The Feng Shui Doctor

My well-thumbed copy.

I rise from my chair before a circle of expectant faces. My palms are moist. My throat is dry. It is time to speak.

“My name is Zimble…and I am a fan.”

A wookiee takes my hand in his furry replica glove and grunts, “Welcome Zimble. You are amongst friends. We are the last best hope for fan kind”.

What brought me to this point? Well, it started in about 1978. There was a British TV show about two action heroes and their stern Scottish boss. It was the ‘running and jumping’ show of its day.

To an eleven year old in the suburbs of 70s Brisbane, it was also a portal on a completely different world where houses were whole storeys high, leaves fell off trees, swimming pools were housed under glass and ladies wore boots that came up to their knees!

Nowadays, when I’m not busy planning the downfall of the tomato, the show occasionally comes to mind. Were our lads truly heroes or were they hapless victims of the political machinations of their day? Did they survive their next assignment? Did they survive their next pair of trousers?! How did they live with the soldiers’ conflict of duty and morality?

Anyway, I followed the career of one of the two: Jem Shaw’s brother, Martin. When people ask why am I a fan, I explain it in three ways.

Firstly, I hardly think it is my fault.

Secondly, from a pragmatist's point of view, everyone has their own ophthalmologist, solicitor, accountant, electrician and banker; why not their own actor?

Lastly (and this is the most tricky to explain), for a physician, the empathic role can be troublesome. Professionally, it is an essential element but personally, it demands a measure of emotional detachment that can sometimes leave a lingering and uncomfortable sense of disconnection.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that the arts, especially drama and music, are a way to reconnect. The work of a good and generous actor can take you to a place that is so exhilarating it is like an emotional jump-start for the heart, whilst all along you know you are in safe hands.

In a roundabout way, this brings me to the real point of this post. Because I am a fan, when I wanted advice on Feng Shui for my new home, I googled to see if Martin had made comment. Voila! I found Martin’s foreword to Paul Darby’s most excellent Feng Shui book; a colourful and handy tome titled “The Feng Shui Doctor – Ancient Skills for Modern Living”.

Martin suggested we all ‘dive in’. So, I did. I asked Paul to do a postal consultation. Being so kind, Paul said not to worry about my fannish path to his door. In any case, fan or no, a zimble needs every bit of help she can get.

Woad House Blues.

"It's a pretty colour...a pretty colour...a pretty colour...a pretty colour," she said, as they came to take her away.

After 23 months of house hunting failure, a (by now) concerned friend suggested I retain a buyers’ agent. I have to say this is one of the very best pieces of advice I have ever been given.

However, before the buyers’ agent, I was on my own, “in the market”, up to my neck in open house inspections and real estate agents.

I did manage to become serious about one house. (See above). It had its advantages. It was modern, it had a nice pool and it was opposite a large park. The time came to sign the contract. The price was good. Everyone seemed to like the property. Why did I feel so worried?

I started having nightmares. Oh no! I've bought a house with no doors! Did anyone see any doors? Zimbles are a bit unhinged at the best of times but never before like this.

With the help of family and friends I tried my best to stay calm about the purchase. A few days later, I hastened to the building and pest inspection.

Someone up above was looking after me that day. Nev, the best building inspector in the world, asked me to crawl underneath the house with him. When I had finished bumping my head on the beams, he said, ‘Zimble, look at that.’ I did and instantly I knew I was saved.

In Brisbane, houses are built on stumps. This is because it used to rain a lot (and may do so again, one day. I know you don't think so, Mavis, but it is possible); ventilation beneath the floor boards helps to cool the home; and there are lots and lots of termites (white ants).

A classic Queenslander with ant capping but not quite what I was after...

A thin metal plate, the ant cap, is placed between the stumps and the house. Since termites cannot go through the plate and apparently do not like to crawl out in the open, upside down, to build their nest, the cap provides some measure of protection.

This here's termite country.

The House of Woad was built in 1999 and therefore, should have had ant capping. There was no proper capping at all. Someone had made a dodgy attempt to remedy the situation by applying a cuff of capping to the most obvious stumps.

‘Ant capping, indeed!’ I said in my loudest and haughtiest tone (so the real estate agent could hear me).

A phone call to my solicitor and it was all over.

Hit the road, Zim.

I do miss the mango tree.

‘Desperate times call for desperate measures.’ Not always but quite often.

‘Needs must when the devil drives.’ One of my all time favourites.

And, as a friend often says, ‘When between a rock and a hard place, get a pillow.’

What else could I think when my next door neighbour, the 92 year old Widow Parrot, called to me from her living room window, yet again? This last time, she asked me to trim my lillipilly because it was blocking her view down the street. The street has no view and in any case, that is what 'The Bold and the Beautiful' is for.

For five years I'd been a virtual prisoner in my own front garden. Whenever I ventured out to weed or prune, Mrs Parrot would appear and regale me with tales of her weekly physiotherapy visits and specialist appointments. Did I know of such and such a surgeon? Was co-enzyme Q 10 better than vitamin E? Could her mower man do anything about his gammy left shoulder? What did I think of the Courier Mail’s latest report on flesh eating viruses?

I did try to handle this with all due deference to Mrs Parrot’s lonely, elderly, widowed, arthritic status. In the meantime, my thistles were growing into a jungle and whole families of tigers were moving in.

To be fair, it wasn’t just Mrs Parrot and her sticky-beaking that was the problem. The house itself was a 1952 post war nana-house with a red brick base, fibro-cement (read ‘asbestos’) upper and galvanised iron roof. It was the architectural equivalent of gusseted support hose. A tiled rumpus area had been added at the back in about 1982. According to Mrs Parrot, the addition was poorly built because the builder’s relationship with the owner’s wife had ended badly.

True enough, the rumpus was a problem. Whenever a summer storm dashed in from the south west, rainwater would run off the sun-baked yard, under the skirting board and onto the tiled floor. This was despite the previous owner’s attempts to fix the problem with a large drain. I asked Otto D'Plumber to come. Otto had been a few times before so I knew him reasonably well. Yes, he could redirect the downpipe at the outside corner and realign the drain.

The cost was listening to his long and detailed thoughts of an overseas holiday. Otto’s mother had recently secured her release from a pair of grossly emphysaematous lungs and in going aloft, had left him a modest inheritance. Would a short trip to New Zealand allow him to also buy a semi-renovated MG? I’m never sure why people expect a lowly zimble to know the answers to such questions yet they always seem to ask.

With the drain fixed, it was time to move.

Why did I move there in the first place? Well, that, I think, was too zimbly for words.

Don't do it! Yer gunna kill 'im!

Today, my registrar said, “Dr Zimble, I’ve got a fascinating case to show you.”

Well, have you ever seen an irate zimble? The hair stands on end, the face turns fire engine red and the arms fly back and forth.

“Warning! Warning Will Robinson!”

Only the indiscriminate use of hydroponic Roma tomatoes on an otherwise edible salad sandwich makes for an angrier Zimble.

There are no “fascinating cases”. People come to hospital because they are very, very unfortunate or a bit stupid or occasionally both (Mavis, that’s you). One finds every groove of human existence in the medical ward and enough pathology to make ones head spin but no one person is a “fascinating case”.

My registrar got the message when I asked him to grab an auroscope and check, yet again, for the elusive moth that Mrs Hemplestead is certain resides in her left ear while I joined the telephonic queue at Pay Office.

What is fascinating is why medicine is so often turned into television drama and nowadays, reality TV. Tonight there are no less than four medical shows listed in the program. Why medicine?

I want to know the trials and tribulations of the guy who controls the water temperature of the Beijing Olympic pool. I want “House of the Dead” brought to life. I want a vegetarian cooking show, like Two Fat Ladies with tofu. What I want is the hero’s journey: the triumph of the brave, the selfless, the bubble permed. [Mavis, take that last bit out right now...no, it's not funny]. Heck, give me unconditional love in the digestive tract of a deep space monster and I’ll be happy. Am I asking too much?

Television medicos go back a long way. By way of childhood deviancy and later, study and occupation, the zimble has been an interested observer. Take, for example, the publicity photo (above) of Jack Klugman in "Quincy M.E." It’s beautiful in its irony because he doesn’t know that forensic pathologists look at microscope slides and not photographic slides.

ER stands as an institution of season cliff hangers, Emmy award nominations (104) and strangely, hordes of moribund medicos. A helicopter whose tail rotor takes a surgeon’s arm returns a few episodes later to kill the surgeon by falling on him in the ER parking lot. This is the typical ER demise. These doctors are some of the unluckiest people you are ever likely to meet.

Unfortunately, they’re also some of the most incompetent. They’re sloppy and slow. They never keep contemporaneous records. They bring their myriad social and emotional problems to work. They are rude to their patients, the nurses, the relatives and each other. They don’t listen to their seniors, they don’t acknowledge best practice and they are not infrequently unethical. Then, they are ever so surprised when they are fired from their jobs or are hauled in front of disciplinary panels or are dead!

While I’m at it, why are they so loud?

“F.B.C. …CHEM SEVEN…CROSS TABLE C SPINE… STAT!”

I understand what they want but why are they shouting?

While I’m still at it, what about the direction? In the multi-trauma scenes the doctors and nurses attend the patient en masse, crowding around him, with we, the viewers, looking up from the patient’s feet.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, let me put in that chest tube for you, you bubble headed boo-boo!”

In reality there is you and there is a nurse (and a medical student who is collapsed, fainted, in a corner of the room).

“No! Stay where you are! Don’t try to get up!”

One morning, a long time ago, my world and that of the medi-drama collided. I was finishing my night shift, collecting my purse and keys. Leaning back on the handrail in the lift, I swung my stethoscope across the tops of my shoes, watching it as it went back and forth, as you do. The lift stopped on the second floor and the doors opened.

I looked up and acknowledged, with a small nod, one of the hospital administrators and a young woman with a head of wondrously long red curly hair. We smiled and she and the administrator got off at the next floor. I thought nothing more of it other than that she looked too well to be a member of staff.

A few weeks later, I sat down to watch the much hyped new television series, “Emergency Action” (or something). We knew it had been filmed locally, as there had been a blurb in the paper and the ED docs said their stuff was being borrowed.

The series was dire in so many ways and mercifully, lasted perhaps, three episodes. The best and funniest thing was spotting the locations for the ambulance shots. The vans would zoom up one Brisbane freeway ramp and barely seconds later, zoom down another some twenty minutes across town on a different freeway. Why not simply turn the ambulance around and zoom back down the ramp you’ve just zoomed up? We don’t mind.

Meanwhile, back at the hospital, about half way through the first episode, there is a scene involving an intern who has an argument with someone outside a lift. The intern then gets in the lift and leans back against the handrail and swings a stethoscope back and forth across the tops of her shoes.

“Holy mouldy macaroni Batman! It’s the redhead!”

There are only two medi-dramas I cannot watch. One is another dire Oz drama called “All Saints”. The writing is so bad it should be called “All Saints turn in their graves”.

The other is “House”. My problem with House is that it is based on the premise that good diagnosticians use algorithmic thinking and when that doesn’t work, there is some random element of God given genius that provides the answer. Perhaps this is the way it is in the blessed nation but in the rest of the world it doesn’t work like that. Most of us don’t have the time or inclination to use a white board and genius is rare.

Another misrepresentation of some medi-dramas is their prognostic licence. One mob of researchers reported they had watched all the episodes of ER and Chicago Hope during the 1994-1995 viewing season and 50 consecutive episodes of Rescue 911 broadcast over a three-month period in 1995.

“There were 60 occurrences of CPR [cardiopulmonary resuscitation] in the 97 television episodes. In the majority of cases, cardiac arrest was caused by trauma; only 28 percent were due to primary cardiac causes. Sixty-five percent of the cardiac arrests occurred in children, teenagers, or young adults. Seventy-five percent of the patients survived the immediate arrest, and 67 percent appeared to have survived to hospital discharge.”

In reality, cardiac arrest is most often caused by coronary artery disease, mostly occurs in the middle aged and elderly and is survived to discharge about 5% of the time. I don’t necessarily agree but was once told the only reason to resuscitate is so that when there is the rare occurrence of an arrest of a young person, you are practised in the skills that will give them a chance. I guess futility doesn’t make for interesting television.

Back to the matter at hand: it's the hands that matter. When I watch a tele-medico at work, I immediately know whether they ‘get it’ by observing their hands. Most will prod and poke as though they’re testing the reliability of a li-lo.

Rarely, I see a quality to the touch and a confidence in the movement of the hands that usually only comes with experience. When it is there, it’s lovely to watch and I appreciate it.

Well, that’s enough of my babbling and by the way, M.A.S.H. is on - it's the one when the unexploded bomb lands in the centre of the compound. Hawkeye! [Swoon].