sofoulandfairaday

[sofoulandfairaday]

tom is absolutely giving medical malpractice.

i'd always seen him as a neuro girlie because of his fascination with and proclivity towards the literal dissection of the human mind (legilimency? anyone?) but i am wedded to the idea of him as an haematologist now that you made me think of it. i think he would want an academic/research position and i can see him being genuinely willing to teach but only accepting the best of the best as his students.

(and thank you so much for the rest of your reply)

there is so much new stuff on your blog that i need to catch up with omg and i swear i will get to it BUT. BUT FIRST. i have a question (which, funnily, is really relevant to my actual offline life rn): if tom riddle was a doctor, what specialty would he practice? [he gives me major neurosurgery vibes] and, more laterally, what do you think makes a good surgeon? as in, what kind of personality types fare the best in a surgical program?

now this is the sort of content i like to see!

while i can certainly see good old dr riddle [bmbch oxon] very much enjoying having a rummage around in a patient's cranium, he strikes me as someone who would prefer specialties on the medical, rather than surgical, spectrum - and, especially, would like specialties which require a lot of sifting through evidence and solving mysteries. he's clearly a puzzle girly [why else would he spend his teenage years coming up with anagrams of his own name?] and so i think he'd very much like the parts of his job which allowed him to spend half his time running a lot of invasive tests on people and the other half skulking in a lab getting an enormous amount of money to run research projects...

so he's applying for:

haematology

aka: staring at blood - which is right up his alley. his particular interest is coagulation disorders in pregnant women - and their contribution to these women dying in childbirth.

histopathology

aka: staring at slices of tissue. he's determined to find out whether or not the soul resides in the liver.

neuropathology

i think we can all picture him presiding over a collection of brains preserved in formalin. one of them is dumbledore's.

forensic pathology

cutting up corpses by order of the state? he's in! his team of graduate students have conned several million out of the wellcome trust and are spending it trying to reanimate their specimens.

forensic psychiatry

because while if you want to be a good psychiatrist you need an iron will and well-developed sense of empathy, if you want to be a bad one you need to be able to gaslight, gatekeep, and girlboss. and our tom's got that nailed...

now.

the above flippancy is about to make me look quite bad, because i am also a puzzle girly, and i like medicine precisely for the sort of mystery solving and research paper publishing it enables. but i'm not a mass-murderer, which i feel it's important to clarify...

i'm not a surgeon either - i didn't struggle with the gory bits of the work, i just didn't find any of the surgical specialties i shadowed during my training particularly compelling in re: that element of mystery.

while the reputation they sometimes have - especially on tv - for being scalpel-wielding jocks isn't accurate, it's certainly true that the defining trait you need as a surgeon is total, unshakeable conviction. in all medical specialities outside of emergency medicine you have the option to adopt a wait-and-see approach a lot of the time - but you do not have this option if you've got someone open on the table in front of you. you need to be enormously decisive, capable of tunnel-vision, incredibly good under pressure, and also a little bit arrogant - the only way you can get through the terror of knowing that you're responsible for slicing and dicing someone [particularly in specialties like neonatal surgery or neurosurgery] is to believe unquestioningly that you're going to smash it.

these are probably all traits you already possess - they're certainly something it benefits all doctors to have, in moderation - and they can also be learned and honed through practise, but they're going to be most crucial in surgery because - the vast majority of the time - your issue won't be working out what's wrong with a patient, it'll be pulling off the operation without a hitch.

surgeons still get to do academic work, clinical research and so on, but if you think you want to be a surgeon, you really have to like that slicing and dicing, in-and-out aspect of the work. if you can't see yourself performing thousands upon thousands of the same operation, it's not for you.

[sofoulandfairaday]

screaming crying yelling

there's some real affection there. it's giving power couple

2!

thank you very much for the ask, pal!

question two on this love your fandom ask game was a very popular one, so I've combined this ask with a couple of others:

[a huge shoutout to the anon who left such a kind message about bookbinding - you're a legend!]

2. what is a headcanon you weren't sure about at first but have come to like?

i have recently - while writing subluxation - been regrettably tricked against my will into finding rodolphus lestrange fascinating [i can hear @sofoulandfairaday giggling and kicking her feet in the air], and i am increasingly coming round to the idea that - while i certainly still prefer the idea that his marriage to bellatrix is an unhappy one - there's some real affection there. it's giving power couple.

5. what is something you see in fics a lot and love?

both fun and profoundly moving engagement with my favourite fandom belief: that you can write yourself into - and out of - the least plausible premises and pairings, turning them into something which should be dismissed as a joke but which instead lays bare the fundamental strangeness of life and of love, if you just have enough nerve.

15. which character always makes you smile?

the man, the myth, the legend��� ronald billius weasley, for the love of whom i would even defend hermione.

16. what is a tiny detail in canon that you want more people to appreciate?

that each of the trio destroys a horcrux, and that each of these horcruxes is destroyed by the person who feels most narratively linked to the bit of voldemort's personality it symbolises.

harry destroys the diary, which gives him a connection he sincerely values to somebody who can understand his experience as an orphan searching for the answer to the mystery of his life.

ron destroys the locket, which tortures him by suggesting his mother doesn't love him and that his great love is futile because she will abandon him. the locket is the clearest example of voldemort's profound mammy issues - he kills hepzibah smith to acquire it as vengeance for her suggesting that merope stole it, and it is the only horcrux he constructs an elaborate defence for in a place meaningful to him from childhood.

hermione, whose experience of the wizarding world is of having to justify her rightful place within it, destroys the cup - the item which has the least personal connection to voldemort but which he evidently chooses as a horcrux because of his own preoccupation with history and his place in the wizarding world.

[other answers from this ask game]

#bellatrix lestrange #rodolphus lestrange #belladolphus

[sofoulandfairaday]

pov: you pop into tumblr for 0.4 seconds after being gone a whole month because life has never been more hectic (which. i never thought possible. and yet.) and this is the notification that greets you. imagine being complimented like this by the smartest person in this whole fandom. i am squealing🥰

12, 15, 23 for the fandom ask meme!

thank you very much for these questions from the love your fandom ask game, anon!

12. compliment someone else in your fandom:

i've mentioned throughout the answers to this game that the thing i find so astonishing about fandom is the fact that it is something which depends on generosity - which seems like it would therefore be unsustainable in the modern world - and that i, specifically, have been a recipient of that generosity. the fact that people make time to read things i bash out hunched over my laptop of an evening is an extraordinary kindness, and that people go beyond the enormous generosity of just reading to also leave comments is something i adore.

so, a shoutout to some of the names i get a little buzz out of seeing in the ol' inbox: @hikarimeroperiddle, @spectral-kitty, @sofoulandfairaday, and @ashesandhackles. your generous reading and willingness to yell far more eloquently than i would be able to about anything and everything is a gift.

15. which character always makes you smile?

tom marvolo riddle, especially when he's swanning around being camp and unpalatable.

23. name a fandom you're curious about because of a mutual:

@bronzeagepizzeria is really doing a great job of making doctor who look interesting, which isn't something i ever expected i'd find myself saying...

[other answers from this ask game]

[sofoulandfairaday]

If I am to kill [Potter], I must do it with another’s wand.

HARRY POTTER AND DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART 1 (2010) dir. David Yates

#he so cunty #we love him for that #lord voldemort #hp edits

[sofoulandfairaday]

Rodolphus: [trying to convince Voldemort of something] If you do this then, uh... Bellatrix will do whatever you want. I'm talking dirty stuff.

Bellatrix: Rod! I'm sorry about him.

Rodolphus:

Voldemort:

Bellatrix: Although he wasn't wrong about the dirty stuff.

#i'm tagging this as #belladolphusmort #my favourite threesome ever #in desperate need of content with these three

[sofoulandfairaday]

How has being a doctor influenced your writing or ig your viewpoints/person? Currently I’m a med student - haven’t really come across many doctors who also write ff (perhaps I’m not talking to the right people haha). Can you tell me a little more about what meds like for you?

thank you for the ask, anon - and i hope your training is going well.

i'm not going to talk about my speciality etc., for internet safety reasons, and i've received another ask which i will one day get around to answering on wizarding medicine as a science. but i will talk about how medicine has affected my experience in fandom and influenced my writing.

my writing process looks, i think, fairly ruthless from the outside. i’m not somebody who tends to agonise over things like word choice, i never have anything beta-read or seek advice on plot lines as i’m writing, i don’t need little routines or dedicated time to write (i’m a whenever and wherever girly), i hit publish and move on, and i’m generally good at not getting upset by criticism. and that decisiveness is undoubtedly a skill which has been honed by working in medicine, but, like other aspects of my personality which affect both my writing and my career - e.g. that i’m extremely good under pressure, someone with good intuition, able to hyperfocus, a lateral thinker, possessed of a very strong stomach, someone who doesn’t need to stick rigidly to a routine, and emotionally resilient - i’ve always been like this.

and i’ve also always been someone who has a preference for characters who aren’t the good guys.

my writing tends to favour the flawed, the lonely, the grieving, the furious, the self-destructive, and so on. i find the virtuous quite boring, and i really dislike the puritanical streak which a lot of fandom discourse (and, indeed, all media discourse) has developed in recent years. i think it’s incredibly dangerous that liking particular themes, tropes, or characters in fan-fiction has come to be equated with the reader’s real-world views and morals, and i think it’s equally dangerous for us to have any assumption that moral purity is possible from either fictional or real people.

that i think this is partially because i’m not fourteen - i remember well the righteousness of youth, and i’m glad that social media wasn’t anywhere near as pervasive then - and i am sympathetic to the fact that a lot of this purity discourse is just teens trying to self-actualise. but it’s also because it’s something that is completely impossible to do as a doctor if you’d like to be capable of doing your job properly. you will never have a perfect patient, you will never like a perfect character, you will treat them anyway.

when you’re training, i think it’s easy to end up with the assumption that your difficult patients will either have reasons for their difficulties which are so understandable that you can have compassion for them with ease (e.g. the nice young person being slowly locked-in by als who lashes out in grief and rage at how their life is being cut short) or so cartoonishly malicious that you will enter a state of clinical detachment and treat them with nothing more than cool professionalism (e.g. the elderly racist who refuses to be treated by a black doctor). and you certainly will have lots of patients who fit these extremes of the spectrum.

but you will mostly have people who are very messy and complicated and human. who will be incredibly unpleasant and yet will also tug at your heartstrings. who will be in pain and will be afraid and will be funny and interesting and grieving and who will also have done things in their lives which are horrifying.

your patients will be cruel. they will be sleazy. they will treat the nurses with contempt (do not be the sort of doctor who does the same). they will be bigoted. they will be rude. they will be annoying. they will be sly. they will lie to you. they will be malicious. the list is endless. you will treat them anyway.

your patients will make bad decisions again and again - the sixty-a-day smoker who needs oxygen to breathe is probably still going to light up the second they’re out of the building, the person who barely survived covid because they didn’t get the vaccine is going to continue to refuse to take precautions to protect themselves - and you will both be infuriated and you will understand how it’s never as simple as just not making that bad decision. you will treat them anyway.

your patients will choose to be and to remain ill-informed - they will tell you that vaccines can turn children trans, or that the pharmaceutical industry is suppressing the truth that homoeopathic remedies cure cancer - and you will both be infuriated and you will understand how it’s never as simple as just changing your worldview overnight. you will treat them anyway.

your patients will end up in hospital for reasons which are directly and incontrovertibly their own fault - they will be the eighteen-year-old who thought they’d be fine to drive after a couple of drinks and has now killed their friend and given themselves irreversible brain damage, they will be the drug dealer who got stabbed by a rival in a robbery-gone-wrong - and you will both be infuriated and you will understand how it’s never as simple as making a different choice when so much in life is a coin-toss. you will treat them anyway.

your patients will end up in hospital and also be bad people - they will be the child molestor brought in from prison in cardiac arrest, they will be the parents who went to the bar rather than watch their child in the pool and are now having to be told that all resuscitation attempts have failed - and you will both be infuriated and you will understand that even the very worst people in the world can be afraid and in pain. you will treat them anyway.

you will also learn a very important lesson: it is tremendously easy to kill someone. you will see one failure to check the mirrors while driving, one punch in a pub brawl, one bump of mdma offered to a friend on a night out, one instance of seeing red, one split-second decision which takes a life. and you will recognise that the killer probably thought of themselves as a good person, but that isn’t how this works. because, of course, the cold, hard truth is that you probably think of yourself as a good person. but you’re going to kill someone too.

not intentionally - i hope - but you are going to act too slowly to begin treatment, or be convinced that someone’s pain can’t be as bad as they say and triage them wrongly, or assume that a patient with dozens of instances on their records of trying to score opiates by claiming to have abdominal pain is lying again, or think that you know better than the patient and their family, or be misled by the charming demeanour of people who are abusing their children. you are going to make a mistake in surgery, or because the lab was backed up, or because you’re tired, or because a&e is at breaking point. and somebody is going to die because of it.

the only thing you can do to stave off that inevitability for as long as possible is to never believe yourself infallible. don’t think of yourself as flawless, or righteous, or moral, or a brilliant genius who works alone. question your expectations; examine your biases; listen to patients properly; be aware of the realities of medical misogyny, racism, and ableism and never think yourself incapable of them; show your unpleasant patients as much compassion as your nice ones; be good to the nurses - they will save your bacon - and be just as good to the porters and the cleaners and the people who work in the morgue; stay educated; inform yourself about the actual experience of people who have, for example, been sectioned, or otherwise treated without respect by the medical system; leave your own problems at the door when you step onto the ward; don’t keep silent if you think one of your colleagues is dangerous; get a second opinion whenever you need to; accept that failure is inevitable; keep trying. recognise that nothing and nobody is ever simple. treat them anyway.

so too in your life in fandom. never think that you alone have spotless interests, nor that your favourite characters are flawless. examine why tropes or interpretations of characters which allow them to be imperfect make you uncomfortable; examine your biases - is your slash heteronormative? is your portrayal of a non-white character stereotypical?; be nice to your commenters, and take as much as you can of what they say in good faith; remember that people writing fic are real and have complex motivations and experiences; regard it as your duty to confront portrayals of the violent and the cruel with as much compassion as you can; keep writing. recognise that nothing and nobody is ever simple. write them anyway.

#reblogging this on the first day of the semester for good luck #on medicine #favourites

[sofoulandfairaday]

i refuse to defend my favorite characters. They did that horrible thing bc they suck really bad

#more of this energy please and thank you

[sofoulandfairaday]

"what do you do in spare time" i yearn and i dream about a life where im loved and nothings ever wrong and it takes up all of my evenings and weekends doing that

[sofoulandfairaday]

love that character. would hate to go into their tag.

#basically all of my babies.

[sofoulandfairaday]

reworked an old wip 🖼️

tom riddle contemplating his prospects... 🪄💫🐍

#in italian we say ‘me lo farei sui chiodi’. and that to me conveys the appropriate amount of horniness that this piece calls for. #tom marvolo riddle #hp fanart #hp art

[sofoulandfairaday]

#favourites #a tom a day makes the (almost) doctor go 🥵 #this might just be my favourite fanart of him. look at this man. #lord voldemort #tom marvolo riddle #hp art #hp fanart

[sofoulandfairaday]

"this too shall pass" well can it fucking get on with it

[sofoulandfairaday]

"READ MY DNI" no. use your block button like an adult. i'm not scrolling through the many-paragraphs-long pinned posts of every blog i reblog something from. if you insist certain types of people aren't welcome in the notes of your posts then it's your responsibility to curate that. or choose a closed social media platform like facebook or instagram. or go and live in a barn away from humanity if you really don't like sharing the world with people who are different from you

[sofoulandfairaday]

You don’t actually think I was interested in you? Why? Because you’re the great Sherlock Holmes, the clever detective in the funny hat? No. Because I took your pulse. Elevated; your pupils dilated.

@giftober 2023 | day 4: eyes, day 13: clocks + day 23: hands

#‘a scandal in belgravia’ you will always be famous #adlock

[sofoulandfairaday]

“Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.”

— Anaïs Nin (via wickedwhimsicalwallflower)

#quotes #favourites

[sofoulandfairaday]

#hp fanart #severus snape #yes to sev as a smoker #the muggle ones. he made the switch to the wizarding brands his fellow slytherins smoked and he found the taste was never quite the same.

[sofoulandfairaday]

I have no concept of tmi you should tell me everything

#about me