A Luce Affiliation

Collingwood is so hip it had to been subdivided.  I live in a little corner called Ghetto Collingwood.  It's near the flats, the Tote and more empty shops than you can poke a stick at. It is not without its charms. We have the Keith Haring mural, and the awesome Collingwood Technical school.  If I were rich I would buy 'D Block': The flats are surrounded by big gum trees, so we have plenty of birds and wildlife.  Our friend Keith, who has his home and studio across the alley from us, has a theory that Ghetto Collingwood is quite safe from theft because thieves don't shop in their own neighbourhoods.  So far this has proved correct.  I once left the key to our car sticking out of the boot lock, with the car parked in the street, for nearly 48 hours.  Whoops.  But no one took it. But it's also quite ghetto.  A few weeks ago someone pooed all over the fence near our carport, and left a pile of dirty toilet paper.  The ju...

I think I used to be quite reckless. I often hear my injured patients' stories and think, "Yeah, I can see why you did that."  But the years are taking their toll and I'm more cautious than I used to be. Here's some advice from the front-line: 1. Turn off the lawn mower first. 2. Hold the beer bottle OR ride the skateboard. 3. Wear shoes. 4. When you want to stand up to get some air, don't.  Lie on the ground. 5. Turn off the blender first. 6. Knives go in the dishwasher pointy-end down. 7. Wax now, pay later. 8. Stop. Chew. Swallow. 9. Don't punch the wall. 10. Climbing a pool fence is a one-way ticket to impalement. If the gate doesn't open, give up.

It's the season for 'best-of' lists.  But I am not a Professional Consumer of Culture.  Far from it. If I were to list the top 5 films of 2012, it would be a list of the 5 films I saw in 2012.  I am the person best-of lists are made for. (Actually, I did watch some great movies last year.  It's just that they are movies everyone else saw 20 or 30 years ago: Apocalypse Now, the Die Hard quadrilogy, Running on Empty, Footloose.  No wonder Jason assumes I have never seen any movies, ever.) Nonetheless, here are my top five favourite books of the year . I really did read a lot of books last year, so a top 5 list seems fair.  When I remember my favourites, I remember not only the stories, but the act of reading them.  Where I was, what I was doing, drinking, smelling.  It is a strangely dual memory, the story and the reading of it intertwined.   So perhaps they were good books, perhaps I was just in a receptive mood at the time.  T...

Every now and then we get a Dead on Arrival come to ED. When people are found dead, they need to be 'certified'.  That is to say, you're not dead until the paperwork's done. A few weeks ago I went to certify a DoA that arrived about 4am.  The body was in a hearse in the ambulance bay, attended by two old, ocker funeral workers. I realised as I approached them that I'd forgotten a torch, to check the dead person's eyes.  I said to  the men, half-jokingly, 'Oh, I forgot my pupil-torch.' To which one of the men replied, 'Oh don't worry love, he hasn't got eyes.' Awesome.

Jason and I have returned from Western Australia with a suntan and some excellent secondhand books. First, a pristine copy of 'Homeopathy for Emergencies': This is a lightweight, pocket-sized alternative to the Australian College of Emergency Medicine's preferred 2100-page tome, 'Tintinalli's Emergency Medicine'.  It covers the core Fellowship Examination syllabus, including appendicitis, acute asthma, heat stroke, fractures and 'crushed fingers and toes'.  I particularly like the ominous image of the smashed bottle with pills on the front. Perhaps it was the inspiration for the Homeopathic A&E? My second excellent find was Sartre's 'Quiet Moments in a War', a collection of letters to Simone de Beauvoir during WWII. Sartre served in some type of meteorological division.  His notes about his own reading- Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty- are fascinating.  But the best parts are Sartre's accounts of mundane army life. He...

I am having fantasies of a long hot holiday in a cabin, in a forest by a lake. I'm not sure where the cabin is. Perhaps it's in Canada, as Alannah Weston recalls in her profile in the Gentlewoman, All we do is canoe and kayak and roast marshmallows and swim. The water's like silk, and you get those hot, hot blue days, but there's always a breeze. And then there's a thunderstorm and everybody gets into bed. Or perhaps it's south of the Canadian border, as in Wallace Stegner's 'Crossing to Safety': "I'll be out on the porch, looking and smelling and recherching temps perdu." Which is what I do for a good long time.  It is no effort. Everything compels it. From the high porch, the woods pitching down to the lake are more than a known and loved place....The light is nostalgic about mornings past and optimistic about mornings to come.    I sit uninterrupted by much beyond bird song... Aah. I want to sit uninterrupted by much ...

I have had a crappy week at work. An ICU colleague once told me that ED doctors make good ICU doctors because, "They're used to shit. Loads of bad shit.  They've waded through shit." So this week I waded through shit. I have been listening to classical music.  All week- Sibelius, Berio, Shostakovich.  This felt like a regression to my adolescence, but perhaps it is a renaissance.