Dream: difficult venous access and a treasure hunt

This dream starts in a hospital room which looks like one of the isolation rooms in our ICU. There is an obese patient lying in the bed and we are in the middle of trying to get a cannula in the patient. Anne, Jo and Hsiang are there and I am the team leader. I shout at them to concentrate on one arm each and the other person the legs - I cannot remember who goes to which part of the body, but everyone seems to be furiously trying to stick the patient with needles.

I look down and every attempt appears to be failing. Lots of the veins that look like veins turn out to have nothing in them, others just collapse and do not accommodate a cannula. There's blood oozing from multiple failed attempts, but the patient appears to be unconscious and he doesn't seem to mind.

"How long have we been going for now?" I ask and no one replies.

"Please get the IO gun as we will need it soon." I say to a random person standing at the entrance to the room.

I then take a cannula and try to put it in the external jugular vein, but I can't find it either. I toss the needle aside and just then, Anne shouts victoriously, "I've got it!"

The lights start flashing in the room and streamers come down from the ceiling.

"Congratulations", a microphone booms, "You have won the first phase of the difficult venous access competition."

That was a competition? I thought to myself. A bloody strange competition.

The next moment, we are all in a 4WD driving along a country road. My dad and another random old man in his 70s are also in the car. Hsiang is driving and I'm sitting in the passenger seat.

The countryside is full of lush green rolling hills, and looks not unlike the part going from Nowra to Kangaroo Valley. The air is fresh and we feel relaxed. The road surface deteriorates somewhat and soon we are bumping along a gravelly track. We come to a cave where it is very dark and Hsiang slows right down to navigate through the cave. I stick my hand out the window and feel that the roof of the cave is awfully close to the roof of the car. I tell him to navigate this way and that depending on the bumpiness I can feel, and we manage to inch through.

On the other side of the cave is a large mansion alongside the road, hidden by a row of carefully pruned pine trees. We stop the car and get out, somehow I realise at this point that we are looking for a treasure.

Inside there are three huge rooms, which feels strange as the outside appearance of the mansion would suggest there were dozens of rooms. In one room there are beds lined up one next to the other, somewhat resembling an orphanage. In the second room there are lots of old-looking bathtubs with clawfeet. The third room holds a variety of equipment and machines which I don't recognise.

I split up my team to look inside each of the rooms carefully, looking for any hidden crevices where treasure might be found. Looking around the house, I realise that there are almost no areas hidden to sight, and everything appears to be wide open. I feel like this might be a difficult task.

Eventually one of us (can't remember who) finds a secret trapdoor next to one of the bathtubs, its handle obscured by the clawfoot. We push the bathtub aside and pull up the door - inside there is a small crevice holding a chest. We lug the chest out of the hole, and with our hearts pounding hard, blow off the dust and open the chest.

Inside there are lots of old china plates and silver cutlery. I pick them up carefully and examine them - in the dream I think that they are real antiques, and I'm trying to tell what era they might be from. As I set each item aside, I get deeper and deeper into the chest until I find a handful of coins which look really really old. They have that rusted green look of excavated items, and with excitement I discern that the print on them says "Elizabeth I". I wonder when Elizabeth I reigned, but think that I've found the treasure.

Together we pull the chest out of the house and close the trapdoor. There are no other people around and we feel like we've found the treasure way ahead of the other teams. We load it into the 4WD and just as we are about to leave Hsiang says "I want to go home now, can I have my part of the prize first?" and Anne says "I know whose house it is, this is Rembrandt's country house. He planted that row of pines out the front."

With the engine running, Hsiang jumps out of the car and Anne runs off to take photos of the house. I feel like we need to get going because we should leave with the treasure before everyone comes, but another man comes out of nowhere and walks up to our car.

He says "Congratulations! Here is your prize." and hands a large bag to Hsiang. He looks inside and claps with glee.

We watch with much anticipation as he pulls out his prize. It is a 12 pack of Sorbent brand toilet paper.

Then I wake up.

Doodle

Food: Feb

This was the best vanilla slice from Revolver, though not nearing the wonderous ones that Lisa used to make in Nowra. The puff pastry is soggy but still delicious (like eating leftovers straight from the fridge), the custard a perfect wobble and the acidity of the passionfruit just cutting through the richness.

Vegetarian big breakfast at Revolver - sourdough toast with hummus, two eggs baked with housemade baked cannelini beans, avocado, roast tomato, pickled beetroot, eggplant relish and goats cheese. It looks very busy on the plate, but the flavours were well balanced and it was such a healthy selection!

 Dad's 60th birthday cake.

Ricotta hotcakes with caramelised banana and honeycomb butter from Bills. This was as good as it always is - such light fluffy hotcakes, drizzled with the most indulgent butter with crunchy bits of sweet honey heaven. If I could eat this every weekend I may grow even more gloriously fat. 

 Stinky tofu soup! This was perfect, reminiscent of the night markets in Taiwan. My place did stink for days afterwards, but it was well worth it.

Sweet potato gnocchi - our attempt to follow the recipe fell apart when I realised we had no scales or reliable measuring devices and had to resort to approximating the weight of a sweet potato with our hands. We boiled it for too long and it got mushy, but a bit of pan-frying did the trick, and we gobbled this down once tossed with pesto and parmesan. 

Kedgeree from Single Origin Roasters in Surry Hills. Aside from the usual breakfast offerings, this really caught my eye - wild quinoa tossed with spices and smoked trout, topped with goats cheese, capers and parsley. It was like a warm rice salad, but with such interesting flavours that I really enjoyed this breakfast (and such excellent coffee they do too).

Summer lunch set at Nazimi - mixed tempura with cold soba. The iced sauce that came with this was really icy cold, and together with the fresh crisp tempura straight out of the fryer, made for a little dance in the mouth. Perfect for a muggy summer lunch.

I love Gumshara Ramen but somehow haven't managed to get there for a couple of years, and they have now moved a couple of spaces across and have a bigger kitchen. Between 3pm and 5pm the usual tonkotsu soups are not available because they are updating the stock with new bones (that is just so cool), so instead we had this fish ramen which was utterly delicious. The soup was thick and rich, coating one's lips with collagen - I think my lips felt plumper by the time I finished the soup! A few slices of roast pork, bamboo shoots, a few nori strips and a scattering of spring onions - so simple, but so satisfying. I must return soon to try the mega ramen that I saw on the menu.

 This one is not food, but I found him while I was looking through photos on my phone. As of end Feb, he is 29kg of muscle! I love Regal, he's such a sweetie.

Dream: I lose my left cornea

In this dream I'm taking handover from someone and suddenly I get a phone call from one of the bosses. He asks me to go and intubate the patient in the corner room because she has been increasingly drowsy all day and he's worried she'll get too drowsy during the night.

I go into the room and the lady appears to be deeply unconscious. So unconscious, in fact, that I estimate I won't need any drugs to intubate her.

There's a laryngoscope and a size 7 tube on the bench just next to her, so I just grab it and put the tube in. Once it's in I realise that the bag is not attached to the wall, and that there appears to be a huge side hole near the connection with the tube (which doesn't exist in real life). When I try to squeeze the bag even with room air, it just all escapes out the side hole and nothing goes into the patient. The patient is still breathing though and her colour is ok, so I decide that there's no imminent reason to panic. In fact I feel remarkably calm given how wrong the situation is.

Soon I realise I'm stranded in the side room and no-one appears to be walking past. I give up and press the nurse call button, and I can hear a distant "ding-dong!" at the nurses station. A nurse whose name I cannot remember comes in and says, "hi I'm Camilla, what can I do for you?" (but her name is not really Camilla)

Just then the patient starts to choke and sputter. She's coughing quite hard and her face turns all red. I ask the nurse if she has any sedation ready at hand, and she says "all I have is these 2mL left of morphine".

I take the syringe from her and start injecting it, but the connection isn't quite right between the syringe and the bung, and it squirts out and hits my left eye.

It stings so sharply in my dream that I momentarily feel as if I'm blinded.

"Let me help you with that, you'd better go look at your eye." Camilla says, taking the syringe from my hand.

I go to the nearest mirror with tears streaming down my face. When I look into the mirror, there are fragments of yellowish stuff floating in my eye, as well as my contact lens which has been shattered into several pieces. I grab some saline and rinse out my eye.

Little bits and pieces wash away easily, but the last part to wash free is a small intact disc of yellow. I intuitively know it's my cornea, and inspect it carefully in my palm. I'd better hold onto this, it'll be pretty hard to get another one. I think to myself.

I look up and a sizeable segment of my eye is missing. The clear fluid from within my eye appears to be seeping out freely and I can see blood vessels at the back of the eye reflected in the glass.

Then I wake up.

Two brief dreams

Regal has a PE:

In this dream I am at a stranger's house. There's a metal fence out the front framing a grassy front yard. I walk up the few steps leading to the front door, press the doorbell and wait. A lady comes to the door, and Regal comes rushing past her and out onto the porch. He dashes around madly, just like he usually does when he is very excited. But he doesn't seem to recognise me or respond to me.

"This is your dog?" The lady asks me.
 "Yes, but he's not usually like this." I try to round him up and hold onto his collar but he manages to escape again.
"He's totally mad and he just bit me!" She shows me some welts that don't look like dog bites, but nevertheless she seems very angry.

I finally catch Regal and see that his gaze is altered. His eyes are flickering left and right as if he has some sort of seizure disorder.

"We need to take him to the council and get him put down". The lady drones in an annoying American-ish voice.
"He clearly has an organic cause for his behaviour, he's delirious not psychotic!"
"All right, I guess we can take him to the vet before the pound." She reluctantly agrees.

The next scene I'm within a doggy ICU where there are lots of dogs lying limply attached to towers of monitoring and infusion pumps. I walk up to Regal and look at the monitor.

He has a Swan-Ganz catheter and I can see he has low cardiac output with extremely high PA pressures (like 80/50) and low systemic pressures. He is completely motionless as I stroke his head.

Poor Regal, I think in my dream, how does having a PE cause agitated delirium? He must have been so hypoxic, the poor little thing...

Then I wake up.


=========
The train from Christophorus cake shop:

 I am at a train station which I do not recognise. I stand in front of a whole row of ticket machines and I am with another person I do not know. We are not sure what tickets we need to be buying, so we go to the window and ask the man where "the performance" is.

He gives us two tickets which are different. One goes to Croydon, and the other one goes to Ryde. The originating station is the same though, Christophorus cake shop.

We go down many sets of escalators before we reach the platforms. There are many platforms as if we were in Shinjuku, but the whole place is old and decrepit, as if it was some sort of war-time bomb bunker.

We get on a train and as it pulls out I realise that the station we were at was Central. Soon we get to Redfern, and the surroundings appear familiar again. When we get to Ashfield I realise we have to get out there, but the train keeps going till we are in Burwood.

Once we get out of the train my silent companion suddenly says "Hurry, we have to get to the performance soon or we will be late."

We start running down the street and eventually we get to the theatre. We rush in and it is totally packed, so we go to the back and sit somewhere very high up. The actors are just about to enter the stage and I can see the first two people - a voluptuous lady in a red silk dress, and one of the nurses from RPA (a balding Chinese man with a wispy goatee). I thought they made an interesting combination and wonder what the play will be about.

Then suddenly I see Hsiang sitting in the front row and all of a sudden I'm really interested to see who he might be watching the play with. I crane my neck to see who is sitting with him and just at that moment, the lights switch off and I can see nothing.
 

Dream: stranded on a Japanese island

The dream starts in dense forest. The foliage makes it difficult to tell what time of the day it is, but it is still relatively light. There is a fresh smell of green-ness, interspersed with the sweet smell of rotting undergrowth. Everything appears to be quite damp, as if we were in tropical forest, but the trees around us seem to be trees from a temperate climate - tall and sturdy.

I am with a girl and a boy, and though we are walking in a group we are quite separated. The girl is far up ahead, and I can barely see glimpses of her clothes through the trees. The boy is lagging behind somewhere and I cannot see him at all. 

Suddenly it starts to rain, and the raindrops fall so fast that it becomes hard to see the path. It's like wearing a visor of water through which the world gets blurry. Everything gets so muddy and slippery that it's exhausting to keep walking though I'm not carrying much on my back.

I emerge out of the forest into a small village of about ten huts in a circle. As sudden as the rain came, it stops. The boy comes out of the forest and stands next to me, looking at the cute little thatched huts with smoke streaming languidly out of them. We are adopted by a family and given a plastic sheet to sit on and some warm food to eat.

We sit on the ground and gaze into the forest, waiting for the other girl to show up. The light fades gradually around us until we are sitting in the completely still dark. Somewhere, someone lights a fire, smelling of damp wood. We join the gathering around the fire, but are unable to understand anything that is said. Everyone appears cheerful in their conversation, slapping each other on the back and telling jokes. I feel excessively tired and go to sleep curled up in the corner of a hut.

The next morning we say wordless goodbyes to the people of the village and head off into the forest, which is as dense as the one from the previous day. This time the boy walks closer to me, and I realise that we have not said anything to each other and I have no idea what his voice sounds like (or what language he speaks).

The track becomes harder and harder to see, in some places just a slicker of mud with a few unidentified prints. Soon we are totally lost in the forest, and the boy gestures for me to take out the map. Only when I see the map do I realise that we are in Japan, and that we are walking through a large area of forest in order to get to the sea. He traces with his finger the various paths through the forest and indicates to me where he thinks we are.

We take a different path which leads uphill. It starts raining again, and this time we huddle under a black umbrella he pulls out of his backpack. After a while I realise that we cannot stop walking or we would become stranded in the forest, so we trudge along in the rain.

At the top of a hill we are struck by the glimpse of deep blue sea in the distance. "We made it!" I shout and start running towards the sea. It doesn't seem to get any closer as we move towards it, but we come across another village where we decide to stay for a night.

We find a secluded spot to sit and watch the sea. Everything seems so very tranquil, looking out over the forest at the still sea. There is a ship very far away, just a dot on the horizon, but I feel like that ship is meant for us.

"Let's stay here in the village and not go to the ship." The boy says finally. He has an awkward Japanese accent and the words sound clipped.

I don't know what to say, and at that point suddenly realise that I have a whole head of long hair. I run my hand through it and a strand comes away. It is bright green, like algae. I pick up the end of my hair and confirm that my entire head is full of green hair. I am so alarmed by this, but the boy says "it's a sign, you cannot leave."

And then I wake up.


There is a strong sense of deja vu in this dream - it is clearly related to my travels in Sikkim where I met a Taiwanese girl called Julia, who was planning to do a 3 day walk from Pelling to Yuksom via Khecheopalri lake. She had a 1 day head start, I took the jeep to Yuksom and waited for 3 days there - but she never arrived. I was worried about her but didn't know who to contact. I never ran into her again on the road, so I never found out what happened to her.

 A Christmas flower in Yuksom

Food Dec - Jan

I am bad at studying, to the point where I'm procrastinating by looking at food photos on my phone and wishing I was elsewhere. Here's a snapshot of what I ate over the last couple of months:

These never fail to make me smile - piggy buns from Chef's Gallery with a sweet black sesame filling. The hard part is - how do you bite into that adorable face?

Kingfish ceviche from Cafe Lima in Marrickville. Fresh strips of fish marinated in chilli and lime juice, topped by a mound of red onion and crispy fried broad beans. Never had ceviche with sweet potato and corn on the cob, but it was delicious.

Sourdough toast with blue cheese, pear and purslane, drizzled with honey. Cornersmith is such a hip place to hang out, starting from the chalkboard where you write your name to the cosy nooks where you can watch life go by, to their own jams and preserves to take home. If only it was closer..

Despite eating a lot already (see above), we couldn't leave Marrickville without a bowl of beef pho from Pho PhD. The stock was rich but a little too sweet for my liking, though the just-cooked pieces of beef were melt-in-the-mouth perfect. 

The burger with the lot at Cafe Guilia made me wish it was my local lunch spot - the best parts of the burger are the perfectly soft bun and such a juicy beef patty topped with an oozy egg. My brain could eat ten of these but my stomach could barely hold one, so humongous it was that it almost causes jaw dislocation.

Korean fried chicken at Naru one (mix of original and sweet & spicy). The powers of google tell me that Korean fried chicken is so ridiculously delicious because it is double fried, which makes the skin is so crunchy it shatters while the flesh remains soft and yielding. The best part is that one doesn't feel like it's oil fest - in fact there's almost no oily residue on your fingers after eating a whole plate of this. The sweet & spicy was quite spicy, but the leftovers were perfect on rice the next day.

 I love a good eggplant, and this was a damn good one. Nasu dengaku at Sushi Masa was half an eggplant grilled to smooth creamy perfection, topped by a glaze balancing the salty miso flavour with the sweet mirin flavour.

The picture doesn't do it justice, but smoked mackerel on toast at Runcible Spoon made me oh-so-happy that I have such great eating places near my house. 

 Handmade chocolate pops at Christmas

I planned to wrap the fried rice (with fresh tomatoes from garden, kecap manis and chilli) in the omelette, but in the end I got lazy. Still delicious though!

 Cold ramen from Ryo's - my favouritest place for ramen, and it was finally hot enough on this day to order the cold selection (I always have no. 3 or 4 from the hot). This came with an soy-egg, boiled pork, bamboo shoots, spring onions and a sail of nori as usual, all dunked in a chilled soy-based dipping sauce. Perfect for a summer lunch.

Prosciutto-wrapped figs with blue cheese dressing from Blu water grill in Hornsby

 Heaven = Marrickville Pork Roll

 Pretty as a picture - chia seed porridge at Sadhana kitchen with mixed berries, banana and some type of vegan honey.

 Summer means fresh tomatoes from the garden at home. These are so juicy and flavoursome that one remembers again what real tomatoes are like. Every year after three months of continuous tomato eating, I vow to be sick of tomatoes for the rest of the year. Then I spend all of winter complaining that the shop tomatoes taste like nothing, and then it's tomato season again!

 Organic pancakes with banana, berries, ricotta and honey from Clipper cafe in Glebe. The strawberry flower with a mint leaf won my heart!

 Marrickville is coming up a lot in this post, but that's because it's such a cool place. This is bruschetta topped with salami, ricotta and honey from Beejay's - such awesome coffee and yet another "hip cafe" for Marrickville.

 Australia day lamingtons from Black Star Pastry
 

One of my many visits to Meetfresh

Awesome coffee at Purple Moose in Alexandria

 All canteens were not created equal - this was an awesome lunch from Kitchen by Mike. Garlic rosemary focaccia, red rice & snow pea salad, creamy cabbage and apple salad.

 Teriyaki salmon set from Nazimi
 

Salmon lovers set (sashimi, roe, pickled, sushi, aburi ) from Niji sushi bar in Kingsford