Mice!

Note: This post is also published in the MMR.

My office is kinda infested by rodents, of the electronic kind. From top t0 bottom:e

1. The old fashion mouse which came with my job.

2. My latest mouse, a laser mouse which came with my Black Beauty.

3. My optical mouse which has a hynotic blue light.

4. My personal favourite, an ‘enhanced’ optical mouse with a ruby red light.

5. And finally my ‘tail-less’ mouse.

Now show me what you guys got!

Thurs, 270907 @ 0744; post call and I slept pretty well.

Blattodephobia

Taking a leaf from Fibrate’s Phobic Entry I will now tell you my (mis)adventures with these disgusting smelly horrible vermins. (I’ve read the Bible from cover to cover and still I fail to understand why God had to create them!)

Ok, confession time. I have blattodephobia (in my case, it’s blattodephobia severest maximus ad disgustus emeticus). I am scared of cockroaches, in plain English.

So’s my wife.

And my daughter.

I strongly believe there is a blattodephobic gene in my family line.

I hated them ever since I could crawl.

I remember one time I put on my long pants and I felt something crawling up my leg!!! Gaaargh! You should have seen me disrobe in lightning speed. My gyrations (and jumping) would have shamed Ricky Martin, Shakira, and Michael Jackson put together. Yup, in it was one big really ugly cockroach hiding inside one of the legs!

Another time, I placed my foot into my shoe and again felt the same sensation! Yup! No prize for guessing what it was. The shoe flew a good few yards.

When I was in Form 5 (or was it 6? I forgot), we had to do dissections in the Biology Exam. I spent the entire month prior to the exam, fasting and praying that the specimen to be dissected will not be a cockroach. I prayed for a frog or a fish; heck give me a chicken, a lamb or a bull, anything! I wouldn’t mind but please God, no cockroaches!

But no, Heaven wanted to test me (God must be smiling and thinking: “Let’s built some character in Jimbo here. Let’s give him trials and tribulations”).

Lo and behold, when the invigilator took out a tiny little box from the boot of his car minutes before the exam (we could see him from the window you see), I knew then that I was doomed. Such a small box could not possibly contain that many frogs/fish/chickens/lambs/bulls for everyone. It HAD to be cockroaches!

And it was.

I was staring my well preserved cockroach minutes later, pinned onto the wax bed. The starting bell rang. Steeling my nerves, I gently grasped one of the dead bug’s legs with my forceps and proceeded to slice open the belly using a scalpel with the other hand. I didn’t notice it but suddenly I felt one of the dead ‘claws’ on the dead bug’s legs caught onto my left index finger! My blattodephobic gene kicked in and I instinctively flung my hand wildly, like some water fowl gone mad doing a mating dance ritual.

Dead bugs do fly. Trust me. I know because my dead cockroach made an amazing trajectory flight over 3 rows of lab tables landing at the back of the lab!

It was 105% humiliation when I had to raise my hand, tell the invigilator what has happened and was escorted to the back to retrieve my post-flight crash landed dead bug. Everyone was staring at me. Blardy cockroach!

Anyway, when I got back to my table with my bug, I didn’t want to touch it anymore and proceeded to draw the anatomy of its abdominal content from memory (I should have done that earlier, sheesh! ).

Oh, here’s another one:

When I was posted to a peripheral hospital as a MO in a small town (with only one traffic light then), we had to rent a house not far from the hospital. What we didn’t know was, we rented the epicentre of the entire local cockroach population. Cockroaches were everywhere, mostly coming out from the squatting toilet hole. You can even see their antenna swaying feelingly even as you go about doing your ‘big business’. Big businesses were done very quickly those days. I didn’t want those antennas feeling my butt.

If we were away for even one night, the next day when we come back, there would be cockroaches seen scurrying here and there. Once we were away for 5 days and on returning home, I (not my wife, she waited outside because she knew it was going to be bad!) went in the house only to be greeted by at least 20 cockroaches resting lazily on the walls!!! And in the cockroach trap we set were about 40 of them (and 1 lizard). I emptied the entire can of Shelltox that day.

Needless to say we were glad to move out eventually.

The ones I really dislike are them that fly! I had one crash landing onto my face. Man, that was truly sick! I swear my pimple outbreaks were because of them!

In my house now, occasionally we still find one or two of them, but mainly tiny ones (I squash them with tissue paper, throw it away and then wash my hands a billion times). Some times a big flying one comes in the house and that’s when the screaming and shouting begin. It’s like Pearl Harbour.

I still have hope of beating this thing. I have one final weapon….

My son don’t seem to have the gene!

Thurs, 270907 @ 0730

 

PS: There is, however, a show that I liked which has animated cockroaches that talk and sing! Not sure if anyone of you have seen ‘Joe’s Apartment’.

Punch Line

A lot of times during my ward round, I actually leave the counselling of patients in the hands of my MO or HO simply because it would save me a lot of time and also enable me to finish the round faster instead of spending time in counselling.

Unfortunately, sometimes this strategy back fires.

Like this scenario, for instance, which happened the day before yesteday. There is this male patient in my ward who has a massive left pleural effusion (which I suspect is probably due to advanced Ca Lung) and because the effusion accumulates as soon as a tapping is done, I suggested to my doctors to counsel the patient on the possibility of performing a chest tube insertion on him (which will help drain the fluid and also allow pleurodesis to be done).

My HO took it upon herself to ‘counsel’ the patient.

She went up to him and said “Encik, boleh saya tumbuk you ka?”

You should have seen the patient’s reaction.

I think what she wanted to say was “Encik boleh saya tebuk…” instead of ‘tumbuk’ (which means ‘to punch’ in Malay!). ‘Tebuk’ means ‘to bore a hole’.

Still, I think a more effective way is to spend time talking to the patient first regarding his condition and why the necessity of the procedure suggested, the pros and cons of the procedure, how the procedure will be carried out and the risks involved. Unfortunately this takes a lot of time.

I think on the whole, we doctors need to improve our communication skills.

Needless to say, the patient declined to be ‘punched’.

Thurs, 270907 @ 0008