Finding the Light

Today a friend of mine is having surgery.  She has cervical cancer.  It was treated, it went away and at the end of last year it came back. Today she will undergo a rather radical procedure - quite a lot of her insides will be removed.
            It is difficult for her and for her family. She has a husband and two beautiful children - a boy proud of his missing front teeth, and a girl with an urchin grin and the largest curls a small child can reasonably carry on her head.
            It is difficult, and she finds consolation in what she phrases as "finding the light" - the light of a dinner with friends, a helicopter trip over Niagara, a son in second grade and a daughter old enough to imitate grownups and be useful - even if that useful is scrubbing down the bathroom when she can't reach the taps on the sink. The water in the toilet solves that problem, and the hysterical laughter that goes along with a hasty shower for a kid and a Clorox scrub for all bathroom surfaces under 4 feet high is about as much light as a human body can stand.

Today she reckons she can use all the light she can get.
            I find my lights in the endlessly variable dimensions of human imagination. Like your daughter, my friend, we dream, and when we have dreamed - then, we simply can't help ourselves. We make it. We tinker and fix and because we did this one thing, we make the dreams bigger and bigger until - to take an example that is not mine - "we find ourselves playing complicated instruments while marching in complicated patterns in lockstep with half a hundred other humans, all of us wearing funny hats" and the result of what is, considered soberly, a rather odd collaboration, sets a million watchers on fire, screaming for joy.
            Sometimes those million people, building and tinkering, iteration by iteration, adjusting and learning and loving, find themselves coming together in a different sort of dance - their million labors condensed into a dozen people with dozen complicated tools each, dressed in masks and silly gowns, moving in unison beneath a circle of bright surgical lights and making life.
            And it is exhilarating. For this to happen, someone dreamed.

You got this, my friend.  You're gonna come out flying.

The Effect of the Occlusion of the Carotid Artery on the Human Female (Age 34)

Public Service Announcement #1: 
It is possible, when working out the kinks in a badly strained neck, for a physiotherapist to press just a little too hard on the patient's carotid artery.
The patient might have to be picked up off the floor.
Oops.

Public Service Announcement #2:
When a recently unconscious patient is leaning half-passed out against a light post while her husband steps sideways to hail a cab because she can't walk on her own just yet, and you have watched said husband as he propped her up against that light post and walked 6 meters up the street to the taxi rank, then this is with absolute certainty not the moment to cross that street with the specific purpose of pressing your face up to within 12 narrow inches of her face, making aggressive eye contact and leering and doing a solid heavy-breathing up-and-down of her limp and helpless person.

Public Service Announcement #3: 
It would be best to count your blessings that she doesn't have the energy to slug you right in the middle of that leer of yours. Because the next time you pull a stunt like that, somebody's gonna.

Bah Hachoo Humbug.

I'm sure that flus come at worse times than between Christmas and new year, but this particular time is probably the least fun time of the lot.
Bah Hachoo Humbug.

Let's pretend that my sneezing sounds like this - and feel all holiday happy and fizz.


It's pretty much the reverse of inappropriately lugubrious holiday music, isn't it?

Physiotherapy Gets Sillier

Back in 2012 I did some physiotherapy at the Clinica Alemana for something extremely boring and muscle-related.  Things were silly there. Recently, the something boring and muscle-related returned and I am back in physio again. During the year and a half since i was out of it, things have gotten sillier.
            I started my course of treatment with an an evaluation with a physiotherapist. I arrived, I took a number and I waited to be called up. And eventually, I was.
             "I have an evaluation today." I said. "At eleven o’clock. Name of Tabubilgirl.” 
The receptionist looked at me strangely and tapped her computer keyboard. She pointed to a chair against the far wall and told me to go and sit. Obediently, I sat. And waited.  And waited some more. After almost an hour, I heard my name -
            “Tabubilgirl!” A woman cried.  “Tanto tiempo! (It's been so long!)  So good to see you!  But-” and her face took on the same puzzled look the receptionist had worn – “What on earth are you doing here?”
             I blinked. “I have an evaluation at eleven. With you.”
            “But the receptionists called me yesterday to tell me you’d cancelled.”
            “The receptionist called me yesterday to confirm!”
             She squinted. “What time did they call you?”
            “Around eleven?”
            “They called me in the afternoon. You weren’t coming. They said you were very definite about it. So I filled your slot with someone else.  But that person cancelled, so you got lucky.”
            And I had my evaluation after all.

After the evaluation I went back out and took another number number and waited to speak to a receptionist to schedule times for my physio sessions.
            “My physio said 9:30 on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays." I said. "For six weeks."
            “That’s complicated.” The receptionist said. “Let me write that down. What did you say your name was?”  She turned over an invoice and wrote in pencil on the back 'Tuesday, 9:30. Thursday. 9:30. Saturday. 9:30.'  Laboriously, she entered each one of the eighteen dates individually into the physiotherapy calendar, asking - and forgetting - my name and RUT (national ID) number for every single one.
            On my left a young woman had arrived to sign in for a session. Her receptionist frowned at her. “You don't have a session today. You’re here for an evaluation. Have you ever been to the Clinica Alemana before?”
            “I’ve been coming here for three weeks! My physiotherapist is inside waiting for me!”
            “That’s impossible.” The receptionist said. “I have you down for an evaluation this morning.  There are no other records-”
            My receptionist cleared her throat. “I’ve entered all your dates.” She said.  “Now you need to go downstairs to the main accounts department and pay.”
            "Can't I pay here?"
            "Of  course not."
            "But I just paid you for my evaluation."
            "That's different."
            I opened my mouth to ask why, but she scowled at me, so I went downstairs to the main accounts department and took a number and queued there for a while.

When I came back to Physiotherapy, my receptionist must have been feeling magnanimous, because she beckoned me right up to her desk and took the invoice from me with a pleased sigh.
            “Now that’s done,” she said, “I can enter your hours in the computer. What did I do with that paper?” She fussed with the papers on the desk in front of her. “Tuesdays – and Thursday – and Wednesdays? No. Fridays? Where DID that bit of paper go?” 
            “Didn't you just put me in the computer?” I said.
            “Not formally." She said. "That was only informally. Now I’ve got your invoice, I can put you in again. Formally. Starting next Tuesday, is that right? Tuesday at 9:30. And Thursday at 9:30.  And Saturday at 9:30.  And Tuesday at 9:30- This is complicated. I'd better write this down first.”
            On my right, an elderly man was checking in for an evaluation.
            “No you’re not.” His receptionist said. “You’re booked in for a session with Sandra.  She’s waiting for you.”
            “I don’t know any Sandra. I’m here for an evaluation.”
            “Your evaluation was LAST Thursday. It’s right here in the computer-” 
            “But I’ve never BEEN here before-”

I left the Clinica smiling peaceably and feeling much better about the state of the universe.

The Platano Orientale

Santiago does an awfully pretty spring.  We’ve got jacaranda trees that bloom purple on every block, dropping pools of purple color on the streets beneath them and casting pools of purple shadow all around them on the sidewalks. We’ve got Ceibo  – the original burning bush, with its small spring leaves blotted out by scarlet pods like clouds of hanging red flame. We’ve got wisteria hanging over walls, heavy and honey scented. We’ve got bright golden Californian poppies, spreading thick across the verges and the hills -
            But most of all we’ve got the Platano Orientale.
            A plátano is, in direct translation to the Spanish, a banana, but the Platano Orientale has nothing tropical or edible about it. It is the Eastern or Oriental Plane Tree - once beloved of Hippocrates, and today equally beloved of Santiago’s municipal councils.  Tall and spreading, with a leaf rather like that of a maple, it grows like a weed, spreading up and out to make shady green tunnels of our hot summer city roads.  And twice in every spring and early summer, it sprouts a crop of fluffy brown pods, which launch themselves on the summer breezes and inundate Santiago. The air fills up like a glass bowl full of dandelion clocks. Walking down the street is like walking through a storm of ash, thick and furry.  On windy days, sheets of platano seeds come drifting across the sidewalks, piling up in gutters, and snagging in trees and bricks and paving stones.
            Platano seeds get everywhere.  They filter under window -frames and blow through keyholes .  They catch in your zippers and your pockets and you trouser cuffs, and they catch in your eyes – which weep, and in your nose, which itches, and in your throat, where it  lands on your tonsils with a shock like a live electrical wire.  And then you cough – a terrible, barking electric cough.  You cough and you cough and you cough you cough – bent double, helpless and weeping -
            My first spring here, I spent three days in the hospital after that terrible electric cough met my outgrown childhood asthma and brought it all back in full liquid-lung terror.  There’s an awful lot of asthma in Santiago.  It’s not just the pollution – and Chile produces smog like it’s the mainstay of the GDP. It’s the way the spring belongs to the Platano Orientale.
            Mr Tabubil, who has never known an allergy in his life, succumbed within weeks of arriving, and passes the spring red-rimmed and hacking.  My Dad, equally hardy, visited us last spring, and half-way across a traffic intersection, he stopped dead in the road and doubled over with that terrible electric cough, locked in an attack that required every instrument in my mobile asthma arsenal to bring under control.
            And I have quite the arsenal.  Since being released from the hospital, spring comes pre-loaded with an arsenal of sprays and drops and inhalers that would make a hardened hypochondriac blush. Our municipalities might love the Platano Orientale, but every doctor I’ve met would, given half an opportunity and an illicit batch of Agent Orange, defoliate the whole city in one fell swoop if it would get rid of That Tree. Medical committees, armed with infographics and statistics, make eloquent claims on the public interest and the public health.  They bring in experts on horticulture and respiratory medicine.  They drag in respiratory patients for dramatic personal narratives. But the platano grows like a weed in poor soil, and when have sense and logic ever prevailed against a budget-minded municipality anywhere?
            And doctors talk darkly, in surgeries and over cocktails, of axes in the dark.

Alba and the Carbon

(the telephone rings.)
            "Tabubilgirl! Quick!  What's activated charcoal?"            "Isn't that the stuff they put in Britta filters?  Alba?  Is that you?"            "You're right!  I have those!  I can take one apart!"            "Why?"            "No time to talk!  I'll call you when it's all over, all right?"
(call ends.)

It wasn't all right.  Not even vaguely.  A question like that needs proper answers. After waiting very patiently for three whole minutes, I called Alba back, on account of how I really really wanted to know why she was taking a britta filter apart to get at the charcoal.
            The answer was pretty good, actually. In between sounds of breaking plastic, Alba explained that she'd cooked pasta for lunch and after eating her way through most of a bowl of it, she'd scraped the leftovers out of the saucepan into a tupperware container and noticed that the lower levels of pasta in the saucepan were evidencing a phenomenon possibly unique in pasta circles -
            The pasta company had put a free gift - a magnet advertising an upcoming animated film release - into the bag along with the pasta.  She hadn't noticed it when she was pouring the pasta into the saucepan, and it appeared that the painted plastic layer of the magnet had melted and boiled off.  The pasta in the lower reaches of the  pot were sort of technicolor swirly, with long, dragging plastic tails, and she was freaking out.
            Alba is good at that.  "On the internet I saw that if you eat like a tablespoon of activated charcoal, you can help cleanse your system. I've already made myself throw up the pasta I ate but what if all the horrible toxic paint - and god knows what it has in it -  has been absorbed into my body already?!   I need to filter it out.  From the inside.  That should work, right?"
            I wasn't so sure.  If the pasta hadn't actually burned going down her throat, it was pretty much inert - sort of like accidentally swallowing a bit of cling-wrap or a scrap of plastic bag.  And even if it wasn't purely neutral, that sort of poisoning generally requires cumulative and repeated exposure to do real damage-
            "I'm not arguing"  Alba said, but she was still making herself a nice cup of activated charcoal tea.  With maple syrup to help it go down.
            "You DO realize that the way activated charcoal works is that it makes you throw up?  You've already done that.  It doesn't actually filter your system from the inside."
             "But not everyone throws up.  I read on the internet that it's like 60% of people.  Tops.  And I'm not really the throwing up sort.  It took a lot of effort last time when I got all that pasta up.  I mean - wow, tickling the back of your throat sure is effective, but boy does it take work.  And even if I do throw up again, well, that's good right?  It means that it's working.  I mean - I mean…. uuuuuuurp.  I gotta go!"
            She hung up.  And five minutes later I got a text saying that activated charcoal really does work that fast.
            The things you learn on a Wednesday afternoon.  In other news, our regular mid-week sketching circle didn't happen yesterday on account of the hostess suffering a bout of self-induced stomach flu.

The Joys of Prescription Antihistamines

"Hey !  Mr Tabubil!  Heeeey!  Guess What! I'm going on the internet to look at pictures of kittens!"
            "Did you just type the word 'kittens' into the run command?"
            "How else do you do it?  It worked, too, see?  Look - kittens!  But I don't want these kittens.  They're too small."
            "That's because they're thumbnail pictures in an image search window.  Seriously, how did you get into the internet from there?"
            "I don't want these kittens. They're not big enough to cuddle. Does the internet have any other kittens? Ooooh - PUPPIES!!!"
            "Oh GOODIE.  You just found CuteOverload.  Although I don't know HOW, in your condition-"
            "You're being that pa word. Puh... pota-"
            "Patronizing?"
            "That's it.  Aren't you."
            "You bet I am.  Remember that nice little lie-down we talked about earlier?"
            "Don't be pota...pato... that mean P word any more.  It's not very - ooo!  OOOOHHH!  Look!  LOOK!! LOOK!!!!  It's a doggie and a bitty baby human and the babby has the big old doggie on a leash and the woggie is running and pulling the sweet widdle babby down the stweeeeet!!!!!!!"

Roll up, roll up, Ladies and Gents!  500 pesos to see the wonderful world of prescription antihistamines! Next time I may just choose Door B and take the allergies. Possibly there will be kittens down there as well.

It's the future and we're living in it.

I went to the dentist today.  It's been a while.  It's not that I've been putting it off, exactly, it's just that I live a very busy life and there are many many things to do, and dentists are only one of them. Sometimes, however, your husband gets fed up and makes an appointment for you, and then you're stuck.

"Tabubilgirl!"  My dentist cried.  "Long time no see!  It's been months! You cancelled an appointment for a cough and you never came back. I trust that nasty thing has cleared up by now?"
            "Yeah."
            He bowed me with rather more than the necessary gravity into the chair and clipped a little paper bib around my neck.
            "Are you ready?"
            "Sure."
            "You are sure?  Absolutely sure?  You have your music?  Andrew Lloyd Webber is all ready to go?"
            I burst into tears.
            "I forgot!"  I wailed. "I left my player on the dining table and I didn't notice until I was already on the bus and I had somewhere else go before I came here and I just don't know how I'm going to do this without my happy music!"
            My dentist is a very nice man.  He dabbed at my tears with my little paper bib and waited until I stopped crying.
            "Oh Tabubilgirl." He said.  He shook his head and smiled.  "Do you remember the first time you saw me?  I wrote a note in your file. 'Tiene mucho miedo.' She is very afraid."
            "That's all you wrote?" I sniffed.  "I'd have said a lot more than that."
            He smiled again - he has a very gentle smile - and patted my hand.
            "I am very careful with your fear.  We will only do x-rays today.  And possibly we will do impressions. For a guard against tooth grinding - there must be a lot of stress built up in that little mouth of yours, eh?"
(Presumably, my dentist saves his smirking for when he pulls up his dental mask.)

We settled for x-rays. When the films were done, he let me up to stretch.  He stretched as well, and smiled his lovely smile again.
            "I have the most wonderful new app on my phone, Tabubilgirl! I was playing with it just before you arrived.  I turned on the radio and held up my phone to the speaker and the app listened to the music, and fter only five seconds - five seconds, Tabubilgirl - it told me the name of the song!  And the name of the composer!  Even which orchestra did the recording!"
            "Really?"  I was intrigued. "I have an app like that, but It doesn't know classical from a hole in the ground.  It only does popular music. I do get the lyrics-"
            "Lyrics?"
            "Yeah - they run on the screen in real time, while the song's playing-"
            My dentist clapped his hands. "Come into my office!" He said. "You must show me. Lyrics!  How marvelous!"
            In his office across the hall, soft music floated across the carpet and around his heavy wooden desk.  He pulled his phone from his pocket and held it up against the speaker of a stereo and pressed the screen -
            "There!"
            "Wait-"
             "No time! Beethoven!  The seventh symphony.  Performed by the Vienna Philharmonic.  Can you believe it?  Performed by the Vienna Philharmonic!  It's incredible- it knows! 
            Tabubilgirl, my wife is in California right now, visiting her mother.  Yesterday, while I was driving home, I called her telephone from my car. I said to her 'Are you at home?  Turn on your computer'  and she did and she asked me what the weather was like and I turned my phone around and held it up to the window of the car and I said 'See for yourself!'  It's the future, Tabubilgirl!  And we're living in it!"
            "I remember" I said " the very first telex I ever saw.  You remember telex?  They used it before the fax?"
            He nodded.
            "In the mid-eighties we were living in Papua New Guinea, in a little town in the middle of the jungle. My dad was doing a lot of traveling - he'd be away for weeks sometimes, and this was the eighties - we didn't even have affordable long distance telephone! I remember that one day the secretary in Dad's office called and told us to come down to the office. She wouldn't say why, just told us to come.  When we arrived, she held out a blue sheet of paper.  My dad had written a letter - just a few lines, and sent it through by this brand new machine.
            I remember that my mother snatched that piece of paper right out of the secretary's hand - she held it so hard that she trembled.  I remember that she cried.  It was my dad's own handwriting - his own hand- written that same day in some place so far away it might have been on another world.  My little sister and I crowded around her and we saw her tears and we reached out to touch the paper with something like awe. It was magic.  A new sort of miracle.
            And today, only twenty years later, I can open a video window and watch my sister-in-law's new baby cry and smack her baby lips - in real time, from the other side of planet.  And you can talk to your wife in California from your moving car - in video-"
He nodded again, and smiled, and nodded, and smiled and held up his phone against the stereo -

It's these little things that make the wonder.  Digital music - sound spun out of numbers, for your ears only. X-ray photographs of your insides, on demand, no waiting.
A machine that holds your memories and do the listening for you and read out the lyrics, in real time in case you don't remember or never knew- A weather check from a world away, a baby's smile, brought into your home -

Vitamin E Oil Works as Advertised

Winter, with the electric blankets on the beds and the kerosene heaters in the living room, is a drying sort of season. Skin cracks and pulls and breaks out in eczema and weird localized rashes.  
            Winter, however, doesn't bother me. I have my secret Australia weapon - my little orange bottle of Vitamin E oil. This stuff is so very moisturizing that doctors recommend it to make scar tissue fade, and on winter spots it works like summer sunlight on snow.

            Mr Tabubil has a small red winter spot on his left calf.  He's not fussed, but I am good at winter spots, and take care of them whether the owners want me to or not.  I started small, doing it up overnight in layers of moisturizer cream and Vaseline  but it didn't vanish, so on Saturday night I decided to pull out the big moisturizing guns and dug out the little orange bottle.  

            Mr Tabubil sat on the bed, looking martyred, but I am strong-minded and I ignored him.  I held the bottle over his leg and squeezed - and the dropper top of the bottle popped off and pinged sideways off the nightstand, and while we were giggling, an entire bottle's worth of Vitamin E oil dropped in one quivering mucilaginous blob onto his leg and slid all over the sheets. 

            A little of this stuff goes a long way: a drop the size of a pearl pinhead does all 10 of my cuticles AND my lips. One 100 ml bottle lasts me all year.  

            It's nasty stuff when it comes by the bottle. Mr Tabubil gagged. I reached down and started scooping, but that ropey, viscous, goop just plain wouldn't scoop.  How it all came out of the bottle in the first place I still can't figure out.  I scraped and pawed and rubbed until half of the stuff was on me rather than the sheets, and then I went into the bathroom and pulled out a bar of soap - 

            And here, we seemed to enter some sort of obscene sci-fi slasher flick. It wouldn't wash off; the more I scrubbed, the worse it got. My arms grew thick and tacky with  translucent goo -down my fingers, across the palms and the backs of my hands and up to my elbows.  Muffled swearing from the shower indicated that things weren't much better for Mr Tabubil's leg - soap and water seemed to help it MULTIPLY. 

            It was very "Killer Jellyfish from Outer-Space!" - suitable for a mid-afternoon matinee at the drive-in where your boyfriend's best friend is hiding in the backseat with a cup full of jell-o - a film like that might get to the heart of it. 

            We worked it out, eventually.  Dawn dish soap was what it took.  A whole bottle.  And only piecemeal. I couldn't touch shiny surfaces till half-way through Sunday. The sheets spent two days soaking in a heavy Dawn solution, and there's a zone the size of a car tire on one of them that looks like the spill sheet under an oil pan.

            On the positive side, as of Wednesday evening my arms are soft like velvet from shoulder to fingertip, and Mr Tabubil's legs are as silky as a head of waving hair in a Pantene Ad.

            But I'm not allowed to touch his winter red spots any more.  He's quite emphatic about that.

Mammograms

Several years ago, right here in Santiago de Chile, my mother had her very first mammogram. For those not familiar with the procedure, a mammogram consists of having your breast slammed forcibly between two panes of glass and photographs being taken of the resulting aesthetic abomination. It was my mother's first time, and she was under the impression that she was going in for something innocuous, something like a CAT scan or an ultrasound. Reality left her extremely surprised, highly unimpressed and extremely sore, and she told the doctor so when she saw him afterwards.
            The doctor listened and smirked.  Clearing his throat he explained exactly how mammograms worked. It wasn't quite a medical explanation. It began with the sins of Eve, and got steadily worse. 
            "And it's worth it." He finished up, looking smug. "You'll have to learn to live with the pain. When you're made a woman, you just have to accept that there are things you just have to put up with."
            Generally speaking, my mother is a deeply polite and retiring sort of medical patient, the type of patient who would rather suffer a massive asthma attack on the floor of the ER than interrupt a nurse's conversation and indicate that the nurse might need to turn some attention her way, but this doctor's breathtaking response to her concerns sent her right over her personal line.  Standing up from her chair, she leaned over his desk and spoke directly into his eyes. 
            "I'm going to make a device for men."  She said.   "Just like this one.  How would you like it if I took you in my hand and squeezed-"
            The interview finished quite abruptly. But she was furious for days.

The point of this incident is that in the intervening ten years or so, things haven't changed much. I may have mentioned, at various moments  in this blog, that I've been going through a few gastrointestinal issues.  One of more picturesque symptoms is bloating on an industrial scale, and one day, not so long ago, I was obliged to make an emergency appointment with my GP -
            "Tabubilgirl!" He cried, as I came through his office door. "Congratulations!  I had no idea!  How far along are you?  Four months? Five?"
            "I'm not pregnant, Doctor." I said. "This is one of the symptoms."
            My GP sent me to a gastroenterologist. 
            A "very nice man."  He told me.  "He'll sort this out - run some tests, find out what sorts of food sensitivities you have-"
            It didn't quite happen like that. The gastroenterologist admired my bloat and palpated my belly.  He watched me writhe in pain, made notes about 'unusual abdominal rigidity', listened through a stethoscope to all sorts of irregular noises- and then he steepled his hands, looked me earnestly in the eye and told me that it was quite common "for women- women in particular- to develop a psychosomatic conviction that they are overweight."
            I gaped. I stood up and turned to show him my profile.  I swiped my hand over my swollen stomach and demanded to know if he thought THAT looked psychosomatic. 
            It was his turn to gape. Weakly, he admitted that it didn't, and I sat down again and we got down to business.
            "You're right."  He said.  "You're absolutely right. It's about quality of life, isn't it?  If you go out for lunch and the other women look thinner than you, that is an issue that needs to be fixed. You should be able to hold your head up high. How you feel about yourself matters."
            I reminded him (with remarkable patience, I like to think) that the bloating was one symptom of a larger issue-
            "Absolutely."  He said again.  "When you can't hold your face up among other women when you're out, that's a real issue.  Don't you worry, we'll get to the bottom of this!"
            I think that he found my outrage amusing.  At least, he dimpled and patted my hand and did everything but  call me a fascinating, bewitching, mysterious little creature as he ushered me out the door. As I stomped my way down the hallway, he leaned out his office door for a parting shot. 
            "We'll sort all this out, Tabubilgirl!  The important thing is to think positive about yourself!"

A couple of weeks later, I had to see another doctor for an entirely different issue.  I was feeling a little gun-shy, and asked Mr Tabubil if he'd mind coming with me, just in case.  I'm glad that I did. This time it was Mr Tabubil who emerged pale and shaking.   
            "I know that things can be really tough for women here in Chile, but it's one thing to know it and a completely different thing to see it happening!  That man looked straight over your head and I swear he literally- literally- didn't hear you when you  talked.  Four times in that conversation I had to stand up and put my fists on the table and say 'What this  woman is trying to say to you is this!'  Four times! It was like you weren't even in the room!  But he listened to me!"
            "Sort of."
            "Okay, when he refused to do a proper physical exam, said that the hospital's physical therapy department downstairs were making things up to support your delusion, labeled you as a psychosomatic hysteric and told you that you were incapable of understanding your own body or health and tried to put you on antidepressants after 10 minutes of ignoring every word you said- well, we walked out on him, didn't we?"
            We sure did. Does that count as a win?
            On a positive note, I now have a wonderful female gastroenterologist, who has taken me for a human being and is making great strides in sorting out my insides.  I have also gained access to a circulating underground list of "doctors that women should avoid in this town."  I've made a few contributions of my own.
            I love living in Chile, but there are lines, and at this line I choose to STOP.  I could write pages - volumes -  about what it's like to be a woman in this country. A lot of them are funny, if you like a certain type of alternative black humor. The rest of them are hilarious - in that special way where laughter is the only alternative to weeping or punching walls until your fists are bloody.
            A lot has changed from when I first lived here in the mid-nineties.  Women now control their own assets after they marry, and they are no longer subject- on pain of law- to the rule of their husbands.  Divorce has been legalized, maternity leave is mandatory in public-sector jobs, hospital nurses have hung up their mini-dresses and their high heels, and policewomen no longer chase down bad guys in circle skirts and knee-high leather boots and handbags.  Men like to talk about how good things are for Chilean women these days; eyes have been opened and the world is changing, improving,right left, center and sideways.  Society's eyes might have opened, but when men begin to talk about how good their women have got it, women's eyes begin to drop, and women are silent. 
            Next Wednesday morning I will go to a courthouse and stand next to a friend while she stands across a table from a Chilean man who decided that her words and her understanding of her own body had absolutely no relevance at all, at a time when they should have counted for most. It's the last step in a very long and extremely drawn-out process.  For a very long time there was no-one at all who would listen to her.  What else could a man, faced with a beautiful woman, have been expected to do? When you're made a woman, you have to accept that you have to put up with certain things, and learn to live with pain. 

When I was in my teens, I lived in Antofagasta, a small city in Northern Chile. Life was good for the construction industry up there; an 8.0 earthquake had recently hit and most buildings in the town needed some sort of reconstruction.  Every afternoon after school I would walk down to a sports club for sports lessons.  Every afternoon I would dress twice: once in my sports clothes, and over my sports clothes, I would put on the baggiest clothes I could find in my house, covering my skinny, undeveloped, entirely unsexual body with t-shirts and tracksuit pants three sizes too large.  And then I would walk a gauntlet of construction men on construction sites - my head down, my eyes on the road, my fists clenched as they whistled and shouted and told me what they'd like to do to me - what they'd like their DOG to do to me - in explicit detail.  
            One day, walking with a friend, I turned to her and said desperately - "Why don't you stop them!  Why do you let them do this!  Why don’t people stop them?"
            I still remember her face - this little girl turned toward me, dull-eyed, said, very, very quietly, so quietly I could hardly hear her.  "What can I do?  I'm just a woman."
            We are taught which words matter and which words don't.  And whose. Today, words still happen in the street.  If you react, the men saying them press on harder with words that are worse, ramping up the pressure, grinding it in. If you don't react, you've let them win - you've let them tell you who are you are and what you are, and there is rarely any dignity in their definitions. 
            When your world is bound by words like these, it's hard to see why you should stop at talking.  Looking is part of the talking - and staring comes after that - and if they let you stare, where might the next step take you when you have been taught to not to see and not to hear?            
            Today's post isn't the littlest bit funny. But laugh, please. Think of those sad little doctors in their high offices, and those cruel men on their building sites and laugh loud and laugh hard.  Wednesday is going to be a very difficult day, and we will need the laughter.

There Possibly IS No Business Like Show Business

On account of being sik, I spent my evening on the sofa, snuffling pitifully and watching old Hollywood musicals.  I started out with There's No Business Like Show Business because it has Ethel Merman and Marilyn Monroe AND Donald O'Conner in it, but the film didn't seem to do much with any of them.  There was a great deal of noise, but not much music.  There was a great deal of technicolor drapery and swirling, but not much dancing or choreography.  Lots of jokes, not much humor, and a great deal of Marilyn Monroe wearing not very much at ALL.   Her character sings in nightclubs, but her costume has chrome nipples on tips of its spangled pneumatic front and that's all I have to say about that.  Poor Donald O'Conner was forced to dance the highland fling to a New Orleans Blues version of Alexander's Ragtime Band - and Ethel Merman?  She had precisely two speeds - full throttle and off, and no-one seemed to be able to get near the off button.

            After ten minutes and six musical comedy numbers, Mr Tabubil looked up from his book and said "You know what?  This is just like porn.  A tottery, badly acted plot to give a thin string of connection to the noisy bits.   And the noisy bits? They're an aesthetic abomination.  And the apparent sincerity of the actors?  Yeah, they're faking it."

            So we put on Broadway Melody of 1940 with Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell instead, and Mr Tabubil forgot that he isn't supposed to approve of movies that aren't in color, and we watched happily until bedtime.

I am Sik

I am a poor unfortunate.  I am home in bed with an autumn flu -  a lady coughed next to me on the plane all the way from Punta Arenas to Puerto Montt last week and it's all her fault.  I started a mild head cold on Wednesday, then languished for days with the sore throat from hell, and just when i decided that it was merely a virus and going away, last night it took a running dive into my chest and did its level best to turn into galloping bronchitis.  And this morning, sinusitis as well. Just to cover every possible contingency.  

            The sneezing is impressive.  It echoes.   Do you remember the old saw about how if all of the billion people in China jumped from chairs at the very same time, the earth would move?

I know that the mathematics are bunkum, but here in my sudafed-fueled daze I'm starting to wonder -  do you think that the mind has a resonant frequency?  And do you think that if we found it, and had everyone in the world hum it all at once, we could crack open every narrow mind - drive big wedges into the gaps and sing them open?  Make people hear the points of view that they don't let themselves see?

            Wouldn't that be nice?

Mr Tabubil calls home every hour to ask me about my temperature , but I don't need to know my temperature.  The whole Tabubil family has an allergy to thermometers; when we see one coming, we hide under the bed.

            It's my mother's fault.  (Isn't that another old saw?)  She suffers from an excess of thermometer-related enthusiasm. If one of us Tabubils ever stayed home sick, we'd find ourselves flat on our backs in bed with at least two - and often three- thermometers in our mouths: a digital one, a mercury one to back it up, and a second digital one to average out the other two.  

              She always forgot about it and left it there.  I'd be in bed with a honking great sinus infection, incapable of breathing through my nose, but she'd beg me - on pain of maternal disappointment - not to open my mouth, so I'd lie there in a haze of headache and snuffle while the world went pink around the edges and she implored me to hold it for just another minute - and right about when I was turning blue and starting to make small squeaking noises, she'd say, from the kitchen, where she'd dashed off to, just for a moment, honestly, I swear I'll be right back -

            "Oh Dear!  How long has it been?"   And it had always been ten minutes longer than it should have been, and she'd sigh and shake her head and tap the thermometer and say "It's been a little too long, I think.  Just one time, sweetie.  Let's do it again." 

            And she'd pop the three thermometers back into my mouth, with a firm finger on my chin to keep the thermometers - and the howling- in.   

            Why Mr Tabubil thinks I'm going to use one is beyond me.

Goodnight.

Welcome to 2013

Happy New Year and Merry Christmas also –

Summer holidays and assorted nonsenses have been happening- 

We went up to Mexico for the holiday season in a family group and we ALL got sick, but we had two bathrooms and a balcony with a charming view of the water, so it turned out a perfectly presentable holiday.

I started the wave with a serious dose of food poisoning on Christmas Eve, and won a very SPECIAL Christmas present- a house visit from the handsomest young doctor in South America.

Have you seen the film The Motorcycle Diaries?  It’s a beautifully filmed love-letter to South America, and it stars a very young Gael Garcia Bernal at his most ruggedly charismatic.  My doctor looked Just Like He Did, but with cheekbones even finer and a mouth even tenderer and eyes that looked directly into your soul and told you that their deepest dream was to make you all better – MUCH better – right here, right now -

My sister Dr Tabubil hung around the bedroom door frame, gawking, while Mum shoved at her from behind, whispering “YOU’RE a doctor too – He NEEDS you to consult!  Go!!” One particularly sharp push sent her lurching into the bedroom and the doctor turned his melting eyes on HER –  

All things considered, the transferal of attention came as something of a relief.  I was sweating, stumbling, scarcely lucid, and my insides were running backward –

The most STUNNING male physician in the history of the species was standing in my bedroom, and he was running seriously second in attractiveness to a mixing bowl.

Mr Tabubil found it all rather amusing. But chose to do his giggling outside, the balcony, where nobody could hear him.

Why couldn’t Santa have brought me something genteel and conversational  – like consumption? 

Segways in Florence.

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Florence. 

On our last afternoon in Florence, we rented a pair of segways from a little shop across the street from the Pitti Palace.  A Segway is second in fun only to a barrel full of puppies.  When you know what you’re doing, control is very near telepathic – the subtlest shifts in balance and inclination are transmitted directly to the wheels and that barrel full of puppies starts looking as if it has a very VERY narrow lead.  It’s the next best thing to flying. 
Presuming you’re doing it right.

We weren’t. 

The rental shop gave us exactly thirty seconds of instructions, than aimed us at the door and sent us buzzing gently out into the street. 

In a corner of the palace wall we made a few experimental swoops and curvettes, and then we were off – we had our eye on the Piazza Michelangelo, a hilltop overlooking the city, whose approach is a series of steeply raked switchbacks that would be rather less pleasant in the summer heat on foot than on two wheels –

It wasn’t quite as much fun as I’d expected.  I didn’t appreciate how subtle the steering control really was, and I had some idea that I had to horse the machine around by main force with my upper body, shoving it hard into the curves and throwing myself forward and to slow myself down and to speed myself up – I could hardly manage the weight of it on the turns, and as I leaned into the hills the thing accelerated like a good Italian racing car and it was all I could do to hang on for the ride. 

We took a trial run straight up the face of the Costa dei Magnoli. Despite the heavy handling, it was an absolute JOY to go whirring up the steep stone streets, buzzing past the walkers and climbers puffing along in their drooping sun-hats and hiking boots, smiling magnanimously at them as we came rocketing in and out of view, dipping daringly into the turns without a breath or a hair out of place, and leaving sighs of appreciation and rueful envy in our wake –

Horsing the segway through all of those turns was exhausting.  At the top of the hill, as we turned out of the last switchback and onto the promenade of the piazza, I lost control of the machine and drove head first into a lamp-post.  The segway recoiled and shot off sideways.  I flew off in the other direction.  It was a busy road and I was falling toward a group of elderly ladies –

            “If I land on THEM” I thought, “I’m going to take out at least three hips -”

Throwing myself forward and sideways, I missed the ladies, but landed hard on the pavement on my left hand.  It hurt.  Coming up for air, I took stock - I'd sprained my wrist and dislocated my thumb.

The elderly ladies were impressed.  Descending on me in a mass, they picked me up and carried me into a café and demanded ice – 

            ‘Lots of it!  Your husband will take care of that infernal machine, you sit, cara, sit and rest. Are you bleeding? No? Oh, your poor hand-”

They petted and soothed, darting and fussing and around me like a flock of small birds, till one of them pointed at her watch.  Bird-like, they shrieked and with a profusion of final pats, fled out of the café and onto a waiting bus.

Exeunt Omnes.

I sat in the café with a bag of ice on my wrist, and a bag of ice on my knee, which had begun to swell, and felt rather lost.  And, I suspected, rather foolish. 

Up on my feet again, my thumb put right, the view from the top of the hill was worth quite a lot of the bother.  And on the ride back down the hill, I couldn’t use my hand at all, and I discovered just how subtly and elegantly the segway had been designed.  Control was effortless when I was no longer trying to control it.  I forgot my hand and dipped and soared and FLEW down the hill – a bird myself.

After we had returned the segways, I began the process of lying my head off to Mr Tabubil about just how much my wrist hurt.  I wasn’t going to waste any of my holiday in a doctor’s office – my goodness, no!

Lying to Mr Tabubil became lying to myself.  My wrist refused to improve, but I refused to notice, and it wasn’t until I was back home in Santiago that a friend bullied me into seeing a doctor.  The eight weeks since have involved a parade of X-rays, CAT and MRI scans, threats of surgeries, hand, thumb and wrist immobilizers, and a lesson in just how badly you can bruise bones.

Keeping up with this blog has involved spurts of typing, followed by protracted periods of serious discomfort, during which Mr Tabubil looks righteous, puts his nose in the air and makes vaguely religious pronouncements about the karma of lying one’s head off to a Loving Spouse about a Serious Injury, and wouldn’t it all have been easier if we’d just Come Clean and had it seen to when it First Happened? And have we learned our lesson yet? 

And then he cuddles me, and feeds me chocolate.  So that’s all right. 
And the immobilizer splint came off a week ago. 

It’s almost all better now.

The Dr Tabubil Files: Leaving Cloncurry

My sister, the estimable Dr Tabubil, is spending ten weeks on a rural clinical rotation in Cloncurry, a small pastoral town in the Queensland Outback.  It's a fantastic place, and together we have collaborated on a series of guest posts all about living and working in the Red Centre.  Enjoy!

 

My time in Cloncurry ended with a bit of a bang. On my second last day, I walked the quarter-kilometer home to my loaner house for lunch, and somewhere in the near distance, there was  an enormous cloud of black smoke  climbing up into the sky.   It was as near as the other side of town, but I could not smell any smoke in the air.  

            A fire clearly, but the wind was blowing in a northerly direction, and I was eastward of the fire -

            I didn’t have the courage to grab my car and drive over to see what was going on.  Bush-fires in Australia are Dangerous.  It’s the triple threat combination of dry air, strong wind, and tall grass.  When the big bush-fires hit, lives can be- and often are - lost.  The worst, and most recent fires have been the Black Saturday fires that took over whole swathes of Victoria in the dry February of 2009.  Those fires took out whole towns, and 174 people died.  

            This one must have been as big as the smoke column promised -within a half hour  I could hear the fire-trucks screaming toward the fire.  But it couldn't be anything too bad - so I finished my lunch  (oh, I will miss those two-hour lunch breaks when I’m back in Brisbane, and  as likely as not, not taking a single break all day, and lunching on a power bar, if I remembered to stash one in a pocket….)  and wandered back to the clinic - where the sharing of information started.  

            There was a huge bushfire right on the edge of town, more or less directly across the highway from the Hospital.  The highway was closed, and traffic was not permitted to leave or enter the town.  You can imagine what this would have been like for the road trains and the Gray Nomads, all on a tight schedule - but you can imagine that it was much worse for us here in town!

            There was a flurry of activity from the Med Super and the GP registrar on call at the Hospital… The Hospital was being evacuated!   And this was news - A major Bushfire threatening a Major Rural Centre - it went out on the television and the radio, and we were headline news all across Australia.  Which might be great for Australia, but was not at all cheering for us.  

            Fortunately, there were not too many inpatients in the hospital to be evacuated, but there are quite a few residents in the nursing home section of the hospital. And what a day they had!  It was the most excitement they had had in years!  Ambulances shuttled everyone across to the newly completed Shire Council Hall, and we settled them all in for the duration.  

            Over the afternoon, the fire crews battled the flames, and eventually, they started to win. 

            The highway was re-opened before dark.  And no-one was injured.

            It was the hoped-for outcome, but it brought home the reality of how quickly things can go wrong out here-  big fires can eat towns, and all you can do is hang on, and hope that you will ride it out! Before the end of the day, the fire was under control and the patients were back in the Hospital (shuttled back again in ambulances).  They had spent about 3 hours total in our makeshift wards and jury-rigged ER, and they talked about it for days - and will probably continue to do so for months! 

The Dr Tabubil Files: The Royal Flying Doctor Service

My sister, the estimable Dr Tabubil, is spending ten weeks on a rural clinical rotation in Cloncurry, a small pastoral town in the Queensland Outback.  It's a fantastic place, and together we have collaborated on a series of guest posts  all about living and working in the Red Centre.  This post is written by me - Tabubilgirl.  Enjoy!

Dear Dr Tabubil

I just learned something  fantastic.  Did you know that the Royal Flying Doctor Service started out right where you are in Cloncurry? 

I am so going full-out fan-girl on you right now, for being there.  You lucky doctor, you!

-A highly excited Tabubilgirl.

I find it very hard to write sensibly about the flying doctor, so - in advance - I ask you to please excuse all of the hyperbole that has crept into this post.  (Except where it is simply an accurate and measured description of an organization that is, by all objective measures, entirely deserving of everything I throw at it.)

            Ahem.

            The Flying Doctor is, at its roots, an air ambulance for a very big continent.  Australia is a massive country.  Across the interior of it, human habitation is scarce, and  scattered.  We have cattle stations larger in area than many european countries, and in all of that space, there might be no more than a couple of dozen working jackaroos (cowboys) and a family or two in a homestead somewhere along a creek.  For most of Australia's settled history (and for all of the history before that) when you were sick, you were sick where you were, and you lived or died on your own out in the loneliness.  All the medicine you had was the knowledge of hygiene or basic nursing in your own head.  

In the nineteen-teens and twenties, a Reverend John Flynn (Flynn of the Inland, he is better known today - the label taken from a famous 1932 hagiography by writer Ion Idriess ) worked the territories as a superintendent for the Australian Inland Mission.  Out there, he found himself horrified by the things that he saw. Women and babies died in childbirth in remote, water-less huts.  Children died of treatable diseases.  Men grew crooked when broken limbs weren't set - or were set wrong.  He  told  often the story of a ten year old child, who had pulled his sick mother  - in a wooden BOX for the god's sakes - for ten days across arid desert to get her to somewhere that might have medical help, dragging his baby brothers and sisters along with him.

Flynn changed all that. 

In 1928, Flynn recognized that two hot new inventions, the radio and the airplane, had the potential to do something entirely unprecedented in Australia. He set up a network of radios across the bush, and brought in a fleet of spanking new airplanes to act as an air ambulance service across the inland territories.  

            It was a rough and ready sort of set up.  The radios were primitive, pedal-powered sets  and the planes were boxy little biplanes that landed on rough airstrips hacked out of the scrub.  But it made a difference.

            How it made a difference. 

            The airplanes got people to doctors and the radios opened up the world to the people who lived out there all alone with the great big horizon. Particularly for the women, who spent much of their lives alone in the bush with a pack of kids while their husbands were out for weeks at a time with the cattle,  the radio was a world-opener.  The radio gave them companionship,  and in time, it led to the School of the Air, a radio-correspondence school (still going strong, although making more use of the internet today than the radio) for children on remote stations, who up till then, hadn't had much in the way of education except irregularly delivered correspondence courses, or what education their entirely-too-busy mother could provide when not providing everything else.

 

The Reverend Flynn wasn't particularly keen on a genuinely inclusive mandate for the Flying Doctor - in its early days he circulated opinions about Australia's aboriginal population that shocked even the other leaders of the Inland Mission (which is not particularly remembered today for its history of Christian attitudes toward the non-white Australians under its dominion.  So that's saying something.)

            However, the Flying Doctor grew past its founders and and throve. Today, doctors fly out of 22 bases across Australia, flying circuits through the stations and townships of the outback, running regular clinics and inoculations, and getting people to hospitals when they need it.  Their airplanes land in paddocks, on country roads, and on dry riverbeds. Their right of passage is absolute. 

            Flying Doctor airplanes have set the standard for rural carriers all over the world - they are equipped with  specially sprung undercarriages for landing on every sort of terrain, their cabins are equipped with advanced pressurization capacity (they can limit the pressurization to 2000 feet to protect patients with heart and brain injuries) and their engines have extended air range for long-haul outback flights.
            The Royal Flying Doctor Service is one of Australia's greatest civil and logistical achievements, and I will take on anyone who chooses to argue otherwise.  With water-pistols at ten paces, if you please. When Australians see the RFDS, we see a net of lifelines - strings of compassion and communication stretching out over our continent.  It symbolizes the best of what we aspire to - an absolute, unselfish cooperation and an appreciation for our fellow men and women. 
            I ran into a flying doctor airplane at an airshow a couple of years back.  We were permitted to look through the plane, and when we'd prodded and gawked our fill, the pilots closed the airshow with a fly-past over the airstrip.  

Here's a flying doctor plane, on its way out to the airstrip. 

And the interior of the same plane - as good a set-up as in any ER, but with seat-belts and altitude controls! 

It was a good way to end a show, with a look at the best human face of aviation, something way beyond acrobatics and big engines and formation flying. When you look at the RFDS, you think - we do all right.  And when you see one of their planes throttling low, fifty feet above the airstrip, you get lumps in your throat and just about stand up and salute.