Friday 23 February 2007

I'm sick - can I bum a fag?

Here is a fascinating little observation about RPA. I went through a ward of 30 beds this week and noticed that every bed contained what used to be called a "white person", now known as someone of European descent. Most of them were in their 70's or 80's, and they were there because they had some kind of old age ailment.

This was contrasted with the scene outside Emergency (or more properly, outside the general entrance next to Emergency). The general entrance is where all the smokers congregate, and the amazing thing is that 30-50% of the smokers were Aboriginal. I went in and out of that entrance half a dozen times at various times of the day and night, and it was always the same. Five or ten blackfellas smoking Winnie Blues or hand rolled smokes. I know that they were smoking Winfield Blues as ground was littered with empty fag packets - no one could be bothered wandering over to one of the bins to get rid of their empty pack.

The other thing is that all the blackfellas were youngish - certainly younger than me, and most seemed to have various bandages and casts on their legs and arms. They didn't seem to be suffering from cancer and stuff - they seemed to be suffering from falling over drunk, getting punched whilst drunk or whacked with a fence picket by another drunk. None of them looked like they'd be reaching the age where they'd be lying with the white folk in the beds upstairs.

I had to spend a bit of time in the Emergency "sub-acute" ward, which is a parking area for about a dozen beds in the Emergency section of the hospital. I guess it's where you end up if you are sick, but aren't suffering from say a gunshot wound or stab wound or have just been in a major car crash and have 50 broken bones.

One of the beds was occupied by a bloke that had suffered a nasty blow to the head. He was seeing double, had blacked out and crapped his pants and had obviously been concussed nastily. Even though the curtains around his bed were drawn, I could work that out from overhearing what the doctors and nurses were asking him and his partner. He seemed quite nice.

His woman was something else. All I could see was a pair of white trainers beneath the curtain, and very skinny calves. I didn't spot the calves for a while, but I could hear her talking to her man behind the curtain. She was calling him a dickhead and an idiot and a fuckwit and generally being not very nice, and at one stage even slapped his face. I guess that was her idea of tough love. She was trying very, very hard to be a very tough individual - too tough to be gentle with him and tell him that everything would be ok.

I also overheard part of her story to a doctor, which was thus - they had gone outside (a pub by the sound of it) for a smoke and he "fell over". Right.

Some time later, the curtains were pulled back to reveal a young bloke, maybe 20, wiry and with a totally blue shoulder and upper arm from a tattoo, and his woman. Sad to say, but they looked about 25% aboriginal, even though I am probably darker at the moment than either of them. The calves are always a dead give away. I presume he "fell over" because he was either quite pissed, or he "fell over" after he got into a fight and the other bloke clobbered him. It was easy to imagine him getting into a fight because of something his girlfriend said or did - she looked the nasty type that would start a fight and then get someone else to fight it for her, and then get mad if her guy didn't win.

It's amazing how tough it is to get into medicine. It attracts the brightest of the lot, and I was certainly impressed by the doctors that I met. I wonder how many of them would apply to do medicine if they got to spend a night in an emergency ward at age 17, dealing with drunks that required stomach pumping, drug overdoses, blackfellas that have beaten each other half to death and the other detritus that washes off the streets.

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