More cow bell!

I thiik've gured t ut.

Agh. My keyboard's 'Eveready' batteries suddenly turned into 'Nolongeready' batteries.

That's better.

I think I've figured it out: why a suburban public hospital is the last place any rational person would want to work.

You see, it's because the energy balance is all wrong; Feng shui, Yin/Yang, the rainbow connection, call it what you will: it's all snafu.

On the one hand, disease drains energy away. No one can do anything about that; it is the way of things. On the other, the soulless culture of public hospital governance and its perpetual holding back of common sense and resources causes a cosmic constipation. 'In' does not replace 'out'. Making matters worse is the lack of any inbuilt reserve and flexibility within the hospital itself. There is no capacitor in this system. It exists in a perpetual state of attrition punctuated by frequent crises.

I saw Avril again the other day. She's 70 and she's dying of heart failure. It's all down to inoperable coronary artery disease and hypertension. She knows it and I know it. In the whole scheme of things, there's not a lot of time left for Avril. She comes to hospital quite often with everything from a serious bout of gout to a casual VF arrest. Bit by bit, her heart is going, taking her other vital organs with it.

One might say, with Avril, we're rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, or, while you're skating on thin ice, you're not falling through. Either way, it's serious stuff.

Naturally, Avril generates a lot of paper work: progress notes, test results, medication charts, correspondence with her GP and other odds and ends. Every time I see Avril, her hospital file has grown a few centimetres thicker.

"Is that all about me?" she once exclaimed, spying her file.

"It is indeed, Avril," I replied.

"Well I must be either very important or very sick," she said.

"I think it's a bit of both, Av."

The real problem is that the hospital has completely run out of chart covers. "Central", the place where chart covers come from, says we can't have any more until the beginning of March. (We ran out in about November last year).

Normally, Avril's chart would have been split into two manageable volumes long ago. As it is, it is bursting at the seams (or it would be, if it had any seams at which to burst). A flimsy plastic doo-dad tries valiantly to hold all the pieces in place while every so often, the hundreds of pages explode in a fountain of parchment all over the unwary intern. It's as though the file is making its own personal protest at being so unwieldy.

"I'm so fat, I can't take it any more!" it cries.

The reason why I worry about Avril's chart is that it is symbolic of this energy imbalance I'm blogging on about. It represents a world which should be orderly and safe but is slowly crumbling into a quagmire.

I can't do anything about Avril's chart cover. However, there is a need for someone, anyone, to add some positive energy to the system. I think there are ways to do this. For instance, I was reading an article in Lancet this morning where a Melbourne physician had decided to, each day, place in her medical ward a pile of photocopied poems beside a bowl of fruit with a sign saying "please take one of each". How brilliant is that!

In my own small way, I've tried to address the imbalance by bringing some favourite tea bags; lemon zingers, chamomile, Earl Grey and the such like to the outpatient clinic for all to share. If tea in the afternoon can happen, then, perhaps, other good things can follow on.