Lucky number 7

It's the early hours of pacific daylight time. I'm in the bedroom I grew up where as a teenager I was mostly rigorous when not smoking weed on the balcony from a homemade pipe i'd engineered of baked polymer clay and a filter pulled off the tap of our family kitchen sink. Four days of no pager, no lorries encroaching the bike lanes of central london, and not a single decibel paying homage to ambulance or addict shouting to be heard beyond the seals of my earplugs, and I am almost back to being a tolerable human being.

Every time i'm home I am reminded of the nature and degree to which my mother is a savage. Yesterday whilst taking a short video of us on a hike, she ordered me to put my device away because had I fallen to the point of immovable injury, the only way her tiny body could have saved me would be to "drag me down the mountain by my hair". O this supreme window into the thoughts that occupy her gorgeous mind! The same person whose response to an inspirational story I sent (in effort to uplift her spirit) about a terminally ill patient taking a long lusted-after cruise in spite of the fear and risk of a world writhe with covid was: 'cruises are stupid and a hotbed of norovirus'. This same mother also carefully details my panties with a toothbrush when doing the laundry and still does not own a cell phone. We have much to learn from her. 

I have been flailing through life since I last wrote this spring, spending any time not hospital resident revising for a series of specialty licensing exams. This imposes extreme limits on how a person in such a career track can access a rare molecule of serotonin, and I have found myself doing sometimes an odd thing in search of a dopamine hit. This has mostly involved impulse purchases proved highly relevant thanks to those http cookies that shed more light onto the nature of one's needs and character than any eat, pray, love or psychoanalysis ever could. So I ask, what does it say about a person who spends 150 quid on vitamins from a company touting the cognitive benefits of omega 3's but also spells cognitive 'congitive'? Whatever. The answer is YES I'll try this one. I'll try anything. Especially if it tastes like mango shampoo.

I have been doubling my vibrator as a back massager due to the record tension in my shoulders and outrageous cost of a professional rub. I have also developed a near daily habit of dried shitake mushroom consumption, which in the valley of despair is totally worth the £4 price tag. Those nut butter filled chocolate bars for a fiver are also as good as they are extortionate. 

Life has continued to be met with catastrophe after catastrophe and I have come to understand that this earthly existence is just a series of mishaps of varying degree with brief and fleeting moments free from incident that give an illusion of an occasional good time. I am not sure if I am getting demented early or just too devoid of concentration to proof check my efforts to navigate this life. At times I have taken to my mobile phone's calculator rather than the recommended dial pad to make a phone call. And I am angry when it does not go through. I am often too apathetic to bend over to manage the hazard of an untied shoelace. My camera reel is a series of accidental screenshots of the morning alarm as I fumble to try and silence it by pressing any button so that I might snooze for a period that will invariably make me late for work again. My baseball hat blows off my head every time I cycle through the wind tunnel on bishopsgate and I don't have the will to chase after it anymore. Everything is under relentless attack of gravity. I hurt my back lifting weights and had to walk in the shape of a number 7 for a week and take diazepams just to get vertical. Lucky number 7. My expensive eye cream smells of poo which I think puts me one degree away from Kim Kardashian who has gone on the record to say she'd eat shit if it would make her look younger. I have been criticized by my friends for putting a space between the final word of a sentence and the punctuation mark in text messages. I don't know why I do that but I can't seem to stop ! I brushed my teeth with deep heat. I cannot understand the complexities behind why my mouth has to be open in order to apply or remove eye makeup. The last gift my father gave me was a packet of anusol. There is an occupation of intractable fruit flies in my kitchen. I don't even flinch anymore when accidentally traversing my shakti mat en route to the toilet at night, and it's definitely not because I've reached the intended level of zen. I very professionally spent an entire stretch of hospital nights using my own recycled clinical note template before realizing all of my entries had been indelibly titled "Night Shit" rather than "Night Shift". And not that I feel entitled, but the last man to give me flowers was a patient who had absconded from the hospital and returned with daisies and an illegal high. The last compliment I received was from a friend who crashed her car into a parking lot pylon whilst zooming in on a photo of my butt on instagram. Everything is wrapped in disaster. 

In a final word I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to my father who I left dejected after he inquired about the bruise on my forehead which I had to admit was down to botox so he wouldn't worry it was consequence of something more sinister. But even still, he looked the way I must have done when I learned santa wasn't real. I'm sorry dad.

Now I'm off to go try and find that old artisanal polymer pipe as a tribute to that world where our resourcefulness once led the way of resistance to a cookie-led consumer driven congitive disaster. 

Lucky number 7

Vitamin D

The covid has clapped back- my December arrogance being one of the few able to escape the omicron variant has come back to haunt me. I'll get back to that though, because I want to try writing this thing using a technique called 'sandwiching' where you start with something positive, fill the middle with negativity, then end with a positive. That way you achieve a sort of mindfuckity outcome where someone feels good even though you exposed them to the nasty.

So I went to visit my best friend in Montana! And that was awesome because wide open spaces, animals, nature gallops, sunsets, belly laughs, and hitting the slopes. She also reintroduced me to the joys of boxed mac n' cheese and marijuana in responsible doses,  and sent me home with a suitcase of organic facial creams, cosy loungewear, environmentally conscious soap preparations, bougie vitamins, and,.... boxed mac n' cheese. 

It was a short week and before I knew it I was back at the Bozeman airport checking my bags next to two apparently 12 year old girls who had two bags of  their own- "this one's the guns, this one's ammo". okkkkk, America. I looked at the lady behind the desk, "this one's the skin cream, this one's the mac n'cheese". It's been eleven years since I moved to Europe and I don't really know where I belong, but it's probably not on a plane with ammo. 

Having grown up in southern california I used to scorn the transplants who all seemed to move there for the same reason- the weather. as if the most compelling thing in your life was the fucking sunshine?! When I was 23 I was energetic, idealistic and in search of a pulse, diversity, culture, a hustle. 'nobody moves to new york or london for the weather' I would say, 'they move there to chase a dream'. What an arrogant little pest I was, spoiled by an upbringing of plentiful vitamin D and happy people.  Now that I am older and angrier and had some time to pursue my dreams in places with vulgar population densities, discourteous costs of living, AND shitty weather, I can categorically say GIVE ME THE GOOD WEATHER. I am totally ok with the sunshine being the most compelling thing in my life. How do I know? because I spent another cold and dark winter with intractable churlish inclinations and then suddenly the sun came out and i felt like being nice to people again. and it was awesome.

I know there's this thing called Seasonal Affective Disorder where you get moody in dark months. I tried to fight this last year by (cringe) lying in a tanning bed. I stopped that after the shopgirl suggested I not wash for 24 hours afterward "to let the tan fully soak in". just couldn't cope with conversations like that or spending my time wondering why someone didn't  explain to her the difference between a tanning bed and a spray tan? The point is, my vitamin D consequently plummeted and with it so did everything else. 

There was a day in February when I almost just completely lost my shit. I was cycling to work for forty five minutes in a headwind with 100km/hr gusts, multiple moments of which were met with neither the peddles nor my entire being moving forward at all. After a protracted period of this I suffered something of a panic attack with somatic symptoms telling me physically and emotionally YOU SHALL NOT ENGAGE IN THIS BULLSHIT ANY LONGER! and all I could think was to get off my bike, throw it into the traffic and find a train to Heathrow where I would buy a ticket to anywhere else. But then I realized I do have some British in me because I just zipped it up, kept peddling, and eventually made it to work and carried on like everything was fine. At least it will be a tailwind on the way home, I thought. NOPE. I'm not being funny when I say that it was a headwind the entire way home. How is it meteorologically possible to have a headwind in both directions? I got through my door and thought, fuckit i'm going to treat myself to a box of mac n'cheese. I was sooo looking forward to this small salvation when I opened the box and dumped the tiny pasta into the pot, only to find that the packet of powdered fake cheese was MISSING. Did a quick survey of my lifetime karma points to try and understand what I had done to deserve this. The only thing that could have made the day more shit would be having your vibrator die just before the point of climax, which definitely did not maybe happened. and that was the start of six weeks of illness spawned by this miserable winter and the stress that accompanies chasing your dreams.

In consideration of this, I realized I have never had big dreams, or any dreams really! I operate more on a get momentarily inspired, pursue the thing in earnest, then move on to the next thing, kind of vibe; zero visions of where I would be in 5, 10, 20 years. I live my life in monthly increments and actually the only recurring dream I have is to go on vacation. These last days I've squirted so much warm, salted water up my nostrils in effort to relieve the sinusitis, that if I close my eyes and concomitantly spray the coconut lemon hand sanitizer I picked up in Montana, it almost feels like I'm on one. 

Going back to the topic of America for a second, one of my big gripes being an American is having to file/pay taxes every year on income earned abroad. So I have my normal UK taxes, also the taxes for my side hustle/being an independent contractor in the UK, and my American taxes. My entire life these days would appear to be just mac n' cheese and taxes. The worst bit is that I have a US tax accountant who "does" my taxes, which means she sends me a form that I spend 5 hours filling out, and then twenty minutes after I send her the financial details, she sends me the completed tax form to sign, along with the bill for hundreds of dollars. Like what does she even do when she "does" my taxes? I think she tries to impress me with her efficiency but actually I really wish her turnaround time was longer so I got the feeling she was the one doing the hard part. 

On a happier note, Ida came to visit! She is my friend from the Milan days and is a big fashion buyer boss for Globus. She has assistants and impeccable standards, is ridiculously beautiful, magically does not age, and has an enviable wardrobe and a figure that looks air brushed in real life. She also studied literature and elevates me on the order of everything from books to the comparative frump of my daily living. We had both been feeling overworked, upset and anxious about the general state of the world, and were mutually desperate for a girls weekend. A girls weekend can really make all your problems go away for a minute. When we were making plans in advance of what to do, she had a very simple set of requests: "i just wanna cuddle in bed, have a couple nice dinners out, and read the penis book". READ the penis book. I told you she studied literature.

We ended up having a wonderful weekend, ditching the usual ritual of working for mid morning chats, long afternoon walks, beautiful meals out, and even a late night dance. But getting ready to go out looks very different when you're approaching 40. There is a preparatory ritual which includes a cocktail of paracetamol, oral and topical ibuprofen, proton pump inhibitors, calcium carbonate, high dose vitamins, lots of water, and even some light stretching. Once we were prepped, we proceeded to the Nomad Hotel for a gorgeous dinner, where at the end, Ida asked a patron of the restaurant to get her coat whilst he was standing there with his wife, waiting for his own coat. I interjected "sorry she doesn't speak English", before hastily ushering her out to a black cab en route to the Connaught Hotel. From there things got weird and we ended up at The Box in Soho, which I will leave to your imagination and to google. Weeks later I am still being punished. 

In those days after Ida left, on International Women's day to be exact, we both received the gifts of Covid AND our periods. First I thought it was going to be mild (the covid not the period) because my rapid test was only faintly positive. But the next day it lit up like the landing lights at Heathrow and I was down for a good nine days, followed by an aftershock of fevers and sinusitis, expelling shocking, consolidated formations from my nostrils. This is ongoing. The 'rona actually took me down on the two year anniversary of when we first met. Which reminds me- do you remember the phase of weird impulse purchases the world made during the first wave of the pandemic? Well that also came back to haunt me and I decided I could no longer survive without this:

THIS is a device that cores and hollows out your pineapple. The other, more sensical thing I decided to treat myself to was a cleaner, which after years of cleaning the bog myself,  feels like the best money I ever spent. 

OK I'm wrapping this up now, getting to the other side of the sandwich. But before I get there let me just say that happy people in London are not to be trusted! There is no reason to be happy when you have no reserve of vitamin D and therefore no resources to synthesize serotonin. The happy people here are drone-bot spies from the government, or they work at the tanning salon and have excessive spray tan soaking into their brains. In fact, the people I trust the most are those who like to complain and talk endless shit with me. This is one of the reasons I have gotten so close with the girl who does my nails. She is Romanian but lived in Italy for ages so we talk shit in italian together for an hour + every two weeks and it is therapyyy. This week I tipped her 20 bucks because she is so much more to me than the girl who does my nails. And mom, if you're reading this, I just want to say that I had my nails painted green for you this week because IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY and green is your favorite color and you are the QUEEN and I'm so sorry I have put you through all these years of paralytic anxiety and I absolutely love talking shit with you too! In honor of you I'm posting a picture of my green nails, which I'm sorry also represents an unmarried hand with green nails. I'm sorry you still have to put up with your primary care doctor asking you why I'm not married whilst palpating your abdomen. And just so you don't worry, I started taking vitamin D capsules and everything is fine.

holidaze

Well, I can't say that the festive season/lead up to the new year was much of an elegant one, nor was 2021 in general my favorite. The highlight of the year was probably the one time I managed to single handedly verbally deescalate an aggressive patient (who had been encircled by 20 hospital staff and security) by simply walking up to the scene with an overly high, tight, and bouncing ponytail and asking them if they wanted milk or sugar in their tea. I did this whilst also avoiding being called a cunt, which has become a relatively standard nomen of adoption in my current line of work (praenomen being "Dr", of course).

Covid wiped out hospital staff over the holidays but somehow i managed to escape testing positive (perhaps owing to the herpes I was battling, putting my immune system into red alert and rendering even the indefatigable omicron variant powerless in the face of my personal space!) What this meant was that I got to sell my soul to the NHS by picking up vacant shifts pretty much every day from mid december through the first week of January. 

On Christmas Eve I tried to treat myself to an Uber to work instead of the usual bicycle, particularly because it was pissing down with rain. But I couldn't manage to get one because Uber SUCKS and so I cycled in all the sog to the hospital. The doctor shortage crisis was so bad that later that evening I was called to move to a totally different borough of London to cover a hospital I'd never before worked in. In the middle of the night! Then when I went to unlock the cyclette (again in the rain), my key snapped. Did I mention it was Christmas? managed to jig the lock off at least so my bike wasn't forever chained to the bike rack (what would you even do in that instance? who would you call?), then cycled across london at 5am in my scrubs, arriving at the other hospital, said a quick prayer, before draping my broken lock around my bike to fake lock it. It was a true christmas miracle it survived the thievery bicycle corporation of london, and I could return home later that morning on my private transportation to find the fresh mistletoe I'd recently taped to the ceiling in a dried up pile on the floor, little white berries chaotically scattered everywhere, which all somehow seemed symbolic of my personal life. 

On Christmas Day I had nothing to unwrap except the lid of my takeaway sushi box, which was perfect. I put Ted Lasso on for the serotonin hit I needed, and for the first time believed myself to be receiving special messages of commiseration and solidarity from the television when at the end of the episode/a particularly shiteous day, Ted snapped his house key in the lock whilst standing outside his flat in the rain. 

Things got weird in my brain space working so many days in a row and flip flopping between day and night shifts. Some flavors of depersonalization and paranoia. After returning from another night shift, I put the shower on and whilst I was waiting for the water to heat up, returned to find a mountain of bubbles frothing up from the drain. My first thought was WHO HAS BEEN BATHING IN HERE DURING THE NIGHT?!!!!!! I even checked the window to see if someone had maybe climbed in. Then I noticed my very expensive shampoo which was half empty half full but turned on its head and suffering a loose cap which meant it had slowly leaked out during the night and now I can't afford a new one.  I was desperate. I  considered changing the "looking for" section of my Hinge to "women" for the first time because, why not?! and also couldn't stand the thought or risk of being asked again by another man the horrifying question: 

'why are you single?'

I then stared for a prolonged period at my face and realized the shape of my eyebrows across the bridge of my nose was completely uneven and had anybody my entire life ever noticed this? and if so why didn't they tell me?

I thought about experimenting with psychadelics, not to party but to access some kind of higher, deeper, more meaningful version of my psyche or spirituality or humanity or life experience. I told this to my supervisor and he suggested psychotherapy rather than manipulating my neurobiology with chemicals. I'm just not sure about anything. I got my nails done with gold sparkles only to arrive back at home and wonder if I had entered the age where twenty-somethings look at me and think "she should dress her age". I should dress my age. 

I had these kinds of relentless thoughts over and over in the lead up to new years day, which I (falsely) hoped would hit the reset button on those thoughts and on my life, and now I'm just wondering, does this kind of 'reset' actually happen on the 1st of January for people? or does January just continue as a more bleak, cold, wet, and dark extension of December for anyone else? 

Because 2022 began waking up very groggy and sort of feeling my way to the kitchen sink à la -eyes wide shut- to fill up the kettle. Turned on the tap and was surprised to find the water vigorously spraying up at my face rather than going into the teapot. My reaction time was slow, or I was just full of apathy!! I did not scramble to turn the water off. all very odd. The screw on the sink had come loose as if to send me another sign from the universe to wake the fuck up. So I decided to go for a walk, listening to the song "ABCDE F (EFF YOU)" on repeat in esprit de corps for everyone on the planet who has ever been wronged. I then decided to take care of my skin for the first few days of the year, using copious amounts of retinol to the point i gave myself some kind of bacterial rash in the corner of my nose. Took my prescription for antibiotic cream to the pharmacist (who turned out to be a verryy junior trainee of something not a pharmacist) who then asked to take a look at the rash. So I pulled down my mask to show her. She looked at me, kind of perplexed, cocking her head to the side the way that dogs sometimes do and said:

"so it's just that right there?" whilst pointing to the left side of her face (the rash was on the right). 

I was annoyed. I already had a doctor look at it and I am also a doctor and I am in a hurry and I am here for topical antibiotics not ketamine written as a script on the back of a cocktail napkin. why were we playing 20 questions? 

"its the red rash on the right corner of my nose", I said. 

to which she responded:

"but you have another rash on the left side of your face" 

Then I, perplexed, cocked my head to the side the way that dogs sometimes do, and  realized the ''rash'' she was talking about was my MOLE. 

But before I could blow my top on the deeper meaning behind my rage manifesting as an explanation between the difference between a nevus and a rash, I thought... 

"what would Ted Lasso Do?"

...and I kept it cool when I kept my mouth shut.

Cheers to a dignified and patient 2022. 

Signing off,

Dr Cunt