Patients, patience and more patients

Everyone has a different idea about what it takes to be a well-rounded individual and surprise surprise it always involves doing the things they have done. We are all narcissistic little fuckers in our own way, and despite claims of low self-esteem being near universal, we still all create our pecking order so that we are at the top. It kind of makes sense, logically you wouldn’t pursue stuff you thought was useless and a waste of time, but people aren’t logical and Netflix’s multi-billion-dollar turnover says we absolutely throw ourselves at useless timewasting. But back to my original point. People who want to travel convince themselves that you cannot really know the world until you travel, but if you are the type to live in a bubble getting drunk in backpackers’ hostels in a couple of European cities or going on Contiki tours isn’t going to suddenly make you a well-rounded world citizen.

People who go to university convince themselves that education is the key, but if you can’t learn unless there are credit points attached to the learning your nothing but a credit less whore interested in actual learning than waving your degree certified superior knowledge about. The one that shits me hard is the people who claim you can’t know true love unless you spawn a crotch goblin. If you are incapable of putting the needs of others ahead of your own, then you probably shouldn’t be having kids in the first place, and you are probably going to have shit boundaries and believe all your selfish martyrdom is ‘for the kids’ when in reality it’s still all about you. I have travelled, and I have a university degree. I don’t have any kids that I know of, and its improbable unless the myth about lawyers being arseholes because they are conceived in arseholes is true. If, however, there is some truth to that particular myth, then one day I will be considered somewhat of a father to the Australian legal system. But back to the original point, I have travelled, I have a degree, but I don’t think any of this taught me more about people and the world than working in pathology for the last 3 years has taught me. Health doesn’t care about race, gender, education, political affiliation or socioeconomic status. Whether you are footballer having your monthly STD test, a refugee undergoing an immigration medical, a middle-class mother doing all the pre-natal testing available, a person battling cancer, or an anti-vaxer getting your vitamin levels tested for your naturopath, pathology is like death and taxes. People from every section of society walk through those doors, and if you do your job well, and I do, you are connecting with them one on one, asking them questions, reassuring them, and seeing them as a human being.

If you average 25 patients per day per staff member, 5 days a week that makes 125 patients per staff member. If we average it out and say I took my 4 weeks of annual leave for the last few years I have worked 48 weeks times 3 which equals 144 weeks I have worked for KRONOS. Now all we need to do is add in our average patients of 125 times 144, now there’s a math number I can’t do in my head (pulls out phone calculator) Side note, some people are worried about people seeing their internet browser history, I’m not, I have never claimed to be anything other than a slightly seedy gay man so no-one is going to find anything unexpected there, but I have often thought that it’s a lucky thing that calculators don’t keep a record. I would be a bit ashamed if people knew the simple arithmetic, I have resorted to using a calculator for, but back on topic, you get 18,000 patients.

Now that’s a lot of people. Unless you are a shut-in, you probably walk past more people than that on the street, but unless you are one of those people others cross the street to avoid you are probably not having D & Ms with that many people. In a mostly professional capacity, I am asking people medical questions for a good ten to fifteen minutes in a 3 by 3-meter collection room. I smell their smells, touch their skin, learn their stories, calm their fears and occasionally touch their genitals. I need to make this really clear because touching penis’s is normally really awesome, but at work it really isn’t. If you need medical intervention for your peen there’s something wrong, and chances are it's something ugly and painful that you ignored for as long as possible before swallowing your embarrassment and going to the doctor. I love dick, so it’s quite upsetting to see an angry weeping penis, it’s like someone left a filthy grubby Big Mac sauce finger print on the Mona Lisa, it’s like the wanton destruction of a piece of art and it offends my sense of the world. People, if your bits hurt, go to the doctor and fix that shit ASAP. No penis should ever cause a man like me to recoil for any reason other than being unnaturally huge.