I stayed home from work yesterday. I woke in the morning and had slept only a couple of hours, and I just couldn’t go. Damn early bus. Though I think that’s only a part of it.

I can stand people suffering, especially when they come to me for help. That’s what I do, and I have tools to help. My attending said to me in supervision a few weeks ago that it’s fun to do the supervision because I see my work as centred on the patient, as opposed to colleagues whose work is centred on the organisation of the hospital, on politics. As long as I can work with my patients, I can take a lot of organisational crap.

Now I’ve been doing my last rotation for about five weeks. Internal medicine, neurological unit. I’m supposed to learn more about the differential diagnoses between neurology and psychiatry, so I’m normally taking care of the half of the unit who’s not suffering from stroke.

Meaning a lot of, as Bouncy Haired Girl calls it, MultiGlyo-whatnot, aka glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), aka unoperable-6-months-to-live-braintumors. These things are so bloody malignant that at the point in time you find most of them, there’s not a lot of treatment left to do, and what there is is palliative.

It might have something to do with my new Chemo Angel assignment (an organisation you should check out if you don’t know it, it’s fantastic) which is a woman my age with GBM and a 12 weeks old baby.

It’s odd. I don’t have such huge problems with death normally, but somehow, things seem to have been adding up. I don’t know. Bouncy Haired Girl says I’ve seemed sad the last few days. I’m glad she’ll be here this weekend – there’ll be So You Think You Can Dance and Torchwood to watch which makes for a good weekend, naturally. Also, three weeks until vacation, yay!

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