existing's tricky:but to live's a gift
I associate the smell of woodfire with autumn giving way to winter, dark wet cobbled streets, treacherously slippy fallen leaves, damp socks, dim bike lights, painful chapped hands. This is the season of course that heralds Christmas, the turn of the year, and thus it felt so natural to me that it took a few seconds before it jarred against the reality of warm summer air and blue skies. I could smell wood-smoke on Christmas day
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It’s early morning before work and I’m writing again in the grey of the soft light. The feeling of writing: thoughts running through my fingers, the beat of the words, the shape and sensation of them, the joy of making something tangible out of something existing only in my mind, an exacting almost topographical pleasure.…
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From the broad to the very specific. Last month I wrote about the ways in which medical encounters can be shaped by the written word, remarking upon the fact that for something that has such power and lasting impact (with the advent of electronic notes, these narratives can follow patients indefinitely), doctors receive surprisingly little…
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Medical terminology, often referred to with the pejorative term “jargon”, gets a lot of bad press. A consultant I once worked with, for whom I have the utmost respect, once asked me why so many doctors used it. It was a rhetorical question:
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At medical school, we are taught to start wide and narrow down. “What brought you in?”, you might ask, before eventually getting to the specifics much much later. In real life, you learn to tailor your first question to the situation at hand. If it is 7pm and there are twenty people waiting to be seen, the way in which you allocate your time becomes a question of ethics. You rarely have the luxury of time in medicine.
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I have never managed to sleep the day before a night shift. It makes no sense to my body, to suddenly try nap during the day. And worse: if I let myself lie in bed too close to the beginning of a shift, eventually waves of sleepiness will start to roll over me. I’m cosy,…
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It’s 1998, or thereabouts. October and the air is chilly, heavy with woodsmoke escaping the cold stone houses of the Circulade, alive with excitement. My sister and I crouch in the little wooden cabin atop a child’s slide, chuntering happily to each other, as we squash lavender between grubby fingers and press the smooth leaves…
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Mad to Live 