Dear Valentine

 

Okay, I don’t do Valentine’s Day, and it’s not just because I don’t have anyone this year to be my Valentine.  I just feel very uncomfortable with the whole concept of the day.

I do agree that there should be a recognition of love and romance, and I do see that it has it’s place in our lives – I have, after all, had moments of romantic insanity and I know how important it is to let someone know those horribly gooey sentimental feelings you fleetingly experience in their presence.  I get it.

 What I don’t get is why it has to be so contrived.  Why, on the 14th of February is everyone supposed to miraculously develop an overwhelming sense of romance – and for us blokes – a new-found capacity for chivalry?  For one day in the entire year, men are showering their women with roses strangled in baby’s-breath (ugh, cliche), and handing them gaudy red cards with a forced sentiment scrawled inside.

Romance is romance because it’s simple and spontaneous.  It’s the motivation behind the small gesture; the driving force that makes you want to do something just because it will make your girl or guy happy.

 Romance is not a mass event like pilgrimage to Mecca, and it is certainly not confined to a 24-hour period of chocolates and red things.

Wake up, Dear Valentine, and smell the roses.

Guster

The Edge of the Ocean

Class has started, and once again we’re expected to be places and smile and do things and wear nice clothes.  It’s not a bad thing, because we all worked hard to get into this school, but now the prospect of the endless summer and all the things you were going to do with your freedom time is gone.  Of course we’re going to have vacations again, but let’s face it – they won’t be long, and it won’t be the same as the countless months we used to have off during undergrad.

 So it comes as no surprise to me that I’m suddenly longing for a road trip.  I’m thinking Caloundra, up north.  The beaches are really nice and the place reminds me of the Gold Coast, or what it might have looked like before it became a flashy whore of a town.   It would be great to load up the car and just drive, circling the dots on the map until we reach the edge of the ocean.

Ivy

With a Little Help From My Friends

 My hair is in a state of dynamic flux… but not for much longer – I’m going to shave it off in the name of cancer fundraising!

The World’s Greatest Shave is a fundraising event held between the 13th and 15th of March, and donations go to the Leukaemia Foundation.

At the moment, over 30,000 Australians carry a diagnosis of Myeloma, Lymphoma or Leukaemia – and only 40% of these people will survive their disease.

The donations made during this special time are so important, as they are used to provide comfortable accommodation close to a hospital during a patient’s treatment, as well as counselling services for families and patients, as well as contributing toward medical research to find better treatments for cancer. 

I have a Shave Page over at the website – www.worldsgreatestshave.com – on that page you’ll see DONATE, and underneath you can click SPONSOR someone, and that’s where you search for my name – Adrian Castelli, and my state is QLD – or search the group GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY MEDICINE and PLEASE MAKE A DONATION!  It doesn’t have to be a huge donation to make a huge difference. 

My family has recently suffered a death to cancer and I really regret that it has taken a death to prompt me to get involved in this type of fundraising.  It’s obviously for a great cause, and donations over $2 are tax deductable!

The greatest thing about this is that anyone in the world can make a donation via my own or anyone elses Shave Page – so why don’t we try to make a little difference?  Even if your dollars aren’t the ones that find the cure, they will be the dollars that helped a person and their family through one of the toughest times in their lives. 

I can’t do this on my own, but I can do it with a little help from my friends.

Adrian.

John Lennon & Paul McCartney

New Day

 

Today we were introduced to the four basic themes that underpin medicine and health care.  We won’t be studying courses or subjects as such anymore, but we’ll be looking at everything in the context of these themes.  This is radically different to how things are run in the undergrad programs, but it’s a new day, and we’ll have to adapt to this style of learning quickly. 

The four themes:

DKHI: The Doctor & Knowledge of Health & Illness – this theme includes the sciencey-mediciney stuff like healthy human functioning and disease.

DHC: The Doctor & Health in the Community – this theme explores how a number of health factors apply to the community and what health issues arise as a result.

D&P: The Doctor & Patient - this theme revolves heavily around building clinical skills, and interacting with patients at a physical as well as at a social and professional level.

DLEPP: The Doctor, Law, Ethics & Professional Practice – this theme may seem kind of separate to the others, but legal and ethical considerations dictate a substantial amount of the decisions and actions of health care providers, and is therefore an integral part of the medical process. 

 The first unit in DKHI is ‘homeostasis’, which for us science-background people is a quaint and understated way of saying ‘the entire human body and every system within it as it functions normally.’  This unit has been squished into 10 short weeks of homeostatic fun, and represents the information that took me 3 years to acquire in my first degree.

Presumably, this is the ‘heart-smart’ version, where all the large chunks of shit have been taken out. 

 So tomorrow is our first real day of mediciney stuff (sorry, I thought today was.  Wrong.), and we kick-off with a lab on cardiopulmonary (heart and lung) anatomy, which means some cadaveric fun.

Kate Havnevik

Welcome to Wherever You Are

Orientation day was yesterday, and because I was sort-of (ridiculously) hungover, I wasn’t in the best mood for socialising and meeting and remembering the names of 400 million people.  Nevertheless, I managed to get through the long day feeling kind-of human.

The orientation schedule boasted a breathtaking array of boringness, but promised some fun times at the local watering hole close to the school.  At 5pm I made my way to the bar with my roommate and another friend, but I was planning on having only a few social drinks and crawling home for some sleep.

 Five hours and many pints later (thanks for double-parking me, B!), I was having the time of my life.  The party moved to the upstairs ‘nightclub,’ where it was no-holds-barred celebration.  Nobody was a wanker (except me) and even the second-year students had made the effort to come and welcome us (the prospect of a drink probably didn’t hurt either), and there was none of the condescension I had expected from them – it was just a party, and we were just some people.

Yeah.  I felt welcomed.

Bon Jovi

Silent Night

 Tonight I need to tell the people in my life something, so I’m going to.  But I am not strong enough, or I cannot physically speak these words to you.  Regardless, on this silent night, I speak.

1. I appreciate you more than I am capable of showing you, and I’m scared that you will never know this.
2. You bring me down, and I wish you weren’t around me.
3. I love you so much more than I want to, and it actually hurts.
4. I am so eager to know you, but more – I’m so eager for you to like me.
5. I said ‘I love you’ before you went away, but I wish you could come back so I could say it again with conviction.
6. I want you to want to be around me.
7. We were like brothers, but we hurt each other so much, and for nothing.
8. I’ve had someone steal this from me once, please don’t be the next one to do it again.
9. You need to stop sabotaging your own life, for your own sake.

Okay, so that last one was to me.