The surgery swansong

I always seem stuck in the middle somehow. Here in the land of XXX beer and strange soccer, I sometimes feel like I've fallen down the rabbithole because everyone is 21 and chirpy and full of sunshine and flowers and I'm not 21 and can best be described as 'not violent' on a good day. There are days when I feel like I should be wearing baby tees and faded denim and kissing posters of Johnny Depp and Luke Perry while listening to The Cranberries. And then there are days when I feel like I should be sitting in a smoky café with a Djarum held between the fingers of one hand, dressed to kill and writing my magnum opus on a very sexy laptop, pausing only to sip from my double-shot with an air of brilliant distraction before I pack it in for the day and ride home in my Sylvia so I can enjoy my gorgeous house, furnished with Tord Boontje and eclectic vintage finds.

I increasingly feel like I am stuck between worlds as the years pass here, neither here nor there. I think that is what sometimes makes me restless and antsy, making me take Deliverance II (sadly, not, and never will be, a Sylvia) and tear down the freeway. Everyone else seems to be in a place I cannot be.

The tension between two worlds was, on a completely different matter, what made the last few weeks rather fraught, at least in my head. On one hand was this place , an offer that came out of the blue by people I liked enormously, for what seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Six amputations in a day! Surgeries galore! Working with minimal facilities in conditions I would never experience anywhere else, seeing cases I would never see anywhere else. I know for most people the allure is unapparent, but to me it represented a glorious serendipitous collision of the things that made my heart race: medicine, animals, globetrotting, food, adventure.

And on the other hand, there was my moorhen paradise, both less and more than I expected. And I couldn't have both.

Pick one.

In the beginning, I picked. And then the siren song of what I was giving up changed my mind, and to some great bewilderment and hurt, I landed in a world of strife for it. And suddenly it seemed like everything was bigger than it should be, and I wasn't simply choosing between surgery and a rented house anymore, but between what I wanted from my future career and what I wanted from my future. And I hated it.

I thought about it a lot, and in the end I chose, although not for the reasons that were originally considered. Throw in a fellow traveller who I hitherto had not met who seems afflicted with a chronic, severe case of Icannotshutupitis and the prospect of spending a few thousand dollars to be painfully talked to death over a period of months and the sudden possibility of attempting to arrange another trip again the following year, and I chose in complete defiance of what I had been leaning toward for more than a month.

I miss it already though. And I haven't told my fellow travellers yet, because I think part of me wants to preserve the illusion that I will be on a plane bound for Rajasthan at the end of the year just for a while longer. I will soon though.

And the next time around, it will be better. Right?