I am a monster that needs to be spayed.

"The two of us, all used and beaten up. Watching fate as it flows down the path we have chose. You and me, we're in this together now."

I LOST 6LBS ON NIGHT SHIFTS!!!! 119LBS FTW!!!!

I have just spent 10 hours over the past 2 days wondering how to write this post so I guess that's a leeway into how ravaging it has been for me. After all this thinking I still don't have an answer as to how I feel or what the hell is going on with me. I have spiraled from being deludedly happy to being tired and angry to being wistful and hopeless to finally feeling like I'm some sort of monster. 

It's Joe. It's fucking Joe's fault. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Whatever is happening, and I'm really not sure what, it's wrong. It's not supposed to happen and a part of me is very, very angry about that. 

Whatever it is, I have never felt so ill in all my life. Admittedly, some of that is probably the caffeine withdrawal and the night shifts screwing up my biological clock. I've just spent the past four nights with Joe. No, not in that sort of way, we were on night shifts together, I was the house surgeon and he was the registrar. And we were the only two doctors on for orthopaedics overnight. So it was kind of hectic to say the least. 

I spent a lot of time with him, in those nights I probably spent more time with him than with any guy I've known (bar my father). That was weird. I was supposed to spend most of my time on the wards, while he was in ED, and that's how it's been for other house surgeons.  But I was in ED for most of the night. I seriously hope that the ward patients were okay because I wasn't really there. 

Not that I did much in ED. Mostly just sat there and wrote notes for him. A bit redundant really. The smarter, more efficient thing to do would have been to split up and divide and conquer the patients but Joe was having none of that. He got in trouble for not seeing patients fast enough and I heard him on the phone, several times, telling the ED bosses that it was very important that I stay with him. 

Here is the be all and end all. I wish with all my heart that I wasn't attracted to Joe. There is nothing about him that goes along with what I've always liked in guys. But I am attracted to him. I have never flirted so much than those 4 nights with Joe. Having said that, I am probably the clumsiest, worst flirt in the entire world so he probably didn't even know. 

I can't tell you how many times I wished Joe would just put his arms around me and just hold me, or just grab my hand. Dammit. When and why did I turn into such a desperate bitch? I am hating on myself right now. The bad thing is, I can imagine myself dating him, and having a good time too. 

And I'm sure Joe doesn't feel anything for me. There might be sparks flying for me but there is absolutely nothing going on from his side of things. He doesn't fancy me at all. And that just breaks my heart. 

But everything has an upside right? I can't eat, I can't sleep. I'm so numb. At least I will lose some weight. 

Damn, feeling bad because Joe feels nothing for me. Feeling like a sinner for flirting with him. I wish I could just feel something else. Dammit. 

Just let me be weightless and numb. 

shattered and defeated and making decisions

"So make all your last demands for I will forsake you and I'll meet your eyes for the very first time, for the very last." 

NB: I apologise if I've not been commenting on your blogs of late. Blogger is doing that weird thing again where it doesn't tell me when the blogs I follow update. I comment on the posts that I see pop up!

I've worked too long, too many long days, too many long hours. I've been afraid, too many moments of insecurity, of panic, of feeling shattered and defeated. Too many thoughts run through my head, my patients, my boss, my future, my body. Yes, I've lost weight, but only about 4lbs, and only the weight that I had put on when I was eating like some freak. So now I am back to my baseline 122lbs. I haven't moved forwards at all and I hate it.

The flurry of clothes that I had bought for myself, all a few sizes too small, hoping I'd fit into them by now still sit on hangers, taunting me and reminding me that I have failed in another aspect of my life. I must try harder. I must eat less. I must just buckled down and do what I need to do. From deep down inside me an old desire is rising, the desire to cut. I swore so many times that I would never go back there. I swore that no matter what, I would handle it and I would not take myself back there. But let's face it, it's an easy way out and right now, that's all I'm looking for. 

A gush of blood and I can sleep. A gush of blood and I can focus and study. A gush of blood and I am no longer hungry. All I need is to bleed out my anger and frustration and fears and anxiety and insecurity and hatred. Bleed it all out, then I can be just me. Calm. 

But I swore I wouldn't go back there. But I swore. 

It's not the only aspect of me that is being questioned. Every aspect of me is being questioned. I don't know what I want to do anymore. So much for wanting to do ophthalmology. The more I think about it, the more I feel like I can't do it. The intake is too low, 2 per year. With the amount of stress that I feel just working an ordinary job, I can't imagine what it would be to live for 5-7 years desperately trying to get onto a training scheme. And then I think of Alex. Perfect Alex. Thin, beautiful, talented, not a bad molecule in her body. She speaks fluent French and is half Japanese and is femininity personified. She's a warm spring morning in Paris with a black coffee and croissant. I try so hard to be like her, but I just can't. 

I'm not that person. I'm fat and bitchy. I'm spontaneous shopping and designer labels and consumerism with all the letters capitalised and italicised. I'm wobbly cellulite and a lazy slob and a liar and an absolute cow with a bad attitude. I'm full of badness and rock and roll and whiskey and port. I'm full Chinese and I only speak English. I'm a cold, wet morning in the Scottish highlands with black pudding and a fried egg. 

How can I pretend anymore. I can't do it anymore. I think of the professor, and how much I adore him and how much I've let him down. I can't possibly face him again. I can't do it. I can't spend the next decade or more of my life with someone who hates me as he must hate me. I can't be with someone who knows all my problems and wants to solve them. I can't spend my doing something that constantly reminds me of how inadequate and unworthy I am, no matter how much I love it. 

I will do general surgery and be worked to the bone. And be yelled at by my bosses and sleep 2 hours a night in my car and slice my own body to pieces and feel like I'm finally in my place. 

Time to do what I must. Book another tattoo, cut as deep as I want to, eat nothing at all and buy the biggest bottle of port and whiskey I can get my hands on. Fuck what other people think. Fuck "taking care of myself". Fuck it all. I don't care if I'm self destructive, maybe that's how I've always been. But it's the only way I know how to get by and right now, all I want to do is get by, one day at a time. 

If that means being hungry but thin, drunk but calm, put together but cut up then so be it. 

lovers in japan

Tonight maybe we're gonna run, dreaming of the Osaka sun, dreaming of when the morning comes. 

Issy and S-babe pull up their seats and we each clutch our cups of coffee. "We're convening." Then conversation and laughter flows without any effort and we catch up on half a year worth of missed time. The same happens a bit later with T and J. It's been so long since I last saw them and it shows me just how lonely I have been this year and it shows what a difference it can make to be around people who care. 


S-babe tells me that T was really, really excited about seeing me. Haven't seen him for a very long time. We talk about Europe, England, holidays and I walk away feeling very excited about my 8 week trip when I had really worked myself into an anxious frenzy about it. Being with people on my wavelength, who I get along with and who care about me is so refreshing, it almost worked away 6 months of stress and loneliness. 


I didn't get to see the professor. I avoided it. I didn't really want to see him. I'm scared that if I see him there will be a wave of untold stories that will just burst forth and then I will be riding tidal waves of trouble. I can be rather pathetic about this. There is a huge amount of pressure when it comes to the professor. It's an emotional bottleneck when I'm faced with the one person who knows all my secrets, seems to care about me but also wants to help me and in doing so could stop me getting what I want. Thrown in there to complicate things is the fact that he determines my future in medicine. 


It was the wrong thing to do. I should have seen him. I don't know. I feel like such a burden to him. I don't know what to do. 


In the meantime, my weight loss efforts have gone down the drain as I entered my hungry part of the month. I've been binging for the past 2 days. I think I had about 800cal today, but I had waaaaaaaaaaaaay over 1000cal yesterday, too many to count. I'm too scared to weigh myself because I'm too scared to see a gain. 


I haven't been working out because I'm so stressed about my visa, about seeing the professor and about sitting my full driver's license test that in my spare time I'm absolutely paralytic and I just sit and fiddle around on my laptop. And in doing that, I'm getting nothing done. I just need to snap out of this, but I can't. I hate this. 

half the calories and be still my beating heart.

Several rather different topics to rant about...please bear with my schizoaffective self. 

I've often heard people say that eating slowly halves the number of calories that you take in. I've always thought that it was such a ridiculous notion, but even so, rather a cute thought in itself. Today I discovered that it is very much true. SO TRUE! WHY DIDN'T I LISTEN EARLIER! My calorie intake has been hovering at 800-900cal per day. Today, we had some friends over to our place and so I ate dinner slowly, and I only had about 350cal before I felt really full and decided to leave the rest for tomorrow. 

I was so surprised at how full I was. This really explains why I always eat less when I go out with my friends. I'm usually too distracted by conversation to eat properly and even though I know I'm eating less, I always feel much more full. Gosh. Who would have though that conversation would literally halve my calorie intake. Magic. Can't wait to keep utilising this. 

Also, so much for recovering from my bout of illness and eating 3 meals a day. Back to one meal a day and it feels great! I'm still pretty light headed but I don't feel so guilty anymore. Am I just incredibly stupid to be coming across this eat slowly thing now? Honestly, if you haven't tried it yet, try it. It works without you realising it is working. 

And now for something completely different!!!!!

A few days ago I cut a treble cleff into my left ankle. Today my flatmate saw it. She asked me about it. She's getting really suspicious. I passed it off as scarification and now she thinks I'm really weird and I'm not entirely sure if she believed me. 

Another issue is that we now have 4th year students and we have been doing quite a lot of teaching with them to prepare them for their surgical exams. But this is their first ever hospital rotation and they want to practice on us instead of real patients. It's actually a really reasonable request seeing as the "patients" in their exam will be final year students like us. But the surgical exam is the surgical abdomen exam and I cannot show them my abdomen. Or they will see my scars. 

Sometimes this habit is incredibly annoying and isolating. 

And now for something completely different again!!!!

My scumbag brain has decided to strike again. Yesterday, it decided that I was to have a crush on one of my surgical registrars. And I am less than pleased about it. He's a really nice guy, as most surgeons are, contrary to popular belief. And I like him because he's only a first year registrar and he's really quite playful. Spare time is spent teasing everyone in sight. Yesterday he hit me over the head with some patient notes and stuck patient labels all over me because I was using his dictation log in. 


And he's pretty damn ripped as well. It seems that I have a very specific type. Guys with totally ripped bodies but rather cute and sensible looking faces. Kind of like, he must be strong but also smart enough to make enough money to support me! Not that I'll need it though because I will hopefully be making buckets of money myself. 


Ah, he's so cute and sweet. *sigh* stupid, stupid, scumbag brain. I loathe having crushes on people! I shall stop writing about him now. Don't want to bore your ladies with my trivialities. 


Hope you are all doing well and dropping weight and dress sizes! I love you all. 

Dr. St Valentine

Fat Piggy, LittleMissFairy, Zapfire, Anafly and Christina - my beautiful ladies! Thank you for your lovely comments on my last post. So encouraging! I feel so loved! 

I honestly can't say how much your support means to me. It really, really means a lot. So, seeing as it is Valentine's Day I thought I'd write a different sort of post. Also, seeing as I just started General Surgery, I thought I'd update you girls on what has been going on. 

The days of medicine are over. No more 7 hour long ward rounds. No more stopping off for coffee. No more gossip with my girls. Welcome to the quickfire world of General Surgery, where the theatre days are tough, the long days tougher and the bosses tougher still. Yesterday I was dropped into the world where the days start at 7am and end around 7pm, you stand up all day, run around and run up and down stairs. No more 8 patients on our lists being considered a long list. Today we had 25 patients. And this is the shortest the list has been in a month. 

This is a world where nobody gives a fuck about who I am or where I am. I could go home and chill out or I can work myself into the ground. The only person who gives me the time of day is Dr. St Valentine (no, that's not his name, it's a literal interpretation of his name). Like the little girl I am, I giggled when I heard his name. 

There are chocolates in his pigeon hole, he offers them to me, "Happy Valentine's Day". We do the ward round with me chewing on chocolate. He treats patients the way I want to treat them when I'm a doctor. Watching him work is like watching a vision of a perfect doctor. He's smart, funny, incredibly understanding and comforting, he's handsome and he puts his patients first. 

It is a privilege to meet someone like him. It's much too hard to find someone to look up to in this world. Hopefully I lose some weight on this run. I'm already shirt tired after 2 days. So very tired. There is never enough sleep, or enough down time. Or enough people who give a shit about me. The only person who talks to me is Dr. St Valentine. And when I see him, I make a mental note that I swear to always treat my juniors nicely. 

Before any of you perk up, Dr. St Valentine is very much married. But my favourite doctors have been married men who I got along really well with. Still, it's some sort of strange motivation. Seeing someone so perfect, it makes me want to reach for perfection even more. I want my future students to think that of me. Beautiful, thin, smart, caring. That's what I want to be. 

I listen for the whisper of your sweet insanity while I formulate denials of your effect on me.

Thank you to Jackie, Gracereturnsslowly, Christina and Fat Piggy for your lovely comments on my last post. It's so nice to find that there are people who completely understand how I feel about the purging. When I feel down and alone, I come on my blog and then I see that there are people who understand and support me and I don't feel quite so isolated.

And thank you to all the lovely ladies who wished me a good day. Because today I had a good day! For once!!!!!!! All those wishes must have added up to one good day and I tell you, I've not been this happy for a long time. You ladies have become a second family for me, so my glorious skinny sisterhood, let me share my happiness with you! Let me rant my joy for one post, normal self loathing and restricting posts will resume shortly.

I finally bought myself a white dress. A nice white, casual, comfy dress. I purposely bought it in a large size, it's suppose to be quite tight but it sits loose on me and is amazingly comfortable. I wore it with my pink sequin shoes, the ones I got from a children's store (as I have very small feet) and a light pink blazer. I felt like a 6 year old but it was very, very cute.

I went to work in this outfit and was talking to TS and my friend Steph when the professor showed up. He made fun of me for a full 15 minutes. About how my outfit was so cutesy and girly, how they've never had a student quite as girly as me. Then he moved onto how short I am. He told them about how he ran into me last week and gave me a kiss and a cuddle, how he had forgotten how small I was and so I almost fell through his arms and how he apologised to me because he ended up crushing my spectacles against his cheek. By this point TS and Steph are howling with laughter and I'm hiding my face with embarrassment.

To make things worse, at this exact point the professor points at me and says "you're blushing!" and everyone just laughs so much harder. Then there is more teasing from the professor about my height and outfit and eventually he says that he means it in a nice way, that I look cute and attractive. And he calls me "bijoux". Which is not a word I've ever heard used before. He explains that it means "small jewel", I say "oh, that's really quite sweet" and immediately blush again.

I've just realised that there was a lot of laughing at my expense. By this point, after being called Bijoux several times by the professor, I must have been quite an alarming shade of red, and I notice that TS has the most amazed look on his face and he says to the professor "I think you're the only person to make her blush". Which of course makes me blush more, and makes the professor look very smug.

Later at night, I pop into the professor's office to ask him a question, he tells me that the white makes me look very innocent and "what is your question, little innocent thing?" I'm making myself another theatre hat and I ask him, if I made him a theatre hat, would he wear it? He seems absolutely delighted at the idea. And asks me if I'd like to go to theatre with him tomorrow morning, he'll have no assistants tomorrow morning and so he'd like me to go.

By the by, here is a picture of a theatre hat. By that I mean, a hat that we wear when in the operating theatre to keep our hair out of the way. And yes, that is me in the picture. Feast your eyes on my fat ugly face. the hat is black with white polka dots held on with a pink ribbon that ties into a bow.

I ADORE theatre, so much. I love going to theatre, ophthal theatre especially. The professor's theatre is amazing because he does the most intricate surgeries. And to assist means I get to view the whole thing down the operating microscope which is special. And to be asked to go to theatre with the professor, is amazing. I don't know if that has ever happened to a student. I think sometimes his masters students to theatre, but as a medical student, really, I'm just there to keep him company.

Today was a good day. I got invited to theatre, which I'm so excited about. And the bijoux thing. And, and, and, this last thing will sound utterly ridiculous, but when the professor walks past me, he always just touches me in the small of my back. For some reason, I really like that.

So there we are ladies, a GREAT day. God, if my friends could read this, they would be even more suspicious about me and the professor having an affair. A ridiculous notion indeed, but there are quite a few raised eyebrows.