Noise Monitor

Shushing the unshushables is a tough job. Betsy Ndlovu has been zipping it for almost 4 years as the noise monitor of a luxury day spa and hospital in Johannesburg. She can handle anything from whispering to dripping taps, echoes and even the occasional ‘voice in one’s head’ which tend to frequent the minds and corridors of patients in Ward C. In this hospital with all its DSTV channel bouquets, flower bouquets and bridal bouquets, Betsy is the law. “Frankly I don’t care for all this schmanciness”, admits Betsy. “If you’re going to be sick, you had better do it quietly”. Betsy detests visiting hours. “All this commiserating, boo-hooing and feelbettering – it just makes noise”. Betsy laments that a single emotional embrace between a patient and a visiting relative can reach the same decibel level as a vacuum cleaner. She produces the noise meter from one of her invisible inner pockets. “Noise monitoring is not an exact science”, explains Betsy. “There’s still a lot we don’t know.” Betsy takes me down a random corridor hunting for noisemakers or ‘busybodies’ as she calls them. “In the old days we used to carry nightsticks and soft rope for gagging, but now a verbal reprimand and a Lindt chocolate suffices”, Betsy sighs wistfully. We journey fourth into the rectangular unknown, creaking in near-perfect silence.

Personal Trainer

The armoured red shirt meets his client at the gym’s cafe – where he swills down an espresso and a shake of undetermined constituents. What an oddity their meeting is. His garish muscles threaten to rupture from the sleeves of his golf shirt (now leotard) and invade the Middle East. His eyes glint from the depths of his deep tan which is ‘full body’. He uses the term ‘full body’ quite a bit now. Margery’s ample 50 something body sways blithely with womanhood and overflows into the cafe with few regrets. She is consumed by frumpiness and frizziness despite her black jogging suite. “Let’s start with an assessment”, the trainer offers, delighted with the amount of syllables he has managed to cram into his new sentence. Of course the assessment had begun and ended when Margery had negotiated the turnstile on her arrival.

The trainer woos Margery with words like ‘orbitrex’, ‘gyrotonics’ and ‘glutes’ as she wades through the treadmill distractedly. The clients with master’s degrees were always harder to get ‘on board’. Margery is then paraded around the gym as she lifts weights into the air for ‘upper body’, lunging and reaching in an elephantine underwater ballet. Five, Six, Seven. He is the handsome zoo-keeper, she the manatee. Onlookers catch a glimpse between pants and grunts - drawn to the shapeliness of the trainer and the spectacle of the trainee. On the step machine the trainer initiates a conversation about the dangers of carbohydrates and spray tanning while Margery replies with the occasional gasp. David Guetta’s ‘Sexy Bitch’ blasts from the speakers drowning out the uncommonness between them. “Same time next week?” Margery winces in agreement unravelling her posture into her now damp jogging suite. The trainer has not broken a sweat. It is doubtful whether he ever has.

Birth

From the crumpled depths of a hospital bed, a mother is contemplating rose petals and razor blades. “Jesus God!”, she screams announcing another contraction. Under different circumstances she might be praising or thanking the almighty but now she begs for mercy. “You are in labour”, the midwife informs her as if it were a revelation. The mother wrenches her fists against the bed as her concave abdomen flops to one side, relieving her vena cava of burden. The CTG machine whooshes with fervour, monitoring the foetal heart from a harness of straps and probes embracing the mother’s stomach. “Jesus God!” she implores again. The divine reply comes in the form of squelching bed sheets that signal that her ‘water has broken’. The first of many euphemisms. The midwife reaches into the mother and declares that she is 7 cm dilated and ready to be moved to the delivery room. “Jesus God!”, the mother thanks the midwife for her analysis.

In the delivery room 3 midwives monitor the perineum for signs of life while shouting “Push!” in Zulu, Xhosa and Portuguese. The mother is encouraged to bear down as if ‘going to toilet’ - which happens anyway. She holds her breath and squeezes down through her open legs releasing the air in a weary moan. “Jesus God!” she applauds herself for effort. Finally the baby’s head breaks through the mothers legs negotiating its entry with a series of safe dial turns. In a matter of seconds the midwife delivers the shoulder, body and feet with a final celebratory splash of meconium onto the linen saver. The pink wet blur fidgets hysterically redeeming its humanity with a gurgling cry. “Its a girl” says the midwife for the 8^th time on her shift. The mother is jubilant but depleted, feeling the maternal tickle of pethidine for the first time. The baby is suctioned, cleaned, cord clamped and cut. The placenta is extracted onto the bed where it glistens with alien impropriety. “3.4kg”, announces the midwife, referring to the new being in the room. Another miracle of life in cubicle 5.

Soccer mom

Soccer mom rips through Ballyclare drive, match bound and impatient for victory and a non-fat latte. Her 12 year old son lounges in the backseat of the Mercedes ML 430 exploring puberty on Mxit and nursing a Diet Coke. The caffeine will help reverse the effects of the violin lesson which ended 10 minutes earlier and sugar is bad for him. Her son has rather taken to the violin, golf and ‘Zoo-loo’ she brags to one of the other mothers. “It’s better than Afrikaans”, she offers with no apparent substantiation. Soccer mom says that she can now say ‘cappuccino’ and ‘biscotti’ in Zulu but quickly admits that the words are very similar if not the same. The mothers sip their lattes from the stands regarding their sons with vicarious tenure. Soccer mom fiddles with her blonde pony tail blinding the other mothers with her Ed Hardy diamante in the sinking African son. To her former classmates, Soccer mom is unrecognizable. Her ample hair and body has contracted into a laboured tightness and translucency that shimmers with the slightest provocation. Her expression is even and flavoured mocha, caramel and freezochino while her arms are an unmatching but enviable brown. Mauritius. For two weeks. “Go boy!”, she shouts aimlessly at the distant herd of players unsure of which one is hers. Some-one had scored a goal. “Thats my son”, she tells the brooding cohort of spectators who grunt dispassionately in agreement and defeat.

Thank you for not smoking, you prick

I have oft been compelled to do what is right.

After another carnal game of Badminton at the community sports centre I find myself in the basement washroom facility faced with the usual encumbrance of ‘wee and wash’ in unfamiliar territory. The cubicle walls are a collaborative artwork of bible quotes, drug dealer contacts and assorted testaments of love and sodomy. The puddle that oozes from the throne’s base precludes me from becoming intimate with the receptacle and I am forced to aim and fire out of range. After a slow trickling victory I notice a handwritten sign above the cistern. ‘Please flush the toilet’ flashes in a strobe-like fluorescence – an immaculate message directed at me alone. Of course I obey. I do not intend to disrupt the natural ecosystem of human waste. And you asked so nicely.

On the way out a sign above the wash basin (which is more of a giant ashtray peppered with human faeces) reads ‘Wash your hands’. The ‘please’ has been omitted - it is now a command. No suggestion of how rosewater hands smell the dandiest or how flesh eating bacteria can make your penis fall off, simply the naked imperative. Do it for your fellow countrymen. Do it or die. “You’re not the boss of me”, I half sneer at the basin. “How could you possibly tell me what to do? You can’t even take care of yourself!”

Underneath the printed lettering some-one has pencilled in something. It now reads: ‘Wash your hands, you scumbag’. Suddenly I am self-conscious and introspective, remembering all the times I sneezed without covering my nose, the times I smoked cigarettes indoors and the time I used my I-pod during takeoff and landing. I once threw a nectarine pip out of my window and rationalised it as biodegradable. Biodegradable? I could have killed some-one. I suddenly have visions of children, bleeding from the eyes, spontaneously combusting - disfigured by some new disease that will later be traced back to this very basin. Traced back to me. I am patient 0.

I wash my hands vigorously with the last sliver of soap, wishing that the hot tap hadn’t been dismembered for I could do with some scalding water.

Reactive Mind

Delirious from hypoglycaemia and the indignity of another failed ‘Pheasant Woman’ novel, L. Ron Hubbard conjured up Dianetics which combined both aspects of his poorly controlled Diabetes and the future Heretics he envisioned would audit the minds of the innocent in an attempt to rid the world of depravity and recapture the monolith. Unfortunately, all the allegories involving molecules, experiments and hard fact were too cumbersome and required narcotic free rationality so Hubbard decided to promote his new science (fiction) by establishing a foundation. Like the rusty sign that indicates the red light district of Nepal, L.Ron too had gained legitimacy through advertising, donations and shock factor. By 1950 he was bigger than the foundation for gluten intolerant Negros and was gaining momentum fast.

The practice of ‘auditing’ which has been described in various Dianetic journals as a ‘lukewarm lobotomy’ combines Freudian psychoanalysis, vivisection and Pepsi. “Basically it’s a spectrum from scalp massage all the way to decapitation”, says one auditor who used to work for the Inland Revenue Service. “Sure there have been casualties, but if you want to find those engrams you gotta dig deep”, the auditor confesses remembering how he once extracted an engram with a spoon without anaesthesia. “But the psychiatrists are much worse”, he offers. “Not only were they behind 9/11 and sub-prime, but they also raped and murdered Michael Jackson”. “Raped”, he mouths silently for emphasis as blood begins to trickle down his left nostril. I politely run out of the building.

Specialty Horoscopes

Medicine March 21-April 19

Unfortunately the House box set you ordered (complete with cane and Vicodin prescription) will not be delivered on time prompting you to swab the neighbourhood trash cans for evidence of Neisseria and foul play. You will see red when a fellow colleague manages to attach his name to a new fashionable bowel ulcer but you realise that you are actually more beautiful than he is and have an eternity of bowel ahead of you with which to be immortalised.

Pathology April 20-May 20

Don’t lose focus. The pinks bring elation, the purples bring malice. The pinks bring excitement to your life. The dots sometimes possibly bring elation. The squiggles may mean something too. Spiculated.

Psychiatry May 21-June 21

This month brings vague nebulous feelings of despair and elation. You will meet a patient claiming to be a ghost, a ghost claiming to be a patient and a chair claiming to be one of the Jackson five– in each, the tea-lady will accidentally diagnose and treat them correctly using your Samsung DVD manual instead of your DSM IV manual. Sprinkling Valproate on your cornflakes does little to steady the highs and lows of patient consultation.

Aneasthetics June 22-July 22

This month you will drift in and out of success, luck and consciousness. Taking coffee without propofol puts you on edge and you tend to defibrillate first, ask questions later. You connect your iPod to the Boyles machine to smooth over the usual beeps with some Enya. Unfortunately ‘Orinoco Flow’ sends the surgical team into a brief coma which you expertly reverse with neostigmine. Your new book ‘Cooking with Morphine’ is an instant bestseller in Tajikistan but your fame is eclipsed by a jealous colleague who shoots to stardom by comparing the sedative properties of Norah Jones and Halothane.

Family Medicine July 23-August 22

Hugging patients does little to thwart the ebb and flow of real diseases this month. After 17 analogies, allegories, fables and Xhosa slang words the petrol attendant is still confused about his hypertension and how many litres you would like to put in your car.

Radiology August 23-September 22

Left in the dark once more, you must retrieve the secret fragments of dust that the elders request. The ability to see through others has left you cynical, sedentary and above all, pale. Several emergencies will plague you this month including a particularly obstinate cappuccino machine.

Obstetrics and Gynaecology September 23-October 22

Unfortunately the cosmos don’t work on a 28 day cycle and tend to favour only half of you this month. While delivering an alleged second twin, an unsuspected ‘third’ assailant snatches your favourite Rolex in utero in what is later described as an ‘unprecedented violent attack on an Obstetrician’. You use the press to catapult your career in the ‘Gynecologist to the stars’ direction you had envisioned in medical school. Sadly many of the starlets who were celebrities back then are now golden oldies.

Paediatrics October 23 - November 21

The child in you embraces what is now damp.

Orthopaedics November 22-December 21

This month you will learn how to put yourself back together again. Distracted and displaced, you can barely remember that C- for woodwork that catapulted you into this job in the first place. After changing the oil in one of your patients you realise that no amount of nailing can mend your own broken heart. You attempt to create a new heart using an avocado, some dental floss and plaster of Paris but abandon the project when your angle grinding skills are needed to install a new toilet in the department.

Dermatology December 22-January 19

Beware the superficial. This month an emergency pedicure will turn pear shaped requiring scrubbing, swabbing, dabbing and if critical, an ointment of sorts. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

Surgery January 20-February 18

This month is a cut above the rest. What you put into the abdominal cavity, you will get out. Not only will you be featured on the cover of SAMJ, BMJ and those salmon cutlets from I&J, but you will also be featured in ELLE/ERCP as a centrefold highlighting the ‘you’ side of varicose veins. One night when diagnosing diverticulitis and ordering Nandos over the phone you discover that yelling at patients has the same effect on them as cutting them open (and to a lesser extent placebo). Without good evidence, you decide to test this theory daily for the foreseeable future.

Plastic Surgery February 19-March 20

This month you are the celebrity. You will successfully change Hellen Zille back into Louis Luyt complete with peck, buttock and eyelid implants. Your Essay ‘1001 uses of human fat’ will earn you time on Jerry Springer where you can promote your new controversial prenatal facelift surgery. You will break several mirrors this month mostly by staring at them for too long and growling excessively.

Death of a Car Guard

The air is as hot as ironed laundry in the shade of the Jacarandas. It is summer in Johannesburg. The suburban street is quiet save for the distant hum of the main road. A dog walks alongside a child on a tricycle which squeaks as she peddles on the sidewalk. I parallel park in a space between a bakkie and a sedan and begin to roll up my window when a calloused crocodile stump penetrates the disappearing gap of the window and lunges blindly towards me. “My Baas!”, hisses the weathered, pock-marked face spraying the window with saliva like a cobra. “My Baas!”, crows my assailant quivering and groping – the stench of his hand beguiling me. “I am Johannus”, he announces from the floor where he now kneels, perhaps beneath my car. “I will look after you, and your car”, he shrieks licentiously, now facing the window with his pathetic, beggarly eyes leering straight at me.

I hear a grey Lourie call from the canopy of trees above the street and reach for an uzzi which has been modified and loaded with 5 cent pieces. I empty the first round into his chest which fragments and splutters before collapsing under the weight of the contribution. “My Baas”, he offers one more time overcome by cunningness and depravity. “No”, I reply, addressing him for the first time. I empty the second round into his head which explodes with a final smirk and soils the nearby wall with copper-streaked blood.

The Curtsy

At a local rally in Harare, President Robert Mugabe is believed to have curtsied in front of thousands of supporters. The gesture came moments after the announcement that sanctions had failed to dim the light bulb that is Zanu-PF. The function, which had been organized by the War Veterans Automobile Club convened to celebrate the redundancy of the $100,000 bank note, which appeared to rain from the heavens like worthless confetti.

Guest speaker Robert Mugabe had only been inciting the crowd for perhaps 40 minutes when he took a step back from the microphone and meandered into the center of the stage. At first it appeared as if one of his syphilitic knees had given way but then, unexpectedly, he did not keel over and die but instead his half-squatting form deliberated into position as if giving birth or passing a stool. His knobby fingers and their dyed knuckle hair began to fumble with the edges of what appeared to be a very loud shirt. And before anyone could stop him, before anyone knew what it was or whether it was good or bad, the President was curtsying - curtsying like a polite 12 year old girl might in the presence of the Queen. Curtsying and smiling.

Several henchman in the vicinity nearly choked on their strawberries (indeed the event was catered by Marks and Spencer).

It was reported that many of the young Veterans had to be given additional (f)arms in order to better understand President Mugabe’s episode of ‘heat stroke’.

Extinguished

Today residents of Santa Cruz were shocked by the by the bizarre murder of yesteryear singing sensation Belinda Carlisle. The 49 year old vocalist was discovered hanging from an energy saving light fitting by a cell phone charger, allegedly not plugged in. 58 year old Alicia Erwin discovered Carlisle at 4pm when she apparently came round to borrow some low GI butter. “It was just awful seeing her floating there. She looked so peaceful. I had to prod her with a broom to make sure she wasn’t sleeping. But then I smelt the smoke” Erwin found that much of the desert style parlour had been burnt with what police would later discover was jatropha seed biofule. Carlisle’s Pomeranian ‘Nooka’ was among the carnage. The dog had ostensibly sustained smoke inhalation injuries but on closer inspection a white, dog-eared segment of paper was protruding from his mouth. Ten A2 sheets of paper were later extricated from its tiny canine jaw. Forensic analysis revealed the papers to be nuclear power plant plans, drawn up and shelved in 2002. No suspects have been named in what has been described as foul and ‘dark’ play.

Darling leave a light on for me
I'll be there before you close the door
To give you all the love that you need
Darling leave a light on for me
Cause when the world takes me away
You are still the air that I breathe
I can't explain, I don't know
Just how far I have to go
But darling I'll keep the key
Just leave a light on for me

A Magical Outing

While I’m sure the memories of Ms Frizzle and her supernatural school-bus are dear to us all, I am referring rather to the posthumous outing of Albus Dumbledore by JK Rowling. The information was revealed to fans at New York’s Carnegie Hall on Saturday. “Dumbledore is gay”, announced Rowling to a momentarily petrified audience. She then went on to explain how he was in love with his evil rival Gellert Grindelwald. Unfortunately Grindelwald, a former Durmstrang-expellee, was interested in little else but nasty things once he had acquired the famed Elder Wand. Dumbledore’s love had gone unrequited – stifled somewhere into his (in retrospect) camp beard. But it wasn’t always like that. Albus and Gellert were meant to be great together – well at least good. Dumbledore no doubt had visions of them skipping through Hogsmead gowns billowing in the air, overcome by butterbeer and fire whiskey, tearing behind his designer half-moon spectacles. Albus learned to forget such feelings. He soon discovered that nothing helps repress occult sexuality quite like a good old fashioned male wand-romp, one in which he would acquired the Elder Wand, banishing Grindelwald to the Nurmengard prison.

Of course it all makes sense now. In our limited necromancy we realize that not only was Dumbledore a homosexual, but he was flaming. He never had a relationship with another woman, he wore a lot of purple (note the luster of the fabric) and his only companion was a bird (also flaming). I just wish he had come out in one of the books. Perhaps Harry plus guests weren’t quite ready to hear it. Sure we can handle Hippogriffs, Snidgets, Bowtruckles and Minotaurs, but what about gays? Do you know any spells?

Do ut des -

Ten people were now crammed into the small consultation room – one of four in the antenatal clinic. I noticed that there were no windows or ventilation slats above the door: it was a room within a room. The air was filled with a sour aseptic odour, warming up with each communal breath exhaled by the room’s occupants. The door had been closed on account of the weather, and out of respect perhaps: we were in a private room after all, sealed off from the patients waiting in the hallway. A rudimentary examination bed, two plastic chairs and a veneered desk hugged the walls of the room and the students dispersed themselves amongst them. The lucky ones were sitting on the examination bed which was covered in transparent plastic, now opaque with fine scratches. The rest of the students squashed themselves backwards, into the wall, standing and leaning with effort. The further from the center the better. The ones in the front were always picked on: names were asked, politeness demanded, nodding was necessary. Two students managed to find space on the cluttered desk where they sat hunched over in waiting. The desk had packets of condoms, sheets of birth control pills and clean syringes all neatly partitioned and stored by cardboard separators. Some STI pamphlets lay folded and piled on the desk but toppled over silently when one of the students whipped open his bag, apparently to find something to eat. I caught a glimpse of the pamphlet: an exposed pubic region with text in blocks of primary colours. The stuff that fear was made of.

Sister Peppy or Dr Pepper or whoever was speaking deliberately and fervently. I only caught the gist of what she was saying because I wasn’t really listening. Daydreaming I suppose. It was a long drive out there. I was tired and my mind wandered to more immediate and prosaic things, things that concerned me beyond the clinic’s isolated needs. The word ‘community’ was repeated several times and suddenly I felt the conjured eyes of the clinic’s 200 waiting patients grow into thousands of expectant eyes – eyes that were depending on my lukewarm indifference to Sister Peppy and her plans. I shut it out. It was too late to care about anything, I had already passed my threshold and was sated. Perhaps with food or some other filler?

My eyes drifted to the wall above the desk, Sister Peppy’s desk, where various HIV posters and A4 sheets of paper with nursing schedules and friendly morale boosters like ‘I can only do 12 things at once’ shielded the paint beneath them from view. ‘Hope Worldwide’ was now being discussed somewhere in the room and I noticed that this organization, too, was represented amongst the chaotic wall collage that extended out of human reach toward the ceiling. Meetings could be held with them. Things could be done. Somewhere in the room someone suggested a ‘partnership’, a ‘coalition’ – the word ‘strive’ may have been used. Some-one mumbled the word ‘community’ again under their breath but it was hard to tell who had said it, or if, for that matter, it had been said at all. But I had already stopped listening. My attention turned abruptly to the postered wall where I allowed my eyes to go out of focus. The blur seemed to hum with the buzzing fluorescent light overhead and it seemed like only a moment passed before we were shuffling awkwardly out of the clinic into the harsh sunlight of the day.