I'm here...

I've been absent from writing this blog because I've finally -- FINALLY -- gotten into the wards. It is terrifying. It is electrifying. Watching someone grasp a 500 year old Egyptian figurine of the goddess Bastet, look at you piercingly and demand your views of death and the nature of souls is not a boring experience. I've experienced St. Elmo's fire.

Late at night, with Mrs. Andrew's homemade bead spread pulled up tight to my chin, my brain burns and sleep is hard to come. Last night they aired a three minute documentary on channel 4 about a man who lived in a flat with 100 birds. One still frame showed him sleeping in his armchair, splattered by bird poop, snoring to the symphony of his pets and the constant fluttering of wings. That's what my brain's been like; inspired by the patients I've visited, my thoughts are a flurry of questions I thought I had long laid to rest. I wrestle with myself.

One of my loan boxes contains a crescent, icelike piece of agate. My notes tell me that in some traditions agate was believed to heal scorpions stings and snake bites. And even still thunder and lightning. At first I could imagine it, a brave silhouette grasping the rock to the crackling sky, pleading for the war of the heavens to stop. But perhaps it stills a storm of another kind and would be best held, clutched against our breastbones.