Spring Time

Spring is in the air. All around me the earth is brightening. The folks in my little out post are more rambunctious than I’ve ever seen them. It’s as if there reins a certain freedom to speak louder than the whispers winter’s oppression allowed; to wear brighter colours.  Folks have a hop in their step. The new season brings with it the promise that excitement lies just around the next corner.

In celebration of this felicitous feeling I shall wear bright garbs myself. In my line of work, one doesn’t often have the chance to dress up as office workers do daily. It’s usually scrubs with tackies and if you’re not on call, you might go for jeans, comfy tops and reasonable shoes. It takes one long day on your feet to cure you of the desire to wear heals or pointy tips ever again. Scarves and necklaces inevitably dangle in open wounds. Bracelets and rings have to be removed when donning gloves. Those gloves are covered in a flour-like powder that will leave white blotches all over your clothing.

The most hilarious apparel available to the medical profession is theatre scrubs. These are not the tailored light blue ones modelled in Grey’s Anatomy. Ours are a foul-shade of dark green. They are specially created to be the most unflattering garments on the market.

In order to enter the aseptic theatre environment one has to first scavenge for the most suitable green linen top and bottoms from a jumbled mass of newly laundered scrubs. On occasion I have found scrub tops where the entrance to the sleeves had been sewn closed. I’ve found a pair of pants with one leg a foot long whilst the other was three feet long. My favourite treasure was a pair of pants broader in cross-section (round the middle) than the legs were long. If the doctors in Grey’s Anatomy were to be dressed in these green clown’s gowns they wouldn't possibly be tempted to do a spot of frolicking in the store cupboard.

Staying Alive

I was recently introduced to the term NAFI by one of my friends and fellow bloggers.  A NAFI refers to a patient with No Ambition and F-all Interest. Before you log off in disgust at me being so judgemental, let me just explain how the concept manifests in practice.

A mother recently brought her six year old child to me after she’d sustained burn wounds for the second time in her life. On both occasions, she’d been sitting too close to the fire, so much so that her clothes caught alight. The mother elected to bring her to hospital an entire month after the burns had occurred with the result that the wounds were septic. The mom showed no sign of being concerned about the child, worried that the same accident had happened again or at least upset that the girl would have to be admitted to hospital for a number of weeks and receive skin grafts. On my probing, she admitted that the girl likes sitting close to the fire, so she allows her to do just that. The child caught alight twice while under adult supervision!

Compare this to the case of the eight month old left alone on a bed with a bucket of boiling water or that of two four year olds allowed to play with matches. You may think these are isolated cases of child neglect but I promise you, one sees these things on a daily basis. Accidents happen, sure, but the difference here is that these people take disasters in their stride. They either expect nothing better of life, having been dealt a rotten lot before. Or they just don’t have a sense of being worth more; being able to work towards a better life. What shocks me every time is that the parents of these children are relaxed when they bring their kids in. If my child had been in such a horrific accident, I would be in a frenzy of concern. I’d cry with my child. I’d ask the doctor a million questions on whether the wounds would heal; if it’ll leave scars; if there would be permanent sequelae. I would just seek to know whether my child was going to be okay.

A mom brought her two year old to casualties after a near drowning. She was so lackadaisical about the whole event, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Surely anyone would realise that drowning kills. This particular mom was not concerned enough to have answers to my basic questions: when had it occurred; how long was the child underwater; was the child unconscious when she was retrieved from the water?

These parents have as little hope for their children as they have for themselves. Even if they are poor, even if they are uneducated the basic human wish of wanting better for your children than you yourself has had should prevail. Ambition needn’t be big and awesome: we don’t all have to be real estate magnates, talk show hosts or beauty queens. What about just trying to stay alive and stay healthy. HIV prevention campaigns might actually be successful if people expected that they might stay HIV negative even though everyone around them is dying from AIDS and if they believed that they were worth fighting for, even if the only warrior were themselves.

Plump, Rosy-Cheeked Babies

My grandmother, who is a very level-headed, dignified elderly lady, recently suggested I look into sperm donation instead of the dating game to find the father of my future children. Needless to say, I have not had a very successful run with relationships. My experience is that South African guys' interest is tweaked when they hear that the girl is a doctor. They immediately think (and some say aloud), “Wow, you must be so clever!” This is inevitably followed by, “Ooh, you must make big bucks…”

The guy quickly catches on that being a doctor does not mean you’re loaded but rather that you often have to work late; get up at night to go to work and cancel dinner dates because you’re caught up in theatre. Their natural instinct of wanting a nurturing figure to adore them 24/7 takes over and things aren’t so rose-coloured anymore. Add to that, that the girl doctor is often more independent, ambitious and sometimes higher earning than the guy and he almost certainly develops an inferiority complex.

One could suggest that a straight forward solution would be to marry a fellow doctor. Many girls do precisely that.  Imagine though the dinner time conversation one would have for the rest of your life: just medical jargon. No wonder so many doctors' kids go into the same field as their parents: they’re never exposed to any other life. Most male doctors would still prefer to marry a nurse than a fellow doctor. It appears that such a partnership suites the male ego better than the doctor-doctor alliance.

My gran herself was married to a doctor and raised three children.  She taught Afrikaans and Geography for a number of years before settling down with my grandfather and running his medical practice. She is well-educated and enlightened especially so for the times in which she grew up. Even so, she followed a fairly traditional course in love and marriage. For her to have considered sperm donation as a way of furthering her own gene pool via her only granddaughter is rather revolutionary.

I recently read an article in a popular magazine about this exact topic. The magazine featured the three most sought-after sperm donors in Europe. All three were of Scandinavian origin; all three boffins of some sort; ambitious and not too bad looking (though rather nerdy). Women from all over the globe, including some South Africans, requested these guys’ genes to mix and mingle with their own and form hundreds of new little earth walkers. It seems that women are drawing on sperm banks much more frequently than I had ever imagined.

The question is: why are we not finding suitable mates? There are more females on earth than there are males and therefore not every girl will find a partner. Besides that, it seems that all the good-looking guys turn out to be gay. Then there are the cry-babies, the mommy’s boys, the a-romantics and the plain villains. Neither a good option. One of my theories is that all the chemicals and hormones in our tap water nowadays, a major one being Oestrogen, interfere with the development of a proper man. In my grandmother’s dating years, the men were strong; their greatest aim was to protect their family against any form of predator. They went to the army where they had to carry about heavy poles and survive in pouring rain storms for weeks on end. They came home with emotional scars but also biceps. A man would retire at the end of a working day to a cigar, the evening paper and pensiveness. Today’s male needs elicit steroids to develop muscles. The ones who don’t bother are called metro sexuals. They write poems and discuss their feelings without being prompted.  If you seek the rougher sort you end up with the type that dangle their pants under the bum line, reek and smoke ciggies. They're bound to disappear as soon as you ask for child support.

So, would I opt out of this hazard-strew mating game and browse the internet for a suitable sperm donor as my granny suggests? Goodness, that might be a much scarier prospect. And what would I tell the child? I don’t think I’m broody enough yet to take this suggestion seriously. If you’re reading this and have actually gone that route, please let me hear your views.

Someone once said that to love is to have your heart broken. This may be so, yet most of us plunge into the obstacle course of having our hearts broken numerous times in the hope that perfect and full-filling love awaits us round the next corner. Is that all-amazing, flying-carpet, fairy-tale in-love feeling worth sifting through the pant-hangers, the steroid poppers and the mommy’s boys for one’s perfect fit. Currently, I’d say I’m still willing to take the risk and play the game.

The Noble Masochist

I’ve worked straight through a thirty hour call more than once, not sitting down, not passing wet or dry over my lips. It is often simply too busy to take even a moment to have your supper. One may be caught up in theatre and once you leave there, go straight on to casualties where you have a backlog of six patients needing to be seen. The first chance to catch one’s breath may be at 3am, by which time you have a dehydration headache and hypoglycaemic dizziness.

Were you to ask a group of doctors whether their own stomachs take precedence over seeing a sick patient, ninety percent of them will most certainly postpone their own needs and go to sort out the patient. Surely this is what is expected of us. We signed up for a life in medicine and that means that we’ll get up on the coldest night of winter and drive through a rain storm to get to hospital if needs be.

I’m not complaining. There's a small pocket of secret pride in my heart knowing that I’ll stay in theatre until the end of the list, even though I’m post-call and can’t feel my feet anymore after traipsing about on them over the previous day and night without sitting once.

I could leave a couple of stable patients waiting to take a supper break but I expect ‘better’ of myself and would just feel guilty while not attending to them. I’ll jump on a patient’s chest to start CPR even when dressed in a designers beige coat, getting blood stains on it, because there’s an immediate task needing my particular attention.

Could it be an elevated sense of my self-worth, my worth as a doctor that makes me fore go my own basic needs? At my varsity's final graduation ceremony, one of the top dogs in management said that our families and we should stop complaining that we are sent into particularly dangerous squatter camps to visit the clinics there. Some of my classmates had reported being high jacked and suffering intimidation on those trips. The official’s view was that we have signed on to do medicine and should know that going to these dangerous areas was part of the course. Moreover, being in such testing situations would make us better doctors. Have I been brain washed to set my own health and well-being aside for my job? Do you do the same or is the better doctor the one who keeps himself mentally and physically healthy so he may draw on his own strengths when faced with taxing situations at work?

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