A Luce Affiliation

I saw the Bill Cunningham documentary last night and it made me FULL OF HAPPY!! "I'm not interested in celebrities and their free dresses ! I'm interested in clothes!" says Bill. This earnest 80 year old rides around New York on his bicycle snapping photos of street fashion for the New York Times. He still uses film that he develops at a corner shop. He wears a bright blue workman's coat that he bought from a hardware store, the same coat that the garbage collectors used to wear, and when his plastic poncho tears he tapes it together gleefully with gaffer tape. He chains his bicycle to a pole before entering the Museum of Natural History to photograph a high-society gala dinner. Now that's my kind of guy.

This week I read a coroner's report from the UK regarding a man who died under anaesthesia: The man was having an operation to repair an injury to his little finger, for which he requested a general anaesthetic. A general anaesthetic is not entirely necessary for a finger operation, however perhaps the patient didn't understood the other options. The anaesthetist taking care of him had difficulty intubating him (putting an endotracheal 'breathing' tube through his throat into his lungs), possibly because he weighed 124kg. After trying several different strategies the doctors ended up putting a Cook catheter in- a narrow, pointy tube, which can deliver small amounts of oxygen. The endotracheal tube can be threaded over the narrow Cook catheter. That's when things really started to go wrong. The Cook catheter wasn't held in place properly, and it slipped down through his lungs and ended up in his chest wall. At the same time, the nurse was asked to connect the o...

After leaving our house in Fitzroy, Pen, Stu and I moved across Smith St to Collingwood, and a much dingier abode. Pen and Stu still live there but I moved out of 'Grey Gardens' in 2007. The only entrance to Grey Gardens is through an alleyway off Easey street. The alleyway usually smells of piss and on weekends there are often piles of empty shoeboxes and clothing tags, presumably belonging to goods stolen from a Smith st Factory outlet. When I lived there the light switch in the main living room was broken so the only way to turn the light on and off was to remove or insert the light bulb. I kept special leather gloves for this purpose as the bulb was hard to remove when it was hot. However, it wasn't all doom and gloom: Grey Gardens has a lovely backyard with a lemon tree and my room had a glorious golden glow with the mid-afternoon sun. The most memorable occurrence during my time in the house was The Gun Siege. I got out of the shower one evening and walked to my ...

Ghita and I went to see Jonathon Safran Foer speak at the Wheeler Centre yesterday. Before I left, I told Jason that it wasn't too late for me to ask JSF to marry me instead. However Jason needn't have worried (and I'm sure he didn't), because it was not as great as I had hoped. Mr Safran Foer seemed terribly serious, expounding seriously about Parenting, and Meat-Eating. He seemed to be hiding his incredible imagination quite well. He also reproduced verbatim lengthy answers and anecdotes that I'd read before in print. Though perhaps the interviewer should be blamed for this one. At the end, as usual, one lady in the audience asked quite a lengthy question about trans-generational trauma. There was a titter in the audience as she entered the third part of her question. I'm sure we all thought, "Who does she think she is?" Surprisingly, Jonathon replied with, "Well that was an *excellent* question." Ghita felt that this was an example of...

It surprises me when people admire the way I can 'detach' myself when patients die. It surprises me because it's not really an effort and it's not really a skill. I think it just comes from the experience of seeing several people die. These days death is so separated from the public sphere that so-called 'lay people'- those who don't work in healthcare- only ever see their own relatives die. And their relatives usually die in a hospital bed. It's not that it's not sad, or that I don't see them as a person, or that I don't feel sympathy for their loved ones. Of course I do. But people die. Some of those people will be very dear to me and others I hardly know. Truth be told, a number of them I never knew because they were dead on arrival. Of course some deaths upset me. If the person is similar age to me, or perhaps they are suffering the same disease as a relative. It always poignant if they have a book in their posssesion because I imme...

1. Alan Ball. The screenwriter (Six feet under, American Beauty, True Blood and Towelhead) spoke at the Wheeler Centre on Saturday night. He wrote the screen play for American Beauty whilst he was working on the sitcom Sybil. Apparently the key to creating something good is to hate your main job so much that it gives you a furious energy. He also spoke of his admiration for Frances Conroy, the actress who played Ruth in Six Feet Under. He said he could give her a script which read, 'Ruth eats a puppy.' And she would be completely unruffled, "Okay. Well I haven't eaten a puppy before." 2. Patti Smith. I read her autobiography, 'Just Kids'. By page 7 I had that warm, secure feeling of starting a great book. She is candid, self-critical and name-drops impressively without ever really name-dropping. Cue happy Sunday afternoon listening to the Velvet Underground, drinking gin and reading. 3. Sofia Coppola Well, not really. but I'm certainly taking he...

So here's an awesome story a patient told me about when she got sick several years ago. My patient described being at work, having had a bit of a cough for a few days. But on that day, she was sore all over- "Even my calves hurt!" Her mother insisted on taking her to hospital where she was admitted to a medical ward with pneumonia. She remembers, "I was having a chat with a really nice nurse who was taking my vital signs. Then the nurse said, "Holy Shit!" The last thing I remember was the nurse hitting a button on the wall behind me." "When I woke up there was a sheet over my face. And I thought, "They must think I'm dead!" So I lay there for a couple of minutes, not wanting to push back the sheet in case I was in the mortuary with the dead people. And then I realised someone was holding my hand." In fact, she had sterile drapes over her face whilst a central line was inserted in her neck. An infectious disea...