Education is an Extreme Sport

This one's for Dr "Kitty" M.


Two weeks ago I threw myself out of a plane.



Willingly.


Granted, I had a professional skydiver strapped to my back.

Furthemore, the professional skydiver had a parachute strapped to his back.


The combination of these two facts resulted in a thrilling, exhiliratingly extreme experience, at 9000 feet above my beautiful city.

Yes, I know. I willingly chose to put my life in danger.

I didn't want to be left out, you see. Life-threatening extreme sports are what everyone is into nowadays. And by everyone I mean schoolchildren.



Like the 17 year old patient of ours today who was stabbed in the heart by his fellow pupil at school.

Serves him right for being foolhardy enough to want an education, I guess.

He died, after being rushed into our emergency unit,
after having his chest cracked open in the front room,
after being sped off to theatre by our valiant surgeons.


He died by bleeding to death on the operating table.


Fuck bungee jumping off Bloukrans.


Fuck skydiving.


Next on my adrenaline rush list... school on the Cape Flats.

The write way to kill your friend

Monday morning 10am: (No lies!)


I'm busy dissecting through the right side of my patient's chest wall with blunt dissecting scissors.

I have made sure that I'm working in the space between the fourth and fifth ribs on that side, and my fingers are hurting from the effort it takes to make it through the muscles into the space surrounding the lungs known as the pleural cavity.



I'm patiently waiting to hear that ultimately satisfying "POP!" as I breach the pleural space.

But this is taking longer than usual, and I'm getting irritated because the patient won't stop screaming and writhing around, despite the more than adequate local anaesthetic and analgesia I've given him.

I think he's behaving this way because he's dressed in a school uniform, and is fifteen years old.

I glance over at his blood-stained school rucksack on the floor next to him. For some reason I find this overused hand-me-down school bag very touching. It reminds me of my own schooling, and of just how much of a nerd I was. I really loved school.

Then again, unlike this dude, I was never scared of being stabbed by my classmate during class for using their eraser.

He was stabbed with a ballpoint pen on the right side of his chest, in a vicious enough way to puncture his pleural membranes and cause a pneumothorax collapsing his right lung.



Sorry kid.

You missed acquiring knowledge in first and second period.
But you've at least been educated, if somewhat ironically, in the lesson that the pen can sometimes be, as mighty as, the sword...