• Glandular fever
• Pneumonia
• Cancer of the brain
• Arthritis
• Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
• Epilepsy
• Appendicitis
• Broken ankle
• Leukemia
• HIV
• Anaemia
• Receding hairline
• SARS
• Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
• Emphysema
• Alcoholism
• Insomnia
• Heart murmur

Me: What exactly does the groomer do for your dog that you can’t?: I bath her myself, but the groomer is supposed to give her a clip, clip her nails, express her anal glands, etc.

Kahlee

Me: I’m sorry, I thought you just said ‘express her anal glands’??

Kahlee: They get stuff in the glands in their butts, and if they’re not expressed every 6 months it can be painful for them.. You kind of squeeze on their butt.

Me: Surely that’s not really necessary? Do dogs in the wild walk around with sore butt-holes all day?

Kahlee: Dogs in the wild don’t eat processed biscuits.

Me: Another tragic example of how humans have ruined the world.

My earliest memory is of lying naked next to my brother on the burnt orange carpet of our hallway in Candowie Crescent. I sucked on black jelly beans and cried silently while my parents rubbed a foul-smelling ointment into my skin. Holding my nose, I tried to ignore the revolting cream that was applied to my entire body from the neck down, but these things are hard for a three-year-old. This entire process was repeated for four consecutive nights, and then I was allowed to bathe as normal.

Years later, I realised my parents had been treating us with sulfur. Dad brought lots of things home from work, but scabies was the best – microscopic bugs that burrow under the skin, lay eggs, and create a red rash that resembles an allergic reaction in appearance. As the eggs hatch and the mites crawl around underneath the skin surface, the infected person develops a terrible itch, scratches the shit out of hisself, and often develops a secondary infection. My father had been working as a GP in a local nursing home in 1989 when they experienced an outbreak among the old folks. They treated the residents and doctors but didn’t think about the doctors’ families, even though scabies is extremely contagious and transmitted readily through skin-to-skin contact. For the remainder of my childhood, I would have an intense fear of insects. When I found out about bed bugs, I slept in the bathtub for a week.

My second earliest memory is of my father forcing me to solemnly swear to never practise medicine. When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, for years I replied, “Not a doctor.” Teachers and creche workers were fascinated by my inclination to define myself by what I was not, or would not do, rather than the opposite, but that ended up being the professional direction I would take as an adult. It’s as if I have a giant list of every career possible and am slowly crossing them off one by one after each failed attempt to make a living. (Eventually, I assume I will be left with my dream job and a string of bad references.)

Dad only worked one job, but he had a hard life. He spent years building his practice and getting patients, and then the rest of his life trying to get rid of them. Admittedly, our number was never listed in the phone book, but do all other forms of advertising go completely unnoticed? An entire generation of Australian adults simply lived without medical care until they met my father at a dinner party in the eighties. Whenever I was dragged along with my parents, I would watch the other guests’ faces light up as they chatted to Dad. “Oh! You’re a DOCTOR? That’s so interesting, because I have this pain juuust heeere…” and they would reveal the body part that grieved them. Even as a child, I was always amazed at the rudeness of these people. If you met a hairdresser at a party, would you hand them a pair of scissors and request a trim? If you met an accountant, would you ask them to do your tax before dessert? If you met a cleaner, would you ask them to pop into the kitchen and tidy things up a bit? Fuck no. But people thought nothing of pulling my father aside at tupperware parties, trivia nights and bible study groups and making him inspect their genitals. Over the years, almost every family friend, relative and member of my parents’ church has adopted my father as their GP. Dad has dirt on everyone in the Hills.

My next earliest memories are of late-night trips to nursing homes to certify bodies. Mum was out a few evenings during the week and Dad couldn’t leave me at home by myself when one of his patients died, so he took me with him. The first time, I waited patiently in the home’s common area. I sat quietly and pulled leaves off a pot plant, but within minutes I was surrounded by gnarled geriatrics with glossy eyes. They shoved pieces of fruit into my pockets and tugged at my hair. One woman proudly introduced me as her granddaughter, then smacked away the hands of anybody else who tried to touch me. They drooled and moaned and hacked and couldn’t hear a damn word I said, which was probably a good thing as I was pretty feisty for a five-year-old. After that night, I chose to wait for Dad in the same room as the corpse.

Not only North-West Sydney’s preferred medical health professional, my father was also the go-to guy for household injuries and neighbourhood emergencies. I probably set the precedent when, one night in the early nineties, I jumped out of the bathtub and ran naked through the house. Still wet, I slipped and cracked my forehead open on the cement step in our kitchen. Instructing my brother to clean the pools of blood off the floor, Dad made me lie on a beach towel in the back room and calmly stitched my face back together. Years later, getting up to pee during the night, I would see the exact same scene happening in the kitchen after one of my brother’s friends fell off his motorbike. People regularly arrived at our door with sprains, burns, grazes, cuts, dog bites, stuffed backs and split lips. Friends seemed to bring to Dad what they were embarrassed to take to the medical centre. He once dug a small bug out of a girl’s eye with a Q-tip, flushed a bead out of a boy’s nostril after he intentionally inhaled it, and sedated a friend’s son after he had tried to scrape their mashed kitten off the road outside their house. Dad was brilliant during emergencies and could treat his own children without batting an eyelid, but when it came to general illness or ailment, my brother and I always went to our mother. Mum had cool hands and stroked your hair; she made you honey tea and prepared hot packs or cold packs or steamy rooms; she rubbed Vicks on your chest and dabbed calamine lotion on your mossie bites. My father, on the other hand, only ever had one piece of medicinal advice for us: “Take two panadol and lie down for half an hour.” Nevermind the fact that I couldn’t swallow tablets until I was ten – lying down for half an hour is practically impossible when you’re a kid. No matter what symptoms we had, Dad’s advice was always the same. It was as if he couldn’t take us seriously unless we were bleeding or bruised or broken. I spent seven years complaining of headaches before Dad sent me to a specialist. Mum received even more useless advice than me – whenever she complained about an ache or pain, Dad simply said, “Aww that’s no good.” One day, Mum snapped. “Eight years of medical school and that’s what they teach you? THAT’S NO FUCKING GOOD?” After that, Mum started seeing a female GP at one of the surgeries Dad owned.

Through eavesdropping on my father’s phone conversations over the past twenty-two years, I like to think I’ve gleaned quite a bit of medical expertise. (Although I once overheard him tell a patient to “take two panadol and get a divorce.”) Dad was always stupidly giving patients his home number, and they’d ring every night the minute we sat down to dinner. I listened attentively as Dad rattled off medications, dosages, statistics and warnings. I also disgusted myself thoroughly by reading his medical journals and learning far more than a child should about the body. At school, I showed off my drug-company pens and notepads (Zoloft was way cooler than Mambo!) and surveyed the playground carefully at lunch time. Whenever a student fell or injured themselves on the monkey bars, I dashed over. “Don’t worry,” I would reassure the growing crowd of spectators, “My father is a doctor.” And they would make room for me accordingly. Then I would inspect my classmate, poke them in various places and ask if each one hurt, nod gravely, and escort them up to sick bay. There I briefed the school nurse on the incident and offered my diagnosis before she rolled her eyes and kicked me out.

The problem with my Dad is that he’s too nice. He treats all our friends and family for free, even though he would never dream of using their accounting, consulting, plumbing or basket-weaving services without paying them. Even when he does things through the books, Dad accepts “alternative forms of payment.” One of his patients, a greengrocer, gives us boxes of fruit after each appointment. An elderly Philippine lady with no medical insurance pays Dad in bizarre desserts (green things with jelly and spaghetti and mousse.) Most of the time, he just bulk bills everybody, even the “struggling” retired couples who request vaccinations before their overseas holidays and then drive away in their sports cars. Dad genuinely cares about his patients though, and he always puts their safety and wellbeing before his own. One day his most annoying patient, a recovering alcoholic, showed up to an appointment blind drunk and twirling his car keys. Rather than letting him put other road-users in danger, my father drove the patient home, stopping on the way to buy him KFC because the lush hadn’t eaten in days. After dropping him home, locking up his car and tucking him into bed, my father then walked the 6 kilometers back to the surgery. In January.

As a side project to general practitioning, my father regularly taught sexual education at a local highschool. This meant that while he usually sidestepped awkward father-daughter chats by cutting a relevant article out of the newspaper and leaving it on my desk, he thought nothing of sitting me at the kitchen table and placing a condom and a carrot in front of me. “Practice makes perfect!” he declared, while I looked up at my mother pleadingly. I was thirteen.

Despite the scabies, career limitations, dead bodies, phallic objects and constant interruptions to daily life, having a father who is a GP has its perks. I can get scripts for anything, we have enough medication in the house to kill a rhino, there’s some great gear on hand whenever I have an emergency fancy-dress occasion, and people assume I’m rich. Unfortunately, I also have an unusually high tolerance to panadol…

It’s 9am and I’ve been up for four hours. I woke up at the butt-crack of dawn because I had a bad dream where my brother died – the fourth in a string of nightmares this week involving dead animals, cutting off my face with a razor, and being raped by wild bush-pigs.

No, I haven’t been smoking crack before bed every night. I’ve been wearing nicotine patches.

Nicorette is possibly the greatest legal substance I have come across in the course of my adult life. Nobody knows you’re wearing it and you get all the wonderful benefits of nicotine seeping directly into your skin without the pesky process of smoking, smelling like an ashtray, and the various safety risks associated with holding a flaming object in your mouth. I can wear my nicotine patch on the bus, in restaurants, at the office, around babies, and right next to the bar when I’m out drinking.

The problem is that rather than overcoming my addiction to nicotine, Nicorette has simply shifted the mode in which I absorb it. While wearing a patch, I am calm, relaxed, energetic and productive. The second the patch is removed, I feel antsy, yell at coworkers, pick fights with my boyfriend and cry. I also smoke cigarettes.

Over the past four months, I’ve noticed a developing pattern in my nicotine use. From Monday to Friday, I wear patches (approx $20 worth), and try not to think about cigarettes. It’s hard work, especially when a lot of my friends smoke, but I often make it through the whole week without smoking once. This is not only due to Nicorette, but also stems from a strong sense of self-control, my ability to overcome temptations, and my incredible resolve. I like all these qualities in myself so much that I want to reward myself for them at the end of the week. I do this by having a cigarette.

Oh yes, as soon as 5pm rolls around on a Friday, I pack up my desk, rip off my patch and smoke until I feel sick. This is sometimes achieved within 2-3 cigarettes, but if I’m planning on drinking over the weekend, I usually just buy a deck in anticipation that I will be a walking chimney until the following Monday.

Now I’m no accountant (hang on, yes I am) but if I used to smoke two packets of cigarettes a week (~$26) and now I wear 15mg patches 5 days a week and smoke one packet of cigarettes over the remaining two days ($20 + $13), I’m really no better off financially.

Why is this stuff so fucking expensive? I run out of money, try to go patchless, SMOKE and then wind up right back at the start of the Nicorette 16-week goddamn program. Sure, I fall off the bandwagon every now and then, but isn’t that to be expected? God didn’t create the world in a day – he created it in SIX days, and then he took a cigarette break.