Blog – PipBrennan

When adventure comes knocking

Sunday Blog 200 – 14th September 2025

Around about this time last week, I was forming a desperate resolve. Just 48 hours into my French writing retreat, I realised I couldn’t manage another seven days. There was a slim window of escape around 3pm when they were picking up the next retreat attendee from the nearest train station, which was a 45-minute drive away. This was a no taxi, no uber situation.

I’ve looked back through the messages to see if there were red flags I missed. But everything I’d read sounded good. Attention paid to writing desks. Tick. Possibility of standing desks. Tick. While the retreat was nowhere near the ocean it had a pool. Tick. Meals delivered to you was perhaps a detail I bleeped over. I liked the sound of 24 hour self-service snack and beverages. The photos looked wonderful.

“It reminds me of the writing retreat in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life”, I’d confidently asserted to family and friends. But that writing retreat was in Bath, England, not countryside France.

I’d arrived exhilarated by the memory of my five-day Italian writing retreat in Verona. Author Catherine McNamara hosted me in her family home. We were both reading Helen Garner books by the end of my stay. We negotiated meal times and menus and when it was time I would come into the kitchen and we’d talk books furiously and cook side by side. I taught her to poach eggs and that was our breakfast every day. There were books, books, books in the house.

The French retreat was an hour’s drive from the airport, and it had been a day-long journey from Italy. But the person who was supposed to meet me at the airport wasn’t there. I had to wait in the cafe for about half an hour and was told to look out for someone with flowers. Like a deformed date, where neither the date nor flowers were real. The plastic posy wasn’t for me but I instinctively reached out to it, he clutched it back to himself and we awkwardly made our way to his car.

After my one-on-one retreat in Italy I was looking forward to meeting other attendees. Only when I arrived and was shown to my room I was advised I was the only attendee. So much for the peer feedback I thought might be coming my way that week.

First up I was given ten minutes alone in the room “to arrive” I think emotionally (during which I unpacked) and was then offered a glass of wine on a silver platter for our first tete a tete.

I didn’t really want the wine but couldn’t quite see how to refuse. I sipped at it while the complicated menu system was explained. It seemed to require endless daily decision-making. I quite like a kitchen forage, and at first, I thought that might be a possibility, due to the advertised 24/7 self-service snack situation. When I was shown the kitchen I looked in some dismay at the messy cutting board, the sink full of refuse. This is one of the perpetual wars I wage at home with my husband. I itched to clean up the retreat kitchen, but it was like there was a repulsive forcefield half-way into the kitchen where I was not allowed to enter.

I had a couple of goes trying to forage for snacks as advertised, but each time, I committed a new infringement of her complicated, opaque kitchen system. Perhaps the main problem was having to share her house and kitchen as she was, well, asking good money for it. I also hadn’t quite realised that meals in my room weren’t so much an option as a compulsion. Guest out of sight and out of mind?

Looking back, I never recovered from her telling me she doesn’t read. So spoiled from my Italian retreat, where we talked books back and forward across the decades and genres, it was hard to be content with the “library” outside my door consisting of ten books, one of which was hers.

So, locked in my room, starved of reading materials and only able to receive the meals that I ordered through What’s App, the final straw was a lunch on a silver tray, but with capsicum. I had completed the form advising of any dietary requirements. It is the only dietary requirement I actually have. I was the only guest. And yet, here we were. The seven days stretched out ahead of me in a long conga line of confusing interactions and unwanted gestures of service. Instead of feeling spoiled, I felt cornered and stripped of my autonomy.

So on Sunday I took a long, countryside walk to make sure I wasn’t being too impulsive. I knew it would play havoc with the writing goals, but I knew the Greek writing retreat was a full two weeks yet to come. So before I finished my walk, I invented an opaque family crisis and messaged it to her, and asked for a lift to the train station.

Normally I am garrulous and a huge over-sharer. But all of a sudden I became circumspect about the details of this family crisis.

“Can you pack in ten minutes?” she said, after trying but failing to elicit any information from me as to why I was leaving. Then, she seemed to understand. Perhaps she has had this experience before?

I could pack in ten minutes. I did. Got the train back to the city and stayed in an airport hotel, hired a car the next day and hit the open road to Biarritz.

Freedom! It was so good to hone my right-hand sided driving skills and pass by fields similar to those which had rolled past while I was trapped with the man with the plastic posy.

I met up with a colleague from the 1990s in Bayonne. I got to see Biarritz. Actually, I saw it four times in the first hour of arriving when I got caught in the one way road system while looking for a park. I got a bit of writing done. But it was an adventure that came knocking, and I hurled open the door in welcome.

Father’s Day reflection

Sunday Blog 199 – 7th September 2025

Composite image - top row left to right, my great grandfather Patrick Brennan my grand father Patrick Brennan my father Gerard Brennan, bottom row left me at Corballa, Sligo, me at Maynooth College with my American cousin — Top row, left to right – my great grandfather Patrick Brennan, my grandfather Patrick Brennan and my father Gerard Brennan. Bottom row, left to right, me at Corballa where my grandfather was born, me and my American cousin Jane at Maynooth where my grandfather studied to be a priest. Spoiler alert, he didn’t become a priest.

I’ve been on the road since Friday 23rd August. I’ve flown across the world, driven hundreds of kilometres in Ireland, both in the Republic and Northern Ireland, then travelled to Italy for five days and am now in France. Two Sundays have gone by without a Sunday blog. I either haven’t had the bandwidth (because, 17 hour 45 minute direct flight from Perth to London) or energy (because transit day Ireland to Italy). And I’ve been marinading a blog on Ireland which needed time to simmer. There’s been a re-arranging of some of my bedrock thinking going on.

Today in Australia it’s Fathers Day, and I’m reflecting on my father, his father, and his grandfather (see photo, top row, left to right). Let’s start with my grandfather, the middle black and white image. Patrick Brennan. He was born in 1870 and was the “fine big lad” destined for the priesthood. He left his home in Corballa (see bottom left, a selfie of me showing the humble home where he was born in the background) to study to be a priest at Maynooth (bottom right beautiful ivy-coloured college, me and my American cousin on our Ireland adventure).

To get in the mood for this Ireland trip and to while away the 17 hours 45 minutes Perth-London flying time, I chose to watch the 1996 movie Michael Collins starring Liam Neeson and Julia Roberts. It was an excellent preparation (apart from Julia Roberts’ token female role) and a perfect take-off point for my binge listening to The Rest is History’s podcast series on Ireland. Walking around the streets of Dublin, Belfast, Derry, Donegal, Galway and listening to them debrief of how the map of Ireland is as it is today. Slipping into Northern Ireland with no fanfare, and out of it again so quickly I had to buy another stamp for my postcard. The Ulster stamp I’d bought in Derry wouldn’t work in Letterkenny.

But back to family history and the line of my father. Spoiler alert, my grandfather didn’t become a priest in Ireland.

Family legend has it that a priest preached against Charles Stewart Parnell, a politician who had advocated strongly for Ireland to have Home Rule, i.e. Irish self-government. Parnell had had a long-term affair which became public around 1890, perhaps to stem his huge popularity across Ireland. His advocacy for Home Rule was working, and the revelation of his long-term affair seems to me to have been a cynical move by UK politicians to provoke conservative Catholic opposition to Parnell. In other words, have the priests do their work for them.

As Parnell was a Protestant I would have expected my grandfather to revile him. But he was incensed enough by the anti-Parnell sermon and walked out of Mass. This led to his expulsion from his priesthood studies, from this beautiful seminary of Maynooth.

As the Fine Big Lad from Corballa, who’d been given every educational opportunity by his father, also called Patrick Brennan (mutton chop whiskers, top left), my grandfather left Maynooth and took the boat to Australia, never to return to Ireland again. After about thirty years rambling around the goldfields and wheatbelt and Midland, he married a 21-year-old and had twelve children, eleven who survived infancy. My father Gerard Brennan was his sixth child (top right, classic black and white 1960’s image).

As I made my way through the The Rest Is History podcast, there were other discoveries that highlighted to me the endless complexity and nuance of colonisation in Ireland. When, exactly was the boot of England really pressed against the neck of the Irish, and who exactly felt it? While colonisation began in 1169, it wasn’t until Henry the VIII when the screws tightened, when the overthrow of Irish churches and monasteries were violently enacted. The mystery of why Ireland stuck with the Roman Catholic church while England, Scotland and Wales didn’t can be traced back to how much the church supported the poor. Those with no land, living in poverty weren’t always interested in politics – if it was an English Lord or and Irish Laird they were still disenfranchised and powerless.

And so, fast forward to 1890, when Parnell, a politician who was bringing Ireland closer to Home Rule than it had been for centuries was destroyed by the Catholic Church adherents because of his illicit affair.

When my grandfather made it to Australia, he became a teacher because of his excellent Maynooth education. No matter the heat, he taught in his three piece suit, and my father, who was one of his pupils, commented that he wasn’t a teacher to set an exercise and sit at the front of the class lounging or mopping his brow. He taught actively, full tilt, all day long in the heat in his waistcoat and jacket. It was true that he also began each school year saying in his thick Irish brogue “stand up the Protestants.”

The weedy children from goldfields, wheatbelt and south west towns had no idea what a Protestant actually was. My father and his many brothers who usually made up half of his father’s small classroom would helpfully elbow their classmates and assure them they were Protestants. Uncertainly, the students would stand, only to be marked out for denigration and abuse for the rest of the school year.

So it confounds me to this day that my grandfather threw away his education and opportunity all for Parnell, a Protestant. And this is the complexity I was chewing over while in Ireland. But also, he may have realised that the priesthood was not for him. The vast brood of children he produced would indicate this is a possibility.

How many of us would not be alive if he had stayed listening to the anti-Parnell homily. So thanks Patrick, and thanks Gerard (modified thanks to mutton chop great-grandfather Patrick who sounded like quite a pill) for grandfathering and fathering my siblings and vast amounts of cousins. Happy heavenly Fathers Day.

Letting the sorrow ripen

Sunday Blog 198 – 17th August 2025

This week I’ve been to Melbourne for a two-day meeting which I had intrepidly volunteered to co-chair, then I played catch-up with other work and volunteering commitments and worked on my final assignment for my first unit of a creative writing graduate certificate. As I’ve been focusing on script writing assignments, I’ve tried not to let my book project get too far behind. I’ve multi-tasked by working on scenes from the book, transforming them into stage versions.

Today I took time with my sisters to mark the nearly one year deathiversary of our beloved Mum. We can’t be together on the actual day, so we got together beforehand.

The combination of the melancholy – Mum’s been gone for nearly a year now – and the subject of my book is all about recovery from a single incident trauma – and the Melbourne meeting was related activism I haven’t delved into for a while – must have made this podcast episode jump out at me. The Uses of Adversity, featuring Martha Beck.

She described the analogy of pain, of sorrow, something we want to stop feeling as soon as possible – like an unripe fruit. But if we can sit with these uncomfortable feelings, they can soften, ripen and sweeten. Anger can become clear seeing. Fear can become courage. Sorrow can become compassion.

That’s what I needed to hear today. And if you needed to hear it too, here you are.

A Glimpse of Helen Garner

Sunday Blog 197 – 10th August 2025

Image of Helen Garner reading from an earlier edition of the literary journal Heat. Pip Brennan in green jacket watching on

On a wild, wet Saturday a couple of weeks ago, I was scampering across Perth, spreading myself across several different writing events on that one day. I missed the interview with Helen Garner, arguably one of Australia’s greatest living writers, at the WA Museum. Luckily Gillian O’Shaughnessy took notes on Helen’s writing tips, such as the importance of writing down dreams. I’m thinking especially the kind that wakes you up with the intensity of feelings it creates.

I did manage to catch Helen Garner later that day at the tiny launch event for issue 20 of Giramondo Press’s literary journal Heat. It was at a place called Light Works I’d never heard of and resembled more of an abandoned warehouse than a venue worthy of Ms Garner. I crowded in, and wondered, would Helen be there in person? It seemed too much to hope for.

She was there in person. Curious, quirky, engaged and friendly. I talked to her. Of course I talked to her. I wish I hadn’t momentarily forgotten the title of her latest book The Season and so had been spared uttering the gauche phrase, “Bloody loved that football book.” But she seemed unfazed. Even I knew it wasn’t the place to whip out my copy I’d brought with me to get her to sign it.

Instead, I took my place to the side, at the front to watch the four writers who were reading from earlier Heat editions. What a joy to hear Helen Garner read out her piece. A friend of mine was standing behind me so took a shot for me to remember the moment. These happenings in life to savour.

Dates remembered

Sunday Blog 196 – 3rd August 2025

On the 3rd of August 1979, I was fourteen years old, and I’d never left Australia. I was about to head off for sixteen glorious weeks in Europe with my parents and my (plentiful) siblings.

I flicked through the photo album from that time today, marinading in the memories. Dad was up on the roof doing last minute repairs, I was saying farewell to indifferent cats. Not pictured: I remember I’d worn myself to a shred worrying if I had enough room in my suitcase for the required amount of sanitary pads for the duration of the holiday. I was too chicken-shit to try tampons, and it hadn’t occurred to me that there would in fact be sanitary ware available in one of the largest cities in the western world, aka London.

Meanwhile, Mum was looking at her garden one last time, hoping it would survive four months without her. She was an inveterate Anglophile and at 53 years of age, she was finally realising her ambition to get to the U.K. Also not pictured, she was awash with traveller’s remorse. “What am I doing? Am I really going to go through with this?” she said, more than once.

Despite her jitters, we left on schedule on the night of 3 August, with a huge group to farewell us at the airport. We flew through Bombay, where we weren’t allowed to disembark, before finally landing in Heathrow. Mum took a picture of the British Airways aircraft that had been her torturer throughout the long, sleepless flight.

The top left image is me looking out over the wasteland of London in the morning of 4th August 1979, jet lagged and slightly horrified. But when I first saw Westminster House and Big Ben in real life, I felt like I’d left my body. We used to have a pop-up picture book with both Westminster House and Big Ben in it. I loved to open up the pages and see this improbable wonder of architecture which is everywhere, everywhere in Europe.

The bottom left picture of me on the train in Scotland also jumped out at me as I flicked through the 1979 album. A glimpse of my still-child self, looking out the window.

As I plan yet another Europe trip–leaving later this month, I remember the 3rd of August 1979 as the date my world view was enlarged beyond the tight confines of Perth. So grateful that this first 1979 trip was not the last.

Kalgoorlie dreaming

Sunday Blog 195 – 27th July 2025

Composite of images - one of me standing outside my family home in Kalgoorlie, one of me in the Kalgoorlie museum with the dentist display, and one of Kalgoorlie dust

This week I had a mini-break in the mining town of Kalgoorlie, a 6-hour train ride from Perth. Kalgoorlie was my home from age 8 months to 3 years. No, I don’t remember it really. But I also went on several work trips there in 1988 and 1989 when I worked at the Western Australian Museum. So this week’s trip was a bit of an encounter with my young, ambitious 24-year-old self.

Initially hired in 1988 as the bright young thing who could explain the monstrous mainframe computer system to the History Department’s curatorial staff, I quickly pivoted. Given that I’d actually been employed to edit data files and write computer user manuals, I was always keen for distraction.

The History Department’s phone rang constantly with random, hugely varied questions about historical facts or perhaps an item they’d found in Aunt Doris’ attic they hoped was worth a fortune. I’d take down the complex queries, explain that I couldn’t advise them then and there, but would find out and let them know. Then I’d do some research, ask the curators for advice, and call them back. Often, people were crushed to know Aunt Doris’s old teapot might fetch $25 at best, or that a cherished story was just that, a story, and history had recorded otherwise.

Over time, my speciality became graciously refusing donations. By then I’d worked out that around of 90% of all museum collections sit in storage. Generally, whatever the donation was, we already had it in plentiful supply. People would turn up without an appointment, clutching their Mrs Potts iron they’d discovered in the shed. They dreamed it would be on permanent display, with their family’s name emblazoned on a brass display label forevermore.

I’d have to explain that we had several of that very same item already. I’d enlighten them about the shelves already groaning with items that wouldn’t ever see the light of display. I explained the heinous cost of museum storage, and how we had to reserve it for unique items. Then, I’d suggest the Education collection, where items that hadn’t been consecrated by formal museum accessioning processes could be handled and enjoyed by the students.

Usually the donor would be relieved that they wouldn’t have to carry the heavy item back home, and also feel virtuous they weren’t wasting taxpayer’s money with another surfeit collection item.

“It’s another Mrs Potts iron,” the senior curator would say to me. “You’ve really got the knack of gracious donation refusal. Would you mind?”

Getting the Kalgoorlie exhibition project in 1988 was a real coup for me. The Senior Curator whose vision it had been, had fallen pregnant unexpectedly and no-one else wanted the gig.

Each and every day I said to myself “well I’ve never done this before, but it doesn’t mean I can’t do it.”

Some of the exhibits I worked on back in 1988 are still there today. I think I can trace my handiwork, from when I helped gloss the wooden skirting boards of the old British Arms building for phase one of the project.

Phase two in 1989 was installing displays in the newly built modern museum adjacent to the British Arms building, known as the smallest pub in the Southern Hemisphere. My inexperience meant I made the rookie mistake of choosing items that sounded important on paper, but were dull to look at.

So the newer gallery displays from 1989 have been significantly changed but some items threw me right back to when I was one of the exhausted, exhilarated installation team. We got the galleries done in time. Just.

My personal involvement aside, the museum of the Goldfields is definitely worth a visit if you’re in town. The downstairs galleries change regularly and the current audio visual display to celebrate and preserve some of the many Aboriginal languages of the area is a must-see.

And for me, the chance to catch sight of my cherished colleague Julia Lawrinson’s Trapped in the shop was another bonus.

Look for the helpers

Sunday Blog 194 – 20th July 2025

I don’t know if anyone needs to hear this nugget of wisdom from Fred Rogers’ mum. If you’ve never heard of Fred Rogers, he was a TV presenter, depicted in the biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood in 2019, played by Tom Hanks. His mum advised him to “look for the helpers, you’ll always find people who are helping” when overwhelmed by scary news stories.

I was listening to an old episode of Tara Brach’s podcast, something I do regularly as a kind of energy re-set, an anti-dote to all the things on my social media feed.

“Look for the helpers,” I heard, and the first person who came to mind was the man at Murdoch station. This is my local train station in Perth. It has a bus station adjoining it to try and convince us to get out of our cars and into public transport. You walk through the bus stop to enter the train station.

He’s a bus station staff member, always with his clipboard, his mask, socks pulled up to the knees. I’m not exactly sure what his paid role is, but I do know he says hello to every single commuter on our way into the train station, and good bye as we head out. Day after day. Every single one of us.

Perhaps because I always catch his eye, he might add a little more to his greeting. “Happy Tuesday”, he might say in the morning, and “Safe home.” He does this for zero dollars of extra pay. Perhaps that’s where the magic comes in. I feel like I will have a good Tuesday, that I will get home safe, just because of his greeting.

At the end of May, I made my way home from work with a very large bouquet of flowers from colleagues for my 60th. He was too busy to greet me properly that day, but the next time he saw me, he said again, “Happy Birthday.”

He makes such a simple gesture, and yet it feels so complete, so kind.

More on yes and no

Sunday Blog 193 – 13th July 2025

What’s got my attention this week was an interview with Atul Gawande, one of my favourite clinician authors. Take, for example the first lines of the introduction his book, Being Mortal;

I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them.

I listened to an interview with him in April this year on The Rest is Politics (well worth a listen) and this quote near the end of the episode leapt out at me. A clinician once told Atul, “say yes to everything before you’re 40, and say no to everything after you’re 40. What he meant by that was, you don’t know what you’re good at. You don’t know what you’re going to be excited by.”

So I’m twenty years late to the no party. This is in fact my third blog on the difficult art (for me) of saying no. I’ve mentioned before my advice card saying “No makes way for yes” This Truth Bomb card is yellowed from its exposure. It’s from of a set, and you can see it’s a different colour from all the other ones. I’ve returned it to its box today, singled out, now a different colour, but still largely unheeded.

I’ve said “yes” to a University Creative Writing course (at last) and that’s why the Sunday Blog is coming to you a little bit late today. I’ve been unable to tear myself away from watching Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play A Doll’s House. Definitely excited by my studies, even at my age.

However, I said no to an impulse buy for hiking shoes yesterday on Facebook. I read the reviews before kissing away the bargain basement price of $50, today and today only.

Is that a sign of progress? I’m gonna go yeah!

Information asymmetry is a thing…

Sunday Blog 192 – 6th July 2025

This will be my last spider bite blog, I promise. For those of you who may need closure, my spider bite wound is healing very well and I’ve eventually settled into the community nursing service after my bumpy start. Perhaps next week will be the end of the need for wound dressing at all.

I’m taking a moment to rejoice in the reduced pain and increased healing, AND I’m reflecting on how little I knew before this misadventure befell me.

As someone who’s been a health advocate for more than quarter of a century, speaks fluent health acronyms, here are the things I didn’t know about managing a small traumatic wound on the back of my thigh:

For the walking wounded, no services or clinics will be open until morning, so if possible, stay home until about 7 or 8am, and hobble into the Emergency Department then. It may save you a lost night’s sleep in the hectic hurly burly of emergency.
Intravenous antibiotics are not a “one and done” situation. It will require you being attached to some kind of drip for at least four to five days.
The catheter they put in the back of your hand to administer drugs and take blood samples etc. has to be changed every 72 hours. But they can put a line in your arm that can stay for about 28 days. This could be what they call a PICC line which goes all the way to your heart, or in my case, a central line which just around the bicep area. Luckily for me.
Should your wound need cleaning, you will need to undergo a general anaesthetic, even if it seems a lot, it is necessary to manage the pain of that procedure.
Once that is done, you will have an open wound that needs to heal from the bottom up. What that means is that each day gauze will have to be poked into the wound. That’s after the old gauze from the day before has been removed. It will hurt but not for long.
So you’ll still have around 14-21 days of healing ahead after surgery, if everything is going your way, i.e. you are well, don’t have diabetes, manage to avoid further infection etc etc.
You will get better then get worse then get better then get worse over and over. It’s a jagged line, but it trends upwards (if you’re lucky.)

While I was given leaflets and leaflets and leaflets – outlining my rights as a patient, how to avoid falls, how to eat well (including a giant food pyramid image), information on smoking cessation, exercise and on and on, none of it gave me the information above that I needed. About what to expect from my body and from the likely trajectory of treatment and healing of a spider bite.

And here is the question I’ve been sitting with. Why are we always chided to be more empowered as patients, but we’re forced to bumble about in an information soup, which overwhelms but doesn’t inform or empower? Why is there such an information asymmetry between patients and the people who care for them? And why oh why has it taken me 25+ years to really see this issue?

Yours, really wanting to know.

The perfect patient mask slips

Sunday Blog 191 – 29th June 2025

Last Sunday I finished my blog praising the health system and intoning that my spider bite wound was healing. By Friday of this week I hobbled out of the non-profit organisation I’d been discharged to for my ongoing wound care. I clutched the back of my leg on my way to my car, crying and saying to my self, “I just want to go back to Hospital in the Home.”

And there it was, the perfect patient mask I like to adopt dropped away.

Tuesday this week I was reviewed at the hospital, with the unwelcome news that I would have to undergo surgery under a general anaesthetic for the wound to be incised and cleaned out. On the plus side, I could lose the bumbag and IV antibiotics and switch to tablets.

Before the surgery I was feeling on the up and up, the pain was diminishing and I was able to drive without agony and generally get on with life. Including MC’ing a delightful evening on Tuesday with graduates of the 2025 Emerging Writers Program in Perth while they had the opportunity to read out from their work of the last year. Definitely a peak moment of the year for me.

The surgery itself on Wednesday went well, although I maintained that sense of being in the wrong play, with the wrong lines. How could a simple spider bite lead all the way to the operating theatre?

In the way of the health world, once I emerged from surgery and lost the bumbag, I was discharged from Hospital in the Home to a non-profit organisation specialising in wound care. My fingernail hold on the Hospital in the Home service was due to the IV antibiotics only. Getting wound care from them as well was a bonus. Once it was wound care only, I was shuffled out of the hospital system.

I left their care with a giant hole not unlike a bullet wound in the back of my thigh. “It has to heal from the bottom up,” I’ve been told more than once. “Otherwise it will seal over and you’ll end up having to go under the knife again.” What this means in practice is that the wound has to be packed with a ribbon gauze which is removed and replaced each day. It didn’t seem to hurt when Hospital in the Home unpacked and re-packed the wound straight after surgery but perhaps that is just my false remembering.

It bloody hurts now and it would seem there are a couple of weeks of this to come. Sigh.

When the perfect patient mask slips I can feel the feelings that I skate over so effectively with positivity. Still, I’m reminded of Anne Lamott’s prayer “I pray not to be such a whiny, self-obsessed baby” I mean goodness, it’s just a spider bite, after all!