I have a juicy medical story to tell that I can actually post here, on the wonderous internet, whilst maintaining my professionally integrity and ethics in medical confidentiality. You see, this particular story does not involve something that happened to somebody else at my work. It happened to me, outside of my job at Fremantle Hospital.
Because my complaint was fairly *sensitive* and *awkward*, I decided to take myself to RPH because I figured the doctors there wouldn’t actually know me personally from Fremantle. Nevertheless, I showed my WA Medical Administrator ID Card to the triage nurse and she whisked me straight through to a comfy bed in the emergency department.
You don’t really need to know the whole story of what happened next, except that I had some student doctors touch me in very strange places, I had an elephant-sized syringe of yellow gel prodded into my butt and I had to pee into about 6 separate cups for pathology. Two consultant physicians saw me (that’s pretty damn good for a public patient in an emergency room) and I ended up being sent home half-cut on a blend of generically-branded painkillers.
This morning I had four different drugs to take (one of them is literally larger than a 20c piece), a medical certificate for two days off work and a massively tender bruise on my buttocks that makes sitting on the couch watching TV surprisingly uncomfortable. Overall, the experience was very interesting, and, although unpleasant, I really aren’t going to complain about being given drugs and time off work.
--- 3 hours ago --- 1 note ---
Having a drink with my good pal Degs at the rooftop bar in Melbourne!
--- 17 hours ago --- 4 notes ---Anonymous asked: Why did you head east? Any good stories?
Went for family holiday. Not particularly, though I was taken aback by how comparability futuristic and culturally rich Melbourne is.
--- 1 day ago --- 2 notes ---
This has been a very busy and productive day.
I have noticed that I desperately need to get myself a flickr, a personal/professional profile website, some business cards and my L-plates.
I am working through issues productively. I am beginning to do all the things of doing whilst I was stuck in high school.
I have realized how far I have come in so many ways. I realize what I have and how blessed I am and what I am capable of in future.
I feel as though nothing needs to change, but the change that is happening merely needs to continue.
This is good.
--- 1 day ago --- 3 notes ---
I got in super-big trouble for taking this photograph. Apparently having a camera on the tarmac makes you a terrorist conspirator or something. They let me go after a stern word and an empty apology.
--- 3 days ago --- 6 notes ---Tonight I was watching the news and saw a story about Demi Moore doing crack or something and having a seizure and ending up in rehab. Although I don’t care at all about any of the facts or characters involved in the story, one thing I noticed is that a recording of the 911 call has been released by authorizes only mere hours after the actual event.
This strikes me as incredibly odd because, under Australian (and presumably British and most European) law, anyone seeking medical or emergency assistance from the government is entitled to complete confidentiality and privacy of their information. I work in an Australian hospital managing information and the very first thing you are told when you start the job is that you never, ever, ever disclose any personal information or data about anyone or anything, ever. It isn’t even ethical to talk about the fact that you know any specific piece of information, even to close friends or family members.
So I just think it is utterly bizarre that, in America, something as sensitive and potentially embarrassing such as a 911 phone call is just given to the media, whether edited or not. If Demi Moore is actually in rehab, I doubt she’d be capable of signing a waiver, and even if she was, she probably wouldn’t want to anyway.
It just doesn’t seem in the least bit logical, because even though the patient concerned is a celebrity, the phone call itself isn’t really of any public interest, importance or significance. It just exposed Demi Moore to an unfair degree of public humiliation without greatly benefiting anyone in any way. Is she not entitled to a reasonable degree of personal freedom and privacy?
--- 3 days ago --- 4 notes ---The more I learn about photography and the more I train my eyes the more I notice blatant errors or poor technique in amateur (and pro!) photographs. It sounds super-snobby but I especially have come to notice things like embarrassingly inadequate depth of field, really poor framing (especially cutting subjects’s arms and legs off in the frame at odd places), slight angling of the horizon, and overly grainy enlargements that “semi-pros” print that just look horrendously terrible.
Another thing that really shits me is that digital photos, especially ultra-wide ones, tend to wash out some highlights straight to ugly white, without much transitioning or colour graduations. Often a sky in a landscape or sunset will have ugly overexposed white blotches whilst the foreground is too dim or grainy. I know that is inherent where there is great brightness difference, but apparently film handles very bright contrasting colours much better and doesn’t wash out to white so quickly, and so I am really really looking forward to shooting plenty more with film in future.
--- 3 days ago --- 3 notes ---Why is it perfectly OK to hook a fish through it’s mouth, pull it from the water and suffocate it slowly to death, but it isn’t alright for another country with a different cultural history to harvest whales in much the same way?
I think it is pretty disappointing that people who are happy to plunge live crustaceans into boiling water incite race hate to the Japanese about whaling.
That’s how I see it, anyway.
--- 4 days ago --- 2 notes ---
Banksy on Advertising
“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are “The Advertisers” and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”
~ Banksy
(Source: elledark)
--- 5 days ago --- 6,760 notes ---
