The Misinterpretation of Dreams

One of my esteemed blog readers summed up my blog as being whimsical and about small town life. I wouldn’t quite say it like that. I think it’s quirky and I think it’s mainly about the things that haunt me, inspire me and make me who I am: my dreams. Nevertheless, I do preside in a small town at present, Worcester to be precise, so let me dream about that a little.

I’ve always considered myself a city lover. I need certain comforts in life, like being able to drive to Nandos at 10pm if the craving for Nandos happens to hit. Now growing up in Durban, I thought I was definitely living the city life, but now I think Durban is just an overgrown beach town. However, I have come to appreciate small town life. Living in Worcester for the last two years I have learnt to do without Nandos. For the first few months there wasn’ t even a Woolies foods and the movie house was an old tin roofed building which showed one movie at a time. Since then things have improved and Worcester now even has its own mall with 5 movies showing at a time! Miracles never cease!

What I love about a small town is the lack of traffic jams. At around 07h15 on a weekday morning you might find around 50 cars on the road leading from the N1 into Worcester. And because there is only 1 lane in each direction, this appears to be a traffic jam, but the longest you stay stuck in this is around 20min. Everyone DREADS this in the morning and tries by all means to avoid it. The one thing I dread about going back to live in Durban, is having to wake up at 5h30, to be on the road by 6h30 so that I can be at work by 7h30 or at least 7h45, when work is in reality only about a 20min drive away. I find that such a royal waste of time! Imagine all that we could do if we didn’t have to be stuck in traffic jams! Is that the ideal way to start your day? Standing in a non-moving queue and becoming tense and frustrated? No wonder people are unhappy at work!

The down side of living in a small town is that anonymity is non-existant, especially if you’re a doctor with an afro. Now, I may see maybe 20 patients a day, while I’m seeing them I’m thinking about how many more patients there are who still need to be seen and what else I need to do to make it through the day alive. I might be interrupted by my bleeper or cell phone going off during the process. So I don’t remember every patient I see, unless I see them on a somewhat regular basis for about 5 days (an inpatient in the ward) and even then it’s difficult to remember everyone. But when I walk around in the mall, I can’t walk from one end to the next without being greeted at least once by a patient who remembers me. The worst is when people come and ask for advise. My advice would be: go and see a doctor, not me, not now!

Now it’s all good and well if these people that remember you are the ones that you’ve been nice to during normal working hours, but what about those people you’ve seen at 3 in the morning who come and tell you they’ve had hard stools for 3 weeks? Well, I’m not very nice to those patients. My words may go along the lines of: If you’ve had this problem for 3 weeks, what’s different at tonight that you’ve chosen to come in at this hour? You’ve already waited for so long to do something about it, why couldn’t you wait 4 hours longer and go to the clinic?

I suppose I should be flattered that I’m so memorable, but my inner reaction is usually: Where did I see her? Did I treat her nicely? What was her diagnosis? Did I manage it properly?

So, although I appreciate the extra time I have in the morning, I think that I’m looking forward to going back to some sort of normal existence where I can walk around unrecognised when I’m not at work. That will not be soon, however; as I am going to do my community service next year in a place even smaller than Worcester, in northern KZN, called Ingwavuma.

To put it nicely my father wasn’t very good at his job. There are different ways to describe this, one friend says that his father was just a sperm donor. I won’t go to that extent, he did slightly more. Another friend told me that his father had the wrong idea about child support, his father thought that it meant the child was supposed to support the father. Once he left school and started working, whenever he saw his father, he would ask him for money or cigarettes, etc. Now my father was not that bad either, but if I’m looking for someone to blame for some of the issues I bear, I think my father would be the easiest to blame, because I don’t think he was there as much as he should have been.

Now I was never fortunate enough to get to know my father as a person, and he never got to know me as a person either. It was always a father/daughter relationship right until he died. I was 14years old and I had been at boarding school for almost two years, completely independant and capable of making a lot of my own decisions. But when I spent a few days of the holiday with him, he still thought that he had to tell me what time to have a bath, his idea was that children needed to be in pyjamas when it got dark. My idea was that I was not a child.

Starting at the beginning, my mother and father got married on 11 February 1983, I was born on 22 February 1983. So it basically took my mother almost 9 months to convince him to marry her, and it was definitely a last minute thing.

When I was accepted to medical school he told me he was very proud of me. He said something along the lines of that it was good to be independant as a woman, that he had felt trapped into marrying my mother and I should never feel that I had to have a man. Good advice, and ironically enough it is definitely a driving force in my life: independance, but at the time it didn’t inspire me, it kinda made me angry. All I could think was: Why the hell are you so proud? You had very little to do with getting me here! How is it supposed to make me feel good to know that I was such a big mistake?

Another time he told me that his and my mother’s issues had nothing to do with me, it wasn’t my fault that they had seperated. I think I was around 7 at the time. I had no thoughts AT ALL about their seperation being my fault, I may have been young, but I wasn’t stupid. I didn’t go for the self blame thing and his little pep talk didn’t make me feel better at all. My mother had to go to court and fight for him to pay child support, so any little talks didn’t take away the feeling that he felt he was better off without children, more money to spend on what he wanted. He felt it was a burden to have to pay the measly sum of R250 per month per child and was not willing to do it out of love!

When he died, he died selfishly too! He had stopped talking to me because on my 19th birthday I told him that I already had plans with my friends and would not be able to spend it at his sister’s house having a braai with him, his sister, my younger brother, sister and cousin. I was thinking: Where the hell were you when I was 9 years old and would have given anything to spend my birthday with you?
In any case, he decided that as the parent the mature thing to do in this situation would be to stop talking to me and he kept this up for more than a year, but lied to his mother and told her that he spoke to me all the time. The only way I even knew where he was, was because I happened to drop in to visit his mother one day and she said he was working in Richard’s Bay and came to Durban every now and then.
Sometime in May 2003, I can’t remember the exact date, my mother called me in the middle of the day to say that my father was missing, nobody could find him. At this point he was living back in Durban and was apparently in somewhat regular contact with my mother, brother and sister and even though I lived not far from them he never made any effort to try to contact me. Now, the news that he was missing didn’t rattle my cage at all, he had gone “missing” on numerous occassions, then you’d hear from him a few months later and he’d be in some city or town, living and working there. But his mother was worried. She said she had been on very good terms with him and she knew he wouldn’t leave Durban without telling her.

My memory isn’t precise, but I think it was two days later that my mother called to say that they had found his body. In Gale street mortuary where all the unidentified bodies in Durban go and where I had to go in 4th year to do my Forensics rotation. Piecing the story together afterwards, he was found in a block of flats along Durban beachfront on a balcony. It looked like he had been pushed from a higher balcony. He was rushed to Addington hospital and was apparently still alive when he arrived, but didn’t make it. I’m not sure why he was unidentified, his wallet was in his pocket with his driver’s licence and other belongings. His vehicle was found in a parking lot in Pinetown. Nobody I know, knows much more. If they do, they’re not telling.

The most ironic thing, however; is that despite not spending enough time with my father to get to know him as a person, and despite all the resentment I still have towards him, his mother often points out similarities in our tastes and manners. Genetic predisposition is powerful.

On a weekely basis I see women who walk into casualty and say: I was beaten by my husband. OR I was stabbed by my boyfriend. OR if they’re really angry- I was hit by my child’s father! And I get angry, with the woman and with the man, and sometimes I get sad. I get angry with girls who tell me that their boyfriends hit them, because who the hell is he? You’re not even married to him, why are you staying with him? I get sad for women who tell me that their husbands beat them, because they may have believed that he was wonderful and then things may have changed after the wedding.

What is it about women which makes them less able to physically injure someone they love, and a man can on a regular basis claim to love you and then hit you? Few abused women, if any, turn around and hit back. I know of so many women who have endured near death beatings and even endured watching their children being beaten. I understand that there are many things that keep a woman in the relationship:
1) The need for financial security. She may have nowhere else to go. Often the abuser has already isolated her from most of her friends and family.
2) The hope that it will get better, it’s just a bad patch.
3) The belief that love can conquer all things.

I remember my mother walking me to nursery school one morning which wasn’t particularly sunny, but she was wearing sunglasses. I remember asking her why she had decided to wear sunglasses, but I can’t remember if she answered me or not. In retrospect I know that her right eye was bruised. The night she left my father I was around 3 to 4 years old. Already sleeping in bed. I was woken up and I think I didn’t really want to get out of bed, I might have protested but I was hurried into a waiting car along with my brother and I’m sure a minimal amount of belongings. We spent the night at her friends house and I remember a teenage girl teaching me to blow bubbles. I had no idea of all that my mother was going through at the time, looking back I’m sure it was absolute turmoil.

Now we can debate for hours on what mat be the right thing to do in this situation, but I know a few things for sure:
1) Staying for the children is a lie. It doesn’t benefit the children, in any way, to watch their mother being abused. Children are also more perceptive than you might think, and no matter how hard you may try to hide it, they will know when something is wrong.
2) If he hits you once, no matter how apologetic he is the next day, if he doesn’t get help he will do it again!
3) Love, as Oprah says, is not supposed to hurt!

Now what I would like to see, is a woman with a plan. A woman who is being beaten should carefully plan her escape. She should take a frying pan to the back of the bastard’s head the next time he raises his hand to her, just hit him hard enough to give him a mild concussion, and then take her children and run for her life.

There’s a group on Facebook which is basically all about how terrible Crocs are. My response is: You can’t judge the Crocs until you’ve worked for 32hours mostly on your feet. I have. And I know that the only shoe that allows me to still be able to drag myself around after having made it through a whole night running around from casualty to labour ward to theatre (and then still having to do ward round and ward work without having slept at all the previous night) is Crocs. It is a pity that they are so ugly, but who cares what you look like when you’re working in a hospital? You end up with so much bodily fluid smeared on your shoes by the end of the day, that the shoe you walk into work wearing might only vaguely resemble the shoe you walk out with! The same goes for your clothes, if you like your clothing a brownish red colour (blood) the hospital might be the perfect place for you to work.

There are some recent attempts at improving the appearance of Crocs, but they still aren’t the kind of shoes I’d wear to make a fashion statement. Nevertheless, when I do wear Crocs (which is usually if I’m on call) my feet thank me all day, they’re in feet paradise.

We are all destined to die, there’s no avoiding it. I might seem a tad bit occupied with death, but I think you would be too if you were surrounded by it daily at work, never mind having to deal with the normal quota of death in the family, the death of acquaintances and friends of friends, etc.

Last night I was happily preparing for a relaxing evening. I had just gotten out of the bath and was busy munching on my supper of 2minute noodles when my phone rang, it was the flustered switchboard operator at the hospital telling me that there had been an accident and all the living victims were on their way to the hospital and the people on duty in the hospital wouldn’t be able to deal with all of them, would I be able to go and help? My first response was no! I’m not working, I’ve planned to relax, I’m working tomorrow night anyway. I spoke to my flatmate, who had had a grand total of 2hours of sleep the night before because she was on call, and she decided that we should call the casualty officer and get his objective opinion of the situation; his response: IT’S BAD! So we knocked on the door of the neighbouring flat and dragged the less than willing off duty doctor out of there and we all made our way to casualty.

Walking to casualty I was chastising myself for making such a stupid career choice, why would anyone choose to be the pig at the breakfast table. That’s what doctors are: Pigs at the breakfast table. We’re the bacon, when we could’ve decided to be the hen and donate a few spare eggs like any other normal 9-5 job. But we thought we were above average intelligence and so jumped from the frying pan straight into the fire.

Entering casualty, the first thing I saw was someone meeting their destiny. If death was a being, I’m sure he stood there slightly amused at our futile attempts to stop him, I’m sure he had her soul in his hands already while we were standing there jumping on her chest and drawing up drugs and pumping up her lungs. Trying to force her to breath, force her heart to pump. She had no idea when she woke up that morning, that by 19h30 she would be laying on a bed in the emergency unit with a gaping hole in her left side, a surgeon standing over her with blood up to the elbows, trying to clamp her aorta in an attempt to stop her from loosing blood.

Now this might be my primary fault or flaw, what makes me a bad doctor: while I was standing there retracting the flap of tissue so that the surgeon could have better access to the abdominal aorta, I wasn’t thinking about the consequences of hypovolaemia, I was wondering what she was thinking as the truck flipped. I was wondering how old she was and whether she was happy with the life she had lived up to that point. When my colleague called for adrenaline, it woke me out of my daydream which I shouldn’t have been having in the first place.

And as I saw more patients I was thinking that one of my biggest fears is dying in a car accident. It’s so sudden, you can’t prepare for it. I know that there’s a lot of suffering involved, but I think I’d like to die of cancer. I watched my 25year old cousin die from breast cancer and I know she suffered, but when death came she was prepared. She had spoken to everyone she wanted to speak to, she had said the things she’d always been afraid to say.

Unfortunately, we can’t choose they way we die and we’re supposed to be prepared for death always. For now I’ll just walk around with fear. Fear, to me, looks and sounds like a huge petrol tanker hurtling towards me down a tunnel where I can’t turn left or right to avoid it. Fear smells like petrol fumes, oil and blood smeared on tar.

Ok, I know 24years old is too young to be dreaming of retirement, and you can call me lazy, but damn I love not working !! I’m on holiday at present  and the days are flying by like seconds! I love waking up and going to sleep at whatever time I want, no alarms. I love not having to plan the day, if you don’t have all these big plans you don’t get disappointed when your plans are ruined by the rain. I think a good holiday consists of sleeping in, eating well, seeing new places and reading books you’ve been meaning to read for a while.

Today I woke up around 11, took a 90minute bath and ate strawberries and muesli and yoghurt for breakfast at 13h00. Then when the rain stopped and the sun came out, my boyfriend and I decided take a drive from Langebaan (where we’re staying) to Saldanha Bay. Our first time in Saldanha Bay, which is a typical little town on the west coast, and we stumbled on a boat bringing in oysters! We got a lesson on farming oysters and a bag full of oysters for R70! We found a grocery store, bought some black pepper, lemon, a knife and Tabasco sauce. Then we found a spot at the harbour and sat on the rocks looking out at the boats and stuffed our faces with oysters while doing our best to keep the seagulls at bay and keep our supplies from being blown away by the wind! It was a PERFECT holiday day! 
 
The only thing that ruins a holiday is knowing that it has to end. So from now on I’m gonna plan well for retirement. Retirement is going to be a permanent holiday. To that end I’ve started reading Suze Orman’s ‘Women & Money’ in order to make even more certain that my retirement is GOOOD! Can I retire by 50? That’s more than my lifetime away! But I can wait, and prepare….