Last week a technical glitch during the RACP exam jeopardised years of study for junior physician trainees. You really have to have studied for years after and before work, around your family, your personal life and instead of having holidays, to understand how unbelievably crap the situation is, but there was a current of nastiness … Continue reading bad doctors
After his daughter developed a blood clot while taking the medication Diane-35, Federal MP Julian Hill last week outlined his plan to ban the drug in Australia. He is concerned that GPs are mindlessly prescribing this dangerous drug because they like the way the name sounds. Let’s review. Diane-35 is a contraceptive pill specifically formulated to … Continue reading pills and clots, Hills and plots…
A few years back, I was on my lunch break in the hospital tea room. A scene from House or Grey's Room or Emergency Anatomy or whatever was playing on the grotty T.V on top of the microwave. An intern appeared to be doing brain surgery alone in a broom cupboard with cleaning gloves. Elective … Continue reading the legacy of TVMed™
The building contractor chatted pleasantly while I checked his blood pressure, waist circumference, recent cholesterol levels, fasting glucose and urine protein. We discussed screening for bowel cancer with “the poo test” versus colonoscopy, with reference to his family history. We talked in detail about prostate cancer testing and I offered to provide written information as … Continue reading what I do for thirty seven dollars and five cents
Setting: Betty returns from travelling South America, blithely planning to take up her medical career where she left off. She will do some revision, a few courses to update her skills and get a well-supervised job to ease back into practice before she decides on further specialty training. Great plan. Unfortunately, she reckons without the … Continue reading Betty vs. The State: a one act play in remembrance of recent reality
1. The Indirect Compliment He was a doctor, a real one. Raised in the bad old days, when your boss left you with three hundred dying children and went to play golf. He walked around with premature babies hanging from the endotracheal tube swinging jauntily over his shoulder. Born with his hands in abdominal stab … Continue reading the three best compliments ever
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Elisabeth Tova Bailey, 2010 This is the autobiography of a woman who becomes suddenly and devastatingly unwell and then meets a snail. It is brought to her sick room and put in a pot of violets by her bed. She finds solace and a solitary kind of … Continue reading eye to tentacle with the snail
Sept 2013 I'm back to medicine - in a haematology unit. Leukaemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma. Hence I'm thinking a lot about my own death and the fact that there is maybe a 30-40% chance it will come with crumbling bones and bladder dysfunction, and almost certainly at what appears to be an inopportune time. I've … Continue reading starting over at the end
My first intern shift in emergency, the consultant smirked pleasantly at me. “Don’t be nervous” she said, “Just remember - the air goes in and out and the blood goes round and round.” That is only half true. That’s what happens if you are a senior. If you are an intern the referrals go in … Continue reading first night
