Chocolate septic balls ( to paraphrase the cook in Southpark)

When your wife suspects you of dipping your ding dong in the pretty young thing next door...you end up as a diagnosis in the new-patient book as follows:

Depending on your views on justice and relationships...some might say she had a perfectly warranted sudden craving for nuts....?!!?!!!

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.

Christmas Carnage

I worked every single day of the Christmas weekend.

It was tough. Doctors, paramedics, police throughout the country celebrated Christmas by working themselves to the bone.

Oh but there's one dude responsible for this:

I blame Santa Claus...you drunken red-suited buffoon!






Well done buddy.

Good Job.
Good Job.


Maybe you did you not read the freaking tourist manual to the Cape Flats that I sent you?!! Huh??!



Rule ONE: Do not drink the tik-laced milk and dagga cookies left out for you. IT’S A TRAP!

Oh it seemed tasty did it?
Oh you just couldn't help yourself, right?
What's that? It would have been rude not to partake of what was offered to you then hey?

Is that why you screwed up and rewarded the good little gangsters, and drug-induced psychotics, and alcohol sodden short-tempered aggressive folk with knives, and guns, and bullets, and other such cheerful weaponry? Huh? Because you were HIGH?

Panga's: The gift that keeps on killing.

Tra la laaaa! ( That's me warming up my voice for the Cape Flats Casualty Christmas Carol)

Ready? Here we go:

On the weekend of Christmas, those shifts they offered me:

One dead child
Two thoracotomies
Three gunshot abdomens
Four beaten wives
Five drunk drivers
Six stabbed chests
Seven drug-induced psychotics...


Can you tell that I was not impressed by the Christmas weekend's holy shitstorm and emphatically not overcome with the spirit of Christmas joy and love?


So here's a tip for next year, Santa Claus: Rudolph and that gang, me thinks it best to leave them at home. That red nose of his is like a shiny conspicuous beacon, and that jolly red suit of yours - BURN IT!

To achieve successful delivery of the goods, without getting stabbed or forced to feed on narcotics, you need to blend in man!

First, remove your two front teeth. ( This will have the added benefit of making you sympathetic to the plight of those cute freckle-faced munchkins who desire just that waiting for them under the christmas tree.)

Next, get a tattoo of something obscene on your forehead. Something like, "I kill for fun and rape for joy". That's just a little something I read on the face of one of my patients a while ago - maybe you could use that one.

Learn some choice phrases in Afrikaans to throw them off the scent that you're actually a do-gooder come to bring light and joy to the dark corners of the Cape Flats.......you know the filthy vulgar ones I'm talking about.
No?
Go back a few posts and have a little read - you'll be sure pick some up from those.


This way - you can wander around the freaky scary place our patients call home and offer those in need some assistance. Your goodie bag may need to be slightly different from the one you're traditionally used to. If you can fit in one first-class education system, a health system run by competent people and some regular nutritious FOOD for the poor...perhaps I'll reconsider your current low-ranking on my list of favourite people of all time...

At the moment you are down there with the Easter Bunny ( who dropped mandrax laced eggs over the Easter Weekend) and the Tooth Fairy - who went rogue and is making a killing off the lessor-incisored natives of this crazy town, used her takings to start smuggling drugs and is now known on the Flats as...the Tik Fairy...*drum roll *

Friday night Folly

The following is an account of our end of the month friday night shift a few weeks ago. It's long. It has no structure. It might all seem a little pointless...

Which is pretty much a description of the evening itself:


My arrival at work is unfortunately not signalled by the large marching band, fireworks and a rip-roaring guitar solo played by a topless Greek God that I think I deserve.

Oh no...instead I am greeted with that age-old traditional greeting, peculiar to the lesser-incisor'ed native of the Cape Flats:
"Jou ma se poes!" (your mother's cunt!).

Seems that one of the psych patients has escaped from the front room, and is currently freaking out in the parking lot outside the unit, screaming obscenities at everyone. He is wearing a hospital blanket and shoes. As I walk past him into the unit, the security guards rush past me to try and capture him...but this one is a wily little bastard who immediately dropped the blanket, exposing his naked buttocks to the world and took off running like a man escaped from prison into the darkness...They might catch him, they might not.
Judging by the pendulous belly on the security guard, my money is on the patient.


I walk into the unit giggling...but this false sense of fun is soon arrested when I realise that there are no other doctors to be seen. Alarm bells start ringing when no-one is in the front room, it's a sign that they are somewhere else. And that somewhere else is usually in the resuscitation room, where there is probably some major shit going down.

I sheepishly shrink off to the tea-room to deposit my things, before braving the carnage I'm certain is waiting for me.

I'm not disappointed.

Dr MB and Dr Mommy are busy doing CPR on a morbidly obese lady in one corner.This happens in the resus room all the time. HOwever, what is peculiar about this is that they are performing this potentially lifesaving manoeuvre on the floor! Hospital is at capacity so no more stretchers available. Silly me to expect stretchers, in a fucking hospital.

What's that Department of Health? Oh, you don't give a shit? Tell me something I don't know.

Oposite them, Dr K and the surgeon are frantically trying to gain intravenous access on a patient. This man has been shot through his chest, possibly through his heart/aorta/lungs/trachea/oesophagus....blood pressure is dropping very quickly and things are looking pretty grave over there...

I notice the medical intern at the back of the room struggling to intubate one of his patients in severe respiratory distress...Looks like that's where I'm needed most, so I make my way over to help.

However, my efforts are thwarted by the head nurse who thrusts a fat folder into my hands and tells me that there is an old man having a heart attack in the waiting room. ARGH!

Sorry little intern...you're on your own.

As expected, the old man is of the Kentucky Fried Chicken-loving kind, and I can see the nicotine-stains on his teeth. According to his clinical symptoms and ECG he most definitely is having a heart attack.

By this time the resuscitation on the lady on the floor has been called off.
We couldn't save her and she couldn't save herself. Call the family. Break the bad news and move her out of there. My heart attack guy needs a bed in resus so that we can initiate treatment and try to save what's left of his myocardium, so that he can get to work on destroying that too .

As I wheel the old man into resus the gunshot wound patient is being wheeled out of resus to the trauma theatre...
He doesn't make the few metres to the operating table, and goes into cardiorespiratory arrest in transit.
All efforts to resuscitate him fail.
I wonder why he got shot? Was he the bad guy or the good guy? I suppose it doesn't really matter..

I stabilise Heart Attack Guy ( we speak about our patients in terms of their diseases, rarely bothering to learn their names) and hand him over to the medical team.

What a start to the shift! As I walk out of resus and back into the front room I am confronted with a warzone.

The front room looks like it has been the site of a recent explosion, people shouting, people wandering around aimlessly, people crying, people everywhere.

In five years time I am gong to have post-traumatic stress disorder and then I'm going to have Vietnam-war-like flashbacks to this moment.

I am immediately cornered by the staff from the ambulance vehicles who have brought us five patients involved in an MVA. Where in God's name are we going to put these people? As I wearily start accepting the patients I hear the door creak open to reveal the paramedics wheeling some more people in on stretchers.

Doesn't it ever end?

Despite the ambulances dropping off new patients, there are still about twenty unseen patients names in the book from the previous shift. Some of them have been here for more than six hours waiting to be seen. They are scattered all over the front room. standing, sitting, lying on the floor. There are no more stretchers available and the super-intendant is taking forever to close the hospital despite being at full capacity. I secretly want to curse the previous team for leaving us with so many to see, but I know that they were just as busy as we are and that I can't really blame them.

A little while later I hear a commotion in the corner, and look up as the police escort two violent psychiatric patients into our unit for assessment. While trying to wrestle them to the ground, the policemen are sending impatient looks our way as they wait for one of the three of us on for the night to sedate the patients so they can carry on with their jobs. I ignore them.

Almost immediately some traffic officers join the party and escort in three drunken drivers for blood alcohol testing. I most definitely ignore them.

Christ almighty I'm seriously hungry. Not sure when I'll get a chance to eat.
While contemplating how many patients could have been seen in the time it takes for me to eat supper, I notice an old demented granny using the dustbin to poo in.
After I shouting at her not to do so she stops, mid-poo and trundles back to her bed...dripping the rest of the interrupted evacuation in neat little puddles on the floor behind her.

I have suddenly lost my appetite.

Straight ahead lies an epileptic patient who is confused after having a seizure. He promptly whips out his penis to pee on the floor next to the bed. Some of it splashes on the escort of the patient lying next to him and a fight ensues between the escort and the confused epileptic.

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

I try to comfort myself with the fact that I'm gaining invaluable experience tonight that I probably wouldn't have learned anywhere else.

What I'm actually learning from these patients is how to make the most of one's Friday night:

Get drunk, drive a car, crash and fracture your pelvis. Get drunk, walk through the ganglands alone at night, get stabbed multiple times. Get drunk, get high on tik, walk in the middle of the road and get hit by a car, fracturing you tibia in three places. The fact that you are too high and drunk to realise that your leg is moving in the most sickening paradoxical motion unintended by nature's design is a testament to the analegesic effects of beer. I can feel the pieces of your shattered tibia grinding against each other while applying the plaster of paris. I think I'm going to vomit.


And what about you lady? What lesson will I learn from you? I see that you are lying face down on the stretcher and you have decorated yourself with long curly braids, earrings, and a large knife handle protruding from your back. I assume that the blade is stuck somewhere in your chest cavity. Tell me, what style of knife handle is in fashion now? MUST get myself one of those for the summer.

Luckily for you, the knife gods divined that the blade should only penetrate superficially under your skin so I can proceed to cut the thing out of your back.

Cool! At last something fun to do!


And...oh...here we go right on time at 04h00 hours. It's the nightly on-call entertainment, performed by the resident nutjobs.

Settle in y'all ! Grab the popcorn! Tonight it's a gut-wrenching caterwauling ballad from psych patient number 6 of the evening. The verse is an ecclectic mix of beautiful arabic verse sporadically punctuated by "Julle vokken holnaaiers". (you fucking bumfuckers). The chorus consists of her screaming obscenities as we wrestled her to the ground to sedate her.

Furthemore her insane soliloquy is manifested by an interpretive movement piece performed by psych patient number 5.
He has been pacing around the big doctor's desk in the middle of the front room incessantly for the last half an hour.
Round and round and round on a mission to nowhere, wearing nothing but a hospital gown and a cool leather hat on his head.
It's impossible to stop him circling.
I dodge bumping into him for the nth time that evening, as I bend down to take blood from another patient (who is lying on the floor). As I do so,the flesh above the back of my jeans is unintentionally revealed. This sets the psych patient into a maniacal hypersalivatory state, resulting in him screaming at me to:

"sit jou hol weg. Maak toe jou hol! Dis MY hol, net ek kan jou holle sien!!!Die ander mans kan gaan kak!" (Put away your bum! Close up your bum! That's MY bum, only I can see your bum! The other men can go to hell!)

And that's when we rugby-tackled him, stapled a note that said "please abort" to his forehead and injected enough valium to send him straight back to his days as a fetus in the womb. Hopefully his mom would read the note and take our advice.

My sense of humour is nonexistent at this point and EVERYTHING is irritating me.

Even this poor 17 year girl who was depressed enough to try and take her own life by ingesting shampoo, hair gel, and toothpaste.

Even this 20 year old girl with multiple bruises after being beaten up by her boyfriend, and claiming that it was her fault she got hit.

Even the very frustrating fact that the nurses are only taking the temperatures of every second patient and not testing anybody's urine.

Speaking of urine - I should have gone to pee three hours ago.

But I'm NOT using the front room toilet. I don't care that I'll probably develop a urinary tract infection or an atonic bladder from keeping it in, but the last time I went in there, there was a delirious patient pissing all over the walls. And there was runny poo in the bowl.

The night is almost over anyway, I'll just keep it in until I get home and then burn a hole into the porcelain when I do eventually relieve myself.

Soon the new team arrives. I barely make it through the handover ward round, mumbling through my presentations of the numerous patients I don't remember that I've seen...I'm sure the consultant thinks I'm a retard.

Bleary-eyed and hypomanic from sleep deprivation, I stumble through my front door.
How did I get home? Did I drive? I can't remember.

While undressing I discover a huge blood stain on my sock. With no sign of injury to my foot I can only assume that the blood belonged to one of the trauma victims I saw last night.

What the FUUUUUUUCK!?!?!

What other bodily fluids have been deposited on my person that I don't know about?!?!

YUK!

I scrub myself raw with nuclear waste just to make sure I killed whatever was lurking on my skin.

I then collapse into bed like a boneless toneless fleshy lump. The most I can manage is to open my mouth while my husband feeds me breakfast...

I'm barely alive, but I survived the Friday night nastiness...

Only ten hours till I'm back for the Saturday night slaughter...

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...

I'll just die if I don't get my hands on that jacket!

I'm a fashionista.

I'm obsessed with clothes.

I'm a woman so this is not really that suprising, but sometimes I even amaze myself at the outfits I come up with. Can I just brag a little bit and say that I've won two best-dressed awards in the last three years: the first being at the end of medschool,( Best dressed student) and the second at the end of internship (best dressed intern).

That being said - not even I would go to the lengths this guy, my patient, did for fashion:

My patient last night was absolutely distraught. He was crying when he told me that while he was walking home he was held up by five men who demanded that he give them his money.

This he did willingly.

They then did the unthinkable horrific thing of asking him to hand over his wool-lined leather bomber jacket.

*insert blood-curdling-fashionista-scream here*

This man absolutely refused.

So the assailants pulled out their gun,and held it threateningly to his head.

Despite impending death, the man still refused.

Was this jacket a family heirloom? No.
Was it the last thing his father wore before dying a hero in the war? No.
It was just a really good-looking well cut real leather jacket.

The enraged gunmen, then used the back of the gun to butt him on the head, and forcibly removed his jacket.

My patient, instead of thanking his lucky stars that they did not shoot him, ran after them screaming and demanding that they give his jacket back, which is when they decided to stab him.

Did I mention that my patient was gay? Not that it's of any significance, other than the fact that only a very fashionable gay man could have more passion for clothes than a woman.

If only I had my awards with me last night I would have instantly, unthinkingly and ceremoniously presented them to this man.

Some women will kill for clothes. Some gay men , apparently, are prepared to die for them.


p.s. This post is dedicated to my mom, from whom I inherited the style gene.

Sneaky psychs.

This was truly bizarre.

The security guard wheeled a young man into the unit at about 19h00 last night. This man was totally unresponsive and slumped lifelessly in the wheelchair.

He did not look chronically ill. He was not bleeding. He had no bruises. He had no broken bones. Also, he had no escort with him.

Thus - we had absolutely no history other than that the security guard found him lying on the floor at the entrance to the hospital.

The man was warm, and alive. Blood pressure, pulse, respiration, temperature, oxygen saturation, haemoglobin, urine and glucose were all perfectly normal. But patient was totally unresponsive.

We tried all the cruel ways they taught us of trying to elicit a response:

Deep pressure on the fingernail beds,
knuckles pressed hard into the sternum,
pinching the skin under the tricep,
and my worst - twisting the nipple.

Alas, he gave us nothing to work with.

We have no other tests available to us after hours, so we referred him to a secondary hospital for further investigation. While waiting for the ambulance to arrive we kept him on the stretcher in the unit.

Whilst processing the constant supply of patients, we kept monitoring him. But he stayed horizontal and unresponsive, mouth agape and eyes open.
I became worried about his corneas so I taped soft pads over his eyeballs to protect them from drying out.

The health factory continued to process patients well into the night.

At about 23h00, we were suddenly shaken by a huge commotion.

Our unresponsive friend had, in a spectacular and violent manner, suddenly jumped off the stretcher, pulled his drip out and was swearing that we should stop "putting shit in his veins". He was a very tall, well built man who was by then frothing at the mouth and glaring at all of us with mean intent. He climbed onto the desk and proclaimed ominously while gesturing around the unit: "All of this is mine. I want it. It's all mine."

The security guard in trauma tried to coax him down, but he bolted, and ran through the hospital in his underwear and hospital gown screaming, until he got outside where he began trying to open the doors of the cars in the parking lot.

It took four security guards and an electric tazer to take the man down.

They then "escorted" him to the police station next door and I didn't see him again.

Bizzaro!

What a sneaky psych patient!

Such strange things happen in this part of the world. This man must have been psychotic. He did not display any classical signs of delirium, or dementia. This was psychiatric...I'm beginning to develop a sixth sense about these things.
They seek me out these psych patients.
My colleagues are calling me the psych whisperer.

I'm still not sure what exactly happened there...no use dwelling on it though. No doubt I'll get a similar case in a few weeks time. History repeats itself often in this trauma unit.

Prison games

It is really not fun in the trauma unit.

From the broken filthy chairs we sit on, to the never-ending supply of emergencies to deal with...it's not what one would call a healthy working environment, or a good night out.


So, we find ways of surviving the onslaught, just to make sure we don't get too depressed and blow our own brains out.

One of these ways is inventing games to play while at work.

This particular game can only be played when the police bring in a prisoner with non life-threatening injuries.

Nobody knows I'm playing the game - that would be unethical of course - I play it with myself and it's all undercover. Under the cover of my skull and inside my own brain.

The opponents are myself, and my cynicism.

What I do is, I don't say anything to the police, except asking them to seat the handcuffed patient in front of me.

Then I play the role of the doctor and ask the patient where it hurts, where it's bleeding, how I can ease suffering etc.

Standard and correct doctor behaviour.

Once I've built up a rapport with the patient, I like to ask how they got their injuries.

Note - I don't ask why they're in handcuffs - just how the injuries happened - for documentation purposes.

What follows is usually a very long story about how the patient was just minding his own business on a street corner when he was attacked, and that the police got confused and arrested the wrong guy.

The prisoner is , without fail, always incredibly polite, well-behaved and upstanding.

I listen, and take all this in. I force myself to believe everything they tell me - hoping and praying with all my heart that this is the complete and utter truth.

Then, comes the crunch point. I interview the police to hear their side of the story.

And I can tell you, they NEVER have the same story. Never.

Mostly , the prisoner was doing exactly the opposite of minding his own business and was either beaten up by the community who caught him, or physically reprimanded by the police while being arrested.

The hard part of the game is not judging the patients when they tell me their story. I like to see how long I can hold off my skepticism. It's especially hard when I examine a prisoner and find the frightening gang tattoos covering his body.

I've seen some insane things tattoed on people's bodies, but these two particularly stand out.


1: If you fuck with me I will kill your wife.

This was tattoed on this guy's FOREHEAD! It had the hangman drawing next to it for further emphasis that he meant what he said. Scary.


2: I rape for fun and kill for joy.

This was tattoed on this man's torso. I could only imagine what he'd done to his victims. Turns out he had been a criminal for many years, until somebody gave him a taste of his own medicine and stabbed him with a sharpened bicycle spoke in his spine. He is now a paraplegic and thus rendered completely unthreatening.

Karma? You've got to believe it.

Unfortunately in this bit of trauma unit fun - Cynicism wins all the time.

I have never won this game.

Which is, I think, exactly why I keep playing it, to force myself to have faith in humanity, despite the gross misbehaviour of its citizens toward one another.

I pulled that last bit out of my subconscious. I don't usually like to go there. There are things in there I've worked long and hard to keep well buried. That was just a little taste. Don't expect a full meal. If you're reading a post and there's a lot of psycho-babble - you know I've gone there and am probably hugging my laptop and blubbering in a corner.

SNVL (Episode 2)

One should always listen to one's inner voice. ALWAYS.

Today mine was screaming - "STAY IN BED! DO NOT GO TO WORK!"

I think the staying in bed part might have to do with the benzodiazepines (valium) I took last night.

No guys, I was not having a little private drug-addicted-doctor party in my bedroom. I was suffering from two days of intractable neck muscle spasm. And everything that I tried failed.

So last resort - benzo's - which I took, in the safety of my own room, after work, with my husband around to take advantage once I'd passed out. Naughty husband.

I was still sedated this morning. Which is why he had to smack me in the head to get out of bed this and effectively shut off that clever voice in my brain that said "Stay at home".

If you've read "SNVL (episode1)" You'll know what's coming next...

It's Winter now and it was pitch black outside by the time I arrived.
The car park was empty.
The red curtain over the trauma unit window glowed a sinister crimson from the outside.
It glowed the way one would imagine a window into Hell would glow... with the flames of Satan flickering through the window panes.

I've seen this Trauma unit many times before but this morning it looked scary. I should have known there would be a demon inside waiting for me.

The demon was patient three of my morning.

Patient three was brought in by her husband, Mr G. Mr G was talking to me but it was in a dialect native to the Cape Flats. Spoken through a gap in his front teeth, this dialect was made even more difficult for me to understand. Me, who over the last five months has been WELL educated in what I like to call, Cape Flats Gam.

He kept on screaming at me in this language and pointing to his wife, and then pointing fingers in my face and being rude. So I told him to get the hell out of the unit.

I then turned my attention to the patient - his wife, Mrs G. She was dressed in three dresses one on top of the other. Nicely colour co-ordinated in shades of red and orange. She also had a green t-shirt wrapped around her head. She wore a sandal on her left foot and a slipper on her right one.

This new style of dress is commonly known in medical circles as..."Fucked in the head fashion craze for crazies".

Oh but that wasn't the most exciting thing about her.
What she was screaming at the top of her lungs was terribly exciting, and possibly some of the foulest demon-possessed putrified verbal filth...

Don't say I didn't warn you....


Me: 'Hello Mrs G - how can I help you?"

Mrs G: "Jou ma se poes, jou fokken holnaaier! Moenie vir my vir 'n poes vatie! Ek isie mal ie? Jy's mal! Jy's almal fokken mal!"

Your mother's cunt, you fucking bumfucker. Do you take me for a cunt? I'm not mad, you're mad! You're all fucking mad!

Me: Ok Mrs G. You are right. I'm mad. Why do you think you're at the hospital today? What happened at home?

Mrs G: "Ek is hier om birth te gee vir my holy babas. Ken julle nie vir my nie? Ek gaan 'n honderd holy babas uitkram! Jou poes! Jou poes! Pasop vir my! Julle ken nie vir my nie - ek dra nie eers 'n panty langsaan my poes nie! pasop jong pasop"

I'm here to give birth to the holy babies. Don't you know me? I'm going to give brith to a hundred holy babies. Your cunt! Be careful of me - I'm not even wearing a panty next to my cunt!"

ME: I..

Mrs G: Fok jou! Julle willie vir my help me. ( starts sobbing hysterically and clutching onto the sister standing next to her.) Ek willie he my pa moet vir my slat nie! Hoekom skree hy soe vir my? Hy het nie vir my lief nie.

Fuck you. You guys don't want to help me. I don't want my father to beat me. why is he shouting at me like that? He doesn't love me!

and in the next breath:

Mrs G: Ek het baie respek vir u doctor. Baie respek.

I have lots of respect for you doctor, a lot of respect.

and in the NEXT breath:

Mrs G: Jy's a jintu! Jy wil my man naai. Ek ken vir jou - jy wys jou poes vir almal en jy soek net piel.

You're a whore, you want to fuck my man. I know you - you show your cunt to everyone and you are just looking for cock.

At which point she shot up out of the chair, lurched towards me with a fiercely clenched fist on it's way to connecting with my cheek.

But I'm quick like a ninja and dodged just in time, just as the sister grabbed her hand and surely averted a trip to the trauma unit myself.

Have I mentioned how the sisters are my bodyguards in this place?


Good God. We needed six people to hold her down while I injected lorazepam, valium and haloperidol into that one. Maybe a little bit of overkill, but - she was dangerous - and like every good ninja knows - hit them hard and hit them fast.

Back to the loch with you, Nessie!

I mean, straight to the loony house with you, lady! I did feel a little bad though - seems like all of this, like with most of the crazies, stemmed from a terrible childhood.

But anyhow...Phew! Nearly came home with a black eye today!

And that set the theme for today's trauma unit adventure - I saw seven crazies today. SEVEN that were so psychotic they needed admission.

Must be a full mooon or something. Or just Satan playing tricks on me again.