The melody of maladie

To perfect your communication is the lifelong pursuit of a holy grail.
The journey starts with the alphabet and ends with telepathy. But the tools we employ along the way are pretty basic.
When you apply this priority to the practice of medicine, the drama is intensified.
The subtleties are not just subtleties anymore. At the risk of appearing crass, they may be life and death.
Don't take my word of it, ask any over confident doctor. I can tell you. He won't know what you are talking about.
Especially when you colour it as follows.
Your self awareness of style, external perception and ultimately the frequency and low hum of the electromagnetic waves you give off must be tuned every minute if not every second to see the Matrix.
Or to have the picture on the stereogram pop into focus.
To find the centre of the maze.
To screenprint in technicolor directly onto an imaginary T-shirt made from background reading and experiential toil which has the word Diagnosis written where the ironing instructions should be.
Ahem.
And then because that's tricky, you have to make it effortless. Not just appear that way, but actually BE effortless. You don't want to stress yourself out.
Then that is who you are, whom you have chosen to become and then medicine is no longer something you just do.
You don't hear so much of it in these days of part timers and jobshare or in those who think a full working week lasts less than 40 hours but maybe that?s what it means when people use the overtired word vocation.
I'd like to think so.
Medicine is a lyrical journey with a catchy harmony and an increasingly contagious refrain.
You have to try to hear the themes through the cacophony.
And then you can to tune your own instrument to the melody of maladie.

Get a bit stupid today!

When you get to recognize that life itself is a juxtaposition of contradiction, a whirlpool of the opposing forces of cold fact and versions of interpretation.
It's daffodils in breezes. It's 8 wheeled juggernauts facing off. Shoots of cress on a conscious planet.
Paradigms of religion and ethics, love and vocation, exertion and television, a discordant mess of intrigue, growth, excitement and ill-thought out ideas.
When you scrawl your personal manual, the bit of your brain that you can permawrite a few lessons into, you realize that you can dip into it and set your sail to steer a clear seamonster-free course.
Of course until you realise that, every wind will be a shock. Every cloud a brand new problem each and everytime. A hurricane will be unfathomable. And when you catch a following tide you may attribute it to supernatural inventions of your deluded mind. Unless you are good at pattern recognition, then you can start to fake it.
But when you find and realise the locus of inscription, you can set your sail.
You can steer beyond the contradictions of science and belief, between longevity and fidelity, between hope and probability.
And you can climb your mast to your crow's nest of understanding and your extended analogy of weirdness.
And look out. Look out over the past and future, of tides to come and shores reinterpreted by selective memory and jaded experience.
But you can see.
You can sail with skill.
You can ride the waves. Hell, you might even choose to steer into a few choppy waters for a bit of fun when you know you can handle it.
You might have an affair.
You might buy a motorbike.
You might close your eyes to the inevitable shores ahead that that course leads to. And that you must eventually negotiate. Maybe you'll sail around a bit in a few circles before you do.
You might run a red light.
You might make some lousy decisions.
You might decide to get a bit stupid.
Or you might not.

What's the matter with me?

I took a long walk into town yesterday. It was familiar stuff. I had a few minor errands that I was half able to convert.
The market was busy but I have kind of seen all the stuff before.
I nearly bought a magazine but it was $15 -the price of a book - there's something funny going on with that industry. The lines are being blurred.
But I got some exercise. I bought a nasal hair clipper. (Well I am at that age. There's no use me denying it anymore).
And I did get a modicum of satisfaction by sticking an AA battery in it and having a bloody good root around.
But.
And it's a small but...
The only time I allowed myself to observe something new and laugh was an action of pure malice.
Well maybe that's too hard on myself.
I was in a slightly pedestrian pedestrian mode and only phoning in my performance as a foot-propelled tourist. And in that busy market I walked past a camera in my peripheral vision just as she pressed (I think the technical term is depressed but the 'de' seems redundant and she seemed quite happy about it) ...just as she pressed her shutter release button. Technical term. OK smart arse, it was just as she took the photo.
I could not help but laugh. To myself of course. (She looked oriental and may have known Karate or at least how to prepare a punishingly salty miso soup).
But it caused an acute internal giggle. Did it not make me want to turn and offer a deferrent British apology? No. Far from it. It made me want to seek out another photographer and get right in the middle of their photo too.
What a fantasic pastime.
Now admittedly in recent years I have hesitated less on pavements and sidewalks to allow the magic moment of shutter release. It seems less important now that cameras are digital and can hold 2048 pics or so and so I have allowed myself this little licence in recent times.
However I think on this occasion I heard a click and the satisfying whirr of a film being rolled. I imaging a lovely printout of a snap almost certainly heavily featuring a close up of my left ear in glorious 35mm.
Now a fine ear it is, but I am not sure her default selection of autofocus was suffcient to bring out all its macro charms.
The whirr sealed the success of the whole event and a naughty new hobby was born.

So long.

There's nothing good about a big day for celebrity death.

Michael Jackson's lifelong and palpable dislike for Farrah Fawcett took a cruel twist today when he tried to outshine her one last time.
I had tried, loaded like a catapult to buy a Jackson ticket for the historic London shows. Previously the urge was not so close to the surface so perhaps he had something that locked it in, made it hardwired.
Having failed, today's revelation of paramedic mediocrity was.... what can you say?
A shock? Or the only epitaph possible?
That UCLA hospital, so infamous for previous celebrity leaks took over 2 hours to confirm death on a body who was cold for 2 hours before arrival, well I guess they were waiting for the lawyers or the media department to pitch up before quitting.
Or the chief doctor whose book release we will keenly await.
The only thing I know for certain is that Neverland's legacy as a tourist attraction is confirmed and our morbid bloodlust for celebrity is fed once again.
Drink deep, friends. Drink from the well you dug.
Your conscience is your own. Personally I have never purchased an edition of Heat.

One suggestion where I reside is for us all to wear one glove at midnight and play Bille Jean.
But as a medic, the last time I wore only one glove, there was only once other person in the room and given a free choice one of us and probably two didn't really want to be there.
And although I played Earth Song in the background, very loudly, it didn't seem to soothe the pain. No the inner connection was very different.
And anyway I think two is too few for a vigil.

But Michael Jackson demise's could probably never have been cured by Anusol regardless of what you will read in the redtops.
He will be sorely missed, but not just by the many children.

There may be no other end for a man who lives his childhood as an adult and lives his adulthood as a child. I've never seen Benjamin Button so I don't really know.
Or maybe there was a way out.
With cosmetic surgery? I doubt it. Though I am sure all the doctors were paid well.
With a true friend who wasn't a leech? Well, he'd have to find one first and anyway, where's the profit in that.
Now it's starting to feel like a familiar refrain. Isn't it Britney? (I know she tunes in - you see that one follower?)
Either way somewhere along the line we lost him.
One of a kind. He won't be the last unique sacrifice.
But he may be the biggest for a good while. Some claim! A great boast for the worms.
So who were the folks who sowed the seeds of destruction and who really killed him.
Who really killed him?
The fans? I think not. That was pure love and in the end that was all he had, certainly not money.
Family? Ask them. Tune if to countless documentaries in the next 2 decades. Don't decide now. You 'll have plenty of primetime to make your mind up.
Maybe the medics who greedily prescribed him his opiates and disgraced the profession were just the final straw.
Maybe the photo of him intubated which I just saw on CNN a couple of hours after death was reported and clearly taken by a paramedic is acceptable reportage.
Maybe in your world friends, not mine.

Then maybe I live in Neverland.

Rules of the air

Another day another tragic Air crash.
And that's not code for British MPs buying the latest Nike trainers on expenses.

The problem with these French pilots is their wine drinking culture. One slip of the mind and they forget they are allowed only one glass of vin rouge 8 hours before take off, not 8 glasses one hour before take off washed down with a White Lightning.