Oh what a day. I'm lying in ward 11 north of the Royal Prince Albert Hospital. It's been a day of firsts, albeit not any particularly exciting ones.
Funny thing about hospitals. They certainly do call a spade a class 1 edged digging implement, unrestricted. To remove nail polish, you are issued with a bottle of not environmentally aproved and skin friendly florally named goop, but a bottle of acetone. To wash, you do not receive some moisturising, scented, ph balanced goop, but triclosan.
Having said all that, I don't actually know what triclosan is. Maybe it summons images of dolphins cavorting in medical minds, in the same way that all the trademarked and patent protected popular names do for us unwashed masses. Trippy.
Speaking of trippy, I spent several hours last night provocatively reading Pihkal in ward and wating room...and was completely ignored. Not terribly impressed with that. I wonder if medical people are afflicted with conceptual tunnel vision. Or maybe they just don't get out much (the notion that they were just too busy was entertained briefly, and then dismissed as being too pedestrian).
Acetone. I was going to say something about the burbs, but I'm not really in them. This hospital is located between Glebe, university central, and Newtown, Sydney's bohemian lifestyle capital. But there's still something quintessentially burbish about it. Maybe it's the way the surgeon's attention shifted, rapid-fire from my long hair, to my long nails (with, I grant you, only the sad remnants of polish on them. Removing old nail polish is just, like, such a destructive actifity, y'know), to some heavily bland questions about anal intercourse. Please. Not to mention his delicate approach to examination; a hot poker in a scabbard across his back would not have been inappropriate.
And I thought the GP was bad. She was polish.
I learned a new word on Saturday. Lokum, or locum or something. It's a term used to describe a stand-in doctor, called in when all of the resident ones have gone fishing. In my mind, there will always be a footnote to that definition suggesting that the doctor in question flew south for the winter going 'quack, quack'.
It's just mildly terrifiying to have a bumbling old man, completely unfamiliar with the clinic, who loses track of the conversation partway through a sentence, looks at you in bewilderment, and drifts off, completely dismiss the opinion of the GP, who, whilst having about as much sympathy as a house brick, and possessed of a tendency to fasten on the word sinuses in the way that others did on 'black death', at least has an established practice to their name.
Ugh. First thing I do when I get out of here is get private health insurance... and get all of my various other ailments attended to. Sure I will.
This is probably a good time to mention that I'm lying here due to an abscess which is located such that sitting is rather less than comfortable. Especially after the pointed attentions of the GP and lokum. Clear?
Argh. The patient next to me is just starting breakfast. He was being a bit noisy whilst asleep, and I started thinking evil thoughts at him, before remembering where I was, and deciding I didn't need the karma hit if he died overnight.
I'm waiting for someone to cart me off to an operating thater, thence to be generally anaesthetized and cleansed of such ill humours as may nest in my bottom. Ah, to sleep, perchance to have an unfortunate reaction with the drugs and spend the remainder of my drastically shortened lifetime in the plant kingdom.