Us and Them

So I was talking to someone the other day, and apart from being generally very lovely, she said a couple of things which suddenly abruptly reminded me of the gap between her generation and mine. They were jarring enough, in fact, that I'm still not totally sure that she wasn't just trying to get a reaction.

Firstly, when I said that I was at Canterbury hospital at the moment, she joked about how it's a surprise that the women in that area are able to have operations, because of how they're totally all Muslim and won't want anyone to see them undressed (which, what? I'm not a veiled "modestly dressed" chick, but I don't go around showing people my bits & pieces left right and centre, so surely when it comes to things like undressing for operations your average Muslim woman and I are on the same page, viz. "alright, I guess I must, sigh"?) A bit later she said that it was ridiculous that the whole hospital catering had probably been thrown off because it was the fasting month and that was silly and inconsiderate of them. (To be honest, I was almost impressed that she even knew it was Ramadan at the moment) This is someone who I remember once making a joke about how any Muslim person is likely to unexpectedly blow you and themselves up or shoot people who make jokes about them.

This sort of thing always throws me, because WHAT. Leaving aside the obvious but frivolous note that I can understand that you might want to shoot someone who's carrying on like that, there's the fact that it's just completely bollocks. Most mass murders, statistically, are committed by well-off white American men. Also, Ramadan comes, as I understand it, with specific disclaimers, like that if you're too old or too young or too sick or whatever, you should eat appropriately. Much like you're allowed to eat non-Halal food if you're starving. I mean, this sensible stuff is literally written into the Qu'ran in a way that it isn't in the Bible, probably because they'd had almost a thousand years to observe the way the other religions of the Book were going and to notice which things were causing big problems before Islam even started. It's got crazy fundamentalists just like Christianity has the Westboro Baptist Church, but on the whole it's a pretty sensible religion. I would be pretty horrified if people went "you're a WASP sort of chick in a predominantly christian culture, therefore you must be just like those "GOD HATES FAGS & LOVES DEAD SOLDIERS" Westboro dudes!" and I seriously think it's pretty much equivalent

Secondly, I jokingly referred to one of my friends in a way which might have made it sound like he was a potential boyfriend, and to forestall the whole misunderstanding, I said that he was "as gay as a hatful of glitter" which is not the sort of thing I would say about someone with whom I was not close, or someone who might not like being described like that, but which is a way to describe some of my friends which has the advantage of sounding as fond as I am of them. But she maybe didn't hear me properly, and asked me to repeat what I'd said and then went "Oh! A poofter! Why didn't you just say he was a poofter?". I don't even think I said anything, I think I just sort of blinked in a taken-aback way at that point. I wanted to say "because I'm a good person? Because that's not the sort of language I have any right or inclination to use? Just like I wouldn't describe a black person as a "nigger", that's just not a word I ever ever use?" (Man, I don't even like to type words like that, but I definitely feel like it's important to be clear in a discussion like this. Still, I apologise to anyone offended my my use of such horrible terminology!)

I remember once, as a child of maybe 10, wandering into a room in which some family friends were talking/laughing and asking what they I'd missed: what was the conversation about? And a middle aged, well-educated grown man looked up at me, a 10 year old, and said "we're talking about pillow-biters". To this day I recall thinking "That's not a nice thing to say. It's not a nice thing to say at all, but it certainly isn't something you should say to me, I'm only a child!" I mean, you know you're doing it wrong when even the kid you're talking to knows that this isn't language to use to children, that it's vulgar and inappropriate and weirdly reduces entire people's personhood to one particular sex act.

I think I've never really managed to get on board with that sort of jokes, with jokes based on the "Othering" of people and groups. I mean, I suppose that implies that I never told an Irish joke, which is obviously not true, but since during my youth I was not in any way aware of the tensions between Ireland and Britain or the long history of discrimination which the Irish have faced, the Irish were, to me, not a Them, but merely a subset of Us. They existed in our lives exclusively as attractive people with great accents, so it never seemed like they were the oppressed, just that "irish" was a handy joke-shorthand for "stupid person who is going to be the butt of this joke" (which now I come to say it still sounds terrible, actually).

Maybe it's because I have so many friends and acquaintances from so many walks of life? This is especially true in this era of facebook, I'm constantly reminded of the lives and individuality of friends who I'd otherwise have forgotten. But I have a lot of friends who are gay, who are Muslim, and even, gasp!, who are Irish. None of these groups are a Them to me, they are Us.

Maybe I am so inclusive in my Us-ing that it loses all meaning? I mean, I tend to pretty much assume that all people are doing the best that they can in this crazy old world etc., so that the Us is pretty much everyone and the Them is maybe viruses, mosquitoes, aliens/zombies/etc. as well as iniquity, entropy, and the harsh realities of the world. We're all against those things, even is some of Us try to fight them in ways which make others among Us think of them as Them, as exacerbating the problem.

Is this just privelege, though? Is it easy for me to grandly gesture around me at all the people of the world and be all "See how inclusive and great I am?! I think we're all in this together! Us!" like Mufasa: "Everything the light touches, Simba". I mean, it probably is. I assume most people are on the same team as me because I've never really suffered. I've never been systematically victimised or done down by other people, I am not Them to anyone but the oppressed, so I magnanimously forgive their resentment? This is obviously true, that this is all incredibly redolent of middle class privelege. The only "minority" group to which I belong is "women" and we make up half the population. Sure there is some male privelege to which I have no access, but it's certainly true that women are also priveleged in other ways, and that being as educated-upper-middle-class-white-Australian as I am, I'm one of those women for whom the gender gap is rendered least obtrusive and intrusive. I can happily get outraged about the terrible things that happen to women who are poor or American or Iraqi or in an ethnic minority or undereducated or just plain unlucky, safe in the knowledge that the odds are good that none of that will happen to me.

So, self-analysis aside, I generally just really don't get Us and Them thinking. I don't understand what Americans don't understand about universal healthcare being good because it stops the poor dying and the dying being impoversished. I don't understand why "stop the boats" politicians can happily say "Australia hasn't got room for EVERYONE! We have finite resources!" but don't see the need to address the problem of what refugees should do next, if no country in the world will have them. For some people that's Them so it's Their Problem, but I've always sort of felt like that was some of Us being subjected to injustices at home, Us who might drown, Us who have literally nowhere to go.I just... I just don't understand.

It's also a big thing in aging, I think, this Us and Them thinking. My grandmother is 100, so people always seem to treat her as if she were either a child or just a very serious humourless old person. Which is not how you would treat any other adult. It's weird that people object to the idea of old people having sex or drinking. It's weird that no-one ever jokes with them or is silly and frivolous. I don't know if it's that we're so afraid that one day we'll be old that we tell ourselves that really they were never young like us.

I really think that even if "We are all Us" is the great white lie, and ignores the difficulties faced by many people who lack our priveleges, if you have to err (and you pretty much do, because you're only human) it's surely better to err on the side of inclusiveness. Better to end up thinking of everyone as Us until 'Them' becomes meaningless than to end up in an ivory tower with a tiny select group of Us, sneering down at the masses of Them. That way lies madness, and Nazism, and Godwin's Law.

10 words

So, one of the guys in our class (a self-sacrificing one, obviously), is putting together a yearbook for our class at uni, since this is our last year. And he sent around things asking for a photo, and a 10 word quote, and a lot of other things, I imagine. I don’t know what question 3 was, or if indeed there was a question 3, because 2 was just such a stumbling block for me. Also, and more importantly, for some reason the version I downloaded went all error 404 and I couldn’t get hold of another copy, and when I asked people, the version they sent seemed, as far as I could tell, to be a totally different series of questions, things like “What were your best and worst moments in Med?” and “Who is your favourite teacher?”.

Since I only have internet on my phone this evening, due to an acute case of being at Grandma’s house, where there’s no wifi except the neighbours’ which is, cruelly and tantalisingly, called “Grandma”, presumably in reference to someone else’s ancestor, and sadly one who has password-security. You can’t get reception here for one of those little gadget things with wifi on them, either, because my grandmother's house is essentially in the side of a stony hill/cliff, and satellites apparently view us as being definitely in the shade of a few tons of rocks. This means that, the deadline for submission being today, and my organisational skills being what you have no doubt come to expect, I’m sadly unlikely to get my thingy submitted.

I always want to do those sort of questionnaires, I mean well, and I open them with the best intentions in the world, but somehow, I’m really not very good at them. I do not know who my favourite teachers were. I’m sure that some of them made an impression, but we haven’t really had lecturers in a meaningful way for like 2 years, and even then, they were sporadic and evanescent. Most people will end up nominating the guy who taught first year anatomy. Mostly they will tell themselves that this is because he was cool and funny (he was mildly funny), but this will not be the real reason, not really. The real reason is that he was the only lecturer who we reliably saw 2 to 3 times a week for most of a year. He’s probably the only name most people even remember. This gives him such a staggering advantage that he really didn’t need the Batman references and the funny voices and the mnemonics which he put in the notes but which didn’t make all that much sense. He was always going to be the only dude anyone could remember the name of. Which is a pity, because we definitely had some whom I liked more. The ones who taught really well, and the ones who I personally thought were more amusing. Tragically, I can’t at all remember the name of the dude who had a sense of humour so dry that it took me almost a month to realise it pervaded his lectures. He was great, although his subject was sadly as dry as his humour, so frankly I don’t know if it helped. Trying to perk up pharmacology (I think it was pharmacology?) with the occasional dry joke is like trying the perk up Uluru by gluing a packet's worth of marshmallows to it. It’s a laudable effort, but you’re never going to make a truly appreciable difference. Also people are likely to object because of the disrespectful vandalism of a piece of world heritage, I guess.

"Best moment" also sort of stumped me, mainly because I’m so self-absorbed that all the things which were actually legitimately Med-related (rather than just happening to be rad road trips with people I met in Med, or hanging out with lovely people or whatever) which were “best” type moments were incredibly twee, like “comforting an old woman whose husband was dying and having her say that I was the only person who’d made her feel better in months”. Which is nice for me to have a moment of smug I’m-a-good-person-ness, but actually sucks for her, and for him, and in the wider implications that people obviously haven’t really been trying very hard at all to comfort her at all.

Worst moments are sort of similar. I remember that for the first week of my 3rd year, I was on ICU rotation, and a patient died every single day I was there. I remember realising that the old guy who I’d made friends with in ICU (partly because he was pretty cool, and partly because he was the only patient there the whole time I was there, and who wasn’t unconscious) had died during my Anaesthetics rotation. I remember being in ED and pumping fluid into the cannula of an old lady who’d come in with no measurable blood pressure at all, until my hand hurt, and being told after 30 minutes to stop, because she wasn’t recovering and wasn’t likely to (I think she actually miraculously did, though, which was nice), and that I should just go back to the area where we hung around waiting to be of any use, and I remember realising that there was nothing I could do, but that I was sort of damned if I was going to give up doing the only thing which might actually help someone which I’d been able to do all week. I also remember the realisation that going “nah, I’ll just stay here, since it doesn’t matter either way and there’s nothing better to do” made me sound simultaneously like I didn’t give a shit and like I thought I was the slow motion hero of a daytime television movie, and didn’t realise that I was an essentially useless and incredibly tiny cog in the machinery of the hospital; not so much a loose cannon who wouldn’t give up on hope, as a loose screw making everyone else’s jobs just that little bit more difficult.

But really, the worst moment I remember recently was standing there uselessly listening to a registrar take a history, like I had done all day every day of that week, every day of that term, and frankly most of the degree, just standing there not really learning because of not really being able to participate, listening to the loud, viscerally distressing, gurgling guttural noise of someone in the next bed having some of the excess phlegm suctioned out of their chests, like I had done every day that week, since that patient had been admitted, while my feet hurt, and thinking “I’m going to spend the next several years of my life doing this and I hate it, but it was my own choice so I can only blame myself, and damned if I’m going to quit now and start all over again. But I wish I could just get a nice sensible desk job, 9-5, with my own chair, my own space, and any actually useful role whatsoever. Why did I quit being a receptionist? God I miss filing and answering phones and being mildly bullied by insecure middle aged women, constantly buoyed by the knowledge that one day I wouldn’t be doing that.”

That was probably my worst “moment”, but honestly, the good and bad in these things don’t really take place in articulated moments. I’ve made some really great friends, and I’m really pleased that one day I’ll be able to actually do something actually useful (or indeed do anything at all!) but that’s not a moment, that’s just a long slow rumbling crescendo of hope. The worst thing has been what that last moment represented, spending years being useless, depressed, surrounded by people like me who were used to being good at things, all being slowly crushed by the knowledge that we aren’t good at this, and that we could never know everything that we ought to know, by the knowledge that each of us will one day have to watch a person die and wonder if it was our own fault, that each of us really will be responsible for someone’s death at some point, and that often that will be something which will never really leave us. It’s been years of standing in hospitals around patients and feeling like we’re part of something which dehumanises them and makes them feel judged and like their dignity, such as it was, is of no value to anyone (seriously, you try to describe the body habitus of an overweight lady who is clearly sensitive about it, in front of her, to a doctor who will correct you if you don’t make it adequately clear that she is overweight, while she lies in bed chilled and exposed, with 4 other well-dressed up and comers standing around her looking at her appraisingly, and tell me you managed it without feeling like you made someone’s day just that extra bit worse. On a day when they’re already in hospital no less), while every single staff member of the hospital system feels like it’s their right and their duty to take us down a peg or two; doctors who’ve already decided that we’re arrogant little twerps who need to be knocked down before we can be rebuilt, nursing staff who are convinced that we hate them and think we’re better than them, no matter how clearly you tell them that you respect them and that the only reason you’re doing Medicine not Nursing is that you’re not actually up to the challenge, who resent us no matter how nice we are to them and no matter how deeply we respect their capabilities, judgement and career.

It hasn’t been a single moment, that worst moment. It’s been one long slow dragging moment which has lasted at least 4 years.

But damned if I want to put that in the yearbook. A yearbook should be a thing of fun! Of nostalgia and “look how young and hopeful we were!” Plus, it’s not always that bad, it’s mainly only that bad for a few hours any given day, or whenever you’re asked to try and decide on what's been the single worst moment of something.

Also, obviously, it saddens me how much more clearly I remember the worsts than the bests. That’s a pity because it’s been quite a nice 4 years really, I’m sure.

But still, the real killer is that 10 word quote thing.

Seriously, what can you say in ten words? This much:

I’ve enjoyed this degree and I reckon that one day}

The best thing about Medicine is that can always}

I hope that in 10 years’ time I can truly}

Can’t wait to graduate and help people and finally earn}

I’m going to really miss uni holidays, but I}

I mean, maybe there are people who could do this, but I am MANIFESTLY not one of those people. I never use 10 words where 1840-so-far would do! And even if I could, I’m not even sure what they’re supposed to be! Are they our hopes for the future? A reflection on the degree? A hilarious out of context quote? I seriously have no idea.

“If I had my time again I’d open a bakery”, how’s that? It's a bit harsh, probably, and also not quite true, since bakers have to get up super early. “Some days this has really sucked but other days I’ve had the wherewithal to hope it sucks less later” is too long, and doesn’t convey the hope I’d like to inject into that latter phrase. Famous quotes like “Why be famous when you can be infamous?” sound sinister. “Hope I’m a better doctor than Med student, good grief!” is nice, accurate and the right length, but I sort of feel like if it’s the only phrase that works, other people will have thought of it too. Plus, there’s the more pressing concerns of (a) what if I’m not, oh dear! And (b) I don’t have access to the damn questionnaire anyway so it’s all for naught.

Maybe he’ll give us all an extension? If he does, I solemnly swear to get organised earlier next time, to use my 10 word thing just there, unless I come up with a better one, to find out the name of a lecturer or teacher I liked, and not to put in all that downer crap about worst moments. It's been quite alright, really. Really it has.