The Misinterpretation of Dreams

A woman’s place in society has changed drastically in the past 20 to 30 years. As a woman born in the 80’s and reaching my late teens in the 21st century, I suppose it would be very difficult for me to understand all of the intricacies of societal expectations imposed on women during the “darker ages” and, in South Africa particularly, non-white women. I grew up believing that I could do and be whatever I wanted.

I don’t believe I am a particularly power hungry woman, but I am something of a control freak. I am sometimes left staggering from the realisation of the amount of power I have as a doctor, to be able to change a person’s life permanently, whether in a negative or positive way. I am able to save lives. Yes, for every life I have saved there are probably 20 more lives I didn’t manage to save, whether from negligence, lack of skills, knowledge or resources or because they were too far gone. But just saving one life is an unimaginable feeling and I can’t begin to describe it.

There are some I remember clearly, mostly children:
THE GOOD
My first weekend on call at Mosvold Hospital. A boy who had ingested organophosphates, which are lethal, came into casualty at least 4 hours after ingestion. Working in a remote rural area, with only one main road which is tarred, meant that presentation of patients was often delayed. By the time he arrived he wasn’t really breathing on his own. I went into automatic pilot. He ended up at Albert Luthuli Hospital in Durban, at least 5 hours away. I don’t know how I managed that, they’re not even the hospital I was supposed to refer directly to; I should have sent him to Ngwelezana Hospital in Empangeni, 3 hours away. Nevertheless, the within the next few weeks I received a phone call saying he was well and being discharged from Albet Luthuli. He came back and spent a few days running around the Mosvold Paediatric ward, because so eager was I to save his life, I had put him on a chopper to Durban without taking any of his family’s contact details!!! It took a few days, but we were eventually able to locate them.

THE BAD& THE UGLY
About a month into my community service at Mosvold, a 2 month old child came in with a history of having received an herbal enema. He was severely dehydrated because the enema had induced diarrhoea, he had the worst electrolyte derangement I had ever seen. I didn’t think the levels of sodium in his blood were even compatible with life! (I didn’t yet know that I would see even worse later in the year!!!) I called the Paediatricians at Ngwelezana Hospital everyday, telling them about his blood sodium levels which just weren’t improving. Not to mention that his stomach was becoming more and more distended. Eventually he was transferred to Ngwelezana where they discovered his anus had been ruptured! He had to be sent to the Paediatric surgeons at Albert Luthuli. After more than a month in total spent in one hospital or the other, the young ignorant mother came back to Mosvold with her child and a discharge summary stating all that had been done for him during his stay at Albert Luthuli. The child had an opening on his abdominal wall through which his faeces had to pass, he was wasted, malnourished and looked so unhappy. The first thing the teenage mother started speaking about was going home. I tried to tell her that while her child was better than he had been previously, he was not yet healthy and needed to stay in hospital. I was convinced that he would die if she took him home. She was adamant. She did not see my point of view, all she knew was that she had not been home in more than a month. I can’t say whether she had even spoken to her family in all the time she had been away.
I eventually walked out of her room, angry because I couldn’t make her understand the situation. My last words to her were that the child was ill because of her actions and if she took her child home he would die and it would be her fault. Before I finished the ward round, the nurses came to tell me that she had left. I never saw or heard of that child again. I’m sure he died within a week. There are many things I could have done better. I could have picked up that he had an anal rupture on day 1 and gotten the correct referral directly to Albert Luthuli much sooner. I could have done a better job with the mother. Yes she was stupid, but maybe if I had not been quite so tactless, she might have brought the baby back to the hospital before he died.

While I say that I am not power hungry, I do want to be in control of everything that affects me, and I suppose it’s because with control comes a sense of power. And quite truthfully, I do feel powerful being able, to some extent, to bring someone back life. And where do the control freaks in the medical field go? Well, lots of them go into anaesthesiology. It’s a very controlled and well defined field. Is it any surprise then that that’s where I have decided to spend at least my next year- in an anaesthesiology department, deciding if it’s what I want to to for the rest of my life?
Oh and the control! It’s like a drug! For a patient having abdominal surgery I inject him with drugs that sedate and relax him completely. The patient can’t breath for himself, because his abdominal and chest muscles are relaxed, but the wonderful heart muscle still goes on pumping. So I take over, I put a tube down his trachea to protect his aiways and attach him to a ventilator to breath for him. He’s hooked up to monitors that tell me whether he needs more or less ventilation and whether he’s feeling pain. Down the tube I send gases that keep him sedated. I make sure he doesn’t feel any pain during the procedure, I make sure that his muscles remain completely relaxed. And then, when the surgery is over, I make sure that everything is reversed, that he can breath on his own again, that his postoperative pain is minimal.

Obviously this is the condensed and simplified version of what anaesthesiology is about. When it goes well, it’s a dream, everything is so controlled. But if it goes wrong, EVERYTHING can get out of control so quickly.

So with all this control and power, and power to control, and some kind of power and control over life and death (or at least the delusion thereof), why is it then that I do not have the power to control my feelings, thoughts and emotions? Why can I not decide how I feel when I wake up in the morning? Why do I struggle so much to control the way I feel about men, love and life in general? Could the problem be that I’m just looking for everything to go the way I want, all the time….?

I love words, they hold us together. We would exist in complete isolation without words, we’d have much shorter lifespans, we’d have much less joy. The written word is invaluable, I think I’ve mentioned before my wonder at learning to read. It was the best gift I have ever received in all my life. I will never forget my first teacher: Mrs Barns at Wentworth Primary School, my hero forever. Funny thing is that she remembers me too, she ran into my mother a year or two ago and asked about me. Tells you something about me, doesn’t it- I was a nerd of note!!

I have ALWAYS loved letters! Writing and receiving letters. I remember sitting and watching in awe as my grandmother wrote letters to far away places, and as soon as I could I started doing the same. I would write long letters to an aunt living in Jo’burg (I was living in Durban, about 6 hours away) and to a cousin living in America. I can’t clearly remember if there were ever any replies, but I always made the whole thing into such a ceremony: choosing the writing paper, finding the right sized envelope, folding the letter to fit into the envelope, licking the sweet edge of the envelope and sealing it, licking the back of the stamp if I had stamps at home. If there were no stamps at home, I would stand the letter on the dressing table waiting until the morning when I would put it into my school bag and ask for 18c to buy a stamp. I would stop at the post office on my way home from school and wait in line for my stamp. I was always excited to see what picture was on the stamp. The most exciting thing about putting the stamp on at the post office was that they had those rolly things that wet the stamp, and I think a few times I made my stamp too wet because I enjoyed rolling it along the rolly thing so much. And personal letters that I receive I always keep. I have boxes filled with letters that I’ve kept since high school, even notes passed during class!

Now, I can hardly remember the last time I even wrote a letter! It’s just such a long procedure, so much quicker to send an email. As for receiving a personal letter, well… the most personal thing I receive in the post is wedding invitations (I’ve received three in the last few months!) and bank statements.

Not to despair, there is something I do still receive and send on a very regular basis: text messages to and from my cell phone, SMS. I love SMSes! They’re like a short letter. And, like letters, I also keep all the smses I receive for as long as possible. Obviously I get the not-so-personal ones most often, but there are some that are very personal that I’ve received from people who would never take the time to sit and write a letter. And even good friends are more prone to put down personal feelings that sometimes can’t be said out loud and wouldn’t be said as often if they had to be said via the post office.
The only problem is that my phone’s memory is too small to keep every sms I’ve ever received! Apparently there’s a way that I can put all of them onto my computer and save them, but I haven’t figured that out yet. Anyway, every now and then my phone beeps and tells me the memory is full and I need to delete some text messages. The problem is that I like to keep even the short seemingly unimportant ones. They remind me.
One from a friend: “Btw, I just wanted to tell you I’m seeing Paul now. What u think?” reminds me how uninterested the friend was in men in the past and I’m flattered that she values my opinion when she does find one she really likes.
“Congratulations, Standard Bank has registered your home loan…” reminds me how exciting buying my first home was, and how much debt I’m in!!!
“YAY!YAY! I did it! My novel is being published!!…” reminds me how anything is possible and I can almost feel the joy I felt when I first read it.
“PLS b @home by 1.30 earlier if u can 2help wit girls…i’m so nervous” reminds me of a friend’s wedding day and how it all turned out better than she could have asked for.
Then some that I’d been keeping, but decided to delete, in the name of healing. From the player: “Good night. Wish I was with you now” “I will dream of u” “Plz can I come over” reminds me of lust and how powerful it can be. And how powerful hope can be, against all odds, against the facts that may be staring you in the face. And that I may lie to myself as much as I want, but in truth what I’m really looking for is LOVE. The truth is that I’m an all or nothing kind of girl.
And then old messages from my ex boyfriend: “I luv u so so much u r my all…u r more to me than anythin i hav eva wanted or wished 4…i wish i had the words to explain how much i luv u…” reminds me that sometimes LOVE just isn’t enough, makes me think that maybe I have made a terrible mistake. I want to delete them but I can’t, because what if his was the last love I will ever have? If I never have love again, at least I have some evidence that once I was loved, deeply.

So powerful are words.

As part of the relocation package I received in relocating from Mosvold to Port Shepstone Hospital, I am entitled to be accommodated at the expense of Port Shepstone Hospital for up to 2 months. Quite a convenience, I must say, as it would have been very difficult to try to find a suitable place to live in Port Shepstone and surrounds while in Ingwavuma, about 6 hours away.

The place I have been provided with is a charming house with a charming garden in a charming neighbourhood. The only things not so charming about the whole deal are my housemates. There are two of them. The one I will not elaborate on, except to say that she seemed almost normal on our few encounters. She isn’t really looking for social interaction, keeps her room door closed at all times. A few times I’ve caught her struggling to unlock her room door or ducking into the bathroom and I’ve kinda forced her to talk to me. She’s never been violent, so I have nothing against her. The other housemate… well, this is where it gets interesting.

Let me start at the beginning:
I arrived in Port Shepstone on a humid Sunday afternoon. Found my way to the hospital where I picked up keys and directions to “Flamboyant House”!! It wasn’t too hard to find, even though the “map” did not include any road names! My remote for the front gate didn’t work, but the security guard was there soon enough, opening up for me. Through the front gate the driveway is to the far right of the property. The front lawn is pretty and neat with two big trees on it. One of the trees has a broken branch which has fallen across a small part of the lawn and adds to the charm of the place. It could serve as a seat when you feel like reading under the trees. At the end of the driveway is a garage attached to a granny cottage at the back of the garden. Tucked just to the right of the garage is an outdoor shower! The main house is just in front and to the left of the granny cottage. I parked my car near the end of the driveway on a patch of grass. I got out and greeted the security guard who greeted me with a smile and started to help me to unload my car. I also grabbed a few bags and followed him up the front stairs. When I got to the top of the stairs I saw that there’s also a nice sized (although slightly green) swimming pool in a separate little area of the garden. In this area there’s also a little bird bath and a garden bench and table.
On entering the house I walked into the living room and encountered “The Housemate!” It was a hot sunny summer’s Sunday afternoon in Port Shepstone and he was sitting on the couch watching wrestling on etv! The security guard introduced him to me. He smiled and greeted me in an oddly feminine voice. The lounge wasn’t very well lit, and he is melanin rich, so I couldn’t discern his finer features, but I could see his shape was not exactly petite. The friendly security guard led me through to my bedroom and set down my parcels, then he took a key from the rack just outside the bedroom door and tried it to make sure it was the right one and then handed it over to me. After which he showed me to the bathroom, dining room and kitchen. He then followed me out to my car and we repeated several trips back and forth until the car was empty. All the while my new housemate sat on the couch dividing his attention between the wrestling and the security guard and I tripping over the front step that was hard to see with our arms full. I’m not sure which he found more entertaining.

Well, nevertheless, I decided that I would not be deterred by the curious nature of the housemate and I would try my best to be pleasant. Although everyone else kept their room doors firmly shut, I decided I liked mine open whenever possible, with the curtains open too, let some light into the place. I busied myself with cleaning my room and unpacking a few essentials for the rest of the afternoon. I also tried cleaning the kitchen up a bit, just so I could unpack a few things into the cupboards and fridge. By the time I was done it was dark and I decided I could do with a bit of cleaning myself. I went to the bathroom and discovered that the light didn’t work. I went to find Mr Housemate, he was still sitting on the couch in front of the TV, and asked him if the bathroom light was broken. “No,” he says, “it’s just fused, it has been for a while.” Luckily I knew how that is meant to be fixed, because he obviously didn’t. Once I had sorted that problem out, with an energy saving bulb of course, I quickly decided that the shower could not be made fit for human use in less than an hour, so I attacked the big bath. In about 15min it looked as if I would step out of it cleaner than I went in, which is how baths are supposed to look! I ran myself a bath and laid down in the lovely bath, big enough and deep enough for two, thinking about what the next day held for me while listening to Coldplay and concentrating on not drowning- I couldn’t even stretch my legs in the bath in the Mosvold trailer park.

During the next few days I learnt that Mr Housemate rises early and didn’t mind showering in a shower with black slimy stuff coating the tiles. (I’ve since changed the state of the shower so that I didn’t mind climbing into it!) His morning exercise consists of walking to the gate at the end of the driveway for a cigarette, while waiting for his shirt to be ironed in the tumble drier. After work he goes to Spar and buys himself oily ready cooked meals for four and eats them alone- a whole chicken with four rolls, 6 fishcakes with macaroni and cheese, etc. After work he also likes wearing shirts with no sleeves and his arms are covered in tattoos! I later also encountered him at close range without a shirt on during above mentioned morning exercise, and realised that his breasts (yes breasts, not chest) are also covered with tattoos. I can’t quite remember if the crucifix is on his left or right breast and if the “Aum” is on his right or left arm, I remember that the Hindu prayer strings around his neck are numerous and he also wears some around his wrists. He has the biggest crucifix hanging from the rearview mirror of his very old Toyota Corolla, which he has to start up 15min before he actually wants to drive it. When I’ve passed by his room when the door happens to be slightly open I’ve noticed pictures of the Virgin Mother and Jesus on his wall and praying hands next to his bed! Maybe he just wants to cover all his bases. Maybe he’s thinking like Denny Crane in Boston Legal when he says to Allen Shaw: “I believe in God, if there’s no God, so what? But if there is a God, then you’re screwed!”
Maybe Mr Housemate is just making sure God knows he believes in EVERY possible version of Him.

This week I discovered two new facts about Mr Housemate:
1) The motor for the front gate stopped working and so it now has to be opened manually. When I get back from work I usually climb out of my car and open the gate for myself unless the security guard is standing at the gate. By the time I have driven up the driveway, the security guard has usually realised that I’m back and has started towards the gate to close it for me. Mr Housemate doesn’t get out of his car at the gate. If the security guard doesn’t realise that he’s at the gate as soon as he arrives, he hoots loudly and repeatedly until the securtiy guard DOES realise and runs to the gate, from wherever he may be, to open it for him!!
2) A work colleague and ex university classmate came over one evening. Mr Housemate greeted her with a slimy “You look familiar. Where are you from?”
I rolled my eyes thinking, “How original!” But it turns out it wasn’t a line, she didn’t recognise him at first because he had put on some weight, but apparently he was one year above her sister at university and he used to work in her neighbourhood. He’s an optometrist and he was apparently a brilliant student at university. He had always been a bit odd and the story goes that he just disappeared and no one in the neighbourhood knew where to!
He’s at least 9 years older than us according to my colleague, which would make him around 35. He looks at least 45!

To be quite honest, he makes me feel uncomfortable. I never take the pleasure of sitting on the beautiful green pleather couches in the living room and flipping channels, because I’m afraid he might just decide to join me. Whenever I walk towards the common living areas in the house (bathroom, kitchen, living room) I make sure I make plenty of noise. I don’t want any unpleasant surprises. I wouldn’t want to walk in on anything I can’t erase from my memory!

So what would the perfect housemate be for me?
Someone with good taste in music, we can’t listen to Queen first thing in the morning, but if someone can’t makes any good suggestions for morning music, then we’re going to have to listen to mine; which could be anything from Black Eyed Peas, Kanye West, John Mayer, Jack Johnson, Tracy Chapman, Missy Elliot to DJ Cleo or Matthew Herbert, depending on my mood.
Someone with a good idea of what’s a reasonable amount of time to spend in the bathroom in the morning and who doesn’t use all of the hot water. It would be even better if said someone could learn my morning routine and avoid clashing their bathroom time with mine.
Someone who would feel like morning exercise sometimes (about 4 out of 7 mornings a week) and help get me out of bed early enough.
Someone who can cook and has a lot of imagination in the kitchen, I tend to cook the same things over and over. If someone could also do the dishes, that would just be an added bonus. If not, then someone can just help to pay for a maid to come in every second day.
Someone who understands to give me space when I close my door, but knows when to ignore the “Keep Out” sign.
Someone who goes away every now and then so I can have the place to myself, but is good company when they are around.

Somehow, I think that like a good man, a good housemate is an enigma. So for now, I’ll be happy to live on my own. It’s ok if it’s small, as long as I don’t have to share it with strange housemates!

I’m feeling very disconnected at present. I think a lot of it has to do with the new job, new place, etc. I don’t really feel like I’m a part of things yet. I feel like I don’t really know what I’m doing, especially in ICU- I’m fumbling in the dark. I feel like the dumbest student in the class, where everyone is discussing a subject on which they all have a vast amount of knowledge and understanding and I’m left on the outskirts of the discussion- I don’t understand enough. And there’s just SO much information coming at me from so many different angles, I don’t know how to handle all of it and process all of it and I’m sure I won’t be able to store all of it. My head’s in a state of disarray.
Then there’s no one at work I feel could be a potential kindred spirit. I don’t see myself connecting with any of my colleagues on a personal level. I’m often wrong, but I like to make quick judgements about things like this. The thing is that before I never felt the need to connect with other people. I never went searching for friends or social connections. Someone once said it was because I had everything I needed. I think sometimes I felt like I had TOO many friends, too many emotional attachments, no room for anymore.

But at present I am feeling very unattached. Yes, I do still have good friends, but they are all far away. Unfortunately I am feeling very disconnected from my best girlfriend too. I’m not sure if it has to do with her being married and me being single, but we just seem to have completely different thought processes of late, we used to agree on everything.

And yes, it does make a difference that I don’t have a boyfriend anymore. I think he was always a source of security for me. I knew that at the end of it all there was always someone who had my back. Someone to call to talk about ANYTHING at ANYTIME. Someone who would laugh at my racist jokes, but know that I wasn’t racist; someone who would listen to my stories about patients and know that my insensitivity was just a defense mechanism, etc, etc…

No I don’t want a new boyfriend just yet, I just want to have a conversation with someone who gets me!  I thought this was supposed to be a teenage phase??!!! But in all honesty, I think I probably had similar feelings, though less pronounced, at the beginning of 2008 on arriving in Ingwavuma. Maybe I just need to give Port Shepstone more time. Oh, and I think it will also help when I find my own place! I really need my own space!!!

The end of my dreaded community service year has come and gone, and I’m on a little bit of a break before starting my new job as a “Senior Medical Officer in the Anaesthetics Department of Port Shepstone Regional Hospital”!!! And I should be ecstatic, but somehow there’s this knot of tension in my left shoulder that won’t go away even after a massage. I know in my head that I should be exuberant- this is a job practically on the beach, just over an hour’s drive from Durban and in a field I’m so interested in I am seriously considering specialising; not to mention that there’s also a salary increase. So why am I not floating just a few inches above the ground, surrounded by a pink cloud of happiness?

1) I’m anxious about starting a new job in a new place. Professionally it means I still have to prove myself. Personally it means I have to be nice to people. I’m not the friendliest person, my first reaction is to not like people, everyone starts off in the negative with me unless they’re good looking enough! (LOL!)

2) 2008 was an almost perfect year for me. In fact it turned out to be the best year of my life so far. I feel I accomplished growth professionally and personally. I gained more confidence in my abilities as a doctor. I gained more confidence in my abilities as a human being and a woman. But then I allowed myself to be sucked into a stupid waste of time of a twirl with a man, which I knew from the start would not amount to much. But still it affected me more than I’m happy to admit.
I just don’t understand how I can be in control of my life one minute and then tumbling disorientated through a tangle of emotions the next, unable to tell myself how I should feel. How is it that a man can have so much influence over me? Even one who is far from the kind of man I’d want to grow to love? How do I come so easily to a point of giving more and more of myself, getting little in return?

At present my only consolation is from something a friend of mine tells me when I ask questions like this: If you could control all of your emotions you wouldn’t be human.
This still doesn’t stop me from wanting to be in complete control of my emotions. And right now I want to feel exuberant about the new beginnings afforded to me in 2009. 
I think I’ll wait a bit longer… maybe it will come soon, the year is still young…