Sunday, May 27, 2007

Enjoying yourself doesn't equate to happiness

It's a lazy Sunday: woke up at 10.30, which is quite late for me (actually I woke up at 7.30 but decided it was too early so I proceeded to slump back into bed), had a breakfast of prawn noodles, showered, and then read the newspapers for Friday, Saturday and today for two hours. I kind of like spending extra time reading the papers on Sunday because I rush through them on weekdays when I'm usually rushing to do some other stuff.

C invited me over to her house yesterday for mahjong and bridge with my elective mates MF and AZ, and also AT who joined us later in the evening. Mahjong is always fun, and we had lots of laughs because MF had amazing beginner's luck and kept winning with high "points" which left us mouths-agape with disbelief, lol. Bridge was both stimulating and confusing, and I still don't know how to play it after years of fumbling around. Dinner was a sumptuous feast of food from Newton, many thanks to C's dad who bought it.

On the way to C's house I took 151, and got a bit of a shock when I boarded it because the interior didn't quite resemble a bus. Something between a bus and a limousine, I guess.


I think it's a bit ridiculous to have seats all aligned along the sides of the bus, especially for people like me - I get rather sick when I sit facing any direction other than the front of the bus (and yet I can read perfectly well if I'm sitting facing the correct direction) - and also the drastic decrease in available seating space with this arrangement. I can only suppose that 151 either has a very low passenger load, which was the case when I was taking it, or they only use this bus during non-peak hours. The design was part of a publicity campaign for one of the Nokia phones with MP3 function, and they had this really loud music blaring out of speakers set on the ceiling and a TV screen on the front of the bus airing the appropriate music video, but the video and audio kept skipping, which was painful. The TVMobile on the bus was also running simultaneously with both video and audio, so that was really bizarre. Add all of that to the way the bus kept jerking and swaying (poor driver) and my ride ended up being quite an unpleasant experience, despite the novelty of the interior design.


Friday at EssJeeH was a day of rarities, where we saw a patient in the clinic who had dystrophia myotonica, and had a good (and disturbing) discussion with our tutor regarding the condition later in the day. There was also a lady presenting with continuous headaches for whom our tutor decided to do an MR angio in addition to the MRI she ordered (MRA is not routinely done for everyone with headache) and the MRA showed global stenoses of the intracranial vasculature suggesting vasculitis. It was a little scary to think what might have resulted if Dr P hadn't decided to do that MRA. In the afternoon we talked to a lady with dermatomyositis, whom they later found had metastatic malignancy (because adult-onset dermatomyositis is often associated with malignancy, so must look for it) and who was remarkably cheerful despite her poor prognosis; I was quite touched by her bravery because I think if I had to grapple with the same situation I would probably not be as cheerful. Words can't begin to express what I felt, talking to her, so I shan't try to elaborate.

The day was slightly marred by this crazy PMS-ing nurse from one of the medical wards who screamed at me when I picked up a case file to look at it - granted, she was passing report (that oh-so-sacred nursing ritual thingey), but not on that particular file, and anyway I was only looking inside for a moment, at the nurses' station, and was going to return it after that, because I know how prickly nurses can get about their case notes disappearing. Thus I think it was quite unwarranted of her to go ballistic on me and use such a rude tone, as well as go on about wishing she could pass report behind locked doors where no one else could touch her notes. I nearly lashed back at her with some rude remark but I didn't because I refused to have as miserable a life as her that I had to go around being rude to other people. I just hope she doesn't treat her patients like that. Good thing MF was similarly annoyed by this nurse's behaviour and our mutual bitching about her calmed me down somewhat, heh.

At the end of the day I saw a rather curious sight of this middle aged man getting into the lift with a teenager dressed in casual clothes with gelled hair and covered with tattoos; I later noticed that this boy had a bandage around his right leg and more worryingly an IV plug set in his hand, and the two of them walked into the car-park, got into a car and drove away. This led me to wonder if it's proper for patients to leave hospital with an IV plug still set in place - either he was absconding from hospital or he had gotten some kind of home leave but would later return, but with an IV? An a/con at CGH emergency department once told us they don't set IV's for every patient that comes in to resus because they have to write a police report if the patient runs away with the IV still on (this applies especially to patients who look like hooligans/gang members). I guess you get to see all kinds of weird things and people after you've been in a hospital long enough.


The third season of Lost came to an end on Wednesday night US time with a highly anticipated 2 hour finale. I watched this on Saturday morning and was totally blown away by the dozens of twists the writers managed to work into the ending, and it opened a whole new can of worms that will hopefully be addressed in season 4. It was also really sad for the reason of one character death (actually, a lot of people die in the finale - hope this is not a spoiler), for whom I had come to sympathise with and care for after three seasons. Sigh.

It's quite amazing that I've managed to stick with Lost for 3 seasons when many others have stopped watching because they found the plot advancements simply ridiculous and too confusing, but I get hooked on the various twists and revelations the very talented writers work into the story, so I just can't stop. It's just a little sad that I have just about no one to share my excitement with, unlike for Heroes (which had a lousy season finale, incidentally).

Avaris / 5/27/2007 02:55:00 PM

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