Tag: nurses

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.
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.
The Things You Won’t Allow Us, Part 1

Aug 8th, 2022

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 am fond of saying that a hospital is one bunch of fat depressed people looking after another bunch of fat depressed people, and that the only way to tell staff from patients is that the patients are lying down. There is more to it than this, of course: consultants are generally called James or Ben, whereas matrons, charge nurses and ward sisters are called Laura and Lucy and Ellie. Everyone else is called Lauren and Ellie-Mae. Patients are called Ray or Phillip or Mary or Liz. You get the occasional Kirsty and Helen among both staff and patients, but I am to date the only Paul who has ever been in a hospital, and as such I am a medical pioneer.

As mentioned last time, my pioneering spirit has seen me become de facto supervisor of a little band of trainee trainee nurses. We are like the A Team, except that we don’t have any useful skills, we don’t have a van, and no one but the NHS would hire us to do anything whatsover. A dog could do most of our work, but we are cheaper because we bring our own lunch in. Then again, it is cannon fodder such as we who run the hospital, and everyone acknowledges this. Myself, I do everything from setting up operating theatres with all the drugs and what not to working directly with surgeons and scrub nurses during operations to wheeling patients, most alive but some very much the opposite of that, around the hospital, to proofreading and editing hospital literature – which gives me an opportunity to remove awkward phrases such as ‘medical doctor’, and replace them with ‘doctor’, and take the chance that people won’t assume their liver biopsy will be carried out by a time traveller in a phone box.

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?’.

While I do not yet perform such a prominent role in our hospital’s main theatres, they are also often surprisingly light-hearted places. This is good, because it shows that the theatre team is confident and relaxed. You wouldn’t want your operation carried out by people who were anxious and nervy, after all. The first time I was in main theatre to, I think, assist with some kind of urology expedition I spent the entire time discussing childbirth with the anaesthetist, explaining that at the moment of my son’s birth all I could think of was Kit Kats, as they had those mad chunky single digit ones in the vending machine down the corridor and I was very peckish at the time. He sympathised, because there was a Full English deal on at the canteen – any nine items for 99p – when his daughter was born and, despite her being successfully delivered two and a half hours before the offer ran out, he still only just made it. He went for maximum variety, including fried tomatoes, probably I suspect as a celebration of the earth’s wondrous bounty. I’d have had six soft poached eggs and three slices of light granary toast myself, but becoming a father is quite tiring and each new dad needs to regain his strength as he sees fit.

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.

Photards:

Main: The biscuit tin in A & E. As usual, it doesn’t have any custard creams in it, because I routinely steal them on behalf of the Radiology team.

Inset top: It will never not be the Jubilee in our staff room.

Inset middle: The scrubs cupboard. XL and XXL usually run out first. The NHS is so fat.

Inset lower: This used to be part of an airfield during World War Two. I let my dog run around and go nuts here now. The arrow is pointing towards Germany.