Premature retirement

Walk in the sun, or

Shall I wallow in silence?

The day off - again.

Virtual images

I'm pretty much hooked on Instagram. Not in the sense that I'm sneaking off to surreptitiously Instagram or that I leave my baby in a hot car while I Instagram for hours. But if you take the CAGE questions for alcohol dependence I actually have a decent hit rate re Instagram.

Have you ever felt the need to Cut down on your Instagramming?
Have people Annoyed you by criticising your Instagramming?
Have you ever felt Guilty about Instagramming?
Have you ever need an Eye-opener Instagram first thing in the morning to steady your nerves?

While considering this I did feel briefly concerned. But denial is the spice of life, so I realised that it really wasn't a problem. After all, many of the finer things in life would also score quite highly on the CAGE questionnaire. Coffee, blobbing, cheese, sleep, Peppa Pig, geometry, reading, hot air ballooning and picking of the nose. How could we live life without them?

Instagram, for those you who don't use it, allows you to take or upload little photographs and gives you some basic colour filtering and highlighting tools to make them look a bit jazzier, and then you publish them to you account. It's like a blog for photos. Other users can see your photos or search for tags that you've labelled them with. You can follow other users and see their new pictures come up on your feed.

Everyone seems to use it for different things. Some people only seem to take selfies - pictures of themselves looking, allegedly, "hot". Other people seem to be obsessed with taking pictures of their food. Or their dog. Or boats. Or sunsets. Or coffee, cheese, sleep, Peppa Pig, geometry, nose picking and hot air ballooning. That's more my arena, that list.

When I first started playing with it I was mostly interested in colour and patterns, like my intermittently series of Pretty Textured Rectangles that I post here. After a while I got distracted by the small size of the photos (on my screen) and the fact that they were square, and I seem to have been conceptualising the photos as almost like tiny icons, of the computing variety. I was trying to capture the essence of the banana (for example) and nothing else.

But now, things have changed again. Now I think of the Instagram photo as like a visual haiku. For me, it's a way of capturing a tiny moment of beauty. Being mindful of the multitude of episodes in life where I catch my breath and stop for a second to dwell on something unexpected. I use Instagram to record that oasis of existence and show it to other people.

It's tempting to fall into the trap of trying to take the same type of photo over and over again. It's a visual social medium so other people can indicate that they like your pictures. And there's always part of you that wants to please other people so you'll be "liked" in some sense. So you're tempted (or at least I am) to give the crowd more of the same. Perhaps this is how the guy who takes pictures of nothing but sneakers got started.

But operating that way just makes me edgy. My fundamental principle now is that I'm taking the pictures for me. They are a visual journal of my life - not the entirety of it, but the parts of it that remind me that life goes on happening all around us and we need to notice it before it passes on, or we do.

So I'm not so different from the people who only publish selfies. Theirs of their bodies and clothes. Mine are of my thoughts and the cogs turning inside my mind to grind the grist of my perceptions into reality.

ED haiku #5

There's nothing worse than
A vending machine dinner
Except no dinner.

ED haiku #4

Always check lipase.
You know you'll add it later,
Even for fractures.

ED haiku #3

To fit in don't shave
And wear a long-sleeved tee shirt
Underneath your scrubs.

ED haiku #2

The sick ones need it,
And it scares the well ones off,
So check the rectum.

ED haiku #1

Yellow eyes I wrote.
But the surgeon who came wrote
Scleral icterus.

Clouds in my coffee

In the middle of my day I found myself lost in a bureaucratic meeting.  People were talking words that I knew but their meaning was obscure to me.  There was discussion of leveraging client actualities, of service overlap, and of negative expression of emotion prior to an upcoming facility transfer.

So I wrote some poems in the haiku style instead.

There's a cardboard box in our doctors' office that has the coffee supplies in it.  On the sides are written poems in the haiku style about or inspired by coffee.  Coffee haikus - I hear you think - what a bunch of hipsters. And truly, there is no defence against such an accusation.  The ones I wrote are pretty damn good though...

A warm cup to hold
To take the place of a hand.
Welcome to the tribe.

Black? White? Some sugar?
Do you embrace or mask the
Bitterness of life?

From the family album #7

Dot, sister-in-law.
You can see where the Hatchling
Gets her fine looks from!

Plummer-Vinson (Paterson-Brown-Kelly) syndrome

Dysphagia and ... ...
Screw it, I'd rather be a
Landscape gardener

Buerger's test

Elevate the leg
And observe it for pallor,
Dependent redness.

Myasthenia gravis

Eye muscle fatigue
Is often the first symptom -
Pyridostigmine.

Henoch–Schönlein purpura

Little red bumps, sore knees,
And a bad pain in the tum?
Monitor kidneys.

Hyperglycaemia

The patient must have
Much too much glycaemia -
So give them no more.

Hypoglycaemia

The patient must have
Not enough glycaemia -
Give glycaemia.

Concerning poems in the haiku form

The more keen-eyed of my readers will have noticed that I've been on a bit of haiku fling recently.  It's kind of my thing - I get caught up in an idea and have trouble moving on until I've wrung all the fun out of it and given it a few more squeezes just for good measure.  You may remember my similar binge of appalling Ernest Hemingway jokes about six months back.  Or my stuttering War On Innumeracy.  Or perhaps you've suppressed those memories.

Anyway, some of you are getting sick of my poems in haiku form.  Some of you like them.  And some of you are getting freaked out by them.  The first two responses are fair enough.  But please, please, do not respond by getting freaked out.  These poems in haiku form (dammit, that's getting tiresome to type, I'm just going to call them haikus from now on!) are not, as you may think, a representative sample of my medical knowledge.  They are the entirety of it.  Every time I learn something new, I write a haiku.  So if you come across something you don't know yet, just think of all the things you do know that I haven't written about yet.

I had a big start to my study binge.  I learned 4 or 5 new things that day.  Since then I've really slowed down.  But that's okay, medicine is not a race.  Not unless somebody is dying right in front of you, in which case it kind of is a race, except it's the winner who dies.  So why rush?

So I'll finish this post with a haiku about medical haikus just to be a little bit post-modern.

Medical haikus
Encapsulate my knowledge
In pithy verses.

(image swiped from savagechickens.com without permission but with much admiration)

Neostigmine

Quickly reverses
Neuromuscular blockers.
Give atropine too.

Hypoparathyroidism

Back pain, cataracts,
A tourniquet makes hand jump,
Tap the cheek for twitch.

Hyperparathyroidism

No get up and go?
Drink so much and pee a lot?
Find adenoma.

Haemochromatosis

Bronzed diabetic,
Arthritis and bad liver -
Treat bloody often.