Standing opposite

Realizations can wash over you at strange times.  I recently sat in with a GP obstetrician* who was running a clinic for women who were 36 weeks pregnant or more.  And if you know as little about pregnancy as I do, that's pretty darn pregnant.  At least two-thirds of the women, in response to the doctor's first question asking them how they are doing, said "I'm pretty over it".

I found it an exciting afternoon because it was the first time I've been able to lay hands on some pregnant tummies and squoosh the baby around.  You do this to figure out which direction the baby is facing and whether it's head up or down, and how far down if it is down.  At first I felt like I was going to pop some of them tummies, they were so tight.  But I watched the GP and she was quite firm with her hands so I was too and she seemed to approve.  "Does this hurt?", I asked at one point.  "Yes!", she replied through gritted teeth, "but carry on".

We ended up running it like a contest.  I got to do all my measurements first and then we compared them to what the doctor got afterwards.  At first I was a bit all over the shop but by the end I was getting consistently quite close to her which was reassuring.

The realization that I had is that my sense of humour is often negative, challenging or provocative.  I don't know if it comes across that way here in the blog - I suspect it doesn't because mostly I am me-talking and hence it's more the self-deprecation that comes out.  Anyway, let me explain...

I was really enjoying the afternoon.  I was learning heaps, the doctor was really nice, and as I am a robot that has been genetically programmed to want to nurture pregnant women, I wanted them to feel relaxed and happy too.  In most circumstances I'll have a bit of a chat and a laugh with the patients.  But all the jokes I was thinking of were things that someone who is about to have a baby really doesn't want to hear.  Things about big heads or tummies popping or doctors being late and so forth.  Douglas Adams described this situation perfectly in The Meaning Of Liff with his definition for the word Wigan:

"If, when talking to someone you know has only one leg, you're trying to treat then perfectly casually and normally, but find to your horror that your conversion is liberally studded with references to (a) Long John Silver, (b) Hopalong Cassidy, (c) The Hokey Cokey, (d) 'putting your foot in it', (e) 'the last leg of the UEFA competition', you are said to have committed a wigan."

I concede that it is possible that my experience was a true wigan in that it was simply the perverse effect of my own sensitivity to the topic that produced it.  But I've been listening to myself for the last few days and I've noticed that most of my jokes involve either absurdly contradicting what someone is saying, mocking them through exaggeration, or other such contrariness.  As such, I believe that what I experienced was a false wigan and that it was simply me becoming aware for the first time of my own tendencies due to my sensible awareness of another person's sensitivity.

It kind of freaked me out at first and I started to wonder if perhaps I was in fact some kind of jerk and should start to take more of an interest in surgery.  I certainly have a bloated ego and a European car already so I think it's a road I could travel all too easily.  But then I re-examined my life as Socrates would urge and realized that I'm a clumsy geek who does chess puzzles and Scrabble online and realized that surgery is not for me - I'm such a nerd I'll probably be an immunologist.  Wa-hay!

* Fact of the day: the word "obstetric" actually means "midwife".  Use this information to irritate obstetricians.