kill.thatdamnpatient.com

Pulling a Sickie …… مرضية – مرضية – مرضية

Posted: 15 Aug 2012 10:07 PM PDT

Story of my fucking life ……

Since I first started at the ministry and to this day the number one reason why people come to see, talk to me and even phone me is by and large for these damn things. It doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing; I know for a fact I’m going to be signing one sick note a week, every week.

Now the fact that I’m writing it is no trouble at all, I don’t mind. What really pisses me off and offends me is how people tend to insult my intelligence and waste my time and my hospitals resources, I’m pretty sure you can come up with 50 excuses and some of them may be realistic but you don’t need to make up a bunch of symptoms and have me draw blood tests etc. Just tell me that eid is coming up soon and you need a couple of extra days before and after to work on your hangover. Saves you alot of trouble and saves me having to go through this song and dance before you finally fess up to it after growing tired of waiting for your x-ray for 2 hours.

Still it is a little annoying especially when you consider the fact that studies tend to point to the fact that the more sickleaves you have the more the economic impact (especially if you are clinically obese); now granted we do have a surplus but still ….. you’d want to put in an honest days work every now and then for gods sake …. just for fun stay till your work day ends …. even if you’re just playing solitaire.

But at least in Kuwait we’re trying to do something with policies that reduce peoples pay slips and making it harder to get sick leave granted, Norway on the other hand are letting things go willy nilly. A recent Norwegian study entitled “Phenomena associated with sick leave among primary care patients with Medically Unexplained Physical Symptoms: A systematic review.” seems to try and say that if you come up with a bunch of symptoms and put them together then you’re likely going to get a couple of days off – even more if its an experienced doctor who you trust. Worse still the conclusion the authors came up with seems to advocate for patients with unexplained symptoms suggesting that work conditions may need improvement with more “breaks” and facilities being on of the factors that will reduce sick leave rates.

Having said that I do have to say that work related stress does have a myriad of effects on your health both short and long term and that has been proven time and time again, so maybe we should have a starbucks where everyone works and give everyone free uncensored wifi at work while banning any and all porn and torrent downloads on domestic lines ….. if that doesn’t make the lazy bastards go to work every single fucking day then nothing will……

And although Norwegians will give you a month off for saying that you have had a sudden onset of ear pain along with a limp and an area of numbness just at the edge of your left eye ball, the Swedes will take none of that shit. According to a similar study performed by them entitled “Sick but yet at work. An empirical study of sickness presenteeism.”they claim that although many people will make up stories, those with jobs that require some dedication or some continuity (such as healthcare, or an architectural or advertising project or the teaching of a curriculum) chances are you’ll show up for work even if you were shot in the thigh. Unfortunately they also found that all the Swedes who did show up for work despite being sick ended up making more and more people sick leading to more sick leaves being given out and exponential losses in productivity potential. This was published in their follow-up study entitled “Sickness presenteeism today, sickness absenteeism tomorrow? A prospective study on sickness presenteeism and future sickness absenteeism.”

So I guess the best option is for the patients to start being more honest, or the doctors to loose what remaining friends their arrogance has left them …. but that my dear friends is wishful thinking …..

kill.thatdamnpatient.com

Tis the Month for it…..
Recap
Week 3 – Muse
Week 2
Week 1 – The Beatles.
Old Habits

Tis the Month for it…..

Posted: 13 Aug 2012 08:55 PM PDT

Apologies this isn’t up to par with what I usually come up with but bear in mind I’m out of practice; rest assured we’ll be back on form in no time !

It’s the month of Ramadan, and while being a Holy month and one of my favorite months of the year which I look forward to regularly namely because of the variety of dishes and the low amount of traffic (thank you … all 1.5 million Kuwaiti men and women who choose make work optional for these past 3 weeks … please keep up the good work, the traffic has never been lighter at 6 am) , it is also one of the months in which procrastination hits an all time high in our great country.
Now we all know that procrastination an red velvet cupcake sampling are our number one national pastimes, but in Ramadan, for numerous reasons we all (myself included) tend to put anything and everything we can on the back burner and spend the whole day dwelling on sundown when we can come alive.

This would all be fine by me if it weren’t for the fact that procrastination in it self is directly linked to certain health and more obvious career risks. It’s been shown by numerous groups from Korea, to europe to North America, that procrastination is associated with a certain framework or set of traits and behaviours which tend to have a negative impact on well …. everything, firstly theres depression (you sit at a desk for 6 hours and don’t achieve anything … you’ll want to shoot yourself) then there’s bad career choices (you think you should apply for degree” x” because job” y” is for the birds …. you end up earning an extra degree you will never use*) and this eventually spirals into major stress and anxiety disorders and eventual meltdown and cupcake hoarding. (No- I’m not joking hoarding syndrome , eating disorders (by proxy) is infact associated with procrastination and not laziness)

Now the reason why I’m referring to procrastination as something distinct from laziness is not because I’m trying to use a smarter sound word to describe lazy fat bastards doing fuck all at a bank till, it’s because they are infact a little different. As Wikipedia puts it “In psychology, procrastination refers to the act of replacing high-priority actions with tasks of lower priority, or doing something from which one derives enjoyment, and thus putting off important tasks to a later time.” where as “Laziness (also called indolence) is a disinclination to activity or exertion despite having the ability to do so” (also from Wikipedia). The distinction is ridiculously important because while laziness just you not putting any effort in procrastination is an inability to priorities and do the right thing. Whats more interesting is that procrastination is linked to certain types of perfectionism, and certain defects in regular emotional responses. So there may be a chicken and egg thing going on here (do we procrastinate because we are emotionally blunted and are actually perfectionists on the inside … Fuck no … you do it because you sleep too much and eat too much ….. stop trying to find a silver lining.)
*Yes, I am speaking from personal experience …… ugh ……

Recap

Posted: 13 Aug 2012 02:33 AM PDT

So for those of you who don’t know me, my name is KTDP (you don’t need to know what it stands for). At some point in my life when I was too naive to realize that making money from medicine is a rarity, I decided to go to medical school and managed to do quite well (though I do say so myself). I then started working for the behemoth that is the ministry of health here in Kuwait.

One thing lead to another and I grew bored and so decided to start blogging, people read what I wrote, people didn’t hate it (or if they did they kept quiet) but I still hated my job and writing about it didn’t really help.

So one day (a couple of years back); I decided I’d grab my shit, up and leave and so I did. I left blogging, twitter, writing, facebook, and continued to spend most of my time being a a ball of festering rage …. to put it mildly and despite all the anger, and apathy I am still considered relatively good at my job.

I don’t like my job (this point should be quiet clear by now) , I don’t like knowing random facts about humans, I don’t like talking to them or working with them (infact for the most part I’m pretty awkward around them). However, I’m good at it, and being at that institution for the time being at least seems like a good idea.

Please feel free to reference the internet archive version of my old blog which can be found here. (apologies the formatting is fucked up for what ever reason, I assure you I had a pretty snazzy theme for my blog at some point …. it was the envy of all the crowds)
So I hope this time round I update the damn thing every once and a while.

Week 3 – Muse

Posted: 27 Apr 2012 06:16 AM PDT

Nothing beats Muse live when the sound engineer knows what s/he’s doing, that’s the secret behind their success, excellent production and sound engineering ……

Week 2

Posted: 24 Apr 2012 06:35 AM PDT

Tom Petty isn’t my favorite singer ever and I really don’t know how this landed in my itunes library but there you go !

Week 1 – The Beatles.

Posted: 20 Apr 2012 02:57 AM PDT

A promised every week until the blog starts I’ll be posting up a video just to keep the blog active. For the most part it’ll be random stuff that comes into my head.

I can’t remember not knowing this song or it’s lyrics, for me it brings back memmories when I was a little less bitter …..

Desmond has a barrow in the market place
Molly is the singer in a band
Desmond says to Molly – girl I like your face
And Molly says this as she takes him by the hand.

Chorus:
Obladi oblada life goes on bra
Lala how the life goes on
Obladi Oblada life goes on bra
Lala how the life goes on.

Desmond takes a trolly to the jewellers stores
Buys a twenty carat golden ring
Takes it back to Molly waiting at the door
And as he gives it to her she begins to sing.

Chorus

In a couple of years they have built
A home sweet home
With a couple of kids running in the yard
Of Desmond and Molly Jones.

Happy ever after in the market place
Desmond lets the children lend a hand
Molly stays at home and does her pretty face
And in the evening she’s a singer with the band.

Chorus

In a couple of years they have built
A home sweet home
With a couple of kids running in the yard
Of Desmond and Molly Jones.

Happy ever after in the market place
Molly lets the children lend a hand
Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face
And in the evening she’s a singer with the band.

Chorus

And if you want some fun – take Obladiblada.

Old Habits

Posted: 19 Apr 2012 04:35 AM PDT

Like smoking …. you never really quit you just do it a little less often…..

Well here’s the thing, I left blogging a while back because I felt bored with the whole thing. People read the stuff I wrote but it didn’t feel like it was helping me (or them) in any way.

I figured if I’d do this again, I’d want it to be something a little more unique than a regular daily/weekly review of cookies etc……No offense, I love the idea of cookies and hearing about the latest exclusive boutique store or the idea of tires burning Simpsons style. However, I’d also like to write something a little less hip and maybe more interesting which is why I started 1 year on.

The idea behind this whole thing is to try and provide a daily post from this day (Thursday 19th of April 2012) and not have it posted till a year from now. I don’t know how interesting it’ll be for everyone but it’s going to be fun for me to look back on how shitty one day feels versus another etc and it may be interesting for others as well. Things like commentary on political issues etc will all be from last years perspective.

Until then I was sort of thinking of putting up random itunes library songs for once per week till then just so that the blog doesn’t appear inactive.

kill.thatdamnpatient.com

Thursday, August 16, 2012