bonjour brightside

i wanted to be a mermaid. i watched The Little Mermaid at least 10 times on videotape and i wanted red hair, a shell-bra and a green tail. my mom said mermaids only exist in cartoons and fairytales, but once i saw a movie where a girl (who was really a mermaid) got to roam the streets in the US of A and whenever her feet touched water, her tail would materialise and my most poignant memory of that was when she would blow-dry her tail after a shower to make it disappear. does anyone remember that movie?

anyway i am going to india in less than a week and i haven’t packed. haven’t even started, frick. i tried to book my train tix online and it was a nightmare. i dunno why but my credit card transactions kept screwing up due to some odd connection error. on my 4th try i succeeded…thank God. a part of me wants to strangle myself for putting me in the precarious situation of travelling to a remote part of india, alone; and yet a part of me feels good that at least i know i always had that adventurous streak in me…. ive always been sheltered and only God knows how much i struggle between independence and tearing myself away from the parental overprotective-ness i’ve grown so used to over the years. well, i think i’ll hardly ever get a chance like this to have a ‘real’ adventure (unless i go eurotripping on a budget) and this is it. so, dangerous or not, i’m giving this a go and will try to be as streetsmart as possible and pray that God’s hand will be upon me… i am really looking forward to immersing myself in third world medicine, to be wowed by the magic of clinical diagnosis, without lab tests and radiology and all things hi-tech….. well, it’s about time.

i was going to check theAge for weather predictions when i saw the headline that MJ was ‘dead’ and farah fawcett had passed away. i was a little stunned but then MJ has had lots of ‘faints’ and strange medical illnesses that elude us all, so i thought maybe that was one of his latest pub stunts….i wish it were so though. it is funny how no one really missed MJ, seeing as he was out of the pop scene for a long time…. basically he was absent – no music, no drama, only little paparazzi snippets of his veil enshrouded kids in video shops once in a while. and we all just sort of kept him at the back of our minds but we never really asked ‘hm what do you think MJ’s up to lately?’. and once he’s physically gone, everyone starts to ‘care’. it’s like that stuffed animal that you had for ages, it was always sitting that same dusty corner of your room but you never really noticed it. then when you realised it was missing you kicked up a huge ballastic fuss over it… people are a bit strange (myself included).

anyway i never really saw him as a 50-year-old person. he just never really grew up- like a peter pan of sorts…. old(er) people die of cardiac arrests, not MJ. ive seen octogenarians revived after CPR from an arrest…so why not a ‘fit’ 50 year old…? it didn’t really sink in until i was listening to billie jean (my favourite MJ song) on my iPod and realised that the world would never have another enigma like him…. goodbye king of pop

and on the other hand some people are already making fun of his passing… i saw goodnewsweek last night and they were rather unkind
“so the coroner hasn’t exactly defined the cause of MJ’s death, but we can be certain that if it was indeed swine flu, those face masks did jacksh*t.”

ok so i laughed at it cause it was funny but that’s still quite mean

i paid 200$, got 3 injections (could have been 4 – luckily there’s a combined typhoid+Hep A vaccine) and now i have had bilateral sore arms for more than 24 hours. i get it if i’d had systemic symptoms but why do my arms hurt so bad?

ive discovered that geriatricians are generally one of the nicest groups of doctors ever. there is something about them that is so genial and gentle (they all have soft soothing voices to start with) and …nice. sorry if i run out of adjectives but nice is just ……nice. i don’t even think they could ever get angry and they all probably have very low systolic blood pressures ahaha. my resident wants me to give patients local before cannulating them, because its “cruel” to stab them with a 20G cannula. after which he offered to demonstrate by injecting lignocaine on himself (aww) but i stopped him in time ahaha.

anyway i was in one our 3 hour long multidisciplinary team meetings and we were talking about ambulances…did you know that a one-way ambo trip to the ED costs 800 dollars???? oh my stars. that is like nearly the cost of one LV speedy 25.

“Mr and Mrs G are worried about finances, especially since they’ll get an ambulance bill.”

“Ambulances are crazy expensive- if you’re not a pensioner or veteran you pay the full cost. My dad lives around the corner from the hospital, but he had to be taken by ambulance and the bill was just frightful.”

“your dad should’ve walked to the hospital…”

“well im sure my dad would’ve walked, unfortunately for him he had a stroke. and by the way the bill was eight hundred dollars.”

“so i assume you had to foot the bill?”

“no i just had to tick the box where it said ‘pensioner’.”

i was giggling in my head the whole time.

i need to write 6 cover letters and prepare for 2 interviews. all iv been doing is eating and gorging myself silly and lazing in bed doing crosswords. sickkk. i feel utterly deflated and need to get my groove back on arghhhh and aged care isnt exactly helping.

its intern recruitment fever at the mo and iv been attending lots of hospital open days and info sessions and career expos etc etc etc. i want to work at RMH! they gave out pizzas and krispy kremes… and the presentation was hilarious = bonus points +++. now the question is will r0ya1 m3lb0urn3 take me in?