Anatomy Doodles

I say this every time I argue for raising the minimum wage. I never hear anyone else say it and I’m glad I found this.

If you have a machine performing a valuable talk for your company, the upkeep of that machine is part of your operating cost. You have to pay to power it, to upgrade it, to fix it when it breaks. And if you can’t afford the machine, the manufacturer doesn’t have to do business with you. They’re free to take their service somewhere else where they think the price is fair.

For humans, a living wage is the operating cost. If you can’t afford to pay your worker enough to live nearby, feed themselves, and get basic health care - all of which are things they need in order to be able to work for you - you’re failing to pay for the cost of their service. 

Hello! Well, life advice is a very personal thing; what suits each of us is quite different. So I don’t know if what I might suggest would suit everyone, but here’s some tips…Interpersonally:

You will have many friends. Right now, you may feel the people you know are all you will ever know, but that’s not true. I’ve met 70 year old patients who told me they are inseperable from friends they met at their partner’s funeral. It’s acually pretty amazing that you can make close friends at any age.

Keeping in contact with friends and family gets a lot trickier when you leave school. People drift off to live and work in different places, they get married or have children, or they just have a job that takes a lot out of them. Understand that your relationship, and how you hang out, can change as your life evolves. If your friend is busy, it’s totally not a slight against you.

It’s worth trying to make an effort to keep in touch with people you care about. You miss them, they miss you. If they bring joy into your life, then make an effort to catch up every once in a while.

Don’t beat yourself up if that doesn’t happen. As I said above, everyone is busy.

But you may find you drift apart from some people you were close with before, and that’s OK too. It happens; perhaps you are all busy, or life takes you in different directions. You might be less close with some people, but you’ll become closer with others.

Relationships aren’t everything; perhaps they aren’t important to you at all. If they are something you value, try to make time for them when you can. Life is busy, and if you’re too focused on everything else, you might not get what you want out of it.

Sometimes things just don’t work out. This isn’t failure, it’s just life. 

It hurts to be honest with ourselves, but if something doesn’t work out, or if there’s an issue, reflect on what you may want to do differently next time. Don’t wallow in guilt, but don’t ignore if you did something wrong, or you might make the same mistake again.

If someone loves you, they will work with you to make things work as best as they can. It may not be enough, but it’s important to surround yourself with people who care enough to try.

People change, or we find out more about how they are. The person they were in the past may not be enough to justify their remaining in your present. You will know if that time has come.

Don’t risk your future on account of your past; move on.

You deserve people in your life who make you happy.

Life:

Uncluttering your environment can really help unclutter your mind. You absolutely don’t have to keep things spotless, but when you can take care of business at home, it can really make you feel better.

Keep on top of your finances, and do them as you go along during the year. Spreadsheets are a godsend when it comes to budgeting, and you can make them do lots of nifty things like adding and subtracting everything for you. Save money when you can.

Keep all your payslips. Just trust me on this one.

If you are unsure what to do, whether at work or when dealing with the Grownup Stuff, there is almost always someone whose job it is to walk you through it. Contact someone; even if it’s the wrong person, they can put you through to the right one. Be tenacious; you will get through in the end.

No matter how tired you are, eat a meal if you are due a meal. You don’t have to eat a perfect diet, but you should try to get some vitamins now and again.

Self care is important. Even the little things can make you feel more human when you are truly at the end of your tether.

If you are struggling, talk to someone. Rant, cry, tell someone your fears. It makes a difference.

Look after those around you. Keep an eye on how they are doing, and if you think they may be struggling, lend a hand and ask them how it’s going. Sometimes people need to know it’s OK to not be OK.

Take your health seriously. No matter how inconvenient it is, check up on anything worrying.

Try something new every once in a while. It doesn’t matter if you feel a bit silly, you’ll get over that. You’ll be surprised how many awesome things you haven’t discovered yet!

As long as you are doing what you love, and what you want to, then the passage of time will never feel like a waste.

If you are stuck about what to do, always think ‘what would 90 year old me think?’. Many of the things we stress about now will be completely insignificant further down the line. If 90 year old you would regret spending some of the best times in your life mired in drama, then remember your time is precious.

Medicine:

You won’t know all of medicine. Never going to happen. So please don’t beat yourself up about that. You will be working your way up gradually, but even the specialist at the top of your dream field doesn’t know everything. In fact, they’ve probably forgotten lots of the stuff that you take for granted.

Treat lunch as a job on your jobs list, it’s at least as urgent as half the stuff on there, anyway! There is almost always time for lunch; skipping lunch as a way to leave on time is a bit of a fallacy. You’ll probably still stay late anyway, so might as well do it without being hungry, cranky, dehydrated and miserable. You’ll get work done faster if you are fed.

It’s OK to not know what you want to do, whatever stage you are at in your training. What you need to do is work out what you enjoy in medicine, and what you hate. And then find out enough about the specialities to work out which ones have lots of column A, and as little as possible in column B.

It’s OK if you change your mind about medicine. Nobody ever tells you this, but it’s OK. You aren’t letting anyone down. You aren’t letting yourself down. You are being honestly, brutally true to what makes you happy, and that’s a brave, wonderful thing.

The senior nurse is almost always right. If a nurse is asking you ‘uhh… doctor, are you sure you want to do that?’ then consult a book or a colleague before doing the thing. 

You will have to make many clinical decisions. But, when you are starting out, your job is to know when they are not your decision to make. Your seniors are there to give the final word on

Treat every patient like you would wish your mum to be treated. Or your granddad. If you hate both of those, imagine someone that you care deeply about you. Someone who means the world.

Being in hospital is a scary, confusing time, and your patient and their relatives may well not have had a detailed explanation of what is going on. Too often the conversations going on around them might be goinb completely over their heads. Talk them through what has been said and done; late is better than never.

The devil is in the details. Your job is to be interested in every little thing, until you can decide it is unimportant. You have to think on your feet. But if there’s any ‘little’ thing that is niggling in the back of your head, dig deeper! It may be more important than you realise.

The most important thing is to know when it’s beyond your scope. Never be afraid to ask for help; it’s better to escalate too soon, than too late.

Shoutout to all the attending doctors who don’t believe in pimping the nurses, just to prove a point to new baby docs.

Shoutout to all the attending doctors who don’t say to new interns, “oh wow, even the nurse knows that answer,” during rounds. No sir, you are not only insulting your brand new intern, you’re also insulting the nurse.

Shoutout to all the attendings who don’t utilize rounds as a speech of their glory days, and how they always knew the answer.

Shoutout to all the attendings who don’t antagonize nurses in front of patients, their families and later laugh it off as “showing those new puppies who’s the boss.”

…shoutout to all the doctors who take the time for new interns to come up with the answer, in non-urgent situations, and guide them in a non threatening way when it is urgent. 

…shoutout to all the doctors who are honest about their beginnings, their mistakes, and candidly share it, (outside a patient’s room, so they don’t freak out, of course).

…shoutout to all the doctors who take rounds seriously, listening to and utilizing all of the disciplines, such as nursing, respiratory, etc. to come up with a decent plan of care.

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When I was first going through my own coming out journey, I also had a difficult time relating to other lesbians and all the media I consumed featuring them was unrelatable to me… including Bechdel’s work! I could read it and understand that it was well done, (better than most of the lesbian media I was consuming at the time) but nothing about it reflected my experience. The lack of lesbian comics that I could relate to was a major part of why I started creating lesbian comics.

And here we are, nearly two decades later, and I find out that the most relatable lesbian experience… is not relating to other lesbians. Consuming every bit of lesbian culture we could get our hands on and still feel like outsiders.

But that actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it. We don’t assume all straight people relate to each other, or relate to all media about straight people. But they have such a wide variety of people and media to choose from that they will always have something to relate to. As a queer person, with such a relative lack of queer media out there, we find ourselves trying to shoehorn our experiences together with others who we have been told are just like us, and it can feel so lonely to realize that if we want to see a reflection of ourselves, we either have to change ourselves, or make our own media. A lot of my career can be summed up as a queer girl trying to feel less lonely.

Bones are interesting because you can sometimes read the patterns of wear and growth like reading a book.

I got a couple of stray cat skulls, and this guy has a pretty interesting story to him.