What does it look like when your friends, colleagues and chain of command – and even c8… [sigh] – totally take you by surprise as you’re rushing stressed out through that pile of pre-holidays paperwork and patient handovers and CDU admin and Emergency shift scheduling – all part of the traditional last-day-of-work-before-Christmas – to wish you Happy Birthday?
It’s happy. Which makes me happy. Thank you.
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I haven’t seen It’s a Wonderful Life in years, so when I caught it on the local Fox channel (shoehorned in a Cops marathon – go figure), it was like seeing it for the first time. I remembered the gist of the plot – suicidal man wishes he was never born, angel shows him he’s actually had a Wonderful Life, man is grateful, angel earns his wings, and all is well in the world again – but if you picked out a random scene from the bank collapse or Mr Potter’s real estate skulduggery, I wouldn’t've clued in what it was.
Kind of funny how relevant It’s a Wonderful Life still is. Yes, it’s a Christmas classic and makes it onto the TV schedule every December – but holidays aside, it’s still a film in season, no matter what time of year. Even with the old-style cars and candlestick telephones, we haven’t changed much since then. Banks still collapse, finances still make people panic, developers and landlords still try to squeeze out affordable housing projects in the name of monopolies and profits. Quotes still have meaning, maybe even more relevance today: “Ah, youth is wasted on the wrong people”; “I been savin’ this money for a divorce, if ever I got a husband”.
And of course, “Remember, George: no man is a failure who has friends.”
Walk-ins at Mental Health always spike this time of year – extra duties needing finishing before end of year, soldiers away from family for the first time, money stresses, the general anxiety as everyone is rushing around to get stuff done and meet that image of what “Christmas” is supposed to be, and all that. But if I could write a prescription for everyone to sit down, relax, watch this film, and really take it to heart, I’d probably be able to whittle down that Psych referrals list down a bit.
Anyway, if you missed it, you can catch it on YouTube. Hurray for public domain!
Goodbye Solo at the Monday Night Film Series last night. The NB Filmmakers’ Co-op runs the weekly screenings at UNB, it’s really the only game in town for repertory cinema. Unfortunately it’s on an abbreviated season this year since UNB’s closing down the theatre for renovations over the winter; luckily the new Fredericton Film Calendar makes it easy to track the precious remaining screenings, and point out other ways to get your fix when Tilley Hall room 102 shutters down at the end of the season.
The film opens and closes with a taxi ride. It’s kind of a cliché in film and literature, the endless plot potentials and character connexions you can get out of mundane everyday things like taxi rides, but it’s a cliché precisely because it’s true. (Just check out freddybeach cabby – you can pretty much get to know everyone in Fredericton from the stories coming out of F B Cabby’s van: “people laugh, cry, break up, make up, puke, fight, bleed, have sex, get drunk, get undressed, get dressed, get arrested”.)
Plot summary from the Film Calendar (skip the next 2 paragraphs if you don’t want to know): “In the first moment of the film, we find ourselves inside a cab driven by Solo (Souléymane Sy Savané), a Senegalese taxi driver living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His passenger is seventy-year-old William (Red West), who books Solo to pick him up again two weeks hence for a long drive to a faraway mountaintop. Over the course of their negotiation, Solo comes to understand that William has a tragic plan for the end of his trip, and decides to befriend the man and dissuade him from his goal.”
Now we’d just had a suicide reported at work this past weekend, so the plot of the film took on a bit of an extra edge. You don’t have to be a doctor to understand the reflex: for days afterwards you can’t help but imagine the lead-up to a suicide, try to understand the incomprehensible by breaking it down into its attendant steps. Goodbye Solo does the reverse – you already know what’s going to happen; here the step-by-step is broken down for you in 90 minutes of screen time: the loss of family, then the home, closing bank accounts, giving away possessions, and finally a winding one-way taxi ride.
Personally I love movies like this that are set in random places you never really think of, shot by directors who call the place home. Winston-Salem, North Carolina – it’s not the same “Salem” as in the witch trials (that one’s in Massachusetts), but it is the same one in Thank You for Smoking – home of R J Reynolds, after all. Movies and shows from common places like New York or London, you almost get distracted by paying attention to the background and thinking Hey, I was there!; with unfamiliar places like Winston-Salem, you see the place through your eyes of a tourist, with the guided focus of a local – thanks to director (and Winston-Salemite) Ramin Bahrani, now you know there’s a Blowing Rock park nearby (on the Blue Ridge Parkway) and how long of a drive it would really be (about 2 hours).
The title is a bit of a obvious give-away for the running theme of the film – Goodbye Solo, ie now connected, now longer alone – as the passenger William is overnight (literally) spirited via cab from his lonely, pining existence and adopted and embedded into Solo’s “family” of fellow cabbies, other African ex-pats and Solo’s own wife and daughter. (I also thought the title might be good portent for asking out someone for company for once – “Goodbye Solo”, ha – but of course, ended up alone as usual.)
The Film Calendar review describes Solo the character as “good through and through, and lacks the North American self-consciousness about relationships.” I wonder if it means to say he’s “good through and through, because [he] lacks the North American self-consciousness about relationships.” The immigrant cabbie who takes his erstwhile stranger fare into a gang bust-up, a bar for pool and beer, and when the fare falls asleep and doesn’t get to the motel he was supposed to take him to, into his own home… helping out a man in need, doing Good, but wow, that’s self-consciousness out the window. (Unless maybe that’s just what all cabbies do?)
Anyway, Ebert does a better review of the nitty-gritty – as he says, “Wherever you live, when this film opens, it will be the best film in town.”
It’s about groups called Copwatch, who do exactly that – watch and document police officers doing their thing in various cities across America. It started out as community reaction to unprofessional behaviour from police officers – racial profiling, harassment, all the way up to the use of excessive force on suspects. In cities like Berkeley, Cincinnati and Denver, there’s Copwatch volunteers who take to the streets shadowing police officers as they interact with the public.
The 50-minute independent documentary shows Copwatch in action: COPS-style, a shaky handheld camera approaches the scene. Nothing secretive about it – sporting hi-vis “Copwatch” safety vests and cameras and clipboards in hand – they record police doing everything from making chit-chat and asking for ID, to chasing down and tackling suspects, pinning them down and hauling them off.
Some constables are used to the flies-on-the-wall hovering overhead, and hand out their badge numbers and business cards to the volunteers. Others are more camera shy and tell them to back off. Most just glance at the camera, and turn back to the business at hand. For one Denver officer, the attention seems to hit a bit close to home – “Why must you treat me like this?” As for the suspects being recorded, the film is like insurance, a safety net – “Are you getting this? Please keep taping this!” (No one, it seems, minds being taped whilst being arrested.)
Before going I got the feeling it was going to take a biased, prejudiced, anti-cop bent – the companionCopwatch.com website features headlines like “Pigs at the Trough” and “Pig of the Month” – but I thought the film was actually pretty fair. (Edit: turns out Copwatch.com is not associated with any Copwatch organisation featured in the film – didn’t catch that when I first Googled it.) The only times any police officers look bad are when some make blatant attempts at obstructing the camera (eg telling the Copwatchers to move away “for their safety” whilst regular passersby continue to walk through the scene), and when their own unprofessionalism undermines them (eg profanity, rude behaviour, excessive force).
Copwatch says that their “fly-on-the-wall” monitoring helps reduce incidents of excessive or unjustified police action. More importantly, it gives residents a sense of greater control and oversight over those who protect and serve them. Police officers themselves in the film go on record to say they have no problems at all with the public keeping tabs on them – nothing to hide, after all.
But it’s a thin line between fly-on-the-wall monitoring and fair oversight, and potentially-distracting and obtrusive intervention to public servants doing what we count on them to do: put themselves in situations with unknown dangers to their lives and those of others, make such situations safe, and apply the law politely and fairly. To wit, the film also captures (though doesn’t comment on) Copwatchers’ own episodes of poor judgment trying to capture incidents on tape.
In one scene, police officers are approaching a house, handguns drawn – obviously some serious threat to life is present – yet the Copwatcher continues to approach closer and closer, within feet of the scene, trying to peer past an officer attempting to keep them at a safe distance. Another Copwatcher walks up to a constable struggling to get a resisting suspect pinned and searched – again, an unknown, potential life-threatening situation – and intrudes, “Why are you stopping him?”
In another scene, a police officer – yelling and hyperventilating, clearly doing all he can to keep collected and in control of the situation – is being told to “calm down, it’s ok” by a Copwatcher. Though the film seems to show the volunteers receiving some kind of conflict de-fusion training, it’s lost on this Copwatcher that being condescending will only make things worse. What, a police officer trying to manage an emergency is supposed to take assurance when some guy tells him to “calm down”?
Brief discussion afterwards. It didn’t seem like there was any interest or perceived need to start a Copwatch group in Fredericton. One person pointed out the film’s age (from 2001? 2004 – the Copwatchers still had actual camcorders, it seems) – now that CCTV and mobile phone cameras capture everything, maybe we’d simply get desensitised and uninterested in anything Copwatch would catch. But another pointed out the Robert Dziekański Taser incident, caught on camera – even in the age of YouTube and viral video, such images still do count for something.
I brought up a stat from the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP – in the past two years, the number of complaints has gone up by 90%; 3 900 enquiries, disputes and complaints were filed last year, versus 2 350 in ‘06 – perhaps that rise goes along with cameras being so handy to capture anything awry. Someone else suggested that the rise has more to do with Prime Minister Harper and “his Conservative policies”, but for some reason didn’t actually specify what policy exactly could lead to such a dramatic rise.
(Other stats I wanted to bring up, but didn’t get to: 3 900 queries sounds like a lot against the RCMP. But if you figure there are 19 000 Mounties in the country, of whom, say, 13 000 work a shift in a 24-hour period; who each interact with, say, 5 people that day; in a year, that’s over 23 million interactions! Though 1 complaint is 1 too many, I guess 3 900 queries doesn’t sound as bad in context.)
She also brought up the alleged beating of a soldier by four city police officers, but other than that, no one had any negative experiences to report from the local force, alleged or otherwise. Speaking generally, another pointed out that “moderate” police officers have a responsibility to control those who act unprofessionally; in response, another felt that no such “moderate” officers exist – she seemed to imply that all constables are inherently violent.
Another seemed worried about a trend of having “military officers” become local police officers, but didn’t elaborate – again, an implication that “military officers” have some inherent flaw making them unsuitable for public service? Sure, military service does teach you about weapons and violence, but more importantly, it teaches you restraint, and the ethical use of those weapons and violence – which is precisely what our police officers need to know.
I thought that one glaring omission from the film was the positive feedback – in the hours of footage that These Streets [Were] Watching, they shared few episodes of professional, pleasant, friendly interactions between police and the public. As a way for the public to take ownership of their police services, groups like Copwatch could/should work to show police how they want to be served and protected. It goes without saying that abuse is wrong, you don’t need videotapes to make that point; but to highlight and encourage positive behaviour, that’s best taught by example.
One person described the change in attitude by the police towards the monthly Critical Mass bike ride. Apparently the first time it ran, police were more rigid; but lately, they been more laissez-faire, and providing safe escort for the riders. It sounded like a step in the right direction – I guess between letting cyclists go, even against traffic lights and the ensuing delay of other vehicles, versus strict enforcement and causing even worse delays to traffic whilst tickets are issued and conflict sorted, they found a reasonable compromise.
One example from my experience: the last major protest I attended was at the meeting of Nato leaders and generals in Victoria, back in ‘07. Kudos to both the police and Victorians for being so well-behaved. Hands down that was the best protest experience I’d ever had the pleasure of attending – yes, being in a protest can be a pleasure sometimes! A peaceful, colourful walk from the Legislature to the Hotel Grand Pacific next door
For the thousand or so protesters (I think the CBC undercounted at 300), about a dozen police officers spread out within the crowd – no firing lines, no riot helmets, no face masks, no shields, no batons and no tear gas. Just smiles and bikes!
Dispersed within the crowd, you were right up next to them, making it easy to chat, see their badge numbers and ID – but more importantly, you just see them as regular people, approachable and friendly, enjoying the beautiful Victoria weather and the buzz of the crowd. The thought to get violent and attack anyone wouldn’t've crossed anyone’s mind, whether protestor or police. How could it? Often times in protests, all it takes is one person to make one aggressive move to trigger a cycle of violence – a protester covers their face with a bandana and picks up a rock, or a police officer draws a baton prematurely. But here everyone was so nice – no marchers with faces covered (why would we?), no police with helmets (except bike helmets, anyway).
Above the cheers of “Stop the War!” though, I heard one voice start to get raised and angry
A protester tries to get a Victoria Police sergeant to… not sure what exactly. Debate? Argue about police patrolling the protest? Go away? Another bystander tries to join in; the protester tells him to “mind your own business”. It looks like the sergeant was actually about to open up and talk with the protester (“we’re just here to have a demonstration and talk, so why don’t we -”), until the protester rudely cuts him off, and accuses that “the only time problems happen are when you guys [police] come along.” Probably nothing the sergeant says would change the protester’s mind or attitude, so he leaves it politely at that.
Having been at other protests on the receiving end of tear gas and getting yelled at – sure, seeing friendly, approachable, professional police officers on duty is nowhere near as exciting as seeing people get heated and go out of control, but I think it’s just as important feedback for communities to offer to their police forces. How can you raise the standard when you don’t have any positive examples to offer?
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how we cover this with the police volunteers.
Back in Victoria on a week’s leave (and to do the yearly military fitness test – I passed), reliving my old haunts again. Flashback: for some reason every time I return I don’t actually live new things, but only relive the places I’ve missed since first-year. Well, I did mix it up a little: instead of the usual Starbucks grande dark and a Svelte strawberry yoghurt, I detoured to Bubby Rose’s, a little Jewish bakery on the way to the hospital.
It’s not like the Jewish bakeries I remember in Toronto. United Bakers and the Haymishe Bagel on Bathurst St (at Lawrence St) were no-nonsense, no-frills, working-man’s sort of places. Loud, busy, eat-and-run or take away: too many people wanting their carb fix to be a comfortable place to rest and linger, or idly chat with the staff. Bubby Rose’s, on the other hand, is much too welcoming, too cute.
I didn’t realise it was St Valentine’s Day until I saw the heart-shaped cookies next to the spinach and feta croissants I usually get. Glazed in red and white, iced with lovey-dovey sweet nothings: “Be mine”, “My chou-chou”, “Kiss me”. I debated getting one to go with my croissant, just on a lark, try to get into the spirit of things, singleness notwithstanding… nah, just get two spinach and feta croissants instead. It’s healthier.
I think the cashier figured out my debating in front of the bakery display. “Any special plans for Valentine’s?” No, just another day, same old same old. “Yeah, me too. Nothing special, no gushes of love.” Well, maybe it’s building up to something. I don’t know what that was supposed to mean, but she laughed a cute little laugh, and that was a nice start to the day. I felt compelled to add a tip on the credit card slip.
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Flashback: so about a year and a half ago, this happened:
There I was, starting my last week on ICU (a week ago, before Emerg), when a bright, keen, beaming girl, smiling behind a bookish pair of thick-framed glasses, nervously knocks on the door. “Hi, is this the ICU? I’m M, the 4th-year med student on elective.”
You can probably see where this is going.
Maybe it was c5’s enthusiasm for medicine, when clerks are supposed to be jaded and stressed-out for CaRMS (“Don’t worry, I won’t steal your patients!” she promised; we only had 6 at the time); or her non-Science, non-premed background (an Arts undergrad in linguistics – she had the balls to do something non-Science for premed “because it’s interesting”); or her walking-the-walk about physicians and activism (did an HIV/AIDS elective in Africa, and was going to the CMA Leaders’ Forum in Ottawa (that she even knew about it is pretty cool; I was the lone delegate from Queen’s my year)) – that’s what I go for, people with those random intangibles I admire and look up to.
Or maybe it was, like me, her dependency on coffee every morning (just a little medium from Timmy’s… so cute!); or her off-the-wall sense of humour (“I was trying to make a joke… no one ever understands me!”), or something more subconscious… but by the way I was tongue-tied on my morning rounds patient reports; or extra sweaty and nervous whilst intubating and putting in IJ and femoral lines when she was shadowing; and otherwise just awkward and palpitating like I was around c3 in med school… Whatever it was. Who knows how these things happen…
Fast-forward to yesterday, late afternoon – I happen to be back in Victoria on leave, c5 happens to have matched to residency here too, I walk into the lounge to check my mail, she’s already at the computer, I’m caught off-guard, she smiles that same beaming smile I remember from a year and a half ago – “Hi”, I fumble and pretend to check something in my coat hanging on the wall before putting it on – “Oh – hi”. And knowing it’s St Valentine’s, my poor single heart is already primed to flutter all the worse today.
I have no idea if she actually remembers me from a year and a half ago, but we seem to chat and get along as if she does. She just started cardiology – You get to fix broken hearts for St Valentine’s, nice – and, just as I remembered her on ICU, excited and keen for medicine. “I get to scrub in tomorrow on an aortic valve repair!” I can’t help but admire – most Family Medicine residents by first-year are happy to give up the OR to focus on the need-to-know basics of purely medical management.
So, any big plans for St Valentines? (Oh dear. Did I really say that? Smooth.) “Nothing special.” (Dare I ask?) Well, if you’re free, I was going to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, it’s a French film about, uh - (Dammit! I’m drawing a blank – I should’ve looked at the reviews earlier. Better make up something fast) - a guy who falls into a coma… and, uh, hilarity ensues. She laughs that cute laugh and beams that beaming smile again… “Actually my sister and I were going out for drinks -”
Say no more – a [sigh] inside, and lest I risk digging myself deeper and losing all semblance of self-respect, I do the only thing I can do: run away! Oh, no worries. Happy St Valentine’s! And I beat a hasty retreat, my coat only partly on, and new retro CBC bag slung off-kilter on my shoulder, laughing at myself. Mostly for the geekiness of the situation, but also that I even managed to get the words out in the first place. Still just as alone on St Valentine’s as ever, but this year, I guess at least I actually tried. Who would’ve thunk? Not me.
Anyway… it’s actually a superb medical drama, that film. It’s based on a real-life story, which became a book, Le scaphandre et le papillon: Jean-Dominique Bauby, one of the editors of Elle magazine, suffers a stroke whilst driving with his son, and ends up with “locked-in syndrome”. Totally paralysed save for being able to blink his left eye, but totally mentally intact, and by blinking out letter by letter, able to write a book about the experience. How being paralysed reveals the power of imagination (“I realised I can imagine anything I want, anytime I want”) and of memory (“They are all there, where I left them”) – the two things that make one human, and still do for him.
You literally see the illness experience though the patient’s eyes (or in this case – eye), and what it looks like when you talk about your patients as if they’re not in the room, and make trite promises that “everything is going to be all right”. (It looks awful.) And you get to learn some French medical terms. A “stroke” is an “attaque”. “Cerebrovascular accident” becomes “accident vasculocérébral”. “Locked-in syndrome” becomes… “locked-in syndrome”. You can use “on s’en occupe de vous” to say “we’re taking care of you”, a person, in the same wording you use to say you’re taking care of a job or obligation. And you get to see a little bit of the French countryside.
Maybe if I knew all that about the movie before I could’ve made a better sell to her, and as doctors we could’ve both gotten more out of it, even if my usual nerd/geek/dork-iness makes being friends or something a non-starter. If I ever have a crush again in future I’ll try to research my potential date films better.
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Flashback: dressed up, off to Vancouver for CaRMS residency admissions interviews – but this time, on the other side of the table, doing the interviews. According to the interviewers’ instruction notes, this year there’s 420 applicants for the 94 spots at UBC. And that’s pretty much all I can say – the very next line on the notes, “Our interview philosophy and our guide are NOT public knowledge! Please keep the following information and the score sheet in strict confidence!”
That said, you can pretty much glean the same info off of the programme’s own website: personal and professional experiences can illustrate characteristics of what makes a good physician, so all you have to do is tell us about your experiences and relate them to how they will make you a good doctor, and we give you points and let you in. Most of the questions will be openers to let you do exactly that: “Tell us about a patient that stands out in your memory”, “Tell us about an experience in med school that taught you something about yourself you didn’t know before”, etc.
I’ll try to be the “nice” interviewer. Maybe one curveball, like “What question were you hoping we wouldn’t ask” – and then ask them exactly that – but otherwise, try to keep things light and easy for them to sell themselves and look good. It’s the final batch of interviews for graduating med students nationwide – and you always save the best for last, right?
Walking home from VGH – about an hour along a deserted W Broadway Av (where did everybody go?), across a ridiculously-busy Granville St bridge (why is everyone in a hurry? If you were so important, the City would’ve given you lights and sirens), then weaving through the human maze that is Robson St (coffee break at the Starbucks at Thurlow St – the one on the northeast corner, that is; multiple Starbuckses at one corner… geez).
But what I want to write about: on Robson St, everyone, absolutely everyone, coupled and holding hands! I don’t know if it was a post-Hallowe’en thing, or an engineered marketing stunt, or something Improv Everywhere would pull, but it was definitely photo-worthy, if I had my camera. It was like walking into no-single-man’s-land turning west onto Robson from Granville.
Picture old curmudgeonly pensioners with matching canes (yes, you can hold hands and canes at the same time, apparently), young goth punks with matching mascara, recently-arrived Japanese ex-patriates (to use the politically-correct term) with matching English gibberish T-shirts – everyone! I must’ve missed that “sign up for a girlfriend to hold hands with on Robson St” list again.
Save for that last lonely bit – I must be the only single guy in Vancouver, ugh – it’s like being on vacation. Well, since I’m just as single on vacation as I am on work mode, I guess loneliness doesn’t really make a different. Just the usual isolation, but in the big city. I’m not sure if its any easier being alone in a big city vs a normal one (“big” = eg Vancouver, ~>1M; “normal” = eg Victoria, ~250k), but it does feel different.
Anyway, perfect mindset for tomorrow’s film at the Vancity Theatre: Coeurs (Private Fears in Public Places) – “Ineffably graceful, Private Fears is a heartbreakingly delicate meditation on loss, uncertainty and love, made with the kind of serene wisdom available only to true masters. The venerable Alain Resnais collaborates once again with British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, and theater and cinema join to make exquisite music. The action is set in a magically snowbound Paris where the destinies of six lonely souls converge and commingle.
“This is Resnais’ darkest and most moving film since Melo in 1986; the unifying image is provided by a constant, artificial snowfall that produces a strange silence in the streets of Paris and a chill in the characters’ hearts. At 84, the eternally elegant, emotionally reserved Resnais seems to be allowing the mask to slip a bit: this is the quietly devastating testament of a deeply lonely man.”
Films like that, thanks to theatres artsy enough to screen them, thanks to cities artsy enough to support them… if it’s not easier being along in a big city, at least there’s films to commisserate with…
When I'm not being a GP in Fredericton, Canada, I'm practicing broken French and Mandarin; playing piano and trumpet poorly; taking blurry or over-exposed photographs; going to films alone; reading too much law, architecture and city planning reviews when I should be studying more medicine; travelling away when I should be settling down; cooking blandly; cycling slowly; and running awkwardly.
