(Hypothetical) honey, I’m home

Well, I’m home! I’ve only had two places so far I can call “my own”, but over that limited n of 3, this is my best place yet. It’s sort of a hybrid between the other two: the character and Downtown location of my old place in Montréal, with the size and fixtures of my place in Victoria. Still don’t have everything quite yet set up, the walls are still pretty bare, but it’s getting there

I moved that “Torch” poster from my office to here; seems more appropriate to keep somewhere removed from the military setting, where it’ll better have that remembrance effect

I had nightmares about the kitchen: when I was visiting on the house-hunting trip, there was years of crud between the stovetop edge and the counter that I was dreading to have to clean. Lucky when the landlord repainted the whole apartment (well worth the wait!) they took care of those nasties too

The microwave stand is actually a bathroom cabinet – there’s another one in the bathroom too – slightly smaller than what was being advertised as a proper “microwave stand”, but half the price. I can live with a little overhang off the edge

The bedroom is huge! It’s like having a ballroom, you could hold swing nights here (“swing”, not “swinger” – this is my bedroom, after all)

It still has the original push-button light switches! Hope these won’t be a fire hazard

I’m really happy how the bathroom turned out – the English-style double spigot sink takes some getting used to, but it’s a neat historic touch; what matters most is the shower faucet and head delivers a nice proper exfoliating torrent, and the drains drain properly. Older places are always a bit of a gamble for those two, but in this place I lucked out

There’s that bathroom/microwave stand, since there isn’t an undersink vanity. I also got a neat toilet brush, with a clamshell stand – you pull on the brush to take it out, and the stand splits in two to let it out. When you’re done, you just put it back in the middle, and the clamshell closes around it. Neat! It’s also made in Israel, which is noteworthy because you don’t see many consumer products made in Israel and imported here. I can’t think of anything else I have that’s made in Israel.

Everything seems to have made it fairly intact from Victoria. The one major loss is the Haida carving one of patients gave me from Masset – no idea where it could’ve gone. Irreplaceable. An excuse to go back sometime, I guess. I can’t find my remote controls either, but that at least is easy to switch. And my old alarm clock (going back to undergrad) doesn’t have an antenna for the radio, so the reception’s kind of crappy behind these old thick brick walls, so I got a new one too

Great location, right in the middle of Downtown

but with all the noise that comes with it. Not so much the fallout of the Changings of the Guard and random concerts pretty much every weekend from the park across the street, or the late-night pubcrawlers frolicking to the wee hours, or even the revving engines and squealing tires of people that make me wish gas prices just keeps going up and up – no, it’s the beep-beep-beep dong-dong-dong of the automated crosswalk. How many blind people really cross the street between 12-6am?!

Again – I need décor ideas. Wall hangings, frame suggestions, new furniture – esp something to fill that bedroom space. Exercise stuff maybe? An easel and canvas – I’m no painter, but I guess I could start. (That would also solve my bare walls problem at the same time, perhaps.) Help!

I’m not very friendly

I’m officially a Frederictoner now, but still without a fixed address – still waiting for stuff to arrive. The idea of living out of hotels seems fun on paper – fluffy towels and bedsheets, the comings and goings in the lobby (like an airport, I guess), weddings in the ballroom downstairs, and daily housekeeping means your bed is magically made and bathroom clean when you come “home” every afternoon!

But the novelty kind of wears off when you actually have to “live” here – there’s no closet space, no laundry (well, there is, but it’s like $5/shirt and – get this – $2/sock!), no fridge or microwave for meals or snacks (well, there is – “Our kitchen is your kitchen”, the room service menu says. Thanks, but my food budget is not your food budget.) and with the daily housekeeping, you kind of feel compelled to tidy up a little bit extra every morning so they don’t think you’re a complete slob.

Summer holidays are winding up, and I think the hotel’s having an end-of-season room sale, the place has been hopping with families and kids the past few days, minivans and SUVs with out-of-province plates filling the carpark. Yesterday I was checking my mail at the Front Desk – well, I guess I do have a temporary “fixed” address after all – and two kids, probably 5 or 6, dripping wet and wrapped in towels ran up and started waving and saluting at me.

I forgot I was in uniform, so I had no idea what was going on… I guess they just ran out of the pool, hence the dripping wetness. Anyway, their excited smiling and waving caught me off guard enough I kind of grunted a (in retrospect) mean What?! Hello at them and walked off. They looked disappointed. Their father called them back, “That’s enough, I don’t think he [meaning me] is very friendly.”

Maybe it’s a sign of the uniform becoming “natural” and comfortable that I’m actually forgetting I’m wearing it – but when it makes you rub off on the public the wrong way, that’s not a good sign. Wearing a uniform is nothing like simply putting on a costume and pulling out an act, but you definitely are setting yourself out on a stage too when you do, and you do have a character to live up to – that kids might want to run up to and play with, so you should be nice and friendly. I guess that’s part of what they mean by being “an officer and a gentleman, 24/7″. Next time I’d salute back, try to talk “kid talk”, maybe let them try on my beret. Any ideas?

Uniform being comfortable: it actually is a comfortable get-up. The shirt (a button-down jacket of sorts) and pants (cargo – a military invention, after all) are totally no-maintenance, kind of loose and floppy, like scrubs actually. There’s drawstrings around the waist to give yourself that reassuring hourglass shape – it’s reassuring for soldiers to look fit and trim and hourglass, anyway – but of course being me I wouldn’t be fooling anyone no matter what I did with it. I just keep them knotted in the inside, loose enough to use the shirt as a pull-over without having to do/undo the buttons all the time.

There’s also some special way to tuck the pants into your boots, but I haven’t figured it out yet. So for now my legs look not so much bloused and trim (like a paratrooper), but rather more billowing (like MC Hammer – the original Hammer, and not his early 00s comeback). I’ve been told to shine the boots, which seems kind of counterproductive for combat camouflage purposes – but hey, mine is not to question why…

The doctor is in… and now actually working

“Settling-in” time’s up, now the work begins. And I actually don’t get to use that office I got all set up – not yet anyway.

I’m on “sick parade” full-time right now, which is military-speak for walk-in clinic. Being military, everything has to be taken to extremes, so it’s pretty well-stocked for a walk-in clinic: we have our own ambulance service

trauma room

OR (though no anaesthesia machine – not that anyone could use one)

a 5-bed Emerg ward

and another 5 beds for treatment/observation/rehydration, or just to hold while we wait on X-rays and labs

Lots of the latter: being the national Combat Training Centre, and people over-pushing themselves on PT or field exercises. It doesn’t stop.

One of the civilian docs reminded me that some may malinger to get off a course – if they can get a doctor’s note saying they can’t train, they get sent home with full pay for the summer. Hey, I’ve barely started seeing real sick people, now I have to interrogate and weed out fakers too? I would just put up a sign, hopefully that will be enough.

At the other end of the extreme though, everything shuts down pretty early, at 1630 sharp – not a second earlier, not a second later. There’s also the summer cadet camp, and of course with kids and summer camps, there’s lice checks and STD talks. Who said there was no Paediatrics in the military? Sometimes I see them at the mall Chapters/Starbucks on Saturdays, they get bussed in as their weekend “treat” away from camp… can’t help but listen in on the gossip in the coffee queue. And wonder how these kids can be getting into coffee at their age.

The patients are pretty hard-core military here – I guess being the training centre, and for many of them the first time they’ve been away from home, they’re all getting broken in. So getting saluted and called “sir” all the time is kind of a given. It’s military tradition, though loosened as it is to include noobies like me fresh off the street with no military experience whatsoever but just happen to have a degree.

I think I’m starting to pick up on different kinds of salutes and “sir”s. There’s the genuine, sincere ones (if there can be such a thing), where the saluter actually takes my rank seriously (ha ha – silly boy), and in calling “sir” confers, I suppose, a power of authority and deference (more ha ha). There’s the going-through-the-motions “sir” that gets tacked on in conversation – usually this comes from the med techs handing over a patient from triage, and has more to do with “sir” being easier to say than full rank and name all the time.

Then there’s the “sir”s from people who really should have no business calling me “sir” – real, veteran, combat-hardened grunts who’ve fought their way up and are only at the clinic because their commander (undoubtedly a noobie officer like me), said they need to see a doctor for a run-of-the-mill comes-with-the-territory ankle sprain they’ve had and treated themselves for hundreds of times before.

This was actually my first patient. And of course coming into the room – sits right up, like standing at attention, but on the exam table, “Sir”. Someone once said that when tradition becomes too flexible (eg salutes/”sir”s for us docs), it become more ironic than anything else. That’s the kind of “sir” this was – a note of over-refined irony, sarcasm even. Anyway, I asked him to wait for the physio to see him (there’s a walk-in physio service) – “Yes Sir” – and as I walked out – did he just growl?!

So hard core.

The doctor is in

Well, the doctor is in…

They’ve given me a few days off at first to get everything set up. The first day the commander assigned one of the medics to show me the base and drive me around, which was nice but at the same time kind of weird, having them wait on me as I did the registration formalities around the campus, like a chauffeur. I could’ve just done it all myself (I did have my car, after all), and even though that medic was a fully-trained paramedic with better things to do than drive the new guy around, I guess that’s one of the mechanics of rank – so the smoother and faster I can get to my work, the same for the medics too.

The office is starting to take shape. I had a Literature and Medicine elective back in second-year med school, one of our readings was from Intoxicated By My Illness by Anatole Broyard. He’s waiting in a physician’s office waiting to see the doctor

While I waited I subjected the doctor to a preliminary semiotic scrutiny. Sitting in his office, I read his signs. The diplomas I took for granted: What interested me was the fact that the room was furnished with taste. There were well-made, well-filled bookcases, an antique desk and chairs, a reasonable Oriental rug on the floor. A window opened one entire wall of the office to the panorama of Boston, and this suggested status, an earned respect. I imagined the doctor taking the long view out of his window.

On the walls and desk were pictures of three healthy-looking, conspicuously happy children, photographed in a prosperous outdoor setting of lawn, flowers, and trees. As I remember, one of the photographs showed a sailboat. From the evidence, their father knew how to live – and, by extension, how to look after the lives of others. His magic seemed good.

I always wondered what my office would look like. Residency was great for training and experience, but not so inspirational design-wise. For one, none of the doctors I know actually have their patients see them in their offices. Instead, when you see them, it’s always in a generic, sparse examination room, usually one of many in the clinic, indistinguishable from the other. No antique furniture, no Oriental rugs – just a paper-covered exam table on an easy-clean tiled linoleum floor. No pictures, no art to speak of (unless you count a poster of The Human Skeleton (courtesy of FosamaxTM)).

Back during that elective, I actually wrote something about what would be on my office wish list: I like to think it’ll be something above and beyond the usual style-deficient clinic. Some fancy, classic stainless-steel and glass cabinets. Clean, bright, white lights. Those fancy bowl-sinks with automatic faucets. And quality furniture. I wonder if IKEA makes exam tables?

The waiting room would also be warm yet modern – an orchestrated combination of stone, glass and wood, and there’d be plants here and there, maybe one of those waterfall walls too. (Kinda like the new Ottawa airport departures level… now that’s a sweet airport.) A wide, open, airy feel. You’d come in, and it would exude a sense of freshness, of openness, of wellness… you’d want to just sit back, breathe, and soak in that healthy vibe. Don’t you feel better already?

Of course there’d be art on the walls – some classics, some of my Dad’s, maybe even some of my city scenes. Diplomas are a given too – I’ll put up my elementary and high school ones too for completeness. I guess I’d have to give in and have a TV somewhere on a wall too – it’d be a slim flat-screen plasma, and it’d be on CBC Newsworld or the BBC equivalent. (No CNN swill here!) There’s reading material aplenty – today’s papers, a few selected magazines (definitely Adbusters. Nothing medical though.), some comics and picture books for the kids. (Sorry, no toys – they get coated in saliva and breed disease and pestilence.)

And to make it complete: somewhere prominent, a cross and a portrait of Her Majesty.

Well, the waiting room is kind of out of my control. At least there’s a skylight – that’s “wide, open and airy” enough, I guess – and a TV – and yes, usually on CBC Newsworld (yay!)

The office itself, I think I’ve managed to add a little bit here and there. You see what I have to work with… standard government-issue desk, locker and file cabinet and bookcase, but with two comfy swivel chairs, I think I lucked out on a furnishing bonus. And the cabinets and drawers, though not stylin’ stainless steel and glass, are a versatile customisable modular setup – and if you know medical equipment, supplies like that don’t come cheap. They even have those classic gauze and swab jars, labelled in perfect Futura face. Thank you Treasury Board!

I didn’t put up the elementary and high school diplomas I was planning, but I’ve got the other essential credentials covered, hopefully people will just assume that I got the childhood basics checked off too

Over the file cabinet I put together this series of postcards from the War Museum: quick and easy way to get some important and famous pieces to call “my own”

Originally I had this World War I memorial poster I bought from the War Museum, of the Vimy monument, with a quote from “In Flanders Fields” next to the exam table: The Torch: be yours to hold it high! / If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields

but I thought it might be a bit too depressing and perhaps counter-productive in the military patient context. The poster, after all, provokes mourning for soldiers lost in battle, and chastens civilian Canadians not to “break faith with us who die”; it would be kind of presumptuous to say the same to the military patients I would see in clinic. So I switched to this one that might be a bit more uplifting

It’s from King George VI’s poster messages to besieged Brits during the blitz of World War II: “Keep Calm and Carry On”. (You can get them at Barter Books – great story behind them, check it out.) Though it also was targeted for civilians, I think the stiff-upper-lip ideal has a place in military medicine too. And of course, to go along with that

Her Majesty’s portrait (just like I planned in med school!), plus the “Key Characteristics of Primary Health Care” – no real reason for that, it’s much too busy and small to read where it is on the wall, but like Her Majesty’s portrait it’s a reminder of some of the ideals to bring to every patient, every visit.

Still a work-in-progress… I’m hoping to end up with something that’s functional, no-nonsense and able to handle the mess of physical exams and such, but at the same time comfortable enough to help settle the ups-and-downs of mental health, and people who don’t like coming to doctors’ offices generally. And on top of that, something that still reflects the context, something “military”. Any ideas? Help!