My hospital was recently revealed to have the lowest staff morale of any medical facility in the whole National Health Service and therefore, we may safely assume, the entire world. Imagine that.
On the other hand, if you go into an MRI scanning room with keys or coins in your pocket, they will immediately accelerate to fifty miles per hour and ping about the place like machine gun fire. That, surely, is pretty exciting. There are no statistics available on what happens if you take an actual machine gun in, but a couple of years ago a gun rights activist helped his mother into an MRI room in, I think, Brazil, and the magnetic pull was so strong that it caused a concealed firearm he was carrying to discharge through his lower intestine, fatally injuring him. Closer to home, on Level 2 of the East Block of what we now know is the most depressed hospital on the planet, I am shortly to be let loose in our own MRI room. Leaving aside the fact that our MRI room is the most dangerous part of the most depressed hospital on the planet, it sounds like quite a larf. On my first day I’m going to wheel a shopping trolley in and watch it bounce about like a pinball because I’ll still be supernumerary – or, as I shall insist upon being called, ‘superluminary’ – and can’t get in trouble.
The change from being someone whose main function is to get things out of cupboards and, slightly later, put them back again to herding people into the MRI scanner has come about as part of my recent and improbable elevation within the medical world. Crucially, it also gets me onto a science-based career path, away from general healthcare, which means I never have to be a nurse. As discussed in previous entries, you never see a happy nurse – and rightly so, because it is an awful job. Nonetheless, I was surprised to find our entire hospital was so gloomy. Be that as it may, for those of us about to undertake an epic journey to being radiographers, then radiologists, then radionauts, these are giddy times indeed. There’s a lot of training ahead, and it’s possible that our natural lifespans might end before our studies do, but Radiology is one of the few parts of healthcare I want anything to do with, so I am chuffed to be able to progress within it. As I am fond of saying, it’s nice to still have a career in front of you and, no matter how dismal the rest of the hospital may be, I am grateful for the opportunity.
That said, there was a great deal of dicking about beforehand. This mainly concerned taking Functional Skills classes in English and Maths to replace required GCSE certificates which no longer exist. I was supposed to take the Maths exam this morning in fact, but I had to cancel it because I had an online lecture to attend. As it turns out, I subsequently forgot to attend the lecture anyway because, as the UK’s only baseball fan, I was watching the Dodgers beat the Diamondbacks on the opening day of the new season, but still. My new post doesn’t officially start until the end of May, and in the intervening time we’re just being ‘gently felt up’, to borrow a curious metaphor from a fellow student, so it doesn’t really matter.
I took the English Functional Skills exam last week, and am awaiting the result. Incidentally, ‘Functional Skills’ means that you have proved yourself to have the lowest measurable grasp of the English language, but sitting the exam was stressful nonetheless. As I demonstrated that I knew the plural form of ‘tooth’ was ‘teeth’ and ‘river’ was ‘rivers’, I was aware of how slowly I write with a pen these days. For years, I habitually wrote with a fountain pen because I am a bit of a ponce like that, so perhaps it was because I was wrestling with a biro. Anyway, fingers crossed that I pass.
Touchingly, the fact that I had to do it at all caused outrage among my fellow cannon fodder, whom I shall miss when I become the hip new kid on the MRI block. This is because, equally touchingly, I am seen as something of an academic, largely on account of owning a Kindle and habitually reading things on it, even though I’ve told them it’s an Etch-A-Sketch. Indeed, with the typically direct vernacular of NHS workers in the lower pay bands, one of my colleagues pointed at me during a team meeting and said, ‘It comes to something when a brain box cunt like that has to prove he can read’. Admittedly, there is little in the way of finesse about this remark but I do not often have cause to blush over compliments these days, so I was grateful for the opportunity to do that, too.
Picters:
Main: My hospital finally gets on the map.
Top: Setting up for some procedure or other.
Lower: These sponges are used to paint iodine on the patient when in theatre, but I also like to use them to signal the patient’s overall well-being to the guys in the control room.
Then again, I have learned that no good songs have ever been written about being on a highway in your mid-forties, thinking about some stoner you had a go on twenty years previously, which seems to be pretty much all the Eagles’ lyrical content concerns itself with, apart from the unforgettable Hotel In California, which is presumably about doing the same thing but drunk. The pleased-with-itself music of American baby boomers is fucking insufferable. Actually, I shall revise that, as I once sold a load of t shirts to the Doobie Brothers, most famous for Listen To A Bit Of Music, at Camden Market and they were a right larf. At around the same time, I sold stuff to Jon Squire of the Stone Roses, either Cagney or Lacey from Cagney and Lacey, the Blue Man Group and the lady responsible for shredding and burning Taylor Swift’s underwear after her two shows at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. What halcyon days they were.
Public Service Announcement: This was an extremely long entry which I split in two in order to get a bit of a cliff hanger going. It’s not much of a nail biter to be honest, unless your definition of tension includes absent mindedness and socio-politics. It takes all sorts though, so if this is your definition of tension, move to the edge of your seat now or, if you’re standing up, start chain smoking and pacing about in an agitated manner.
I enjoy a day of assisting with liver biopsies. Essentially, you’re a scrub nurse, working intimately with both the surgeon and the patient. I like to relax patients beforehand by saying I’m a bit of a fainter when it comes to needles, so can you hold my hand and tell the surgeon if you see me keeling over, etc. Fortunately, I’m not a fainter when it comes to anything at all or I’d have a hundred reasons to pass out every working day but, rather pleasingly, I do sometimes have patients saying ‘You alright, Paul?’ to me, mid-procedure. I also sometimes ask if they’re OK with Labradors because the surgeon is blind, or do they mind if we have a kebab before we start because we’re very drunk, and so forth. I mean, obviously, you have to read the room before this sort of thing but, as I am fond of saying – ‘If you can’t muck about during surgery, when can you muck about?’.
All in all, the ability to be not quite in the moment is a valuable asset for anyone working in a hospital, and if you’re thinking of working in one yourself – perhaps to fulfill a lifelong ambition of being tired and poor – I strongly recommend you learn how to do it. I mean, pay attention and all that, obviously, but also try and think about something else quite often or you won’t get through your first week. The results can surprise you. For example, during a recent routine liver biopsy, I realised that I needed to start a trade union, and save the working class. It was quite a remarkable moment, although obviously under the circumstances I had to keep it to myself.
Ever since Barack Obama proved that even a black Freemason can be President, there has been a pervasive belief that, for anyone, anything is possible. This is socially, culturally and literally untrue in the case of every person who has ever lived, but I get the general idea: we all have within us the ability to amaze ourselves, and that’s lovely. Indeed, I amazed myself recently by outperforming several other applicants, presumably goths, for a job wheeling corpses around a morgue at a popular East Anglian medical facility and, while this does not carry the same gravitas on the world stage, it was nonetheless quite a turn up for the books. I should state immediately there is more to the job than that, as I am to be trained to a surprisingly high level for, essentially, a hospital porter, but the corpse wheeling is where my predecessors have struggled. Well, that and the lifting and hefting of people, living and dead, ‘who aren’t getting any thinner’ as my new manager adroitly put it.
to ‘Anton’’s assertion that I only want to work in a morgue so I can go ‘nonce-ing and Savile-ing up the corpses’. For the benefit of foreigners, Jimmy Savile was an enthusiastic British paedophile and necrophiliac from a toxic time in the world of mainstream celebrity. My current girlfriend was once told she ‘…fills out her jumper nicely’ as a twelve year old by Rolf Harris, another notorious wrong ‘un of the era although, in his defence, at least he was good at drawing. At the height of his ubiquity, Savile was known for advertising the then-new Inter City train links criss-crossing the country. The service was only two years old at the time, which is presumably why he was interested in it, but while Jimmy Savile and I do both have several jobs – hospital porter, IT support, estate work at Runton, and a bit of UberEats delivery on the bike for me; television personality, charity fundraiser, paedophile and necrophiliac for him – we otherwise have nothing in common. Jimmy Savile was, by any measure except marathon running, a worse man than me, and I consider the matter closed. I mean he really was awful.
a few hours after wheeling them into theatre for what turned out to be unsuccessful life saving surgery, which will at least give a sense of continuation, but still. For all that, though, dealing with the newly dead, and being responsible for their dignity at an undignified time, is a privilege. Also, a morgue is a place where, if nothing else, there is no suffering, which is an extra incentive to be chirpy. I’ll probably start by addressing the room to the effect that can anyone who isn’t dead make themselves known before I start rearranging limbs and writing labels and so on, because I am likely to freak the eff out if someone wakes up half way through. As far as I am concerned, going about my tasks with the demeanour of a 1950’s bus conductor is a way of remembering that my subjects, embracing mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything were, until an hour ago, as alive and embroiled in the lunacy of the days as you and I. And, when the cycle ride home has blown the formaldehyde out of my hair, and my son is brandishing implausible Lego creations at me and my dog is trying to climb into my shirt, it will remind me to be grateful to still be here.
The Runton Diaries 