Tag: norfolk

Adventures in Magnetic Resonance

Mar 31st, 2023

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.
Losing A Finger, Part II

Dec 24th, 2022

In our hospital, if you’ve broken a bone or been in an accident, are otherwise ill, or work here, you’re fucked. On the other hand, if it’s parenthood or cancer you’re after, you’re in luck, because the oncology and birthing units are excellent. In fact, midwifery was my first choice of working area, because I like the idea that, as soon as a lady’s contraptions start, you are dealing with two patients – the lady and her lovely new baby. Male midwives are not exactly encouraged, though, which I suppose is why childbirth is so disorganised. In any case, the advantage of working in a disintegrating NHS is that if you keep your wits about you and dodge the worst of the crumbling infrastructure, you can end up wherever you want – and, as mentioned last time, Santa may have provided us with a path through the flaming wreckage to something worth doing, which is very fortuitous indeed.

I work in Radiology, and Radiology is great. I was sold on the idea of working here when, on a pre-employment visit, a recruiting nurse pointed to our unit and said ‘no one really knows what goes on in there’. Now that I do know what goes on in Radiology, I have decided that I, too, would like to earn a living by injecting dye in to people and then taking pictures of their kidneys. Imagine my delight, then, when a Christmas miracle arrived in the form of training to do that exact thing. Yes, there are two years of preliminary training to get through first, but this involves being a mysterious, specialist Radiography nurse, and not a fat, unhappy, normal one. I initially missed the news, because Mr Universally Inept and I were dealing with a patient and consultant who looked like R Kelly and David Bowie respectively, causing us great amusement. I wanted treatment to include a duet of Starman. Anyway. There are four training places up for grabs and, as I am one of only two applicants without a significant learning or behavioural issue, I consider myself to have a fighting chance.

Well, there’s a thing with that. Remarkably, the Inner London Education Authority has lost all academic records for my school, so there is no proof of my pass marks at both English and Maths. I therefore have no way of proving to the University of Derby, who are providing the training, that I have basic literacy and numeracy skills, and that educationally speaking I am a safer bet than the mentally handicapped. There’s no point me waving a Masters Degree in Politics around either, because that’s a Humanities subject, and this is a branch of Science, so it doesn’t count. Also, there are mutterings that the University gets extra funding for special needs students, putting me at a further disadvantage. I don’t believe this, at least not in the rather nasty sense it is implied. I mean, God knows the NHS is a freak show, but still.

One of the reasons I don’t believe this is that, as several of us crowded into our unit’s Bad News room for a Zoom call about the course, I found myself next to Mr Universally Inept. There is a legend in Radiology of a mysterious angry giant whose mighty footsteps cause the masonry to shake and the theatre lights to flicker. This is, in fact, Mr Universally Inept crashing bed-ridden patients into every single door frame and supporting wall along the main corridor in our unit. Everyone’s crashed a patient into something, but it’s usually just one of the cleaners. Not everyone has crashed a patient into a massive static display screen while wheeling them into an operating theatre, causing their procedure to be postponed for several days while a replacement screen is found, and subsequently crashing them into a wall on the way back out, but Mr Universally Inept has. Within ninety seconds of sitting down, he had banged his knee on the desk, struck the monitor with his forehead, dropped his biscuits twice, discovered that a pen had leaked in his pocket and somehow caused his staff door pass to disintegrate. He is a catastrope of a man, and it was like sitting next to some kind of localised natural disaster. I do not think a career in renal surgery is a natural move for him.

Fortunately, one of my more niche duties is proof reading NHS governance for our matron before it goes off to the Department of Work and Pensions. She rather generously describes me as being of ‘the highest integrity’ and that, if I say I have the required qualifications then, as far as she is concerned, I have. She’s on the selection panel too, so I am hoping she will be a useful ally. So keep your fingers crossed if, unlike Mr Universally Inept, you are able to do that without somehow breaking an arm and starting a fire.

In other career news, Sid recently got a Maths Whizz silver award from his school, and is therefore more able to prove his numeracy skills than I am. I would put him forward for the training, but he’s adamant he either wants to be an asteroid and go to space in a rocket, or remain Earth bound and be a ‘cleano winder’ [window cleaner]. Everyone’s aiming for the stars this Yuletide.

Public Service Announcement: We are shortly off to church for carols, followed by fish and chips and present wrapping. it seems statistically unlikely that you’re dashing through the snow in one whore’s open sleigh to the same carol service as us, so I shall instead take this opportunity to wish you a Merry Very Christmas, wheresoever in the Empire you may be, and a happy and healthy New Year.

Picters:

Main: One of these people is my old dear as a teenager, in a dockyard drawing office.

Top inset: A hospital staircase of my acquaintance.

Lower inset: At least the dog’s comfy.
Losing A Finger, Part I

Dec 22nd, 2022

It’s Christmas, so that’s lovely. I’ve had Paul McBeatle’s Mull of Kintyre on heavy rotation while walking the dog, as it is my favourite Christmas song despite being about glens and heather in Scotland. Actually, I wonder how many Scottish couples called Glen and Heather there are? Loads, probably. And don’t believe the hype: even though Scotland likes to present itself as a big cold field where bitter people live, this isn’t true. It is a beautiful place full of brilliant people, and I think they should play to that aspect far more. Yes, if they’d got independence they would’ve wasted all their tax revenue changing the name from ‘Scotland’ to ‘Not England’, as not being England is the most important thing in the world to a major international player like Scotland, but still. Even if you’re Scottish, it’s Christmas. It’s even Christmas at my hospital, where everything’s covered in tinsel and the corridors are knee deep in Cadbury’s Heroes, which makes moving patients around tricky. I’ve been substituting prosecco for lidocaine to cheer them up during surgery, though, so all’s right with the world.

It’s probably worth pointing out that I am not a nurse. As I may have explained before, I’m not even a trainee nurse. Myself and my fellow dogsbodies are, essentially, trainee trainee nurses. We are obliged to do a lot of nurse stuff, because there aren’t any actual nurses, and there aren’t any actual nurses because being an actual nurse is horrible. To their credit, they try to put you off a career in nursing by being overweight, depressed and obsessed with cats, which sends a pretty clear signal. I often imagine that when they leave college, nurses are given a special advent calendar with a window for every day until they retire, and behind each window, as the years grind past, is a little chart to record their increasing disappointment with life. As you can probably imagine, this puts those of us working towards actually being nurses in a bit of a quandary because, as far as our training and exams go, success would be a disaster.

I explained the horror I feel about this at a recent ‘Hey! How’s it going?’ meeting my fellow cannon fodder and I had with a sympathetic consultant. On this occasion, we were talking with Dr Bowler, who I think we met last time. I am fond of Dr Bowler, as he addresses everyone as ‘chaps’ and ‘Dear boy’ and habitually wears a sheepskin flying jacket. As I once remarked to him, my dissertation was on the British Commonwealth in World War Two, so to work with someone who appears to be a Spitfire pilot is very exciting. Then again, it can be a strain on hospital infrastructure as he sometimes comes to work in a Lancaster bomber, which takes up forty-seven parking spaces, and so on.

Anyway. Looking back, when asked our opinions upon our training and eventual destination, I may have been channelling Tom Hardy’s portrayal of Reggie Kray in the pub fight scene from Legend. This is because I found myself saying ‘I’ll tell you all about being a nurse. Fuck being a nurse, and fuck nursing. Fuck oncology and gynaecology and the other ologies. Fuck main theatres, fuck wearing scrubs and fuck fucking about all day with fucking syringes. In fact, I would rather lose a fucking finger than be a fucking nurse.’

Channelling Reggie Kray or not, it was felt by my fellow dogsbodies that this explained our position adequately. It was unclear what someone who appeared to have spent a long morning dog-fighting with the Hun would do about this but, as it turned out, there was good news on the horizon. Or bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover, if you will. (NB Germans aren’t allowed to have Christmas because they don’t deserve it).

Picters:

Main: Joe in the glamourous Compleat Angler by Norwich station recently.

Top inset: I recently attempted to get Sid to eat more vegetables by hiding garden peas in his birthday cake. He spotted them, unfortunately, but thought it was quite a larf.

Lower inset: A Christmas tribute to the late Queen, who Sid thinks flew a ‘Spitflier’ during this summer’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations.
Rock Climbing With The School Bully, Part I

Nov 7th, 2022

Public Service Announcement: We’ve just changed our WordPress subscription, so if this looks terrible, I can only apologise.

Is bullying all bad though? It’s a question worth asking. For example, a colleague of mine goes rock climbing with another colleague who used to bully him at school, which is both heart-warming and bleak. Well, this isn’t entirely true, as it’s actually a climbing wall, not larking about on a cliff or whatever. When I was told the news, I said ‘That mate, is not only bleak, it’s Dave Dee, Dozy, Bleaky, Mick and Tich’ surprising myself that a lesser known Sixties pop group was the conduit for my enthralled incredulity. They were from Devon I think, and did a not-unlikeable tune called Bend It, which I should like to re-record as Balls To It for a larf. Anyway. The reference went viral among the three other people in the room – appropriately, now I come to think of it, as it was a room in the pathogen lab – and led to a lengthy pile-on from all corners consisting of being up the bleak without a paddle, an insistence that bleak is the word a la the popular disco film Bleak starring John Travolta, and culminating in a warning to not eat too much chicken and bleak pie in case you get bu-leakmia. Nonetheless, childhood misery (in what we may safely assume was a secondary school) is the Highball Centre on Twickenham Road’s gain, so that’s the main thing.

Before we go any further, I should like to point out that my focus upon endemic bullying within the NHS is merely as a starting point for a new trade union. Working in a hospital is certainly awful, but it would be wrong to suggest that every corner of the National Health Service is a well-spring of human misery. In fact, my part – Radiology – functions more like a clinic than a hospital, and has a relatively sedate atmosphere. The first time I assisted with a trans-vaginal biopsy illustrates this: I attached the ECG cables wrongly and had to fiddle about sorting it all out, causing a delay. This can not only stress the patient, but shortens the time anaesthetic will be effective. Instead of being a dick about it, the consultant said to the patient ‘It’s OK – Paul’s used to working on bigger cases in our main theatres’, de-escalating the situation nicely. I greatly appreciated this and thanked him afterwards. Similarly, when an early patient-fetching expedition saw me crash into almost literally everything in the entire hospital, my colleagues explained that the bed was faulty and reported it to Maintenance, who sent a little man to take it away, covering up the fact that I was drunk.

Anyway. This was to have been a much longer post. I am turning it into a two-parter, though, as I have to pop round and see my old dear, who just rang to inform me that she has been buying gardening stuff. I hate the outdoors, and have insisted that I am only going round on the understanding that I am not helping in any way whatsoever with any actual gardening. To her credit, she has adjusted well to life in Norfolk and enjoys growing joyless vegetables such as courgettes on her allotment. However, she recently admitted to me that she ‘has always been in awe of strimmers’, and I am keen to see how a person in awe of strimmers reacts when they actually buy one.

Photards:

Main: A theatre trolley being prepared for, by the look of things, a standard drainage procedure.

Top: A staircase of my acquaintance, East Block, Norwich and Norfolk University Hospital.

Lower: As the UK’s only baseball fan, I took annual leave to watch the World Series, and when I came back my LA Dodgers mug was broken. I am treating it as a Hate Crime.
Some Cat’s Birthday, Somewhere

Oct 20th, 2022

Public Service Announcement: the hospital mission statement has recently changed.

A regular feature of my working day is stealing supplies from around the hospital. This is necessary, because a) our own stuff often don’t turn up and b) it is a larf. To this end, I encourage my fellow NHS cannon fodder to imagine that, instead of carting a patient about the place in a hospital bed, they are instead piloting a Viking longship in the ninth century, and the hospital is a monastery on the Isle of Iona. This initially drew a few blank stares but once I explained what the Isle of Iona is, and the significance of the Viking raids there, they embraced the idea with great enthusiasm and now return from jaunts to A & E or the ‘Big C’ cancer unit with drugs, nephrostomy bags and urine bottles, of which we never have enough. I have suggested we solve this with a grit tray along the centre of our ward like you would have if the patients were all cats but, thanks to the magic of stealing, these days are a thing of the past. As we enter the last weeks of 2022, my unit’s boast is that any mammal of any size can urinate in comfort. Actually, I think this should be the mission statement for the entire hospital, rather than the current one – ‘Our vision is to provide every patient with the care we want for those we love the most’ – which is just annoying.

My personal mission statement is that ‘It’s always some nurses’ cat’s birthday somewhere’ and I frequently remind my gallant team of this, as it means that cake is also up for grabs around the wards. It is usually found on the draining board of the small sink units outside the linen stores which are the impromptu staff room on most of them, along with the ‘I’m Not A People Person’ mugs – another strong contender for the hospital mission statement, now I come to think of it – and endless boxes of fucking Cadbury’s Heroes. This is unless you find yourself in paediatrics, which is all crisps for some reason. I’m not convinced that cholesterol is the evil substance it is made out to be, having read everything and spoken to everyone I can find about it during my current concerns about peripheral arterial disease, and am instead blaming refined sugar and processed foods. Sadly, I love these things very much, so am unable to share in the bounty of birthday cake theft. This is troubling, but now that being a wellness coach has replaced being a primary school teacher as career of choice for young middle class women, there are at least plenty of people to talk to about it.

Such is the plunder available that I have long thought it would be possible to survive at work by just eating cake and Cadbury’s Heroes. Imagine my surprise when I realised that some of the cannon fodder I am seeking to unionise actually do. I’m pretty sure they will be stealing biscuits and whatnot from stuff the patients get bought in by their families and so on, too. I’ve done that, if it’s those mad Christmas seashell chocolates or Ferrero Rochers or whatever although, being a gentleman highwayman, I tell the patient I am stealing stuff while doing it. Also, my motivation is gluttony rather than malnutrition, but I now know there are patients who have food brought in for no reason other than to feed staff. This is insanity. I know staff that order sandwiches and such for fictitious patients so they have something to eat, and that a blind eye is often turned to this, but patients actually feeding their carers is madness. Awful. It would be nice to be as proud of the NHS as people who don’t work in it are, but I’m afraid I am not.

Then again, this sort of thing is why unionising the cannon fodder might be a good idea. Also, I do have the germ of an idea about how to spark this into life, in the form of my personal development review. This is where you bang on about all the stuff you’ve done in the year and set goals and so on. I have spent most of the last year being appalled and horrified, so I don’t have much to say. I could set my goals for next year as being less appalled and horrified, I suppose, but might refuse to take part altogether on the grounds that I have no faith in the management of the NHS, which would lead to some interesting discussions when it gets escalated. My case in point would be the manager who actually writes my personal development review, who caused a member of staff to leave by repeatedly shouting at her, in anger, in front of colleagues, that the only reason she goes to football is because she is racist and homophobic. She was a Norwich fan, too, and they are a lovely bunch. She could’ve complained, but the person she would be complaining to is a close friend of the manager concerned – they go on holiday together and whatnot – so she understandably felt that this was pointless and now works in Pizza Express, where at least there is quite a lot of food about, I should think. Yes, I understand that it is tiniest conceivable spark, but that’s all you need really.

Anyway. The rest, as they say, is histology. In case you are unfamiliar, this is the clinical study of cellular structures and, come to think of it, would’ve been a more appropriate remark while justifying the theft of hospital supplies then going on about Vikings and the Isle of Iona. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Picters:

Main: A cannulation trolley of my acquaintance.

Top inset: The scrubbed floor of one of our operating theatres. You’d think that a flooring material that retains the slightest splash of iodine with the permanent appearance of a bloodstain would be seen as a design flaw, but it appears not.

Middle inset: The baffling and recently changed hospital mission statement.

Lower inset: Sid larking about in some woodland a couple of years ago.