should be tried (and if guilty jailed) in a neutral country such as Sweden, which has undertaken similar judicial roles in the past (The former Serbian president Biljana Plavsic is in jail there after he was convicted of war crimes). If we cannot afford him a free and fair trial then we are ultimately no better than he was.

And if the Americans want him to be executed (which they frankly seem pretty keen on) they should do it themselves and show their true spots (and wear the international condemnation that would follow like real men).

There is nothing quite so discomforting as watching someone try and get themselves sued. Now after acknowledging that good and effective communication was an increasingly vital skill for doctors to possess, and one which had generally been badly taught in the older 6 year courses (if it was at all), the organisers of the new course introduced a number of tutorials and lectures to directly deal with issues of effective communication and conflict resolution.

Armed with this knowledge I often find myself cringing in the presence of senior, old course trained doctors, who in spite of many years of clinical experience, and obvious skill and knowledge in their chosen area of clinical practice, repeatedly do and say things which are in the “don’t ever do/say this” lists in our lectures.

• Sometimes they don’t explain things adequately, and leave the patient confused.
• Often they revert to confusing medical jargon so that they don’t actually have to tell a patient bad news, or even sometimes so that they don’t have to really talk to them at all.
• Sometimes they don’t listen to or acknowledge the patient’s concerns.
• Sometimes they tell the patient how things are going to be, and ignore the patient’s complaints.
• Sometimes they barely acknowledge the patient at all, and just talk to the notes or the other nearby doctors, as though the patient were just another piece of the furniture.
• And sometimes they are just so amazingly tactless, insensitive, and offensive that you want to leave the room before you find yourself being asked to testify in the lawsuit that is in the process of being started in front of your eyes.

I say this last one because they have done studies that have shown that poor communication and lack of patient empathy are the biggest predictor of whether a doctor will get sued, rather than anything at all to do with the doctor’s clinical competence. For that reason many medical insurers will decrease a doctor’s insurance fees if they attend communication training courses run by the insurers.

Anyway today I was in an outpatient’s clinic with this particular doctor, and spent the morning watching patient after patient leave confused and “talked at”, until finally one patient got such a rough deal that she stormed out of the consult. While the doctor hadn’t actually done anything clinically wrong in relation to the treatment of her medical condition, he was so offensive towards her as a person that I would be highly surprised if lawyers weren’t involved soon.

(And all along I just wanted 5 minutes afterwards with each patient to explain what had just been said and done, and basically tidy up the myriad loose ends, but sometimes it sucks being a medical student, because I couldn’t…)

Another odd thing I have noticed recently is that everywhere I go there seem to be girls walking around with Louis Vuitton handbags. Some times it seems like every other woman you pass on the street or see in the hospital has one. Perhaps this is just a symptom of greater awareness, thanks to my increased exposure to friends and associates of working age who possess said handbags, and as I such I know what to look for, or perhaps it is a sign of a greater madness, in that possibly it is simply because there actually are more women with them about. Frankly I don’t understand spending thousands of dollars on a handbag, but I suppose that the kind of women who spend that kind of money on a handbag would counter by saying that they don’t understand how I could spend thousands of dollars on computers.

While in Bali I bought a nice little fake Omega watch, which is basically the first metal band and body watch I’ve ever owned (generally I’ve been of the black plastic digital sports watch persuasion up until now), and because I wear my watch on my left wrist, it combines with my newly acquired wedding ring to repeatedly startle me with the sudden sparkliness of my left hand. Now I know that by a ring and a watch are far from even approaching bejeweled excessiveness, in fact it is under performance in many circles, but I can’t help but stare at the sparkliness and have the phrase “Man bling” pop into my head.

On an amusing aside, I think that “bling” was the first indication that perhaps I was getting old and grown up, in that it was the first major trend that I was simply unaware of since my early teen years. Now I’m not saying that I ever was an avid watcher of popular trends, or in any way a participant in said trends, but apparently months and months passed between the emergence of bling and me becoming aware of it, and even more months passed by before I came to an appreciation of what the hell everyone was on about when they talked about bling. I just had no idea (and additionally didn’t give a flying…. well you know what I mean). It was then that I realised that perhaps being more concerned about exams and health insurance than the latest trends was my brain telling me something about not being a youth any more.

Actually I think that they are called Toadstools

One question which popped into my head as we holidayed in the world’s most populous Islamic nation (although Bali is ~90% Hindu and only ~5% Muslim) is “Does Islam have televangelists”. Is it just a bizarre Christian thing, or does it extend to other religions?