The principal of our school once made an entire netball team cry. They had lost a game, or two, and he ripped into them, telling them they were lazy and hopeless.
He was a tall man with broad shoulders, who was natural at sport of any kind. Anyone without some ability with a ball, or a stick, or in the pool, was looked down upon. Mocked even. He certainly took every opportunity to rub in any girl’s sporting inadequacies.
As I could barely swim across a pool, let alone the length, and thought ball games the most ridiculous waste of time ever invented, I was not a favourite.
I played netball because we had to, not because I enjoyed it. I could barely put the bib on the right way, never mind catching the ball and throwing it to the best person, or putting it through a hoop. If it was a friendly game, that was fine, I could enjoy the running around and just be silly.
Tennis was the only game that I could play with any skill, but my serving technique was seriously lame. Most of my serves got into the right place, but a toddler could have returned them so slow and gently did the ball lob over the net. The ‘skill’ was obviously limited, as I never represented the school, or played seriously.
I could run in primary school, and enjoyed the feeling of getting a place, but once puberty hit, I seemed to slow to glacial pace. High jump was a torment. I tried again and again to get over the bar, but always hit it. Eventually I lost my nerve, and flat out refused to try anymore, despite the teacher’s urging. Same with gymnastics.
There was one netball game where the ball hit me in the chest, and I must have been winded, because I started having trouble breathing, and was gulping in air. I wasn’t hurt as such, but I was aware that one of my classmates, a girl who was fairly good at sport, was bending over with laughter.
I started laughing too, and I don’t quite know why. Probably I wanted to be seen to get the joke, fit in with the others, that sort of thing. But what I was actually feeling at that moment was a particular sort of pain, not a physical one. The classmate had thrown the ball directly at me, hard, knowing I would not catch it because my reflexes weren’t that good. I was the non-sporty one, the dag, the swat.
But trying to laugh whilst being winded produced a strange effect. I was desperately trying to stop the heaving of my chest, but not succeeding, and instead, it became worse. So much so that later another girl told me she’d heard I’d had a fit.
That moment: the classmate bending over whooping with laughter, others laughing too, me struggling for breath, trying to maintain some slight sliver of dignity, but also trying to join in with the hilarity, to be one of them, not the outsider.
I recognise that what I also felt, besides the humiliation, the pain, the difficulty breathing, was a rage, a burning rage. But instead of letting rip and laying into the classmate, I swallowed it. It was a bitter meal, and undigested. Years later, I remember my classmate throwing that ball, and the bitterness comes back, sharper than ever.
Friday, 24 October 2008
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Tuesday, 21 October 2008
fragment 1
Tomorrow we’re doing a bilateral orchidectomy on a prostate cancer patient. Study up some anatomy tonight, and come and assist, eh? You can sit on one side, I’ll sit on the other. It’s a simple operation.
So said the urology registrar to me, a raw, terrified intern who barely knew what day it was, let alone how to operate on a poor defenceless man with cancer.
It was 1989. I had been working for about four months as an intern at a war veterans hospital. I started in the rehabilitation ward, looking after people who’d had strokes and could no longer speak, walk, understand anyone else, eat properly, you name it. Damage to their brains had wiped out one or more of the functions that the rest of us take for granted every day of our lives.
Then I went to the respiratory ward, where the registrar had a modified machine-gun laugh that he let fire onto unfortunate victims when speaking to them of their diagnoses. Good morning Mr Jones, heh-heh-heh, we’ve got your biopsy results, heh-heh-heh, you’ve got a form of lung cancer, heh-heh-heh, it’s called squamous cell. The only reason he got away with it was that his patients were either too stunned to register, or they took it not as laughter but as some sort of tic.
Next was the kidney ward, where all things urological were treated. It was mainly prostate problems, including cancer. And sometimes the treatment for prostate cancer was removal of both of the testicles. Hence the request from the registrar that I help him with this procedure.
I entered medicine because my father wanted me to do it. Secure job, reasonable pay, work for life, that sort of thing. And one of his brothers had a son who was a doctor, which I suspect also had something to do with it. Being a fairly compliant daughter, I went along with the idea, even though my strengths lay in other areas. So obvious was this disjunct between what my father wanted and what I was good at that all the teachers spoke to him about their concerns with his decision.
But the more they talked, the firmer was his mind made up. I knew when I got the acceptance letter in the mail that it was the wrong course. But as the only child of a controlling father and placating mother, and my own keen desire to keep the peace, I kept my mouth shut and got on with it. Its easy to make up scenarios of different outcomes twenty-six years later, when everything has changed.
Medicine was interesting, but I was out of my depth. I’d always been an anxious child. During the course of those six years of study, anxiety became my closest companion, depression and mild mania enclosed me in their arms. I could not, however much I tried, remember all those facts.
Towards the end of the course, when my relationship with my parents had deteriorated beyond my endurance, I decided it was time I left home (I was twenty-three after all). In return, my father told me I had been adopted. In such a state, I began work caring for the sick.
Being asked to help remove a man’s testicles, even in the name of therapy, was the beginning of the end. The morning of that surgery, I froze. I could not move a single muscle. I lay in bed incapable of speaking, moving, thinking. It must have been two or three hours before the panic lessened, and I could rise.
I left medicine a short time later, never to return.
So said the urology registrar to me, a raw, terrified intern who barely knew what day it was, let alone how to operate on a poor defenceless man with cancer.
It was 1989. I had been working for about four months as an intern at a war veterans hospital. I started in the rehabilitation ward, looking after people who’d had strokes and could no longer speak, walk, understand anyone else, eat properly, you name it. Damage to their brains had wiped out one or more of the functions that the rest of us take for granted every day of our lives.
Then I went to the respiratory ward, where the registrar had a modified machine-gun laugh that he let fire onto unfortunate victims when speaking to them of their diagnoses. Good morning Mr Jones, heh-heh-heh, we’ve got your biopsy results, heh-heh-heh, you’ve got a form of lung cancer, heh-heh-heh, it’s called squamous cell. The only reason he got away with it was that his patients were either too stunned to register, or they took it not as laughter but as some sort of tic.
Next was the kidney ward, where all things urological were treated. It was mainly prostate problems, including cancer. And sometimes the treatment for prostate cancer was removal of both of the testicles. Hence the request from the registrar that I help him with this procedure.
I entered medicine because my father wanted me to do it. Secure job, reasonable pay, work for life, that sort of thing. And one of his brothers had a son who was a doctor, which I suspect also had something to do with it. Being a fairly compliant daughter, I went along with the idea, even though my strengths lay in other areas. So obvious was this disjunct between what my father wanted and what I was good at that all the teachers spoke to him about their concerns with his decision.
But the more they talked, the firmer was his mind made up. I knew when I got the acceptance letter in the mail that it was the wrong course. But as the only child of a controlling father and placating mother, and my own keen desire to keep the peace, I kept my mouth shut and got on with it. Its easy to make up scenarios of different outcomes twenty-six years later, when everything has changed.
Medicine was interesting, but I was out of my depth. I’d always been an anxious child. During the course of those six years of study, anxiety became my closest companion, depression and mild mania enclosed me in their arms. I could not, however much I tried, remember all those facts.
Towards the end of the course, when my relationship with my parents had deteriorated beyond my endurance, I decided it was time I left home (I was twenty-three after all). In return, my father told me I had been adopted. In such a state, I began work caring for the sick.
Being asked to help remove a man’s testicles, even in the name of therapy, was the beginning of the end. The morning of that surgery, I froze. I could not move a single muscle. I lay in bed incapable of speaking, moving, thinking. It must have been two or three hours before the panic lessened, and I could rise.
I left medicine a short time later, never to return.
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