The Misinterpretation of Dreams

When you work in any medical field, you begin to appreciate free weekends. The thing is that patients don’t stop getting sick after working hours, and so there always has to be SOMEONE on call. Now on call can mean anything from being in the hospital for 24hours without a break, to sitting at home waiting to be called in. There’s a bit of a pecking order, and most often the intern at the bottom of the food chain is stuck in the hospital doing all the dirty work, while the consultant (or specialist) is able to give telephonic advice from home and only come into the hospital if specifically asked to by a junior doctor who feels he or she can’t handle the situation. It’s almost guaranteed that the longer you have been a doctor, the higher you climb on the ladder and so the less hours you spend in the hospital on weekends, but this is more the case in some specialties than others. It’s common knowledge that a dermatologist is less likely to be awake at 03h00 than a surgeon. But it’s not only the doctors who have to sacrifice weekends and sleeping hours; to run a good after hours service a hospital also needs nurses, cleaners, porters, laboratory technicians, radiographers, and even physiotherapists.

So when we do have a free weekend, there’s a lot of thought that goes into what to do with it. Getting a good balance right can be tricky. You often want to forget about work completely, and especially when you work in a rural area, you want to get out of the area completely. But you don’t want to get back to work on Monday morning feeling more tired than you did on Friday afternoon, because most likely you’re not going to get much sleep during the coming weekend. The point is that, for me, a lot of thought often goes into what I do with my weekends. My free time has become most precious to me.

This weekend gone by, was a particularly interesting one for me:

I did quite a bit of traveling. A good friend, whom I worked with for two years during my internship in Worcester, got married this weekend. The wedding was in the Midlands in KZN and three other friends flew in from the Western Cape. We had a mini reunion in KZN. I met the bride for the first time at the wedding, quite honestly I wasn’t impressed. This wedding convinced me, even more, that I don’t want a traditional wedding. I just want to elope to an island where the rand can buy me 5 star living for two weeks, come back and announce I’m married and then have a huge party to celebrate and show everyone the pictures. So many brides just look so unhappy at their weddings, except when they’re plastering on the smile for the pictures. And oh how I hate those posed pictures!!! At this wedding the bride had a list of pictures that needed to be taken, who would be in them and in what order they would be taken! During this time I amused myself by trying to figure out the family dynamics, assumptions are often more entertaining than the truth.

I added one year to my age- I am now officially 26 years old. It’s such a big number! I can see the wrinkles starting to appear, mostly my smile lines are more visible, but I’m telling myself that’s not a bad thing. I spent my birthday swinging between trees in Karkloof forest. It was an amazing experience. (Check it out at www.karkloofcanopytours.co.za)  I thought I’d be scared, but you wear a full body harness and helmet, you’re strapped in tight and you feel so safe. There are about 4 guides with you and the view is so beautiful, that when it ended I was disappointed. But we seemed to have had perfect timing. As the last people in our group crossed the last slide, we heard thunder and saw clouds rolling in. We had a short walk back to the base camp through the forest and over a stream. In aid of holding onto my youth (and not slipping and hitting my head on a rock) I took off my shoes and squelched my toes in the mud and put my feet into the cold stream water. We ended off with a light lunch on the verandah watching the rain pelt down.

I added three books to my personal library: A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth (a birthday present); Shataram by Gregory David Roberts and Before Mandela was Mandela by Eric Myeni. Unfortunately I have to hold off on starting any of them just yet, I’m really chomping at the bit for Shantaram because I have been meaning to do it for a while, but it’s 933 pages long and I can’t NOT finish a book, so I had to be sure I was ready. For now I have to exercise self discipline and stick to Clinical Anesthesiology, in particular the chapter on Local and Regional Anesthesia, because I have a presentation to do soon and also there’s the whole ‘Diploma in Anaesthetics’ (DA) thing that I decided I was doing and I can’t back out now. The problem with studying is that procrastination only makes it harder. ( But I suppose procrastination is a bit of a problem with anything that needs to be done.)

I added Tracy Chapman’s “Our Bright Future” to my music collection, but I was fortunate not to have to pay for that: I be a girl from the Caribbean!!
So far my favourite track is Conditional. I must agree that love IS conditional; there ARE strings attached. And that’s the way it should be. Only God, parents and dogs can be expected to love unconditionally.