Cranioclasts and cephalotribes

Outside the room in which we have lectures in the old main building of groote schuur there is a display cabinet full of disused “antique” obstetric tools. A lot of them have names which imply their use. McGill’s forceps – removing something. Uterine dilator. There has been a set of tools thats use I could not determine. They were the cranioclast and the Winters combine cranioclast cephalotribe. They were the second most brutal looking set of tools, sparing only the uterine dilator.

In a lecture today we were told that in decades gone by, at the beginning of the 1900s having a cesarean section carried a 100% mortality rate, so if a baby died in utero owing to cephalo-pelvic disproportion (head is too big to fit through the birth canal) or other causes of a cessation of normal labour, they used to use tools to crush the now still-born baby’s skull  in order to facilitate the removal of the products of conception from the mother.

Pretty Brutal

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Wading

Today I had one of those days which feels like you are wadding in quickly running water. There is a lot of university work to do, in theory, and it is very difficult to find dirrection. I have 3 A5 booklets, one of lecture notes, one of notes on management of labour and one of notes on neonatology. I also have 2 fairly think A4 booklets – the Perinatal Education Program booklets on Neonatology and Obstetrics. Today I waded through them. I don’t know whether I took anything in or whether it was productive.

I also napped, blogged, sorted out email, read some more, ate, cooked. I did run of the mill things.

If today had a fun theme it would be dropping things that might be fragile.

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Unlikely picking up

People are very very strange. A few days ago, may as much as a week ago, I went out for coffee with my friend. While she and I were sitting at sinful, an incredible ice-cream shop in camps bay, chatting about life love and the world, God decided to descend strange distractions on me. No jokes, 2 sperate crowds of medical students that I hadn’t seen since ending uni last November bumped into us, as well as 2 other groups of people who knew me.

The waitress was very cool, so I left my number on the slip. I don’t normally do things like that but the person I was with brings out the best and worst in me so I did it.

Today I was sitting at home minding my own business and she smsed me! It was funny and very cool. We’ll see what becomes of it.  I hope she doesn’t play games

Time between time

Today was one of those days where those absolute saints who design my course decided to give us hours and hours of free time between 2 sections. I started going home, but after seeing the trafic at the M5/N1 interchange – one of the worst designed roads in Cape Town – I decided to back to Uni and kill time.

The computer in the teaching ward was too slow to surf so I read

and I read and I read and I read for 3 and a half hours. Good book.

The one think that I really love about fantasy in specific and the wheel of time in general is that it parts time and you can just vanish.

Perceptions

Today I had 2 very interesting lectures. One was on labour. The lecturer ask the class which way the vagina runs and instead of a unanimous answer there was a bustle of confusion from which I could not hear what people were saying. The lecturer silenced the class and told us this truism, which I think is funny by virtue of its truth, and what the truth implies.

Woman think that their vaginas run downwards and outwards.

Men think that vaginas run upwards and inwards.

Its beautiful. Woman see their vaginas as an organ from which babies and menses come and men see it as an organ into which their penises go!

Later on during the day a lecturer was giving us a talk on the 3rd stage of labour and puerperium. I nearly left before he came because he was running 15 minutes late, but it was worth staying for 2 reasons. I now know how to pronounce the word puerperium (poo r per i um) and know that it refers to the 42 days following birth. During the lecture he drew a line on the whiteboard and told us that he was drawing on important dates. After spending a while talking about 24 weeks and 28 weeks and 34 weeks, which are all important, he took a step forward, and in the voice of a man letting a student in a secret he shouldn’t he said “I am going to tell you about something that happens at 40 weeks, to most women who are pregnant that a lot of my colleagues often forget” He then paused for impact and said “Woman and 40 weeks often go into labour.”

Don’t you love unreasonably boring lecturers

Yesterday I started university – 4^th year medicine.  It’s not easy getting back into a routine after a holiday, but I manage. Wake up at 6:30. Drive to uni. Sit through lots of long boring lectures. Hang out with medical students, which in my opinion hasn’t been the enjoyable thing ever. Spend the whole day in lectures. These things are all tolerable.

 

Today my threshold of tolerance was pushed within microns of me running out the class screaming with boredom. Sometimes lecturers cover the same topics other lecturers have covered. Sometimes the same lecturer goes over stuff they lecturer you on previously. Sometimes the department of human genetics give you the same introductory lecture with the exact same slide show 3 years in a row. Today’s 1 and a half hour lecture on breast feeding was a boredom defining event without comparison.

 

Having grown up and still being involved in a youth movement makes me fairly critical on methodologies. I am fairly tolerant and adapt at sitting through lectures. If the lecturer is knowledgeable enough and doesn’t have serious personality disorders or schizophrenia I thoroughly enjoy them. This lady who lectured us today decided to hand out very dull scenarios about breast feeding problems to arbitrarily defined groups and then asked us to decide how to deal with them. Despite the fact we managed to do this well she managed to drag it out, slowly, like a torturous execution, for an hour and a half. It was truly wonderful.

The nature of relationships

It is not so much that I do not understand the games people play, or even why the play them. It is more of a questions behind why even start? Why train our children and peers to play? To what end?

 

I personally consider the games men and woman are socialised to play with each other a thoughtless continuation of our instinctive natural ritual of mating. Birds, dogs all them beasties put on little shows for their mates in order to impress them and get them knocked up. In so much as we are able to control whether we get each other pregnant, surely we are able and mature enough to be honest with one another instead of avoiding the question and running circles round each other.

 

I live my life in an honest, open and direct way. I deal with my feelings as they came honestly with whoever inspires them. If somebody makes me angry it feels better to talk to them about it then to put them right on their bonnet and melt through their engine block. Why is it that if somebody makes me happy I am socially expected to play games with them, sms them, phone them and do all kinds of weird things to eventually get to a point when we’re both drunk and finally tell them without them having a fit / stop talking to me / key my car / file a restraining order?

 

Quite honestly I have not, did not and will not play. So far this hasn’t gotten me very far in the world of relationships, but eventually I plan on meeting somebody mature enough and open enough to show feelings and speak about intimate things without spending 3 months pretending to people and things we are not. I find that form of play incredibly disrespectful and do not play back

cool runnings

There’s this completely unreal franchise in Cape Town called cool runnings. Its a Jamaican themed cocktail bar / restaurant that manages to attract the most delightful sort of people. The one I went to tonight for a friends 23rd is located in an area called Observatory which also has a habit of attracting the interesting sort.

Besides from the usual crowed of Rastas which inhabit the joint there was an amazing guy who had the left side of his oily black hair hanging halfway down his face and the right side about half way down his ear. There was a short stout woman with her hair dyed that colour red that looks brown except for the frizzy bits which look startlingly red. There were people with weird undercuts and overall the place looked like it was having a strange hairstyle contest

One of the things that I absolutely love about the place, and all other bars, is the smoky noisy atmosphere where every is checking you out if they’re not to drunk to see. You can feel your lungs undergoing neoplasia while you struggle to hear what the person next to you is saying.

I plan to return to cool runnings as far from now as possible