Hibernation

Winter this year has felt like a lifetime. Perhaps because we lost most of Autumn to the lockdown. Perhaps because I spent all Summer studying for exams. Perhaps I’ve just clocked too many hours recently at work. I’m honing in on seasonal joys: mulled wine, scented candles, homemade soups and stews, evenings reading to the sound of wind and rain. I carve out time for yoga in the darkness each morning. Even so, my body feels restless and tense, longing for longer days, to be outside again, to feel free. Maybe it’s time I started running again.

Not a lot is new since my last update, it seems. I’ve done a couple of twelve day stretches at work and a week of nights, days off have been few and far between. I had to push my writing onto the back burner for a while, in order to contact referees and beg references, get CVs and cover letters ready for the annual recruitment cycle. Reading back though, I realise I’ve sent out two newsletters since then. And you guys, it’s been such a joy to me every time someone has signed up, I’m so grateful for the support, it feels just a little bit less like writing into a void, you know? But I hear your feedback: that a lot of you have read everything already by the time it hits your inbox(!) Unbelievable. For next month I have a bonus post planned.

Work is picking up. Winter is always a busy time in Medicine. Too many people live precariously on the edge of decompensation, all it takes is a virus, a cold, to tip them over the edge. The medical take numbers are swelling. The wards are over-capacity. But quick discharges are practically non-existent. We are beginning to feel the aftermath of the lockdown: too many people who ran out of their regular meds back in March, who have been patched up for the past few months over the phone by a GP placed in an impossible position, people who have let things slip, not wanting to cause fuss, who have felt their mental health crumble in isolation, and now come in, on the brink, just a heartbeat away from total disaster. In some ways it feels good to be moving faster again, there is always a sense of satisfaction in rising to the adrenaline-fuelled challenge of a particularly busy shift, picking up the pace, pushing your limits, trying to clear the board. The shadow side is constant low-grade fear, forever afraid that your patient’s name may come up at handover on your next shift: did I miss something, should I have done that differently, what did the team change the following day? Learning how to give yourself grace is never-ending.

On the wards, I had a lot of fun over the past month working with a new team, Koromiko. A huge part of what I love about my job is working with other people. Everyone has something different to teach you, and there can be a lot of satisfaction in paying attention to what people want, anticipating how they might react, trying to be forever one step ahead of the curve, then being aware of other people doing the same for you, so that everyone is trying to come together in the most harmonious way possible. Obviously, this is not always how things pan out. But it does happen surprisingly more often than you might think – probably something to do with the types of personalities medicine attracts, as well as the way we’re trained. And when it does come together, when the important jobs go smoothly and you have time to pay attention to the non-essentials (but really just-as-if-not-more-essentials), such as asking your patients a bit more about themselves, or grabbing coffee and learning a bit more about your colleagues, that’s just the best feeling.

Things come in waves, there’s no making sense of it, they just do. I remember when I was a surgical house officer and we had three ruptured spleens (a relatively rare thing to happen) come in the same night. Some days the board is full of chest pain, other days everyone (staff included) has a headache. Over the past few weeks we saw countless variations of shortness of breath, ranging from chest, to heart, to blood disorder, to obstructed bowels, to over-medication, to god-only-knows-what. There was also a decidedly pious twist to our patient list: we were blessed countless times, schooled about the scriptures, had one person explain she had received a divine message that her relative required electrolyte replacement, while another feared her symptoms resulted from relatives conjuring up the devil. The variety never ceases to enthrall.

Outside of work, more of the usual. I’m halfway through that stack of books from my last update post, excited to make another bookshop trip in the next few weeks. Always keen on recommendations – especially older titles that are more liable to be found in secondhand bookshops. If you’re looking for suggestions yourself, Toni Morrison’s Beloved was the most beautifully written heart-breaking story I’ve read in a long time. I was also surprised by how much I enjoyed Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, which reminded me of The Rosie Project. It’s an incomparable style of writing, but it made me laugh out loud in the library after a pretty rough set of nights. Everyone needs different kinds of books for different moods and days.

Things that have made me happy recently: a long overdue haircut, a documentary on Klimt and Schiele, catching up with friends, getting dressed up to go out, fresh flowers, pearl milk tea, days without rain.