Another Pair Of Eyes

Earth Hour

“Critics describe the event as symbolic and a meaningless gesture.”

Surely the aim of a protest is to raise awareness. Symbols are powerful things for such a goal. I agree with Earth Hour.

Do you?

Neighbours

I was woken up at half past four in the morning to the sound of yelling, swearing, anger, sobbing through my bedroom wall. It takes a lot to wake me up in the early hours, but this qualified. I won’t relate to you what sort of things were said; just accept that it was sufficient for me to call the police. I heard three doors slam on their car when they left.

I’m genuinely quite upset. I left this morning and went home. It’s a family living next door. I’m haunted by whether I did the right thing or not.

Venezuela

Well that’s not good.

Doctor Mode

I try not to have purely medicine-related posts on here very often as I know they can be a bit wayward/boring/trivial, but occasionally one just slips through the net so…

One thing that soon becomes apparent when you study medicine is the clinical mindset, or ‘doctor mode’ as it is so often referred to. Talking about the colour of people’s shit? Disgusting…but not in doctor mode. Then it’s fine, as is talking about dead bodies, cutting things up, blood spurting left right and centre, gross infections, PR exams, flayed arms, pus, piss, needles, silly numbers of abbreviations*, brains in buckets with the eyes still attached and feeling hungry in the DR.** The only thing that doctor mode still isn’t very good (for me at least) at is asking people to take off various items of clothing for examination.

All well and good, considering that dealing with the above is part of day to day life. The problem only arises when you forget to move from one to the other – doctor mode isn’t very social-friendly, because there is almost no question which is out of line. Someone says ‘I’ve got stomach ache’ and you’ve got to catch yourself before you start asking about when it started and how quickly, and have you eaten recently and what is the consistency of your stool and have you had frequency issues, has this happened before? are you taking anything, does anything make it worse or better and—wait.

Normal conversation. It might sound like an exaggeration but there is a lot of this thinking about and it can be difficult to suppress. I guess it’s similar for anything someone is interested in – if you’ve got a fascination with cars, you tend to ask more questions about them when they come up. It’s just that I don’t always want to know, on the real side of life, that in all probability someone has an STI/UTI because of the class of antibiotics they’re on, or that someone’s parents have heart problems because there’s a propranolol box on the side in their house, or that someone has high cholesterol because of the xanthalasma and arcus around/in their eyes respectively, highlighting their increased risk of ischaemic heart disease.

Better get used to it, I guess. It’s difficult to escape medicine sometimes.

*Seriously! Earlier I wrote a list answering a question ‘what investigations would you perform?’ and all it said was: ECG, ABG, BP/HR, RR, CXR (AP), FBC

**dissection room, for anyone who’s not come across that abbrev. in past entries

Sunshine

Sunshine, summeryness, and sport: the recipie for a good day I feel. Today was a good day.

10 Things

1. Campus is just as quiet on a sunday night at half 9 as it is on thursday morning at 4:50am.
2. German paramedics are not used to British binge drinking.
3. It is always possible to keep going without sleep. The quality of your skill at <insert activity here>, however, decreases swiftly with each passing hour of lost sleep.
4. Dutch hockey teams are not used to British binge drinking.
5. Chocolate factories do not give out as much chocolate as they should do/used to.
6. German hockey teams are happy to invent games to match British binge drinking.
7. When someone who works at the bar starts trying to pick a fight with a mate, having 50 other people with you can get him fired.
8. German police officers are not used to British binge drinking.
9. I love Holland. I love the language, I love the weather, I love feeling like I am in a second country I can call home (even if I’m not really).
10. You might think that being drunk makes people inelegant and incapable of co-ordination, but try running around a hockey stick with your forehead on it twenty times and then walking in a straight line.

Until next year, hockey tour!

Gym

This post might be a bit scatterbrained. Forgive it. It is only young.

In the last week I have, for the first time in many years and only for the 3rd or so time in my life, entered that strange world that is the Gym. The alien looking pieces of equipment crouching in a whitewashed room; that peculiarly gym-like smell, the whooshing noise of the rowing machines that follows you wherever you go and the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of someone pounding it out on the treadmill. Everyone there looking slim, trim and expressionless.

No smiling please: this is a place for grim determination. The gym shares something with the London Underground in that unless you know someone pretty well, you say nothing at all. I’m sure if they provided copies of the Metro it would almost be indistinguishable – the vague smell of sweat, random noise and the tinny sound of someone listening through headphones to something almost familiar.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the quantitative aspects of the gym world. 32 minutes exactly on the cross-trainer, 387 calories burnt, and distance covered…well, not far. 2km. The gym machines thrive on numbers: 2000m on the rowing machine. 2 minutes, 11 seconds average/500m. 134 steps per minutes on the trainer. Avg. 196 Watts…numbers numbers numbers. I even added my own numbers while lamenting not bringing my own headphones with attatched music player: 16 vanes in each section of the air vent in front of me, 3 sections, 8 vents in the room total, 384 vanes total. They certainly keep your head engaged enough to avoid a part of the boredom associated with staying in one place while apparently going somewhere.

For all that, and much to my surprise, I actually quite enjoyed it. It was different, and it lets you drift into your own little world which requires no focus at all on anything about you – if I did the same running, I’d get flattened or trip over a kerb or hedge or skate park or whatever. It gives you a feeling of satisfaction – 387 calories? That’s about this much:

Shame the rest of that was eaten by me earlier, otherwise I might even be down a few calories instead of up a lot. If only I’d paid attention to the rowing machine I might have been able to claim more. The gym brings out your competitive streak – you want to beat yourself, grind yourself down and wear yourself out. you come home and shower and feel refreshed, and its refreshing to do so.

Maybe I don’t hate the gym after all – perhaps the boring, monotonous first couple of times were just a blip (or perhaps I’ve gotten more tolerant of boredom and monotony!). And as I need to get fit, fast, there’s probably few better ways to do it.