Adrenalin Rush

My Fridge

2009-04-04T16:18:00.000-07:00

I reckon the time has come for this blog to come to an end. I have tried to be funny, smart and crucially relevant, but for the first time since I began posting my entries, I have completely and utterly lost the will to continue. As you may have noticed, the gaps in-between updates are becoming more and more tenacious. The most recent ones unmistakably show how bored I am.

I want to go out more. Go to a museum or a cinema. Or even just chill at home. Cook some food, read a book, whatever.

I still want to be funny, and to some degree smart and all that other crap, but every time I read what I have written here, I am compelled to be miserable and a little bit ‘hissy’ if there is such a word. Maybe it’s the black template.

But I like the template.

And If I change it, it may not sit comfortably with the posts. I may as well delete the whole thing, which I would rather not do at the moment.

I want to take it easy and have been planning to create a more relaxed and unrestrained blog.

Last night, I made a new one.

To everyone who has read this blog and has left some lovely, lovely, comments. Thanks.

You are all my friends. Feel free to add me in your friendster or facebook.

Or follow me where I stay fresh and lush in:

My Fridge.

Explore Philippines

2009-02-17T06:32:00.000-08:00

I've been working mostly night shifts this week and was really anxious that I'd be missing my primetime TV favourites such as Wednesday night's new episodes of Grand Designs and I have to admit, the nightly one whole season pre-final showdown of singing newbies in... (cringes) American Idol. A guilty pleasure. I know it’s cheesy TV but ever since I've seen Quentin Tarantino in the show, I don't care what people think.

Boy, I'm so glad to find out that we actually got a Digital TV Receiver collecting all sorts of crumbly stuff beneath the coffee table sitting comfortably between old books and other scraps of paper. The beauty with these set-top boxes is the huge hard drive and the ability to receive and record freesat TV. It took a while to muster how to play with the toy but after going through the rather tedious orthography that comes with the machine I was ready for my first ever recorded TV program I could watch the next morning coming off work.

So I didn’t miss watching BBC’s exciting new 'Explore' series featuring the Philippines: Manila to Mindanao. Great. The crumbling Rice Terraces. Masses of humanity in a throng of religious fervour. A mysterious $987 billion treasury note by the Marcoses stashed somewhere in Brussels. Human Rights Abuses. A cityscape that could give Danny Boyle further shedloads of Golden Globes next year. It stirred all the mushy parts of my tired brain that I couldn’t sleep so I ‘Googled’ and found out I wasn’t the only one gripped by the program. In typical bourgeois fashion, most people are horrified by the Beeb’s showing of the crass images of impoverishment.

I made sensible comments in some of the blogs but nobody seem to like it posted. Tough. I’ll post it here instead. This is my blog and it looks like it needs a fresh entry.

Sorry, I couldn't find a photo of me in front of Quiapo Church. I hope the Vatican will do for now.

Anyway, I found the feature really interesting if not thought-provoking. I wasn't really hoping to see lovely tanned lissom beauties vegging out in lush florae you'd expect in a tourism campaign. It's a well informed documentary for chrissakes. What an eye-opener. I didn't know that people can live in a cemetery and was quite touched by the prudence and mental soundness of the ordinary people that were interviewed - those that don't speak English as opposed to those that speak with American accent.

The young lady who declared she doesn't believe in ghosts as she hasn't seen one - contrasts the quite ironic naiveté of a former first lady who said that 'they' only found beautiful shoes instead of skeletons in her closet... is funnily enough, quite daft. Either that or she’s quite lost in translation. She has perhaps a more literal meaning for ‘a skeleton in the closet’. Those shoes may well be the metaphor of her cronies’ scandalous massive gory larceny. Every sole of those finely crafted pairs of shoes is tainted by the poor Filipino's sweat and blood sodden flesh and bones.

And I figured a few more dichotomies... The quiet honesty and dignity of the way the poor people live in spite of their conditions (still smiling and happy to pose for the camera) and the hypocrisy of the establishment: The Church, the Military and the deceitful politicians.

I do agree (and proud of it ) that there are a lot of beautiful things in the Philippines and you get glimpses of it in the program i.e. the people, the countryside, the fragile wildlife etc... But sadly, the overwhelming poverty and corruption are grim realities which we all can't deny. A testament and the raison d'etre of the Filipino diaspora.

Thanks BBC for quite honestly, a poignant program.

For the very upset Pinoys… Don't worry, your typical tourist may find it really boring and would tediously flick channels like he would brush aside a bland pudding off a supper plate.

BTW. We also have the most astonishing and most pristine gated communities and golf courses in the world. But this is how the upper classes behave. Thanks Tala for the link.

I'm bored.

2008-11-10T01:27:00.000-08:00

I peeked into my girlfriend’s email last night, and this is the reason why I try to avoid being political lately. I could potentially destroy friends and family relationships.

On Sun, 9/11/08, ------------- < -------- @yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
From: ------- --- < ---------- @yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Bigger VenueTo: ---------- @yahoo.com
Date: Sunday, 9 November, 2008, 11:21 PM

Dear _______ ,
How could you read _________ ’s mind? Laughing out loud. Implying that I am mad and could lose my fingers typing long texts in my cellphone days on end, he asked why I haven’t just sent you an email.

I wondered for a while why you haven’t replied to my last text. I actually thought that you were offended by it. The evangelical school quip was a product of _______ ’s really cheeky wit. I already threatened him of severe punitive guilty conscience if for that reason (naughty text), our friendship is compromised. You may also take this (before you meet him) as a warning. Read: he’s got a really twisted sense of humour, even though he believes that he’s actually charming.

I am really taken with Obama. Not only that he represents what I believe are the better values: non-threatening foreign policy, a more inclusive domestic policy, tax relief for the less fortunate and therefore, not elitist.

I know. Your typical decent, higher earning, hardworking taxpayer couldn’t be asked to subsidize the ‘so-called’ welfare lazy stiffs. It isn’t difficult to convince some people especially during these times of financial difficulty that say, a pretty hard up single mother with lots of children, a non-english-speaking-trying-to-get-something-for-nothing-immigrant as a drain to the public resources.

Maybe it’s about time that Americans channel this bias towards the billions of dollars worth massive elephant – the bankrupt banks you doled your taxes into just recently. By the way, _______ corrected me that this is not just a recent phenomenon. He said that large US companies have been ‘helping themselves’ tax dollars in more questionable ways than those homeless gits just trying to get a warm blanket over their heads since Ronald Reagan. He asked me to copy-paste some of these:

$1.6 million in federal funds for McDonalds, in part to help them market McNuggets in Singapore from 1986 to 1994.

$278 million technology subsidies to Amoco, AT&T, GE, GM and IBM between 1990 – 1994 while they cut thousands of jobs and posted combined profits of $25.2 billion in 1994 alone.

$300 million tax deductions claimed by Exxon when they spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound.

Around forty-two Fortune 500 companies paid no federal income taxes from 1981 through 1985 until a minimum tax was forced on them in 1986.

Yes, it's pretty boring.

* ________ dumped a massive pamphlet in front me just in case he says you will ask for references but I thought it’s too geeky to even bother.

So, Obama hits the right spot for me. And to be honest, (laughs) you may also add that he is fit, dark, younger and better looking

( *Note: Dark here doesn’t mean she’s racist. I think she really likes tanned, dapper young men. I can’t speak in behalf of the Italian President in this matter though, LOL > howling. )

I’m still not convinced by the idea from your text that ‘God ordains leaders’ as this would automatically suggest that Hitler and such other horrid dictators as consecrated mass murderers. I have no issue with faith as it denotes personal belief rather than a dogmatic institution with divine power to control human destiny as in religion. Faith for me encompasses all the other positive aspects of a personal belief that promotes tolerance, free will, compassion, peace and harmony. You can call it Christian, Moslem, Buddhist, Rastafarian, whatever. I’m not comfortable with all the other negative bits that make you stick a lethal bomb up your ass and blow other people’s brain to smithereens. Having said that, _____ have just shown me verses from Exodus, Genesis and Leviticus that illustrates the use of terror and gory violence against gays, prostitutes, sinners, Egyptians and even newborn babies in the Bible, Yuck. Bloodshed makes me feel sick. That is why I hate his collection of horror movies, but that is beside the point. I’m not a huge fan. I don’t go to church often either. Nowadays, I merely believe that there is a God.

He calls me a boring-moderate-petit-bourgeois-trying-to-seduce-a-leftie-into-the-middle-pacifist. Whatever that means. I couldn’t understand what drives people into the left or right end of the political spectrum if there are really such silly things. He said that right wingers are uptight cold-bloodied arrogant bastards. I suppose lefties are then loose, unfaithful hot-bloodied love rats. I’m really confused. I’d rather stay in the middle as a lovely lukewarm moderate temptress.

God bless, _______ .

PS. He didn’t mean to call you a religious extremist. Although, he’s the one that came up with the rather lame ‘potions and spirits are healthier when moderately taken’ phrase. Thank God, we’re not mad.

blue light, part deux

2008-07-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

There I was sitting at the back of the ambulance - the only time I was actually chilled, after a really busy night drawing up drugs, chasing up blood results and doctor referrals. Then there’s the most challenging bit, I think. Reassuring family at bedside. You wouldn’t send a family home when there is a possibility of ‘movement forward’ to another facility, need for involvement in a significant decision making process and quite possibly termination of therapy if deemed futile.

I felt weird (I always do, anyway) that there I was running around pushing drugs and fluids to preserve or keep organ function stable and restoring a family member’s confidence every time the machine beeps, but at the same time painting a rather bleak picture as quite often, it is better to offer little or no hope to prepare them for any negative outcome. You would have to continuously assess the family's emotional stability and intellectual capacity to understand the situation obviously.

It is during these times (early morning) when Consultants are hard to come by and decisions become really slow. The family have also decided to go home at this point which I thought was fair enough since they were practically up the whole night. We haven’t heard from the London hospital and dispiritedly, I was looking after a patient with a very unstable blood pressure and not blowing off his carbon dioxide despite of all the tweaks done on the ventilator. A high CO2 concentration on a head injured patient is basically, a ticking time bomb.

So I was quite happy that by six in the morning, we were whizzing our way to London. I didn’t mind that I had to catch a syringe flying in my direction from an ever so sprightly young doctor who can’t be bothered with her seat belts. These things happen. Once not so long ago, it was a sickie bowl.

I phoned up the patient's wife explaining to her that they might place a bolt through her husband’s skull to monitor the pressures inside and they may or may not operate on his brain depending on the degree of the damage. And that he may or may not survive the operation. I really felt sorry for her and she was really grateful for all the care and the honesty. I have omitted that part where we ask if the patient is on the organ donor register.

I apologized extravagantly when I handed over to a colleague. I know, I passed the buck.

blue light

2008-07-26T16:00:00.000-07:00

Still couldn’t sleep after one yet long graveyard as I clocked two hours more than my 12 hours shift last night. Good thing it’s my day off and it’s a lovely Saturday morning. Which doesn’t make any sense really as any random week day is fantastic as long as it’s my day off, to be quite honest. Well, aside from the fact that Subway’s £1.99 ‘Sub of the Day’ today is beef. I have to say it’s a greasefest already equivalent to my one week calorie requirement, but what the hey. It’s all about the jalapeños, baby. And I had zero calorie points last Saturday to make up for.

Grilled scallops with carrots and asparagus. Not so sure about the caviary pink fish roe mess though.

The reason for the two hour delay trip to the ever so lovely land of nod was the fact that by six o’ clock this early dawn, I was sitting at the back of the ambulance with all the liquids – what remained of the uninteresting shabby cuppa tea swirling in my gut space as it blue lighted (I would imagine more than 90 mph) it’s way off the motorway to London. I had admitted a patient from Accident and Emergency last night – a 60ish gent with subdural haematoma and cerebral contusions according to scans taken off his head.

A proper Level 3. Score we give to intensive care patients depending on how many organ failures they have equivalent to how often you have to run round the store cupboards like a headless chicken rummaging for wires and monitoring equipment to keep you interested.

Quite often the gizmos work, but other times they just become random number generators producing randomly generated algorithms i.e. the machine is telling you that patient is really dry and needing lots of fluids when obviously overloaded. Sorry Asimov, but sometimes Artificial Intelligence is just shite.

To be continued. I got a party to attend to this evening.

back to reality

2008-07-16T09:31:00.000-07:00

I’ve just been back from my holidays and even though I’m still struggling with jet lag and physical unease from exhaustion, I went straight back to four straight twelve hour shifts last week that I feel the need for again, another two weeks holidays. Back to life and (trying hard not to make it sound like a sing-along) back to reality.

No more lobsters in England!!!

I’m quite sure there’s a cheesy pop song like this one in the early nineties. Work as usual is pretty much as dull and boring as the weather. Since coming back, I have only just looked after bog standard post-operative patients monitored overnight, woken up the next day, extubated then discharged to the wards.

Kayaking is not for the fainthearted quite literally. You can flip over and you need at least half an hour of cardio warm up before you step inside the lithesome vessel.

I wonder if patients with complicated problems which we often think are more interesting also go on holidays. Say, somebody with Addisons disease that had been going on for years undiagnosed could be admiring the works of Gaudi in the quirkiest streets of Barcelona until he/she has a crisis. That’s a pretty morbid thought and not a very good example, so I will slap my wrist and change my topic. Of course, patients that actually get better are way far more interesting and rewarding.

My holidays went really well. I enjoyed the picnics and the barbecues.

Soaking up magnificent late afternoon sunshine petting the maple leaves as barbie gently sizzles in flame.

That’s Canada. Quite simply, the most glorious place on Earth.

Oh yeah? Remember this?

They get really stroppy when you disagree. Next they’ll be telling us all evil villains are British and a bald head really is a solar panel to energize the brains.

More holiday pics here.

Oh yay. Poutine.

2008-06-18T13:43:00.000-07:00

Nope. Those are not swear words. I just couldn't think of an appropriate title for a blog coming off a night shift and still feeling a little bit coldy. I went to work even though I had this cough that started off as hay fever ish/type/thing few days before the weekend that became a full blown flu by Monday. I would like to think that I'm forging to improve my work ethic by running my burnout limits to the max. But really, no. I only did just the one night. I was sent home from work a few days ago for concerns that I may actually infect the whole workforce. Oh, yeah. Blimey. Pathetic... I'm really inclined to add a bijillion exclamation marks here. But somebody actually told me that excessive use of exclamation marks is pretty retarded. What every self-respecting blogger should aim to do is leave the impact of what one has written to speak for itself. (Take Note, Tala. Ha.ha.ha.)WTF.

I'm off to Canada this week. My flight's on Friday.

! ! !

By Friday evening, a few hours after touching down Lester B Pearson International Airport I would have chugged down every drop of Canadian beer off cheap cold bottles whilst partaking a massive bite of pommes frites drowning in artery-clogging gravy and cheese they call Poutine. I have yet to find out whether Poutine - a Quebecoise dish of fries is the French equivalent of the Italian Putanessca. Them Europeans associate comfort food with depraved debauchery. And Canadians are pretty touchy when pushing the superiority of their beverage that side of the Atlantic. They would actually describe American beer as like: having sex in a canoe which innocently, may sound pretty flattering. But having perhaps, inherited the British humour more than the 'other' colonial cousin, this actually means that American beer tastes so f#%!ing close to water.

No offence meant to all my American friends as I would in all honesty prefer New York City over Toronto anytime of the day, but Canadians are just so damn funny.

#1. Who can resist the Royal Canadian Mounties? Remember Benton Fraser's dry humour in that early nineties TV favourite called Due South? Don’t forget his sidekick lip-reading deaf wolf Diefenbaker. And imagine jumping along BBC's ‘Monty Python's Flying Circus’ as they sing the chorus to that silly Lumberjack Song.

very old pic of young howling's first trip to canada
still with his old pinoy passport. prancing along moose dressed as mountie.

#2. Celine Freaking Dion. Okey, in fairness, they also have ‘Feist’.

#3. They are bilingual. Therefore, it’s quite easy to pretend that you don’t understand English. The French street signs don’t leave you with an excuse for bad driving, though.

#4. They still allow themselves to be ruled by the Queen of England. Where were they when The Sex Pistols played "L'Anarchie pour l'UK" in two concerts at the Peter Street venue during the summer of 1976?

#5. Despite #4, they ditched the English and gone for the Metric System. I know, it's the bloody French.

camping with big sibs.

#6. The angel Michael protested when God created Canada. ‘Don’t you think you may be giving these smug Canucks a little too much? Upon which God manifestly said: ‘Wait until you see the neighbours I’m giving them!’ And He didn’t mean the Russians. No kidding. Lookie here.

#7. They call their dollar a 'Loonie'. Reminds me of the people from a lunar colony that lead a revolt against Earth in that silly book 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' by Heinlein. Funny dinkums.

#8. Their Prime Minister Stephen Harper is already a wax figure that even Madame Tussaud doesn't need him in her cheesy museum. Apparently, Egyptian mummies at the Royal Ontario Museum are more life-like compared to him. See for yourself here.

And see ya all guys after two weeks!

I can blog.

2008-06-03T13:31:00.000-07:00

I can’t believe I already spent a year and a couple months off blogging by looking at my last post here. I have to say, I haven't done it for a whole lot of rather morally admirable reasons:

#1. I learned to eat fruit and vegetables - and consequently lost a massive chunk off my lardy body weight. My cholesterol level was down to 6 from 8 and I’m now sitting comfortably between 60 – 65 kilograms range. For the record, I’m not scared to pile on a few kilos here and there for now. So I don’t really mind summer barbecue invites. On proviso that it’s never gonna be a pirate-themed affair involving the use of painful eyewear.

I know, I did it last year.

#2. I had been waking up really early every Thursday mornings to avoid the traffic off the motorway on my commute from home to school.

I took a post graduate course at The University of Greenwich in London and been wearing ‘the perennial grin’ on my face for the past few weeks after receiving my grades. I got 72 %. And yup, that is not a failed grade. In England where the passing mark is 40 %, that (70 – 100%) is actually an excellent grade. It means excellent understanding of actual theoretical perspectives and that your essays showed evidence of substantial independent reading as well as they are accurately referenced using the Harvard approach. It also means that some people I know who tried really hard with their coursework and barely passed can be really excessively complimentary in that rather annoying sarcastic way. I tell them that I just got lucky then stick my tongue out.

#3. I have stuck my tongue out every day for the last three weeks that my tongue muscles are now extremely toned to rival the phallus of any pre-pubescent tosser.

_+880____________________________
_++88____________________________
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__+888________________________+888
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__++888_____+++88__________+++8__
__++8888__+++8880++88____+++88___
__+++8888+++8880++8888__++888____
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#4. I have also mastered the art of finger gestures.

Kill Bill

2007-04-20T04:32:00.000-07:00

I received a letter from my GP to contact surgery for an appointment to see the Doctor to discuss the results of the blood test that was taken of me last week. Not a clean bill of health, I have to say. Just when I thought I got over SAD – short for Seasonal Affective Disorder, I felt creeping in last year when daylight started to ebb away by October, and the self-destructive need to fill every centimetre of my gut space with horrible carbohydrates.

But yes, the clocks have already moved forward as the days got longer and now you wake up to see your single-mum neighbour sprawled on all fours at the back garden lawn like a New York City Thanksgiving Day Parade Balloon inflation.

Not an encouraging view, I assure you. There is a reason for spray on fake tans and coffin-shaped indoor sunbeds. Or the tokens you can collect from reading crappy newspaper you can convert to cheap beach holidays in Greece where you can sunbathe all day without a Japanese whaler carrying a massive harpoon on sight.

Check your BMI (Body Mass index) here and see what the US government thinks of you. Luckily, unlike Matt Damon and George Bush, I’m not overweight just yet. It amazes me to find out that the midget Tom Cruise at 5’7” and 170 lbs is actually overweight. I bet it’s his height that gave him away. The government approves my 5’7” and 154 lbs as normal, but I’m almost pre-obese because of my height. LOL! But that’s the least of my worries. My fasting blood sugar is 7 which may indicate I have diabetes and my cholesterol levels from the blood test is massively high at 8, when ideal value should be below 5, so basically, I am a ticking time bomb.

Huh?! Is this Lara Croft?

Another sad tosser who played a lot of video games and watched way too many films. I do agree with the Screaming Nutcase here. A college student with a concealed handgun license would have confined the carnage. Virginia Tech killed the bill (Oops, Kill Bill – no pun intended) that allows on-campus carry of firearms last year. But if every student has a license to carry a handgun - is there a guarantee that it won’t look like that scene in Battle Royale? It’s about time the US should follow Britain’s example of criminalising guns and stick a lot of closed circuit television. The UK has one camera for every 14 people; you wouldn’t need a myspace or a friendster account to be a cam whore. One camera for each Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Oh, yes! More cameras, please!

"My heart goes out to all the victims and the friends and families of the victims of the Virginia Tech tragedy." ~ nicked this line from alternati .

Have a Kit Kat

2007-03-25T08:12:00.000-07:00

I made a silly mistake of signing on to take three modular ICU courses in my appraisal last year. A maximum of two months is given to the staff to complete each module. It took me a year to finish one, only because the most part of it - I completed three days ago. I should be so damn proud of myself.

I still have two more modules to tackle then I should be ready to sit down with my Boss to review whether I deserve to jump up to the next pay scale: I reckon a few pennies to catch inflation, pay the monthly mortgage and keep me off sleeping rough outside under the streetlamps. Not to mention the cosmic bloody tax. The fate of my bank book’s equilibrium depends on whether or not my Boss agrees that I meet the knowledge and skills required for my post. Such a pretty sad wanky life I had this week.

And I feel really bad for being unable to update this blog. Most of the time I spent trying to make sense of the tedious squiggles on a strip of paper caused by electrical good fortune or mishaps that occur inside a grumpy old turd’s heart. It is fascinating to find out how the heart could draw an ugly picture of you. Especially if you’re miserable, eat lots of pies, and your best friend is a fag called Benny (I mean Benson & Hedges). I don’t mean to put you off the smokes, guys. I still think smoking remains the one stiffened finger raised to authority. It is definitely cool. Although. I have to say, your heart’s rhythm may look like Count Dracula’s bad teeth if you’re not lucky. No worries, you can always give up red meat if you’re not ready to stomp your butt of choice. I heard that chocolates are good for your heart.

Phytochemicals known as flavanols, which are found in chocolate, fruits and vegetables, can boost the levels of nitric oxide in the blood of smokers and reverse some of their smoking-related impairment in blood vessel function according to a study by the American College of Cardiology two years ago. So I’m tucking in a huge chunky milky bar and lots of veg. Somebody slipped this rude magazine with loads of free goodies ( a kitkat, dvd and funky eyewear) in the groceries this morning. I’m not sure what to do with the 3D specs.

The Great Global Warming Swindle

2007-03-09T06:40:00.000-08:00

I nearly had deep-fried pancakes for brains by trapping all the carbon for not breathing whilst watching the program on C4 last night. Not to mention the melted bugbears from my nostrils. CO2 does warm you up after all. Or does it not? Quite the exact opposite: after watching Al Gore’s version of the story. That ‘Inconvenient Truth’ scared the crap out of me – the hyperventilation left me feeling absolutely cold. Kudos to the people behind the rather catchy title, as well. It sounded like the Sex Pistols album I have a taste for. Nothing beats good old Johnny Rotten rasping “And now the end is near…” in their take of that Sinatra classic in high speed punk rock.

The Arguments:

1. CO2’s 800 years lag behind temperature rise from a statistical graph ( the same one ) used by Al Gore – showing him scratching his head from the inconsistency of the data in that other program but he just bollocked it anyway, to fit it into the theory he is obviously sticking up to. Ice core samples show carbon increases after warming. Therefore, maybe the carbon is a result of warming and not the cause?

2. Anomalous post-war temperature dip, when there was frenetic industrial activity and hence, more carbon emissions.

3. Man-made emissions are miniscule in comparison to volcanic emissions ( although when Pinatubo erupted: the biggest CO2 emitting volcano for years, CO2 levels went down slightly ) and carbon dioxide from animals, bacteria, decaying vegetation and the ocean to create an impact. And the fact that man-made CO2 is only approx 0.004% of the green house gases while 80% of which is cosmic ray - generated clouds. Quite simply, the sun is causing all the warming.

4. "The warmest periods have happened well before humans started to produce large amounts of carbon dioxide. Earth's 4.5 billion year history is one long story of climate change. In more recent history there has been: a mini ice age in the seventeenth century when the Thames froze so solidly that fairs could regularly be held on the ice; a Medieval Warm Period, even balmier than today; and sunnier still was the so-called Holocene Maximum, which was the warmest period in the last 10,000 years." [ channel 4 ]

5. We are not alone. There is warming in Mars where fossil-fuel is considered primitive. In fact, there is warming in Jupiter and even in Uranus, yet crusty inhabitants there are having a field day and drinking lots of warm beer. I’m just taking the piss on this last one but honestly, I’m quite bored already. The list is endless ad nauseam. Okey, next topic.

The Conspiracy:

1. In the 70’s the National Union of Mineworkers staged a massive strike. Then Prime Minister Thatcher pushed the government’s opposition to coal-fired power. And voila! Global warming scare tactics was born.
2. The cold war. There was a need to step-up the Nuclear Weapons Program. The political need for pro-nuclear arguments needs backing from supposedly green power from nuclear power plants.
3. The end of the cold war. During the last breaths of communism, hippies and peaceniks need new platforms to channel their angst to. Red is no longer fashionable. Let’s go green!
4. The rich oil sheiks can bend over and bite the pillow. We are using solar panels now.
5. The Inconvenient Truth is a Convenient way to scare people from the Third World from developing. China – whoa! Scary.
6. The Antichrist is an ecologist.
7. Sir Bob Geldoff and Bono are running out of causes to promote their next Live Aid Concert.
8. The people behind this program have actually got their pockets piggy-backed to huge multinational corporations and oil lobbyists.
9. Just read Michael Crichton’s novel: State of Fear. Can't think anymore.
10. Oh, yeah! Let me add that the green movement is actually founded by Martians ( the original green people from the red planet ). They are planning to take over by hijacking the Earth’s weather centre. Eco-activists are in fact Vogons who suck in poetry and live on a diet of pure marine life. "So long, farewell and thanks for all the fish!"

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

2007-03-05T08:46:00.000-08:00

If you watch way too much TV, is against the war, and care about the environment, there is a pretty high chance that you are a communist or even better; you could be the Antichrist. Yippee! Thanks to Neuro Linguistic Programming and Neuro Associative programming. The red colour is a Neuro-Associative re-conditioning for the RED flag. We have all been brainwashed to communism. I have read from a fellow nurse-blogger who came across this information from nutters he would rather not link to so as not to increase their website’s Google ranking.

I tested it the other day by staring hard at the red BBC logo. Et Voilà! :

“Wala tayong maaasahang
Bathala o manunubos
Kayát ang ating kaligtasáy
Nasa ating pagkilos.
Manggagawa bawiin ang yaman
Kaisipáy palayain
Ang maso ay ating hawakan
Kinabukasáy pandayin…”

I was singing the communist anthem whilst marching to an imaginary orchestra playing "La Marseillaise". I also couldn't stop raising my left arm with hands clenched as if I was a puppet and some mysterious power was pulling the strings. Scary.

This reminded me of my gramps ( I mentioned in my previous post here ) who showed us in the 80’s that by erasing a few of the sun’s rays in the RPN 9 ( a local Philippine TV network ) logo, you can come up with the hammer and sickle communist symbol. He told us of the subliminal message that will apparently prepare us for the revolutionary takeover. Then came another historic period in my childhood TV life. ‘Voltes V’ was banned by President Marcos. Children all over the land cried as they really love the action-packed anime series. How could children understand the political messages ‘hidden’ inside the story line is beyond me.

“Speculations abound that the show could be used by activists who might use it as a tool to create a revolution similar to the Ilokula, or use it as part of a class struggle leading to socialism or communism, or the freeing of the "slave" class in the Philippines (Voltes V might serve as a code name by the rebels and its song as a password, such as the phenomena of Grândola Vila Morena in Portugal's Carnation Revolution in 1974).” Another issue claimed by some was that the Emperor Zambajil's name (sometimes spelled Zambojil or Zambujil) was changed into Ferdinand, General Bergan's name was changed to Fabian or Vergan(for Fabian Ver - Marcos's Chief-of-Staff of the Philippine Military at that time), etc. which intended to mock the administration. Also, Voltes V was planning a people's revolution throughout the series and Marcos feared he would end up like Zambajil, overthrown by his own people including the "nobility". [wikipedia] Ha ha ha ha!!!
I couldn’t find that old logo but the simple RPN in red background will do just fine. “What utter bonkers!” I thought. Okey, Benedicto, the founder of the TV station is from Negros where peasants working in large tracts of sugar plantation were dying everyday of starvation: good ground for mass uprising, but how could a super-rich media tycoon like him allowed subliminal messages about his downfall on his network? Well, just like Ripley’s ‘Believe It or Not’, after the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution, all of the stocks and assets of RPN were sequestered by the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) under Aquino. Not exactly communist, but still revolutionary at that time.

That was twenty years ago. Now you can watch 'The Lost Tomb of Jesus' in the Discovery Channel without the annoying dictator pulling the plug. And nobody takes the mick when an arch-conservative cardinal in his Lenten Speech last week gives a warning of an Antichrist who is “a pacifist, ecologist and ecumenist”. It's funny that the Antichrist is a bit like Christ Himself. LOL!

Big Yellow Taxi

2007-02-24T15:51:00.000-08:00

I planned to bring down our brand new treadmill since last week but I’m just too lazy to do it just yet. I prefer to call it brand new even though it’s been gathering dust living in the loft for about two years. I could count the number of times that I’ve used it with my fingers and I don’t even have to use both hands. It’s a Saturday and it’s my first day off since we had our holidays last week. I’m lucky to be given the weekend off to be quite honest. So I had a very prolonged lie-in this morning. I work really hard in hospital, and I deserve some peace and just be slothful today. I will start milling about on a conveyor belt like a fat Uramaki roll in a sushi bar tomorrow.

With one skilled swipe on cold water that’s been dripping overnight from the faucet, at the same time making a mental note: need to ring the plumber, also take care of environment ho-hum, wiped the dry skank off my eyes, grabbed jacket and I was out to buy morning paper. The Independent Saturday Edition comes with a FREE hardback. Today’s freebie is “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess. I’ve seen the movie version by Stanley Kubrick in one of those art house theatres that shows independent and foreign films 4 years ago, but can’t quite comprehend the dialogues as the characters speak in weird gibberish. The random acts of violence portrayed in the movie are all done to the strains of rip-roaring orchestral music by Beethoven that just reinforced my intuition: Classical music is made for torture. I learnt later that the movie was made in the 70's. The clever use of soundtrack is quite a landmark for films at that time and I don't know, it may have influenced modern day directors like Guy Ritchie or Quentin Tarantino. The newspaper will be featuring 25 more from a collection of Banned Books that have, “over the years been banned, censored, stifled, blue-pencilled, expurgated or burned in public. Their survival is a triumph of independent thought over the forces of repression, and a reminder of how exhilarating fiction at the cutting edge of the imagination can be.” So the paper says. I can’t wait what's next Saturday’s is.

( I'm going out to buy a newspaper. Ain't I clever to put the first picture in the end? Yup. The pictures should be viewed from the bottom up. That's how the story goes, really. )

A sad New Yorker decided to make a humongous political statement about the environment just like Joni Mitchell in her hit song “Big Yellow Taxi”: (all together now) “they paved paradise and put up the parking lot blah-blah…” I quite like the version by Counting Crows and Vanessa Carlton doing just the mmm-bop part. Whoever did this is probably just as homesick as I am. What would they think if I do the same thing with a tricycle in tacky paint work? I wonder if it’s legal to dump a decomposing old car in the middle of a driveway.
I’m definitely not getting inside a 70’s memorabilia.

Gastro-porn

2007-02-17T15:11:00.000-08:00

The French are pretty shameless when it comes to public display of affection especially when they are dans le feu de l’action ( in the heat of the action ). One particular girl didn’t care that the crack of her derrière ( ass ) was aiming to eat the brioche au chocolat in my hand every time her boyfriend shoved his face on her. And not the least bothered that the sound of their spit as they exchanged it - put me off eating a favourite French roll: croissant packed with chocolate and hazelnut. No wonder I couldn’t give two lardy arses about Saint Valentine's Day. I was too tired coming home from the trip and had enough of this soppy lovin’ feeling to last me a lifetime.

People in France go nuts with their chocolate and hazelnut spread. Not only as a substitute for Viagra but also for Prozac. Apparently, a jar of Nutella sits alongside the weapon of choice in a suicide scene of every French teenager and jobless graduate who had a nervous breakdown.

The bus we took during the tour is packed with plump middle-aged tourists and young fit Parisiens like a tin of sardines but the view from the window was oozing with vitality, intrigue and appétit just like a Bernardo Bertolucci movie. I don’t know why, but every time I think of Paris, I remember that doggie style scene between Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider using butter as lubrication. Could be the reason why I got this very funny mental carnivale de l'erotique thing going to any food that I ate whilst I was there: Crème Brûlée, strawberries, cheese, crêpes and even a sandwich.

I’m not surprised about this Freudian fascination with the most celebrated landmark – The Eiffel Tower. Like the rest of them tourists, I was transfixed to the romantic view. Then I suddenly had butterflies in my stomach. Or more like worms clamouring for food. We got off at Champs Élysées and took a lovely long walk in the most beautiful avenue in the world.
Dining in a restaurant is really tricky. The waiters can be a real pain in the derrière. Most can speak English but they have this weird view that most people, even tourists can also speak French. You must at least know how to twaddle a bit no matter how unintelligible it is just to get their attention:

"Répondez blah-blah, s'il vous plaît." ( I know it means respond if you please -that RSVP note they usually put at wedding invites, but if you mumble it rather quickly, the waiter may take it that you would like to see the menu, please. ) Otherwise, your bum will bleed quicker on a chair waiting for them to serve you than you would if you swallow and crap a dozen Big Macs. Then there is the nightmare of actually reading the menu. Whatever you like just avoid the word: "escargot". It’s better to eat lumps of green grass / things drenched in olive oil than a row of terrestrial snail in their shells swimming in yellowish goo of butter. I had it before. Not very pleasant.

The wine list is another. The girlfriend was quite good at this. Like a true connoisseur she read it aloud punctuating her words with oh’s and ahh, I’ve tried this before and that, or something: it was like watching Chinese movies - I didn’t understand a word but I liked it. I noticed she picked the second cheapest bottle. Uh, huh. I bet she was bluffing. The steak was a bit dry but not bad. I’d preferred it if they drowned it in gravy though, and not piped a silly heart-shaped trim of sauce around it.

The dessert was scrumptious.

The rest of Paris pics are here:
City of Lights, Gastronomique, Disneyland

Pardon, Je Descends Ici

2007-02-12T06:39:00.000-08:00

Tried to cram in all the best bits of Paris in one day, but failed. I really thought I already mastered the Metro (the city's own version of underground tube or the subway) from the 2 other visits I did of Paris in the past, but still got lost and almost ended up in an unknown town very far from the city. By just scuttling off the intricate rail transport network ad libitum, we unwittingly got on Réseau Express Régional - a commuter train that takes you to unpronounceable faraway French suburbs.

After nearly memorising all of Ooh La's pretty, pretty loops and jangly guitars from The Kooks 'Inside In Inside Out' album, we managed to get back to Châtelet Les Halles in the heart of Paris - apparently the world's largest underground subway station, and arguably the world's busiest: second only to Shinjuku in Tokyo. By the time we got out of the tunnel and seen the light, the weather is already a bit grumpy and temperamentally unsympathetic. Good thing that the five day travel-pass allows you to just hop in and out of any form of transport: bus, subway, boats etc. Otherwise - my carefully messed up hotel-room-dried fringe would have wilted, and I would have ended up looking like a wet salmon soused overnight in bad marinade.

"Whoa!" That robot stuck on the glass panel is supposed to clean the museum. "I can't wait to get in!" Then I noticed the sign. The Louvre is apparently closed on a Tuesday. The girlfriend was amazed I could read and understand French. She didn't see the English small print. "Oh, darn!" Just what we needed. Not that I've not seen that famous muse of da Vinci yet - but after reading the Dan Brown novel, I just so wanted to see her again. Never mind the long queue and the horrible eau de cologne tourists had a bad habit to slap their mug with. Web geek abbreviation of the day: MALPT! "Merde A La Puissance Treize!" which is "Shit to the thirteenth power" in unsophisticated Anglaise chav-speak. We also didn't have the time to see:

Le Musée d’Orsay
Sacré Coeur
Le Pantheon
Sainte-Chapelle
La Conciergerie
The Eiffel Tower

Actually got to the four legs of the Eiffel. Then the skies pelted us with hailstones the size of pitted prunes. What a shame.

[ more of my lovely pics of Paris here ]

Smiley Sweeties

2007-02-01T08:58:00.000-08:00

Thanks for putting up with my perpetual whingeing. I had enough of it to be quite honest. This dark taste for wretchedness is pulling me down. I felt this rather horrid cold won’t go away. I spent loads of time tired in bed feeling really down and hardly had any appetite to eat. Thanks for all your wicked suggestions to help beat this horrible, horrible affliction. And yes, a little wank under the sheets might help. Thanks, Bryan. But nah. I’m just hungry, really. I need to eat.

So. I went to the shops this morning and look! Sweet yummies.

I couldn’t find anything more with the highest Glycemic Index to blast away my brain’s serotonin levels.

Who needs a happy pill when you can have a smiling gumball for 20 pence?

[ Howling's Photoblog ]

I’m also going to be on blog leave for two weeks. A bientôt!!! I’m going to Disneyland Paris on Saturday. One week of eating pommes frites. Not freedom fries or bloody stupid chips.

Au revoir.

Greenness Next to Godliness

2007-01-18T14:39:00.000-08:00

I’m bored to death today. I was unable to update this blog because I’ve been feeling under the weather these past few weeks. I had this chesty cough that just wouldn’t go away and coming home from work yesterday evening; I just fell on the bed and sacked out like a heavy Edwardian oak door with all the bones in my body feeling like a stiff hinge. I also woke up in the middle of the night parched and shivering from the cold. I could have sworn the old mercury thermometer melted between my gums.

I need to chop my head off before it explodes and create a huge mess on the floor. Pardon me my dear friends; I’m having one of my emo moments here. I am having a blinding headache and every muscle in my body felt so weak I couldn’t even help myself to a bowl of cereal. If mighty Zeus will ask me to bear the World on my shoulder instead of Atlas, I would definitely drop it on our kitchen faux-granite work top: “Oops! I think I just smashed the planet to smithereens.” It reminds me of my pop’s step dad we should have called gramps but we called dad instead. Don’t ask me why. We have a conspicuously or grossly unconventional family. For somebody who people think is a very religious man he is so wittily full of irony. He is a genuine Michelangelo and sculpted all the saints/angels/whatever that adorned the village church. One day, an old friend asked why he walked out in the middle of a church mass just to have a cigarette and he replied: “God bestowed me these privileges because I made all His images. If He would allow me to control the weather centre up in the heavens even just for a day, I would scorch the earth and everything that’s in it.”

He predicted in 1986 that the Philippines will become a communist state. It nearly did: until stupid lizards suddenly decided to change their colours at the crucial moment. Or could it be the dissent in the politburos ranks over strategy that until this day is still causing a bitter feud within the armed people's movement? I don't really know, to be quite honest. This is just a stupid theory. On the other hand, the religious broadcaster Pat Robertson has spoken to God this year and was apparently told that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in “mass killing” late in 2007. Jesus. That’s a lot of dead bodies. I am utterly fascinated by people who are propitious, although I’d prefer my gramps over this saddo.

I learnt from Erlend Loe that a human being weighing 70 kilograms contains among other things:

45 litres of water
Enough chalk to whiten a chicken pen
Enough phosphorous for 2,200 matches
Enough fat to make approximately 70 bars of soap
Enough iron to make a 2 inch nail
Enough carbon for 9,000 pencil points
A spoonful of magnesium

If green friends are going to push recycling because of this, I am never ever going to use a bar of soap again. Or pencils. Never mind that cremation is apparently the third largest source of mercury emissions. I can’t understand all this fuss about CO2 emissions from burning corpses anyway. Years ago, The Church of England asked the clergy to discourage cremation because of the greenhouse gases generated. News here.

I am feeling so cold. Where is global warming when you need one?

One Flew Off The List

2007-01-03T08:38:00.000-08:00

Another year is over. In theory, I should be looking forward to one whole year of bingeing on 12 plump looking fruits, constant travelling, and ticking people off the list of friends. Once I decide to be superstitious and think Chinese just like my woman that is. She makes sure that we have an assortment of fruits on New Year's Day. The fruit thing actually meant a year of prosperity or abundance. Pardon my fundamentalist stance on the matter, but if some people can annoy you with their own literal interpretation of “The Good News” when they knock your door whilst you’re basking in your mid afternoon tea, I suppose you can apply the same principle to your own brand of opined notion.

Shivering from the cold weather and frantically flying off stairs and platforms to catch the train to London on New Year’s Eve would mean a year off exotic holiday locations which isn’t bad really, if you think about it. Stevie Wonder must be having a laugh when he wrote the lyrics to ‘Superstition’. It helps if all you wanted to do for the evening is sit in your comfy sofa dipping huge chunks of Brie and Camembert cheese to dollops of cranberry sauce whilst watching a raucous showdown of indie bands in Jools Holland’s Hogmanay New Year music show.

Ticking off friends from the list is when the events of that evening turned a bit uglier and darker. We were knocking down glasses of chilled Bucks Fizz – a sparkling blend of wine and orange juice: according to the hostess and watching Jools Holland. Good grief! Not too exciting compared to what we would have had anyway, minus the skyline view of the Big Ben and House of Parliament of course, but still I wouldn’t trade in the comfort of our own house in the ‘chavvy’ village to that posh apartment where you are all cramped in one corner of that post-modern-type-box building sat uncompromisingly and craning your necks to the direction of the flat TV screen on the wall whilst a spring was poking your ass from that geometric designer chaise longue.

I thought my girlfriend looked a bit red when I threw a glance at her. It can’t be that cheap booze she took a fancy with. I know you can turn into funny shades of colour when you’re drunk. My humble clinical training taught me that the liver is in overdrive when you've consumed obscene amounts of alchol. That means a drop in your blood sugar - making it hard for you to concentrate, then the heart pumps harder, that shoots up the blood pressure and the really rosy cheeks: I thought she looked really pissed. Peeved, if you take alcohol out of the equation. My hindsight still 20/20 at that time, was telling me it can’t be the booze. The drink she was holding on was only 4% vol. alcohol. I know her liver is capable of metabolising that smidgen of intoxicant even if she took 4 gallons of it in an hour. This was very unlikely considering the slow traffic lane the drinks trolley was traversing our way.

Amidst the noise of fireworks and rock n’ roll from the telly she mimed: “I am so pissed off with Clara!”, whilst she is pointing to her mobile phone. “She will definitely be deleted from my address book”, at least that was how I gathered it: trying to lip read what was coming out from her potty mouth. Nope, I was wrong. “She is sooo permanently deleted! You won’t even find a trace of her in the recycle bin!” This was whilst the ‘Arctic Monkeys’ are trashing their guitars in the middle of ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’. It was surreal. And very funny. And very serious. Her expressions spelt trouble. I wouldn’t have expected it coming from a technophobe like her: venting her anger in the latest version of Windows media. I wouldn’t be surprised if she will suddenly speak in Hyper Text Markup Language and be the Time’s Person of the Year by 2008.

She showed me a text message from Clara: “Sorry, but Twitty Bird is not ready to face you lot yet”, or something like that. It became apparent that we should skip her place as we go on with the New Year house-hopping tradition because a twit is in her building. Twitty is one of the Talentless, Witless, Irritating Toad ( TWIT ) friend we dumped last year whilst on holiday in New York. He is just one of the other two TWITs ( Ant and Dikey ) who constantly whined about the absence of lifts in the subway, how dirty New York is and think they’re too posh to climb the Empire State building. You could put them all in a box along with what she calls overseas-workers-trying-to-be-bourgeois with typical nouveau-riche mentality who believes that it’s posh to wear shirts with heavy designer labels, whose idea of culture is trawling the shopping malls down Fifth Avenue and think that museums are dreadful places to be seen with. A Pinoy version of Chavness, if you ask me.

Clara is her almost posh friend who spices up her English with Spanish and would never look chavvy in top to bottom Chanel outfit, but quite daft in relationships and choosing her own friends. No matter how hard I tried to convince my girlfriend that beneath the finest lamb’s wool of Clara’s skin is a pig’s entrails, she would never listen to me.

I really felt sorry for her. She was utterly devastated to lose a best friend who she now realized is also phoney: a few hours before the New Year.

Bah, Humbug!

2006-12-19T15:59:00.000-08:00

I walked into the unit and wondered why we don’t have a Christmas tree. Around this time last year, we already had enough blinking lights to trigger grand mal fitting to a photosensitive epileptic, and with alcohol hand rubs placed strategically in every nook and cranny, I thought it’s rather rich the hospital is still standing and hasn’t burned to the ground yet. I really hope it’s not the thought police at work here. I heard the Royal Mail is stamping out true meaning of Christmas by issuing stamps without any trace of the Bible story and instead featured little harmless cartoons that will not offend other faiths. I only hope those cartoons are not Danish. The same is true with greeting cards:

“One 'offensive' card risked provoking Christians by suggesting the shepherds only saw the angel appear on the hillside because they were hallucinating after smoking drugs. And another card ignores Christmas altogether - wishing the recipient a "Happy December". Other designs include a pan of Brussels sprouts, a shoe, a woman pointing a gun at 'chavs', a moonlit bridge and, bizarrely, a line of meerkats.” What you get for reading sucky papers like the Daily Mail . LOL!

#10 Reasons why this year’s Christmas is really sucky.

1. Our health care assistant who I learnt today has worked in our unit for more than eight years handed in her notice of resignation last month, so maybe she can’t really be bothered to put up the tree. She did it every year, and was really good in keeping our patients and the unit clean. With the current crisis in the NHS, she may never be replaced. Who’s gonna wash the teacups?

2. They also say the tale of three wise men paying homage to baby Jesus may not be really three at all. The Gospel apparently refers to them as merely wise men: no mention of actual number whatsoever. But I don’t give a toss, really. I’m more concerned that three more wards closed this month. That means we’ll be stuck with wardable patients in our unit. More tea-drinking, weetabix-eating patients as opposed to patients on Galileo, Lidco, Bis, Prisma and all other binary code speaking gadgets that you could ever find in Critical Care. What a shame. I quite like my toys. Even more so at Christmas.

3. The NHS froze the hiring of new staff due to budgetary constraints. It is quite ironic though, to find that the Trust is advertising a post for a high salaried monkey * Smoking Advisor. Salary that’s large enough to pay two more nurses in ICU. I say: “leave them smokers alone!” If they can’t read those death threats / warning in bold alphabets in cigarette packets, maybe what they need are free eyeglasses for Christmas. Shoo them off to Boots or Specsavers.

4. I learnt that the abbreviation Xmas is not really irreligious. The letter X is actually a Greek abbreviation for Christ. And obviously, Christ is not a swear word.

5. I’ve seen in the Biography Channel that Santa actually used to wear a blue or green tunic until Coca Cola matched it to their trademark colour. And Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer was just invented for a US firm’s Christmas promotion in 1938. It’s quite traumatic to learn that they have been lying to you since you were a kid. They are a bunch of utter crooks and liars.

6. Jesus was probably born in a cave and not a wooden stable, say the Biblical scholars. It’s not posh enough to be born in a wooden stable and to learn that he was born in a cave is pushing.

7. I’ve read somewhere that before turkey, the traditional Christmas meal in England was a pig’s head and mustard. More like what we have in the Philippines. Bring back the good ol’ days!

8. The only greens we have in the Christmas Party do are what I would call junk food: chips and crisps. I didn’t realize that some people’s concept of veggies is limited to potatoes and corn. Although apparently, many parts of the Christmas tree can actually be eaten, with the needles being a good source of Vitamin C. That is, if you’re really peckish.

9. Also, in the Czech Republic they enjoy dinners of fish, soup, eggs and carp. The number of people at the table must be even, or the one without a partner will die next year. Good way to control population, I think. This might be useful to people at immigration. Although, maybe I should heed the NHS Blog Doctor's advice: We must behave ourselves. Medical Bloggers in Britain are suspiciously disappearing into thin air. Scary. What has happened to free speech? The most recent one is also my friend: HospitalPhoenix - a very witty and strongly opinionated doctor. I for a while enjoyed being in the Top 4 of his Blog Links like a “myspace whore”.

10. In Greece, Italy, Spain and Germany, workers get a Christmas bonus of one month’s salary by law. The NHS on the other hand is taking the Dickensian Scrooge’s stance of being a tight fisted miserable old fart.

* There are more monkeys like this one in Doc Crippen’s Blog.

.........................................................................................................................................................................

Thank You's:

To all those who greeted me on my Birthday.

To NHS Blog Doctor for another mention in Part 3 of Britmeds 2006

And to Airway Control for including me in Change of Shift Vol. 1, No. 13

Check out!!!

See you all Next Year!

Cheeky Monkey is 30+ this Week

2006-12-11T01:38:00.000-08:00

Bloody hell, I’m getting old. I only have a handful of offline friends so in theory, I could get away with a trip to the local pub for some fancy grub then back to the house for a tipple and then that would be it: another birthday done and dusted. My woman on the other hand has other ideas. She’d have loads of friends to come for a house party and so, in the next few days I’d be moping around oriental supermarkets as her kitchen bitch. My mom was a home economics teacher: one of those oldie worldly parts of elementary school where young boys and girls are taught how to cook, grow a vegetable and mend holes in old socks and knickers. In other words, she was a domestic goddess both in school and in our own house when I was little and to be honest, I’ve grown up reasonably prepared for life. I can fairly muster a good slap up meal.

It’s the prospect of feeding a few thousand people all together at the same time I find as a steep learning curve. Case in point yesterday: spent three hours at Tesco’s trying to tick off last bit on my list to buy – sprouted beans for the spring rolls. I wondered: do they grow them in winter? There are lots of other normal looking beans in there but none of them is sprouted. And why would you have bloody spring rolls in winter anyway? I resigned. Three long hours is bloody long time to spend on such a freak herbaceous plant. That’s three hours I could have spent watching valuable TV and reading lovely blogs.

I planned to stick a lovely picture of me here as a baby whom I thought would be cool but decided against when I looked at it this morning. I was a nasty piece of work. A face really only a mother can love. There are some advantages to it of course, as you don’t get your nose or your cheeks pinched all the time by dirty old hags when they come round your house to use the toilet. For some bizarre reason, our house is the only building smacked in the middle of the town between shops and the church with toilet facility.

“Oh, he ain’t a cute kid,” are perhaps the first words I learnt, as I wasn’t really confident with my looks when I was young. I looked after a young lad with Asperger’s Syndrome last week whom I had a nice time talking with and found out some similarities between him and myself when I was growing up. I was so socially inept and had very few friends. I only have just one friend when I was a young schoolboy and only because he carried my backpack and did my writing when the teacher was not looking. I started going out with girls really late because I was pretty convinced I was a monkey.

The 80’s should have been the years I'd cross-pollinated all the flowers I could find in the garden patch figuratively but I was doing it rather literally. All the other boys in our class were listening to Sex Pistols, had spiked hair and looked really cool in sunglasses. I had Petri dish in my backpack, a green thumb, had no idea what snogging is and had Wooly Bully- a pretty stupid obscure song by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs as a favourite.

The 90’s turned a bit sharpish to my favour. The grunge scruffy look was all the rage, oversized charity shopped shirt tucked in the wrong places, Kurt Cobain killed himself as an act of self defiance to fame and women started to look at slightly autistic men in a different light.

2006 - This year I started to blog and even as my girlfriend is now quite busy in the kitchen, I can’t help myself getting online as soon as I dropped the grocery bags.

This blog is quite sad and pathetic. Pardon me, I have to digress big time here.

Okey, the girl has called someone's idol a monkey but what now? That is her personal opinion and that's what free speech is all about.

"Nobody should be running around in a murderous frenzy and do something akin to a "blog rape" of obviously, a young and still quite naive blogger. Monkey is not really that offensive and she definitely has valid points in her rant, so give the kid a break! She has not offended a god or a prophet, and even so, I wouldn't agree that someone should stick a bomb in his / her arse to avenge the insult that someone has caused to an ideal or religion, let alone a boxer. Some of the so called intellectuals here who sadly, support the notion that she is just reaping what she sowed are also missing the point. It is unfortunately, quite shallow to react to this really childish argument.

If they are really smart, they wouldn’t be engaging in this stupid kind of nonsense blog war. Why not intelligently challenge her on why she believes that Manny doesn’t deserve to have his statue erected alongside * Rizal or Bonifacio..?”

Someone screamed from the kitchen. Oh, okey. I have to log off now. I need to peel some potatoes.

* Rizal is a Philippine national hero. Bonifacio could have been the national hero, but he isn't toff. Manny is, well... Just a minger with boxing gloves on.

Good News: Pinochet Died this Morning. Amen.

Who's Mad?

2006-12-04T13:55:00.000-08:00

So I turned up at work feeling like a toilet roll. This is the continuation of a previous post that got sidetracked when I made it to the First Edition of the British Medical Blogs. Yey! I can not really provide an explanation why I’ve chosen to use these banal two words to describe my state of being but it was the one closest to feeling like crap that I can think of at the time. Seems like an appropriate metaphor for feeling really thin, featherbrained and can’t be bothered to do anything as challenging as a therapeutic transaction with patients who sometimes if not more often know more about their medical conditions than I do. I once looked after a patient who has Googled every ache and pains she ever had, every pills or tablets taken and every diagnoses accumulated as if it is some form of a “fascinating morbid collection”, literally and figuratively. Makes you wonder: What’s wrong with collecting stamps? Or stuffed dead animals? How could anyone obsessively collect an alphabetically arranged mental card index of a random number of pathologies or allergies that they could just pull out from the back of their heads each time they see a slight rash or a spot of discolouration on their skin? I remember having this kind of anxiety each time we had a trip to the hospital to see actual patients or diseases for our related learning experience as a student. This may sound like a fun outing or a field day, but more often than not you end up lying down on your stiff bed in the dormitory having cancer or tuberculosis. Imaginary ones at least. Thanks to the web for wider access to medical information, medical blogs like " this " and popular medical programs on TV, now this kind of phenomenon is not just unique to medical / nursing students.

Hypochondriasis is the new opium for the masses. So it’s quiet possible that anytime soon after you’ve extubated ( remove tube / artificial airway ) on an asthmatic patient who had a respiratory arrest ( ceased breathing ) you might find yourself unprepared to his / her witty sense of humour:

“Nah, TB’s my disease.” And wished you had equipped yourself with appropriate House MD’s unconventionally artsy verbal skill: “You own a disease? Well, I’m sorry I missed the IPO on dengue fever.”

It’s quite easy to get psyched about it, and on the other hand, quite hard to psyche yourself up about them especially now that more and more people are crazy about medicine or just plain crazy. Of course, verbal interactions in reality unfortunately deviate quite steeply from art. You can not look at a heavily bruised patient who jumped off a nearby bridge and say: “Oh, well that rules out the race thing, ‘cause you were just as black as last week.” May work hysterically on TV, but I doubt it if you can pull it off in reality without getting sacked for being un-pc ( politically incorrect ).

Although patient’s in ICU who are subjected to sensory overload, sleep deprivation, loss of control and lots of other various factors could be ( unable to find a pc word at this point ) just as mad: known as ICU psychosis. Most have grown dependent to their carers from prolonged helplessness that they reverse back to being a child:

Client: Can I go out please ?
Nurse 2: No I am afraid you can’t.
Client: Why ?
Nurse 2: Because you said this morning you were going to jump off a bridge.
Client: How do you know ?
Nurse 2: Because all nurses are psychic !

So unless you are like these witty, witty Mental Health Nurses that could read patient’s minds and could maintain a childish conversation to an adult with an otherwise child’s brain called reciprocal transaction in psychoanalytic theory - looking after a conscious, chatty and wardable ( should live in the ward if there is a bed there! ) patient can be really, really daunting indeed.

The Big Tasty

2006-11-30T03:33:00.000-08:00

Oh, wow. I was about to publish the second instalment of my previous post this evening when I peeked at my stats-counter: blimey.

What’s this bloody traffic all about?

You fancy hunting down every arse or perve trawling the web for bits of smut or any kind of titillating information - you stick a tracker device on your web page. It shows statistics of every visitor that reads your blog including visitor paths, visit length, country, city, state, ISP, recent book bought, shopping habits, etc.

It gives you a mental picture of how sad this people are and it’s quite interesting to see the trend change: whoa, this miserable git who bought Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and likes Parliament of Whores at Amazon’s is trying his luck today, especially if you tag your post with words like: death, evil, melancholy, and even the silly word – sperm.

Well, since Monday evening my counter is reeling from hits by all sorts of really nice and decent medical people. Huh? So I traced back the paths and found out that the ever so respectable Dr. Crippen: yeah, the world famous GOD (just a bit) NHS BLOG DR JOHN CRIPPEN has included this blog alongside the august line up of other British bloggers in his First Edition of ‘The Britmeds 2006’.

It’s going to be a weekly round-up of medical blogs where every sentient puppet on God’s stage is given a wider audience.

Or something like that. You may call him a chauvinist he says, but this round-up will have a strictly toff accent. No more Mc Donald’s or French bloody fries… This is the Big Tasty. Although he admits this is not going to replace well-established colonial institutions such as Grand Rounds and Change of Shift. Well…

What are you waiting, lads! Let’s go blogging. As HE said so himself:

“Who could disagree with a sad Pinoy nurse…”

Bloody well done! Doc Crippen. And Happy Anniversary. Oh, he is such a lovely Doctor. Very socially aware and sensitive. “He watches and weeps as the Health Service, slowly, but inexorably, is destroyed.” His own words. I feel the same sadness, really. I wouldn’t mind sitting down with him for a Pint and fat chips in my garden one afternoon underneath a downcast grey English sky.

Amyotrophia

2006-11-25T11:19:00.000-08:00

I cringed to the idea that I’m getting two patients at the beginning of the shift even though I was promised that if push comes to shove we would shift my other one to the ward. That means unless somebody pops in the Accident & Emergency after doing something silly like slashing his or her epiglottis in the middle of the night, I’m stuck looking after two babies weaned off from life support and milkshakes of various types of narcotic drugs. I’d rather have one proper ICU patient to be honest, especially at the end of my fourth night.

The unwritten definition of proper patient: attached to a breathing machine, a lot of wires and completely sedated or even paralyzed.

I don’t normally mind having a chatty whingeing patient, but after doing 34.5 of your 46 hours all night before the weekend, you’d wish for a really chilled, inanimate, unconscious patient to cap the end of your shift.

It doesn’t help that you only spent four hours on your bed Friday morning as you find your main electricity supply switch tripping off every time you turn the kettle on to boil water for your cup of tea. Thank heavens for yell.com! I felt all my muscles have wasted and found myself unable to lift our dog-eared cumbersome Yellow Pages book.

Certified electrician came after an hour and a half which I though was quite impressive considering that it takes an hour for the Pizza man to find our door on a clear day. That was 1.5 hours knocked off from my nine hours sleep day before I go back to work in the evening. Routine checks done by electrician in switch box took another 20 minutes plus 10 minutes to unplug all the various appliances stuck in all electrical sockets.

To tell you the truth, I have enough of them to suck out all the electric juices of an entire city and greenhouse gas emissions enough to eat away a big chunk of the ozone layer the size of an Alaskan village.

Electric power is revived after some tinkering but for some reason, every time kitchen power supply is switched on the whole thing trips off again. Fuses are checked and that sorted, the culprit was eventually found: hiding deep inside a socket box of the cooker was a loose wiring. Another 15 minutes spent fixing the problem and 15 minutes having that well deserved cup of tea until electrician left. Total time lost so far 3.5 hours.

Gave up another half an hour or so to watch day time television as brain still spinning around from all the adrenaline, never mind the biologic clock thrown completely off a maelstrom of bad work schedules and unpredictable eccentric English weather. Tired and sleep-deprived, I can’t help turning up at work feeling like a toilet roll.

To be continued...

Nurses Taking the (chokie) Bickey

2006-11-19T07:20:00.000-08:00

From the other side of the planet where I schooled and trained, the doctor is god: an omnipotent, autocratically patriarchic kind of god. Nurses are relegated as angels or cherubs. Angels are people of exceptional holiness. Like nuns or sisters. When some nurses holiness become nonpareil, they become Sisters. Cherubs are also special. They are an angel of the second order. They are most loved by patients because they coo and smile. In fact they smile a lot they grow their wings by smiling.

It is not always a good thing to be god, so most angels are quite happy to stay as angels. In other words, doctors are doctors and nurses are nurses. If a nurse wants to become a doctor, he or she goes to medical school. Yeah, he or she carries them heavy books and burns the eyebrows. You don’t become a doctor by being struck by lightning from mount Olympus.

Oh, the good old days. Nurses nowadays apparently don't smile, and I didn't notice this until I stumbled upon this blog by The Angry Medic. No! They don't.

Good Nursie! Here, Have A Biscuit.

I was so busy writing about The Melancholy Death of Evil Sperm I forgot stuff that really matters. I know that this will not generate as much comment as the previous post, but what the hey.

NHS Trust Offering Nurses Chockie Biscuits – to encourage them to smile at patients. This is actually quite funny.

In this part of the planet there are no such things as gods and angels: you are made to feel part of the team. This is a good thing, really. Most nurses are happy to stick to their roles and doctors do their own bit to achieve the goals of the team. Some nurses are given roles that obscure the demarcation between each role, and as long as they work within a framework that protects them i.e. defends them from danger, injury, loss, lawsuits etc., and with a fair amount of compensation for this added role, he / she is happy to oblige. Whatever the reason is:

To save Trust money – as it pays peanuts to hire nurses to do the job or to recompense for the shortage of doctors, the latter being highly unlikely, added to a lot of confusion and mayhem that bedraggles the modern NHS.

“In recent years there have been growing concerns about nurses who are “too posh to wash” and prefer to spend their time on administrative and technical tasks rather than basic care. Two years ago a resolution at the annual congress of the Royal College of Nursing proposed that nurses were now “too clever to care” and suggested that the compassionate part of their job should be delegated to healthcare assistants. The provocative motion was a reference to nurses increasingly concentrating on technical duties.”

The way that language * in bold italics here* is used in a country where political correctness is the order of the day, along with the rest of the article, I find it really naughty. Absolutely demeans the value of nursing and I suspect the reason behind the culture of disdain to what is now being perceived as old-school or traditional nursing:

Washing or feeding a patient is not posh or clever.

I have to admit, I have met quite a few nurses with this kind of mentality and they are usually not the clever ones. They don’t see the theory behind the importance of hygienics – the science concerned with the prevention of illness and maintenance of health, or nutrition, but see it merely as hands on activity not worth wasting a few brain cells with. They are also the ones who always like to nip out for a ciggie all the time as if that doesn’t waste a few of their brain cells but that is just my stupid theory, and I don't mean to diss people who smoke. Everyone's got a right to have cancer. As long as you get your work done, it's a free country.

I also see really brainy nurses who don’t wash patients. They only assess and make diagnoses (and debate with doctors) like Nurse Ratchet. They are a pain in the ass.

Fortunately, there are still a lot of proper nurses, especially in ICU who are very, very skilled, technically savvy, they could set-up a Galileo Ventilator and a PICCO machine blindfolded, line a Haemofilter in under a minute and still back –up all the data files of the main computer server, yet would be happy to do mouth care, eye care every four hours, make everyone a cup of tea, wash a patient at the end of the shift, then recite Shakespeare’s Sonnets backwards from 154 down to 1. But that is in Critical Care where if possible, patient to staff ratio is kept at 1:1.

In the wards, you see an entirely different picture. A Picasso painting of an abattoir where more than 30 patients are lying in their own filth, relatives curbing a fantasy to kill and one single nurse running round like a headless chicken.

So yeah, no smiley face here.

The Melancholy Death of Evil Sperm

2006-11-14T12:53:00.000-08:00

Peter is a young boy. Like all naughty boys his age, one night he had a ‘humpy pumpy’ dream and woke up in the morning feeling wet but rather feeling good about himself. He quite liked that dream so much that he started doing it even when he was awake. One day, he learnt that doing it all the time is evil. He was told that he was killing all the sperm. He had no idea what they were talking about, so one day he looked it up in the library and found out what it looks like. He thought they were cute and felt extreme guilt that he had been killing them all this time. He promised himself not do it again. The following night he had another one of those “dreams”. In this dream, he decided to keep them all alive. He tried so hard to save them, but in the end, all of them but one died. He kept this special one in his aquarium.

He woke up the next day feeling the same wetness in his nether region, but was relieved that he had at least saved the life of one. Hastily, he removed all the fishes from his aquarium to keep them from eating him. He couldn’t think of a name for his creation so he just called it Sperm. He knew it’s a stupid name for a pet but that’s how he called him, anyway. He thinks it’s a boy although he’s not quite sure. It is the sperm that fertilizes the egg that will determine the sex of the baby. Some sperm carry the X-chromosome and some sperm carry the Y-chromosome. If an X-chromosome-carrying sperm fertilizes the egg, the baby will be a girl. If a Y-chromosome-carrying sperm fertilizes the egg, the baby will be a boy. The egg is a nonentity. Although they may share the same number of chromosomes, the egg has no influence whatsoever in the determination of gender. He felt smug knowing this.

Each day coming home from school he felt really happy that Sperm was growing really well. All his effort to compete with around 200 million other sperms paid off, and made him really fit and healthy. If he is going to run in the London marathon he would certainly win, only he couldn’t run. What a shame! But he sure could swim: hell, he’d swim the length of the English Channel from Dover to Calais without breaking a sweat. His tail gave him the ability to swim at utmost speed. As weeks and months passed by, little Sperm grew up from teensy tadpole into a whopping malacopterygian monster that Peter decided to take him off from his tiny aquarium and chucked him into the lake where he could swim freely. As always, he would visit him everyday to check how he is and if he is happy with his new home. Peter was balled over one day to learn that Sperm could speak. It knocked his socks off:

“Boy, how did a single tailed coelacanth with hydrocephalic head ever learnt how to talk?”

Peter boy may not know it, but the witty, witty Michael Moore, the scholarly author of “Stupid White Men” and creator of “TV Nation” wrote in his book “Downsize This!” that the sperm can put the best computer chip to shame. He said: “The sperm’s head is densely packed with a ton of genetic information. His midsection, like our bodies, contains the life processes that allow him to stay alive, to move, to do his work.” Wow indeed. Peter had never been happier. Now, he was able to discuss American gun culture, corporate politics and why it’s time for a regime change at Number 10 with his genius pet. One night, he woke up from the wailing wah-wahs of police sirens: there had been reports of sightings of a whale-like monster by the lake. Scenes of terrified women were shown on telly.

A woman alleged that this evil monster jumped off the shallow waters of the lake and chased her.

Early next morning Peter went to the lake and looked for Sperm. He couldn’t find him. He went in the afternoon crying whilst searching for him, but he wasn’t there. Nope. He simply disappeared. In the end, he just presumed his beloved pet died.

It is quite possible that Peter recovered from his depression after a few trips to a head-shrinker and some happy tablets, but the story of Sperm did not end here. As you may all know, millions upon millions of tiny little sperms are helplessly massacred by men. Snuffed out and smothered in tissues, then mercilessly thrown in the bin.

* Silly story inspired by Tim Burton in “The Melancholy Death of Monster Boy & Other Stories” and by Shelley Jackson in “The Melancholy of Anatomy”.

Colonial Dumping Syndrome

2006-11-08T06:08:00.000-08:00

- To drool over stuff whose enjoyment stems not from its perceived necessity to remain physically or mentally viable but rather from a bizarre obsession with brand, signature, origin and class connotations.

Girlfriend and I always find ourselves literally in each other’s throats every time we are out to stock up the fridge, the cellar or the wardrobe:

“I reckon this will be great. It has baking soda and it promises shiny white teeth. And uhhmm, it also is dead cheap", to which she’d say, "don’t believe anything that’s printed on the packet, silly. We’ve always used Colgate.”

Background info: Those who grew up in the Philippines know that the stuff you clean your teeth with is not a toothpaste but a colgate. A carbonated drink is not a soda pop but a coke. Imported American branded products are more superior to generic local ones.

“Oh, wow. The nanotech textile on this cool Gap shirt ensures that it will be stain-free forever. This is NASA stuff. Only astronauts wear this type of kit.”

“Well. You don’t drink red wine and don’t tell me you’re going to wear that stupid shirt forever, she quipped. Where is it made from? To which I lost all the energy to even look: Uh-oh. It’s made in the Philippines.”

This should never be confused with IMSCF [ I’m Spanish Chinese Filipino ] Syndrome. A supposed phenomenon of identity crisis amongst overseas Filipinos resulting in a unique form of institutionalised ethnic forgery .

This is purely physiologic in the sense that people who suffer from this affliction often have a low blood sugar from hyperventilation, hyperexcitedness, and weakness every time he sees anything shiny, metallic and small. Especially if it is visible from a window of an Apple Store.

People who have this syndrome also need to have small frequent trips to cafés, preferably Starbucks and little treats of simple sugars which again, preferably Hershey’s or Ben & Jerry’s.

New York City. Somewhere in Fifth Ave. Capital of capitalism and crass materialism.

People with severe cases need expensive holidays.

I wanna go to Peru. I want to see the Nazca lines. The lines are geometrical figures, trapezoids, triangles and animal figures etched on the rocky Peruvian mountains thought to be the remains of an ancient giant extraterrestrial airport. But nah, she will not have any of that crap:

“Christmas shopping is best value in New York.”

I was tempted to suggest Angkor Wat in Cambodia. We could spend a few weeks there en route to the Philippines. I heard it is quite interesting and probably much cheaper of which she would probably say:

“I had enough of these trapezoidal, triangular monuments of gods or aliens and all these boring star gate theories.”

I'm sure, she would.

I’m getting my intestinal tract gashed if she won’t.

Also. Next time you hear stories of children dying from salmonella from surplus milk products dumped to the third world or people from a cracked heart valve, be very scared. This is a more evil form of dumping syndrome.

* Cautionary Advice: Without understanding the finer nuances of this author's amateurish attempt at humour there is a bit of concern that he may be taken in earnest that would altogether defeat the purpose of this ( tongue-in-cheek ) banter. The girlie's words are intentionally hyperbolized to evoke sardonic wit and not a blatant representation of her values or character. She is inherently down to earth and not a vacuous evil reactionary of stiff bourgeois upbringing. And we are not always at each other's throats, really.

Day After Night of the Living Dead

2006-11-01T03:13:00.000-08:00

Woke up rather dazed and confused this morning. Been out the whole night before Halloween Day partying: “Deadman’s Party - Come As Your Favourite Contraceptive”. Lots of aging hippies in inappropriate Goth get up. Cheap booze and bizarrely, expensive grub. Not exactly haute cuisine but rather a bland mish-mash of terribly hideous and greasy vegetable samosas, chicken fritters – the type you’d get from a cheap Indian takeaway. And onion baji as hors d’oeuvre. Yuckity yuck.

Wrong: What’s the point of the theme? I’ve never seen anyone wearing a pill box boob tube to pop your fingers with whilst dancing to “Let’s Go To Bed” by The Cure. Or anyone brave enough to wear a condom over his head. Where’s the pounding yet equally depressing Heavy Metal music?

Right: It was indeed a Deadman’s Party. Everyone is either dead or a zombie. I was sitting next to an apathetic bore or asshat without any sense of imagination. Or a smidgen of humour. Dead or alive. Simultaneously.

Wikipedia

Like Schrödinger's cat:

“A paradox of quantum mechanics. There’s a cat in a box with a pointed gun at it and the shot is triggered by the weight of a single atom. If the gun doesn’t go off, the cat lives. If the shot is fired, the cat dies. But quantum theory says every atom exists simultaneously in decayed and undecayed states. So the gun fires and the gun doesn’t fire and the cat exists in two states, simultaneously: alive and dead.” Got this from “Electric” a book I was reading last week.

Or a vegetable:

A rather derogatory term most people self-consciously try to avoid to label a long overdue patient dependent on life support - hospital geeks would like to call as ‘breathing machine’ waiting to be freed from a life of opiate induced stupor, torture from chemical restraints and being forced fed with blenderized complex compound of gooey stuff through the tube wishing for a merciful anaesthetist to do a brain stem test. A rather sad, sad state your conscience constantly wrangle with in silence. Is life or death worth fighting for?

Or a job burnout:

You love saving lives but there’s just too much death. You end up getting depressed and frustrated and confused. So many people perhaps don’t realize just how demanding the life of an ICU nurse is - that everyday you are routinely involved with life or death decisions literally. Death is what you have for breakfast, lunch and aftenoon tea. You will eventually succumb to being powerless and helpless. This is interesting:

"We must believe we are potent, that we have the power to influence what happens to us. I say "believe" because how we see the world exerts a significant impact upon one's susceptibility to burnout. Believing that you can't control what happens to you and feeling helpless is one of the most threatening human experiences. Any time you believe the world uncontrollable, you are in trouble. Research suggests, for example, that Voodoo deaths may be caused because the victims believed they were helpless. Many concentration-camp prisoners seemed to have died of helplessness. They were told and believed that the environment - the guards - had total power over them. Based on his own experience, Bruno Bettleheim, a renowned psychologist who survived one of the worst Nazi death camps, says that it was when people gave up trying to influence what happened to them that they became walking corpses."

[ Causes of Burnout ]

I drank quite a lot of lager. No red wine, as I had gout. I asked my self:

Why on earth am I here?

enough nano already

2006-10-24T02:50:00.000-07:00

So today, my phone is off the hook. I’ve done 2 days and 4 nights. I can not do anymore shifts. I deserve a holiday. I’m gonna finish reading my book – today it’s ‘Electric’ by Chad Taylor. To be honest, there’s a lot of stuff that you can do even if you just stay at home. Stuck on the fridge with a “prattling mal-bred miscreant” Shakespearean Insults Magnetic Poetry is the list that I made:

1. Build up my core body strength in time for snowboarding season. Lots of stretching exercises whilst visualizing snowy white pistes of Les Deux Alpes. Very important to hone muscles of stomach and back especially if you are very keen to show off your 360 flips and you fall over a lot. Oh, I can’t wait. Meanwhile, I will just pretend that I am bendable Huck Doll rearing to be opened in time for Christmas.

2. Do some baking. Test drive this simple easy malt bread recipe I got from a backpacker: Mix 8 oz self-raising flour with 2 oz sugar, 2 oz Ovaltine, a bag of mixed dried fruits. Pour mixture in lined 1lb loaf tin and chuck in oven preheated at 350 F. Bake for 45 minutes and voila, a rather tasty and rich grub. Enough calories to keep body primed for a week of peak fitness.

3. Claim the free music codes from Coke that I didn’t manage to do the other day – I have three tracks that I have yet to download from iTunes. These are the tracks I’m thinking of at the moment. I’m still open for suggestions:

a. I am thinking: ‘Under the Bridge’ version of ‘All Saints’. I’m a big fan of Red Hot Chili Peppers and I heard this girl band version played in a cool bar last week. I couldn’t convince myself that it is actually cool and would never buy an album from this group in a million years, so I’ll download this crap and see how it goes. It might grow on me.

b. Carpenter’s ‘Superstar’ – I’m not doing this for my Dad who I suspect got this bizarre obsession to get into Karen’s pants. I am actually downloading Sonic Youth’s version from the ‘If I Were A Carpenter’ various artists album. I actually used to have one. My own copy which I originally bought for my father as birthday gift who obviously hated it then eventually ended up in my christmas stocking. The novelty of it faded after a few times of listening pleasure that I finally gave it up to my demented Carpenter freak Chemistry teacher - But now I quite miss that Sonic Youth track, but will not buy the whole album just to let it go through the same humiliation in my hands.

c. The Raven: read by Christopher Walken in that Edgar Allan Poe tribute album. I thought this chap was really cool in ‘Pulp Fiction’- perhaps better than John Travolta or Samuel Jackson who were kind of over the top. I like what he did in that Fat Boy Slim video: ‘Weapon of Choice’. Imagine your own gramps dancing and flying around in a hotel lobby. And he’s not imitating Fred Astaire. He back flips and leaps over tables to a bleeding killer soundtrack. To hear him doing Poe’s most psychologically disturbing poem would be really hardcore.

I’m into ‘Arctic Monkeys’ at the moment but thought: ‘You Probably Couldn’t See For The Lights But You Were Staring Straight At Me’ is rather too long a title for a song to be in a nano. So perhaps, ‘M’ by ‘The Cure’ is more in keeping with the minimalist credo. Or why not ‘Sigur Ros’- strangely titled, actually untitled ‘( )’ album. Yes, just close and open parenthesis. No titles, no track titles and just a blank booklet. If they have actually etched the text in nanoscale using a nano Biro that can only be read using high resolution scanning probe microscope then that would have been a real nanotech album.

If you think about it: there is actually nothing about the ipod nano that is genuine nanotechnology. It is all a marketing strategy. To even speak of size- the ipod is not made in actual nanoscale. In terms of scale, this nano guitar fabricated by a group of geeks at Cornell, would take an atomic force microscope to pluck its strings.

Here is the point of the exercise: it is pointless to listen to - as their vibration is way beyond human hearing.

Nano @ work:
Imagine this drug that we routinely give to patient’s when we put them on a machine that replaces their kidney called “5Z,9α,11α,13E,15S” – naahh, we actually just call it Flolan – it prevents blood from clotting up whilst they are attached to the machine. The actual strength of the molecular formula in 50 milliltres of the solution is 500,000 nanograms. That’s how potent this drug is. To illustrate: your typical Paracetamol tablet is 500 milligrams. 500 milligrams is 500000 micrograms. 500000 micrograms is 500000000 nanograms. We normally give 0.2 nanograms per kilogram of patient’s weight per minute. So let’s say, a patient is 65 kg:

You give 0.2 x 65 x 60 ( 1 minute = 60 seconds )
----------------
10,000 ( 500,000 nanograms / 50 millilitres)
= 0.078 millilitres

To be administered through a properly working infusion pump - no more, no less. You miss one zero and you bleed a patient to death or instantly from shock.

A more interesting coup d'oeil of Nano - is from the novel Prey’ by Michael Crichton that I've read recently :

Story revolves around a modern couple. Wife works in a nanotech firm manufacturing nanorobots that will enter the bloodstream to take pictures of diseases or maybe zap cancer cells that eventually evolved into invisible cameras for intelligence to be used by the military. Because the scale of these devices also require nanomanufacturing- they have exploited latest developments in biotechnology and used theories of evolutionary learning and emergent behaviour. Basically, because of the futility of building nanomachines to build these nano robots, bacteria are made to produce chemicals which are then combined with engineered chemicals and attached to another bacterium called ‘assemblers’ to hatch some really fancy small microscopic flying robots with onboard computers and solar power generators and of course, fantastic artificial intelligence that then got really fucked up. So here comes the husband who appears to be an expert entomologist or geneticist of some sort to complicate / solve problems. A bit of love triangle between co –worker and wife ensues to juice up the story. But ultimately the horror began when these smart nanobots that behave like a swarm of insects but were actually bacteria since they are nano version, remember [ ? ] of say, bees or flies, whatever began to attack humans. Lots of screaming, explosions, car chases in the end which probably would be much better left to the cinema. I’m sure it’s going to be a cracking movie. How fiction just seem to be much more interesting than the reality of nanotechnology which is pretty much a part of everyday life now, amuses me.

Just Relax

2006-10-22T05:54:00.000-07:00

I'll Take Care of the Squealing, Wretched, Pinhead Puppets of Gotham! *

I’m off today. Actually, I’m off work in the next seven days. Yesh!!! The beauty of working a big chunk of long shifts is that you can have long days off. Doesn’t happen normally especially in the run up to winter when a decent number of staff is needed in the hospital due to a high number of patients, but quite a lot of staff phoned in sick lately that I get to cover their shifts.

Ahhh. Winter & winter blues. More and more people are getting ill. Scientists have always suspected a strong link between heart disease and depression, and if you think about it - a high percentage of illnesses are also psychosomatic or caused by being a little bit on the loopy side: then no wonder that working in the hospital is just becoming a nightmare. Bad weather + depression + stress + loads of cigarettes + lots of ambulance people bringing in inanimate bodies + lots of work for nurses = lots of sick nurses and even lots of fainéant staff feigning sickness. Here’s the top 5 this month:

1. Asthma – Allergic reaction to the cold weather obviously. Also it doesn’t help if you smoke like a chimney.

2. Getting a divorce – For some reason, it is becoming trendy. Stress and depression tears a loving couple apart? And bizarrely, we appear to share this same issue with cold weather animals like the penguins.

3. Seasonal Affective Disorder – I’m not going to elaborate on the subject as I actually wrote something about it recently here.

4. Death of a cat – Unbelievable but true, I would understand it coming from someone who is probably autistic and derive all form of social contact from a rather stinky animal. Cute but otherwise not a good excuse for skiving.

5. Flare up of Gout – Usually attacks the joints of your foot. Extremely painful. Caused by extremely elevated uric acid in the blood from consuming rich food like anchovies, consommé, cheeses and lots of red wine. I should know, because I had it quite recently - but when all of a sudden everybody’s got one it becomes quite faux pas. To a colleague who I strongly suspect is just faking it: “There’s actually a lot of ailments in the planet. You can’t speak Latin, so obviously, if somebody says: "numquam poetor nisi podager" which translates to “I never write poetry unless I am suffering from gout", you haven’t got a clue. So pick another disease, will you?”

* Taken from a line by 'The Penguin' in Batman Returns ( 1992 )

I See Red

2006-10-19T03:37:00.000-07:00

I was happily sipping my ‘fair trade’ brewed coffee when I walked past the beverage counter and found: Diet Coke – * free songs on iTunes with this pack. I did a double take and whoa - grabbed one from the fridge. The thing with labels that are often preceded by an asterisk symbol is that they always have a nasty small print at the bottom – the catch. Once they managed to charm you with their twirly bold text that promise other worldly consumer item other than the rubbish that you are actually consuming, comes the actual terms of acquisition of the said consumer product: normally it would ask you to cough up more cash which defeats the meaning of the word ‘free’ they like to stick on their merchandise to boost sale.

You know what they’re like: all marketers are liars and all companies regardless what their company logo or names appear ie: LibEyes, Proctor & Gambler, Tammie Bleeding He'llFigure whatever, Jewish, Christian, Islam – they are all heathen: meaning not acknowledging your own God - kind of liars. Anyway, this one is easy. What Coke only wants is a valid email address. Offer limited to residents of Great Britain and access to specified hardware and software to use iTunes.

coke killer

So that in the course of the three days I was working and eating rubbish food at the hospital cafeteria, I managed to accumulate three ‘stickies’ with song codes I could use to download music and fill up my thirsty ipod. Then the realization:

Hell. I’m feeding the ipod instead of myself and pumping my nervous system with enough aspartame [ artificial sweetener ] to bugger my brain in making complex processes that logic demands. Got to wake up and smell my own ‘fair trade’ coffee and make another poor peasant somewhere in the planet a peanut richer and wonder:

1. Does buying free trade actually make a difference to third world farmers? Same us having a Red American Express Card help eradicate Africa of Aids?

2. Or is it just another marketing tool to fuel consumerism?

Amex UK

Suddenly, my tummy felt queasy.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

I had cappuccino and hummed my favourite song by Joe Jackson:

No caffeine, No protein, No booze or Nicotine
Remember
Don't work hard, Don't play hard, Don't plan for the graveyard
Remember
Everything, Everything gives you cancer
There's no cure, there's no answer.

Stonehenge & A Case of Humour Bypass

2006-10-12T13:26:00.000-07:00

“Personally, I would call the climate around the end of September the middle of autumn. Although, I should say it is a tad bit nippy for early October this year, Isn’t it?”

I overheard consultant of surgical team giving a small lecture to one of his senior house officer about the weather after the rather boring mundane daily rounds of checking wound drains and stomas that take forever to work. I mentioned to him that this particular one is still rather dusky and not the usual pinkish colour I’m normally accustomed to.

Stomas are formed after a colostomy or ileostomy - depending on which part of the intestine the surgeon thought best to create an opening or a bypass for the patient’s faeces to come out. Best graphic way to put it:

[ I suggest for those of the slightly squeamish kind to look away from the monitor. ]

Normally happens when it is no longer possible for crap to come out of the ass hole.

Stoma is just a fancy Latin or Greek term geeks in the hospital like to use to sound important or mysterious for the ‘mouth’ or the opening. Funny to think that no matter how medical science has progressed medical people still cling to good old classical language.

“Give it another day or so… I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t work.” Charles the house officer croaked whilst I was showing him a few millilitres of the serousy stuff that I managed to drain off the colostomy bag. He was not showing any particular notice how dusky looking this stoma is. Charming, and obviously not bothered.

“Isn’t it chilly and foggy this morning? Driving down the M20 is horrendous.”

Big brain surgeon said, “It’s the Autumnal Equinox my dear, the time of year when the sun god Apollo crosses the celestial equator from up north down to the south. Marks the beginning of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere..” Proving yet again that not only he is a smashing surgeon but also a brilliant Astrophysicist.

“Doesn’t help that you live in England”, I said.

The Autumnal Equinox signals the end of the summer months and the beginning of winter. At this time of the year, days have been shortening since the Summer Solstice some three months earlier, and the Equinox is the point where nights reach the same length as days.

Sister Rebecca in her poetic best, added: “Oh yes, the Chariot of Fire traversing the skies. We have been following the cycles of the sun for millennia.”

Of which surgeon said,” that is utterly bonkers, Sister.”

About Stonehenge

“Oh yeah? Have you been to the Stonehenge Doctor..? Stone circles are scattered all over the British Isles and they date back more than three thousand years.”

Junior Doc quipped, “Isn’t that where naked women prance about on a full moon once in a year?”

“Of course, not. They are aligned to the Solstices and Equinoxes using a standard unit of calculation that was so precise; the central value can be measured to accuracy in less than a hundred nanometres.”

“Are you trying to tell us that the metric system might as well be invented by Stone Age Brits way before Saxon peasants knew about the English system? The French won’t be happy with you Sister,” said the surgeon whilst everyone sniggered.

“Very funny. Well, if you men think that Neanderthals like you are, travelled a smooth evolutionary journey from stupid cavemen to sophisticated metrosexual: You better keep an open mind. The world is not what you think it is.”

Then someone said: “Oh yeah, and the advent of a nip in the air is what they say when they hang a Japanese criminal.”

Oh, be very careful with what you say. Big Brother is watching.

Nip in the air were the words from a local vicar who, musing on the change of seasons wrote in his column and was forced to apologise after being branded a racist. Nip by the way, is a shortened form of the Japanese name for Japan. [ BBC News ]

What has happened to the British sense of humour?

Above Us Only Skies...

2006-10-06T12:30:00.000-07:00

There is nothing more precarious than having to deal with good old religion when caring for a terminally ill patient. Not only you have to make sure that you are adept with whatever quirks and oddities these religious nuts have, but as a Nurse you have to ensure that you remain sensitive to their cultural needs as well. It is very, very frustrating, but it’s part of the job. Since I have worked in a few other countries prior to coming over here in England, I know what some of them are like. Although most are quite sensible, they have needs that often breach “unit policies”. Some cultures are very, very closely knit as families which I guess is a good thing, but they will overcrowd the bedspace no matter how you tell them that you can only have two relatives at a time. Okay, sometimes you can understand the grief that these families are bearing and you can be a bit flexible, but oftentimes you just find their behaviour quite challenging:

“Hey! Did you buzz before before you bust your ass in here..?”

There is actually a doorbell outside that has a huge sign in English that says: Ring the bell and wait for the Nurse to take you inside.” It is quite understandable if you are dealing with older people who perhaps couldn’t see properly or may have language issues, but not with obstreperous girls and boys who just don’t care about anything whether they know how to read or write.

“And hey! No flowers, please. They got little bugs in them that we don’t need more than what we already have in here.”

Moslems may request a special food that may have been ritualistically slaughtered in whatever manner their religion called for, and may ask for it to be placed in a location that does not necessarily conform to unit policy on infection control, but cultural sensibility is tops- so you can perhaps, let them get away with it. Make sure there is no newspaper lying round the bed with cartoons of Mohammed in it. They also get ‘arsey’ when they find little specks of blood on the bed, but this time they can keep their anal behaviour with them and shut it because you can’t be bothered to change the bed sheet every time you take blood gases. You stick to your priority: Save the patient by keeping him breathing and the planet by conserving energy and reducing laundry detergent use.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses will get barmy if you give them blood even if they will die bleeding. Imagine this: A man is dying of bleeding from a perforated duodenal ulcer, but the family is refusing a much needed blood transfusion. Jehovah's Witnesses believe blood is sacred, representing life, and the Bible tells them to abstain from blood. Some artificial blood products may be permissible but never natural human blood or its byproducts. I know this is quite painful to watch, but to be a culturally competent care provider means recognizing that patients have a right to make this choice. So you’re faced with the dilemma whether to save their life or their soul. Okay then, save their soul.

It’s the added pressure of having to deal with self-righteous, over zealous and raving evangelists that makes saving lives much, much more difficult that it is quite a refreshing break to find a simple good natured atheist on a deathbed. He was admitted following a bowel operation and was extubated the next day. Because of his cancer that has already spread to his lungs and kidneys, the Doctors decided not to re-intubate him in case he deteriorates. He was told of the poor prognosis and he was pretty much happy with the plan for his care and even refused to be resuscitated. “I’m not scared to die”, he said. I noticed that he had loads of books with Jedi Knights on them and a copy of HG Wells: War of the Worlds, so I asked him:

“Do you believe in aliens?”

He said, “Not really”, then added, “Same as I don’t believe in an all powerful being who demands to be loved and adored by his people unconditionally, then punishes them according to his whims and fancy.” He asked me if I go to church, and I told him sometimes, because I’m Roman Catholic.

Then he said: “Pardon my irreverence, but do you believe in God?”

I told him, “If you mean God that punishes according to his whims and fancy, then maybe I’m an atheist, but non-belief doesn’t stop me from being a good Catholic.” So he laughed hysterically, and told me it’s the funniest thing he ever heard.

The patient died the next day and I was told his family was very angry that a Nurse asked for a Catholic priest to do last rites for him. I learnt that this Nurse thought he was doing good service by providing spiritual care even if he didn’t know what the patient’s religion is, which I thought is very insensitive. There should be a commandment that says:

Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself!

Hello, Darkness

2006-10-02T06:18:00.000-07:00

I woke up to a really dark morning today. I have to remember that the clocks will go an hour back again this month as British summer time is drawing to a close. Why we move the clocks backward is still beyond me, but I was told it is supposed to save daylight in winter evenings – but working twelve hours in a day doesn’t really make any difference. You go to work early morning when it’s really dark and come home in the evening when it’s surprise, surprise – daylight saving time or not, really dark. Worse, you will find that it probably rained most of the day as well.

If you find yourself eating lots of carbohydrates, generally miserable and becoming more and more antisocial, you probably is SAD – suffering from a biochemical imbalance in the hypothalamus due to shortening of daylight hours and the lack of sunlight during winter otherwise known as Seasonal Affective Disorder.

So, I sorted out my wardrobe: Off the loft went my T-shirts, my sneakers, sandals, flip-flops, and assortment of sunglasses, visors, baseball caps and everything that looks bright. Down came the biker jacket, woolly sweats, trench coat and that mean black Doc Marten boots. Good bye to brightly coloured 80’s preppie slash nerd look and say hello to blood sucking Lord Byron.

you can click on image to enlarge view

I’m surprised to find out how much rubbish I have accumulated. Did I actually wear these clothes? No.

Then I read this: Shopaholics are almost as likely to be men as they are women, according to a study published by psychologists today. [ Guardian Unlimited ] And eat your heart out, this: Freud thinks men are anal-erotic. Freud represents the ‘anal character’ by the image of a man who, like the devil, is given to hoarding, sadism and pedantry, and who, like the devil, is a secret lover of excrement. [ Freud Satan and the Serpent ] I dread the day when The Devil Wears Prada opens in UK cinemas on Thursday. Sick.

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sunglasses. mud flows like river. along with industrial waste. ashes falling from the bleak sky. the prey is seen lying on the surface. with debris, tissue paper & matchsticks. fleas flocked to feast on the refuse. the parasites viscerous craving thrived on the flesh. their blood: slime tinged- the colour of money. their fat-bellied camouflaged aid. serve the compulsion to suck. from the sallowed cadaver of the victims

Country Needs Broom

2006-09-27T09:56:00.000-07:00

I feel sad again today. As you can see, this is my "sad blog" and I am a sucker for sad news. It has been more than a month since an oil tanker chartered by Petron sank off Guimaras Strait – that bit of sea between Panay and Guimaras island just like that bit of Atlantic ocean that forms a channel between France and Britain. What makes this even sadder is the fact that as you read this, bunker fuel continues to leak from the sunken ship at the rate of 120 litres per day. Since that sad stormy afternoon of the 11th of August it has already ravaged more than 300 kilometres of coastline and displaced thousands of people that are continuously growing in numbers as the oil spills reach other island shores.

Guimaras Island is one of more than 7,000 islands that make up the Philippines. It is an idyllic spot for cheap island trips during my heydays as a poor nursing student before I could afford ‘Boracay’. Boracay is the Philippines’ world renowned beach where a cup of tea is as expensive as a cuppa in London and I have to say, nearly as good. Unlike the posh Boracay however, Guimaras is charmingly simple and serene where food and accommodation is fairly cheap and with a wonderful community feel. It is a small island which I thought you can perambulate in a day, or perhaps cycle- both I haven’t actually tried, but you can sense that everyone knows everybody. Most of the people are fisher folks and farmers that will make your stay most enjoyable as possible. I stayed at a friend’s house when I went there, and once the neighbours knew that I’m not local they made it a point that I go to a village disco – it’s a dance event organized by local youths perhaps similar to a rave of early nineties Britain where they set up massive boomboxes in their backyards that blasted wicked ghetto tunes to bust your eardrums until the wee hours of the morning. The difference is: when here you get to pop a few ecstasy tablets, there you gobble perfectly legal organic pest free mango. What is illegal I learnt later is when you bring ‘seeds’ from other islands- as local authorities will confiscate it to keep the province pest free. That is what a typical English bloke here would probably say as: “Quali-ee, aye…?”

Pinoy Travel Blog

The disgusting part of the story is that corporations- as monsters as they are only have one purpose in their minds: to make the most profit for their shareholders.

“Petron Corp. said on Wednesday it has no obligation to cover the cost of cleaning up the massive oil spill off Guimaras Island in central Philippines, nor even to extend economic aid to the communities devastated by the tragedy.”
GMA News

“An investigating panel by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Tuesday cleared Petron Corp., the country's largest oil firm, of criminal liability in the sinking of the MT Solar I.”
GMA News

Corporate Social Responsibility which is in place to protect the people and the planet is obviously “broomed” aside. The Philippine government owns 40 percent of the corporation and this just makes the word “broom” in perfect context. As long as my memory can remember there is an overfamiliar slogan in Philippine politics that says: “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, walis ang kailangan…” A banality that roughly translates to: “A broom is what a country needs to prosper “ which again may prove to be valuable to clean up the sludge left by the oil in Guimaras and of course, may yet again become a popular byword for politicians implying the muck in a society that just trundles itself in a vicious cycle.

BBC News

Pardon me if I’m going to digress. The Philippines is a country unlike any other country in the world where history just keeps repeating itself.

I lost count of the countless people power revolution. Edsa I, Edsa II, Edsa Bloody Trilogy.

I get confused with flip-flopping allegiances. Where you will find a senator who is a sister of a Filipino martyr supposedly downed or whose demise was supposedly perpetrated by a former President whose wife the former first lady whatever you call them, now goes to the same prayer meeting together with this senator to renew their relationship with God. Only God knows how you can still follow me on this one.

I am tired of the superficiality. This same senator believes that you can’t have God’s blessing without forgiveness. She was the one who did an impromptu dance on the Senate floor when prosecutors walked out when they were doing their bit to impeach the President. Obviously, now she is implying that God won’t forgive you lot if you don’t forgive her. That impeached President was an incompetent prick from the entertainment industry that has a godson from the same industry that now sits in Senate alongside that "twat" who danced about.

The way the relief operations are being done right now in Guimaras showed a government who remains out of whack. It is like watching a bad soap opera full of incompetent actors that cater to a certain group of audience that are just too doped to change channels.

What a bunch of utter fucks.

Duck or Get Squashed

2006-09-22T11:49:00.000-07:00

If you think working in our unit is like going to a fancy dress ball with all this tiny benignly naughty nurses with cute skintight knit hoses – doesn’t mean that tights is still fashionable after 1989 or knit hoses are still pre-requisite to the job, but that is still the stereotypical image of a nurse by a stereotypical bloke ain’t it? Think again. Our ICU is like an Amazonian world where alpha females constantly mud-wrestle to oust another alpha female in ruling a pack of Amazonian women.

Imagine Eve Nazi sister you never see smile when she comes to work. She always got the churned up look every time she works with a new overseas nurse. She doesn’t allow them to touch the bedside computer believing the whole network will crash because of their technological ineptitude. She would make you believe that women Nazi soldiers are worse than men in the treatment of war prisoners during the holocaust.

Then there’s the overly patronizing sister Rebecca who likes to think she is a reincarnation of a Sylvia Pankhurst – type character from the industrial age. She is into Buddhism, Rastafarianism, communism or council bolshevism, holistic medicine and all the isms and alternative crap that you can think of. She is into a lot of them, that she admits she gets confused with her political agenda. She gets premenstrual all the time. Very unstable. At times she is laidback, other times she is a slave driver obsessed with work output and productivity. Gilda said, “she is sex deprived by her chav-scum toy boy.”

The same with her twin Trotskyite Sister Petra who has interesting views on why she hates Lenin and why she thinks the former Soviet Union was actually a capitalist state as it was run by party bureaucrats and all that, but is also an intellectual snob who would quash creative input from the ICU “collective” in say, what kind of food to bring for the unit barbecue. “Nuts”, I’d say.

Thank God, lesbian sister Stella left. I actually thought she was a man, until I saw her wearing a skimpy PVC skirt when we went to watch a local production of “The Rocky Horror Show”. It was so hilarious when a newly hired overseas nurse confessed of getting her sex advice from her before she went home to get married in India. Imagine what happens when a young straight boy had sex education from a stroppy old queer. Stella then found a better paying job with better looking uniform as infection control adviser in another hospital. Apparently, she disliked the very generic non-gender-specific look of our hospital scrub suits. Her new job suited her very anal personality.

What we put up with every fucking day. These are women in huge bondage boots who could easily bundle you in the trunk of their cars or run over. Duck or get squashed, tell me about it. Not that a few of us male staff cared as most of the aggression are directed to their own amazonkind. Considering the profession’s military past – picture stiff heavily starched uniforms and navy shoulder pads.

Pic of The Sisters - Canada's Military Heritage

See any bloke there?

I can understand. My girlfriend left three years ago disgusted to what she called too much “bitching” in the unit. We certainly need more male staff here.

Sink, Swim.

2006-09-18T11:35:00.000-07:00

I met the student nurse again today. She was in the coffee room and looked really shattered. I sensed that she had been crying. When I asked her if she’s alright, she told me that the patient that we looked after the other day, passed away. I’m not surprised. He was already on a maximum dose of adrenaline yesterday, and required a lot of filling- you give them lots of IV fluids to maintain a decent circulating volume or at least a decent central venous pressure. I wasn’t sure what the diagnosis was but from what I can gather, he probably died from cardiogenic shock – basically what happens when the heart gets tired from pumping really hard to compensate for low blood supply as a result of acute ?MI, ?PE or pulmonary embolism that we talked about in great length yesterday. These are all purely conjecture, but this was the most probable cause of death that I can think of by just connecting all the dots and without actually looking at what the doctor wrote in the notes.

I felt sorry for the student, obviously her first time to witness a tragic scene in ICU. You do indeed feel a strong sense of empathy to the patient’s family when this happens. Not for us though, we have already developed tough emotional shields to deal with it. It is stressful, but at the end of the day, you got to do what you got to do. I wonder if this is a reason why ICU nurses are the most soulless and insensitive ‘unprintable’ colleagues that you could ever work with. I’m not gonna push for it, but it’s an interesting theory. She told me that she is going to finish her course after a year and will soon be a proper nurse but still feels ‘out of whack’ – her own words. She asked me how long I’ve been working in the unit blah-blah: Hinted interest to work here, so I felt obliged to give her some encouragement. You don’t really want to scare them, do you? So, I told her:

“Oh, it’s lovely to work here. People are really supportive.”

Basically, I didn't tell her what I've been through. If it isn't too over the top, I could have described a hippy commune where everyone group hugged after a task is done, and working here is like playing ball in a lovely white sandy beach where everything is warm and you work hand in hand as a team, when I thought: Yeah, right. They will throw you in the middle of the deepest ocean, and you either sink or swim, so I told her instead:

"People will help you and guide you every step of the way."

Chaos, Control.

2006-09-17T17:01:00.000-07:00

The unit is like the double sided painting of Wassily Kandinsky called Chaos / Control in that John Guare play: Six Degrees of Separation, although it looked more like chaos all throughout and not a smidgen of control when I came this afternoon. They are about to tie the tube on patient’s mouth to keep the airway, whilst the doctor is bagging/hand ventilating him. Meanwhile, poor Galileo – our ever so reliable breathing machine is screaming low oxygen. I thought I could be useful by trouble shooting the bloody machine and hopefully shut him up. I’m not really sure if he [ the machine ] is a he as he sometimes get premenstrual and become so hysterical. You got to learn how to press the right buttons with him. I tried to check if any of the tubes are kinked, checked if the machine is plugged to the main oxygen supply, clicked menu screen, with that really annoying smug look, I thought I looked smart whilst I was doing it and I'm not really, so I clicked the buttons, hell - any button because I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but it worked. Man, I was good.

“Okay, Howler. You take charge of this one.”

“I’m not yet here, sister. Remember I’ve just arrived in the unit, [ thought I could have a cuppa tea but this bloody-ancient-heretic-piece-of-science-not-ashamed-to-be-called-Galileo is having a fit. ] I’m just trying to help.”

Sister gave me the Naomi Campbell look.

“Oh, okay. I don’t know this patient.”

“Neither do I. He came this morning, but he’s not in the system yet. The notes are with the doctors.”

I can see what seemed like notes scattered on the work station. “Yeah, right.”

“Honestly, we have been busy.”

Fair enough. It looked like they have done quite a lot indeed. The poor man appeared to have lots of invasive looking lines in various parts of his anatomy. Arterial line, CVP, Femoral cath, you name it, he’s got them.

“So what happened to him?”

“Oh, nightmare.” Sister hissed, then sashayed off and disappeared from the hallway like it was a catwalk. Lovely.

“They think he’s had PE’s whatever that means.”

“Blimey.” The curtain just spoke like that ‘voice’ that sometimes lent itself to cute farm animals or burning bushes in the middle of the desert. I opened it, and there she was. Student Nurse. Poor little bugger looked really terrified.

“You gave me a fright, dear.” C’mon in, and see what we have here."

Wished she hadn’t because she then asked me a barrage of questions.

“Hold your horses. I don’t really have a gift with translating gobbledygook either but let’s say PE is a plug, sometimes gunk, but mostly a blood clot that travels from your legs to your lungs then bugger off your heart, basically. I was told 10% of patients who develop PE die within the first hour and 30% die subsequently from recurrent embolism. They sometimes call it economy class syndrome. You know, you go to some beer festival in Germany, but you’re trying to save your booze money so you took the cheapest easyjet flight where it’s so cramped and you end up having a massive heart attack and a dead brain [ similar to what you get if you watch a lot of old american musicals, usually with Julie Andrews on it ] somewhere in the mountains in Salzburg where the Sound of Music was filmed in the 60’s.”

“Oh, DVT.” She said.

“You’re a rock star.”

I wanted to show her the PICCO machine as I was getting inspired, and I was explaining to her how you could inject cold saline to the patient’s heart and then the machine will pick up this cold saline at the end of the art line and be able to calculate cardiac output by analysing the thermodilution curve using this algorithm called the Stewart-Hamilton, when she looked at me terrified.

“What is it dear?”

“Is it like that Pulp Fiction thing? When they draw that circle on her chest with a lipstick and jammed a fat syringe of something into her left breast?”

“Naaah.”

“You inject the saline through the tube, of course. Then it will tell you the patient’s CI [ cardiac index ] which is basically cardiac output indexed to his weight. If it’s low, maybe patient is dry, so you give him lots of fluids. Or SVRI [ systemic vascular resistance index ] when peripheral blood vessels suddenly turn hip-hop and hang out loosely like a baggy trouser, so you loose that pressure. Then you need to give a drug called noradrenaline to act like a belt and squeeze that trouser up so you won’t have blood pressure down to the floor.

I was really enjoying it. It was like Beauty and the Geek. "My favourite is the GEDI…" And before I finished, I knew what she was going to say.

“Oh, I see. Obviously, you like Star Wars. I love them.”

Global End Diastolic Volume Index is the volume of blood contained in the four chambers of the heart.

“Bloody hell, you've seen way too many movies.”

Mad, mad.

2006-09-17T15:40:00.000-07:00

“When the person prays, the prefrontal cortex is focused on the words. The left lobe processes information about our position in space and time. It gives us the idea that we have a distinct physical body. When the parietal lobe shuts down, we can no longer distinguish between our self and the rest of the world. As a result, the subject believes that he or she is in contact with the timeless and infinite power of God. It feels like a spiritual experience, but it’s really just a neurological illusion.”

I just read this book by John Twelve Hawks called: “The Traveller"

And it is really mad fiction. Take note: Fiction. But I'm not trying to avoid dissing someone's religious sensibilities here. Make no mistake. The cover will tell you that it is the new “Da Vinci Code”, but I think it is actually more engrossing. A cross between Masamune Shirows’ “Ghost in the Shell” if you like Japanese cyberpunk manga, or ‘The Matrix’, I can understand if some people would compare it to that movie as most of it was taken from the Japanese anime and George Orwell’s “1984” if you’re serious with your books. Sorry. I have been reading a lot of ‘trashy’ novels lately, but I can say that trash is good.

The author could have added a bit of Michelangelo’s painting of the “Creation” in Sistine chapel to illustrate his “God is a creation of our neurological system” theory.

God superimposed on the mid-sagittal outline of the human brain.
id blog

"The Creation of Adam fresco shows Adam and God reaching toward one another, arms outstretched, fingers almost touching. One can imagine the spark of life jumping from God to Adam across that synapse between their fingertips. However, Adam is already alive, his eyes are open, and he is completely formed; but it is the intent of the picture that Adam is to "receive" something [life/knowledge/spirit] from God."

The Brain of Creation

It has posed some controversial issues regarding which one is the creator. God or Adam?

Does Michelangelo just like Da Vinci had some issues with the church?

Si vis pacem para bellum! Pope Benedict XVI has wittingly or unwittingly joined the politico-religious mayhem. Check out Hillblogger's take on the latest religious extremism.

So, which is mad?

Religion or science. Any of the two can blind you. Take your own poison.

Although, it is not fair that people always refer to UFO believers as nerds and weirdos, as when you think about it, the universe is a vast space with perhaps millions, if not billions of potentially livable planets that may actually have life-forms with more brains than the rest of us, whilst those who believe in an invisible all powerful being from the sky are feared and venerated.

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infection. the almost sterile. sanitised climate. of the white tiled room. belies. the bleaker side. just as the fetid odour. of the amputated. diabetic leg. reflects. deformities. should perish. derived pain. mollified. by anaesthetic. more potent. than. the opium. healed. the spirit. what the high priests. have. which the people don't. when they make. revolutions. to cure aberration.

Funky Neuroleptic Malignant Soup

2006-09-09T06:31:00.000-07:00

I’m off today. Yippee!!! Last night I was made to look after a very interesting case. It is not often that we have psyche patients in the unit, unless of course you count those that OD’d [overdosed] on some bizarre mix of whatever tablets they found in their toilet cupboards and those that fiddled and got carried away with whatever vegetable they found in the kitchen fridge.

This one is really catatonic schizoid and was sectioned 5(2) which translates to being actually legally restrained and detained in hospital when deemed necessary by the medic as sanctioned by the UK Mental Health Act. I thought, this is going to be very exciting – although, after a rethink I wondered why do I always get a sick patient? I know, patients come to ICU when they are really, really sick but I was also thinking along figurative lines like: Yeah, let him deal with an antisocial mind and of course, violence. I can sense a bit of sexism in the allocation as I am the only male staff, but I can understand as this chap is really ‘huge’. Not a politically correct choice of word, but this one really tipped the scales and the bed.

I wasn’t really convinced that he was a proper ICU candidate looking at the working diagnosis from the wards. It’s quiet often that those patients go to ICU because they are physically rather than medically demanding. I don’t mean to slag off the colleagues from the wards because I know they are really hard working and understaffed, but it’s quiet funny to see patients that you have just attached to wires and monitors one minute and then offered tea and newspaper the next. They are not on an aeroplane, and definitely not in business class. It is ICU for crying out loud, and it’s an absolute waste of hospital resources.

Looking at his notes:

Query CVA [ Stroke ] – found in dumpster / skip , not responsive, GCS 12/15. I thought: Oh, okay. But also, he is catatonic and he is psychotic.

Query Septic, UTI smell. – I wasn’t sure if I’ve read this correctly, but this was in the medical notes. Honestly. And I thought, wow. If you happen to have this wonderful sense of diagnostic olfactory skill, think of the hospital money that can be saved.

Who needs that lonely git with the Petri dish and culture bottles in that sad cubbyhole called the lab when you can go round the park and sit beside a group of greasy ragbags that stank of horse piss then tell them:

“Oi! You mingin’ little bastards take a couple of tetracycline three times a day because you lot got a urinary tract infection.”

Query Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome, on Quetiapine , Amesulpride – Very fancy and had no idea of it to be honest. Mental note: Will Google the damn thing as soon as all admission paperworks are out of the way.

Past Medical History- Stroke a few years back. Old CT Scan, showed Lacunar Infarct.

Outstanding problem:

Elimination – Not peed since morning. Massive bleed from urethra. I was told that they tried to insert catheter in the ward but failed miserably. Had a look and it appeared that meatus is very, very small. Managed to insert size 10 catheter and blood flowed instead of wee. Did bladder washouts but clots seemed to block passage. Wondered if they rammed this poor man's tackle with a 12 gauge shotgun instead of Foley's invention. In the end, Doctor inserted Suprapubic Catheter – And ouch! This procedure is not for the squeamish. Made sure relative is tucked away in a corner in case there are outbursts of ‘unprintable’ language. He did a portable bladder scan then stabbed the poor chap’s tummy with the tube. I would say, it worked really lovely. Urine flowed. Well done.

Overnight, respirations and gas exchange have been monitored. Kept an eye for hypoxemia and acidosis. Intubation set kept at bedside. Monitored temperature and ECG for arrhythmias. Full blood work including CPK, liver and thyroid function. Hourly neuro observations.

By morning, patient remained stable. There were discussions of lumbar puncture to rule out CNS infection, but I was already looking forward to ravage this nasty but highly nutritious miso.

Miso Soup Simple English Wikipedia

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graveyard. inertia of the body. runs. counter to. cerebral. paralysis. agression sublimated. brought deep. introspection. vagrant matter. exhumed. the abyss. where. time is just a concept. the spirits. meandering. gave the illusion. of coming back. on exactly the. same temporal length of event. i screamed to ascertain. its reality.

A Shining Star

2006-09-09T01:59:00.000-07:00

Four years ago this month, my gran passed away. The day I received that tragic news, I wrote this:

I feel sad today. Not because Mama as we fondly call our grandma God bless her soul, passed away. I feel sorry for my children who have lost their chance to meet the most extraordinary woman I had ever known in my whole life. I couldn't imagine Mama being frail and weak. When I was little, she came across as superhuman to me. So powerful I can only describe her in virile terms. I would cringe just hearing her footsteps cause I knew I'm off to the bath with that most awful looking scrubbing 'thingy' I had seen - not the fancy loofah you buy nowadays at Body Shops, but that horrid piece of rock: as in huge lump of rough mineral matter from god knows where on earth's crust it got blown up from. Imagine the most excruciating pain when that rock touched the skin.

As I grew older, I came to realize how graceful and exquisite she was. Perhaps still strong, what with the "language" and the pints of booze she consumed, but she was strong in that sort of Master Yoda kind of way: a wielding force of delicate composition and artistry. I remember how my sister in law got told off by her at one time. She had a rough day with my nieces and she was at the point where she was almost ready to take up the whole ammunition that a country has against her children, when Mama appeared and froze her with her words. Unprintables most of them unfortunately, but I've never seen nor heard such wisdom and discernment. That made Mama my superhero or heroine for that matter ever since, and still continues to inspire me and gives me strength everytime I face bullies and Darth Vaders of this planet. I wasn't on the hefty side when I was going to school and I learnt to use the art of clever conception to fend off and crumple my adversaries.

I never used to have pocket money when I went to school. My mother was a public school teacher and she never gave me money so that I can have nutrition instead of junk peddled outside school. The maid will just materialise as if some strange law of quantum physics caused her to be teleported from our kitchen to the class room at the exact time we are having our 'recess' to shove a veggie porridge and the most pathetic nutribun on my face. I don't how what sort of psychodynamics would that scene affect the other children but I'm sure it gave me the most inferior kind of complex.

I was such a wimp that my teacher had to sleep beside me as a cub scout when we got castawayed in some equatorial hell hole somewhere in Pilar during one of those scouting trips. It rained hard that day, and I heard from the 'big' scouts that there was a tropical storm boiling and that all the roads were flooded. I was so convinced that my father was going to pick me up that afternoon. In actual fact he tried, if not for the wicked ancient narra tree in Santa Fe that completely blocked the road. It was the longest night of my entire childhood life... I sure got teased as 'the baby boy' by my classmates.

There I was: a glass of milk in hand, staring at those ugly morons chewing the nastiest looking coconut candy courtesy of Nay La-on who had not only the most fascinating 'candy store' chucked by god right in front of the school, but also a dark 'gambling' den where old ladies smoked fat tobaccos and played cards - the type with the oddest pictures in them and not the usual clubs and spades. The kind with swords and witches hanged upside down.

Then I discovered that Mama was one of those ladies. I didn't mind then that I didn't have money, knowing that she was there. She was such a star literally as her name "Estrella" in Spanish implies. She would dish out the shiniest coins, and like manna from heaven they fell to my hands and into Nay La-on's till as I took some of the most heavenly tasting coconut candy. My sisters and brothers would agree that Mama was the most generous person to grace the planet. My sister 'Star' named after Mama would have her 'unprintable' gashed for that. She was the favourite "apo".

I heard from my sister two days back that Mama was so dyspneic that she needed continuous oxygen. It was comforting to know that a grandchild who is a doctor was there to attend to her needs. My big sister is also a doctor and it was natural to dicuss the matter in medical terms. We were both adamant for any escalation of treatment. Mama if I guessed it right was 98 and we favoured a more humane treatment. I told her that all Mama needed is TLC: what we call in Nursing as tender loving care. She needed loads of it. It is what I learnt from dealing with patients and families in my whole professional life as the kindest and most comfortable and dignified way to go. I'm pretty sure she would choose it that way. I couldn't imagine Mama dying. She would love to be remembered as a living force. She was a woman with so much style and magnificence, it's quite impossible for me to think that she was gone. She would continue to live within me.

It is such a shame that I wasn't there for her. Wish I could go home. Definitely not to throw ashes over rice fields, rivers and streams... not my style. I'd sit for a glass of wine (not 'tuba' of course, her preference. Couldn't take it. I had a nasty gut after a first attempt to gobble that stuff) A lovely vintage bottle of really sparkling champagne would be nice, if Mama won't mind... and get drunk.

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pulling through. wondered. how the cactus. survives. in a. harsh environment. oasis. & riches. gut feel. honey & gold. acquiesced. the warning. of the teet. damn. my body. is almost. soaked. halfway. might. as well. dip. & wade. into. the water. sand. existence. death. defying. instinct. evoked. pedantic. oddity.

Crikey!!!

2006-09-05T14:58:00.000-07:00

Hospital Geeks:

About a Nurse,
Cosmic Watercooler,
CMMIII ,
Emergiblog,
Impacted Nurse,
MediBlogopathy,
Mel's Thoughts in Passing,
Memoirs of a Mental (Health) Student Nurse,
NHS Blog Doctor,
Nothing is True,Everything is Permitted,
Protect the Airway,
Screaming Nutcase Thoughts,
The Angry Medic,
Under the Canopy

Village Geeks:

Bryan Miseducated,
For Crying Out Lout! Listen to Me Dammit!,
Hillblogger,
Hinaing ni Pining
Inside The Mind of a Single Guy
Iron Wulf,
Jammy's Log,
Jessica Rules the Universe,
Misteryosa ,
Moby,
Momel's Big Blahg of Bullshit,
My Life-Shlife,
Random Thoughts,
Recedo (L),
Sarcasm Aside,
Sasha's World ,
The Boy Who Warholed Fiction,
The Queer Chef
The Warped Zone
The Words Of The Left-Handed,
Tralalalala ,
Village Idiot Savant,
Wordgasm

Back To [ bloody ] Reality

2006-09-03T10:55:00.000-07:00

A friend quipped: "What a depressing way to start your blog..."

She suggested that I should throw in one of those cute 'smileys' here and there.

"Oh, okay."

Terribly Happy Blogs

I am stupendously happy. Although, it’s quite hard to keep an arched face without being terribly sarcastic, don't you think?

Guess I woke up in the wrong side of the bed when I wrote it. And perhaps, wrong side of the planet. I wished I had a longer holiday... And stayed a bit longer there in the Philippines.

Some people can probably relate to this: The minute you step foot on English soil, you behave like an Englishman. It's a bit like when you are in Rome-you-act-like-a-Roman kind of thing / analogy... Only this time you don't just act. You almost become one.

Strange.

An Englishman. Read: Übermensch miserable weiner. Maybe it's the weather. Or maybe it's Darwin. Adaptation or something. One of the cornerstones of the theory of evolution: Conforming oneself to a new habitat as in - this environment is full of miserable twits so I become a miserable twit. Example:

[ Situation # 1, this morning in the coffee room checking my emails ]

Cheeky sod: What are you doing?

Me: Uhm, I'm trying to check if I got mails.

Cheeky sod: Oh, yeah?

Me: Oh, yeah.

Cheeky sod: [ Breathing down my neck ] Making irritating twirp sounds...

Me: Can I have some privacy please? I'm reading my email.
Don't you think it's rude that you are having a look?

Cheeky sod: Ain't you supposed to check your bedspace? Your monitor's alarming.

Me: Oh, bugger off !!! I had somebody keeping an eye on it. I am having my break. [ Wondered whether we get paid when we do breaks ]

Hmmm... Gotta check this out soon with Matron.

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boggle. drained. creative. mental. process. sucked out. from the sink. spawned paranoia. while playing. enzymes. detergent. washing machine. ecological. atrocity. contrived. by erudition. to create. biochemical [ germ? ] warfare. narcissus. imagine. intimations of monstrousness

Hello, World.

2006-09-02T22:17:00.000-07:00

I'm now here. Back to doing my own laundry, doing my own lunch and doing the bloody dishes as well. I'm back in England.

And I'm miserable as hell.

I don't know. Someone is always casting an evil spell on me. I nearly missed the plane ha! ha! The airline reception has been screaming for my name... And I didn't have a clue. But oh, maybe that was a blessing. The lady by the booth changed my boarding pass to businness class... Lovely. Got 360 degree reclining chair and vodka tonics every half an hour or so.

That didn't stop me from having terribly horrid little naps though.

Because: Day before my flight back, we had a terrible road accident.

We were going back to Iloilo from Capiz... And our car ran over a man - Oh yes, a breathing human being in the middle of the road. My father was driving and bizarrely, his initial reaction was to flee... First time I have seen him panicked and about to have a nervous breakdown... I couldn't imagine my own Pops doing a hit and run.

I screamed as loud as I could to stop the f ***ing car!!!

I ran back to help some locals carry this obviously passed out human body into the back of the car never minding really, whether we were causing further injury to the man... I suppose calling for an ambulance would be really stupid in the middle of nowhere in the third world. I was doing neuro assessment stuff as best as I could while screaming at my Dad not to step heavily on the gas pedal in case we ran over another live object or a really massive running vehicle and make a huge mess on the road. After a while, my patient regained consciousness and I started asking him questions which drew out some really stupid responses... Okay, the guy had a really huge [maybe 8 cm] gash at the back of his skull and oozing bright red blood saturating my new pair of jeans and heck! even my boxers. It was like:

Eyes - spontaneous.
Motor - squeezing my hands really tight and obeying commands.
Verbal - a lot of crap.

This was happening while the car was doing tailspins. I wished I was in my usual controlled environment. Only after some really hellish driving and cursing did we manage to get into the E.R. of a really decent hospital after the town. I would say they have such lovely staff. Well, they were a little bit mellow but I guess it’s that time of day. Siesta or something. I had to constantly remind them that I am not a bloody doctor… even after I had some gloves on and stuck my nose on my really really confused patient's mouth for a whiff of alcohol ( I wan’t to know if he is drunk ) then whacked him with a full blast of oxygen. After another round of Glasgow, my suspicion became true. My chap is mental. He should have been in a psycho ward and not running round to self destruct. I went out for some fresh air while the authorities were taking a blotter report from my father which I wasn’t really keen to listen to, to be honest. So I just bought some really flash slippers and duds for my new friend.

I discovered another problem in the afternoon when my friend's family finally appeared. I was told that he won’t take the pills. Like a flashing bulb that you hit from a help menu screen:

How is he gonna take them antibiotics?

I called my sister who happens to be a wicked shrink.

And so this is how I had my weekend and how I had this pretty nasty leaving do any amount of pampering by the pretty airline stewardess can't help to alleviate. My only consolation is that I got my new friend now pretty much settled in a mental facility.

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not enough. nostrum. consume. the threshold. stench of foot. blood. all over the place. reeks. of havoc. people shrieking. nebulizer. not working. smithereens. splintered images. have ear. marks of matisse. patience as an art form. shambles. his fantasy. to kill.