Tired

Hail,

And today's post will be brought to you by the cerebellum and the pons, two bits of the brain that keep functioning even when the rest of me is too tired to even think.

The cerebellum is the "little brain" we've all got, that looks like it's been blue-tacked onto the back of the spinal cord. It is involved in motor skills (me typing), attention and cognition (me thinking what to type) and emotional regulation of fear and pleasure (me enjoying typing... but not that much). The pons is another bit of the brain that does the relatively unglamorous things. While your cerebella are composing sonatas and building robots for Mars, the pons sits there and manages facial expressions and bladder control.

Mmm. If thought is neurons talking to each other, I wonder what they say to the pons?

Anyhow. I am deeply tired. Here are some of the reasons why:

I sucked at Emergency Medicine the other day. Nobody died, nobody got sent home while actually on fire or anything, but I dropped three sets of forceps while suturing up an angry Irishman's brow, and I sent someone off to another hospital when there was probably nothing wrong with him that couldn't be fixed on Monday, and I forgot something embarrassing about different kind of artificial heart valves.

Not good.

And I wondered three hours into the shift if I should just give up the job, and if it wasn't for the absolutely gorgeous last presentation (a ten year old girl with a cricket in her ear, everything went perfectly, all went well, her coming in crying and clutching her ear and coming out smiling with an inch-long insect in a specimen jar, all black and glistening and bristly), I would have given it some serious thought.

See, three months ago I was really good at my job. Now I suck. And I know all the stuff, how it will get better, how this is how you learn, how it's better in the long term and all that, but at the moment, every day I go in and I do something important ineptly. Not good at all.

And then the next day was study, all day, dawn 'til dusk, writing my "reflective journal" and reading about antipsychotics and prostate specific antigen tests, and trying to get things together.

And today at the practice was madness - people turning up late, and the front desk not realising they were late, and a woman from Tasmania with eight or nine different medications for which she needed scripts, and for which I had to contact three different regulatory bodies, and a man who actually, as he put his hand on the door-knob to leave, described his recent symptoms of what was very probably a heart attack.

And various things I have to write and write down and write about and write about my feelings of writing about them.

And I am worried, deeply worried, about three of the people I saw today.

Anyhow - I didn't want a meandering moan today, I wanted an haiku.

Failing that, I will sign off and write more on Wednesday.

Thanks for listening,

John