A crazy week…or how I love my registrar

Wow, it’s over, my first week on call. It was not a good one, all in all. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the on-call system, in my hospital I work from 9am to 9:30pm. Until 5 is just a normal day, then from 5-9 everyone else goes home and it’s just me. Which in itself is pretty scary.

It basically started badly on monday with a crazy-busy oncall, and just after I had got back from handover (where I make all my patients someone else’s responsibility for the night) I was called to see this patient who was very breathless. When I went to see him he was breathing hard and grabbing my arms yelling ‘you have to help me, I can’t breathe’ but all I had time to do was scream for some morphine and my registrar (who I’d had to call in from home earlier about another patient who had dropped her GCS from 14 to 9…freaky), crank up the oxygen to 15L and drop the bed flat before he arrested and I was yelling for the arrest call to go out. We did CPR for 45 mins but he died. It was my first arrest, it was so fast, and I was so upset, I spent like half an hour crying in the treatment room.

I talked it over with my ultra-calm registrar (I love him) who assured me I did everything right, we all did, and there was nothing we could have done differently which would have changed the outcome. Did I mention I love him?! Nothing is so scary when he’s around, he’s so calm and I get so flapped, while I’m busy freaking because someone’s BP is 80 systolic he’s like, ‘it’s fine Jo, just give some gely‘ and I’m like, oh yeah, I remember I know how to do that, why didn’t I think of that?

The week didn’t really get any better, we had another very unexpected arrest on wednesday night, though after I’d gone home, and last night was a 4-admissions-after-7pm night, which scuppers your plans to go home on time somewhat. So it’s been a bit mental really, and I’m appreciating the weekend more than I ever have before I think. I’m still in my pyjamas, it’s nearly 2pm, and my bleep is safely at the hospital where it can’t bother me.

I was discussing working life with another of the F1s last week – it’s amazing to find out that though we all look calm and in control at least most of the time, inside we are all totally out of our depth and terrified of doing something wrong and getting shouted at! It’s good to know I’m not alone.

Got a few days off next week, I’m going to Loch Lomond-shire with a friend for a couple of days – she’s been in Japan for a year, I can’t wait to see her – so that will be nice. I have to work monday first though

Hopefully I’ll blog about something less medical soon, apologies for the shop talk of late. Here’s a joke one of my seniors told this week to end on!

How many orthopaedic surgeons does it take to change a lightbulb?

…………just one – Dictation: Room dark. Refer medics.

One left

Today was my fourth 13 hour shift of this week, and it has not been a straightforward week!

The days have been ok, but the on-call bit has been pretty mental. More when I’ve had some proper sleep and proper food and am wearing jeans and don’t have to go to work in 10 hours. So, saturday.

Basically it’s been a growing up experience this week. Promise to write more after I’m done tomorrow, or perhaps on saturday, but just thought I’d let the three people who read this know that I’m still alive, the hospital has not beaten me, though the non-compliant rota joke is wearing thin!

Exhaustion…or how I learned that medicine is a game

Well, that’s me finished my first 8 days of work…I calculated that I’ve worked 86 hours since last friday which is rather a lot if you ask me, and I’m ready for my day off now!

All in all, I’ve really enjoyed it. I’m starting to think it’s some kind of crazy game. Here’s how I see it:

Go to work in the morning – get handover. This determines the difficulty of the game that you start at. Lots of sickies = advanced, nothing to report = beginner.

Level 1: The Ward Round – see all patients before moving onto next level. Complete menial tasks for points, insert venflons for more points, review sick patients for bonus points.

Level 2: Complete ward round jobs. More points to be had by knocking down obstacles such as fluid prescribing, rewriting kardexes and things. Go back three spaces for a tissued venflon.

***Congratulations! You have prescribed meropenem, at £100 a day! Win a free lunch from a drug rep***

Bonus Level 3: Lunch. This is a difficult level to get to and is not reached every day.

Level 4: Get called to see a sick patient. 500 bonus points for not killing them, 100 points for correct investigation and initial management, 100 points for diagnosis. Lose 500 points if you have to send them to HDU. Lose 1000 points if you have to send them to ICU.  Game over if you have to send them to the morgue.

…anyway, you get the picture! Some days you win, some days the hospital beats you. I won a couple of days this week, but other days I lost. A couple of people got really sick, a couple are dying, we had to tell 5 that they have terminal cancer, and on one day my (male) consultant and my (male) registrar between them managed to make 4 ladies cry in the course of one ward round – enter me with tissues and sympathy while my reg and consultant stand there looking awkward and saying ‘there, there’ in a very male way.

So it’s been a rollercoaster, but I’m feeling good. I’m starting to recognise when people are properly ill, I’m not panicking about every little thing, and I’ve stopped freaking out every time I prescribe a scary drug – warfarin and insulin are not exact sciences, I find, and I even managed morphine and benzodiazepines a few times this week!

This weekend I have lots of nice things planned, including taking the medical students out for lunch, seeing a friend from uni, and playing my violin at church. I’m looking forward to it.

But most of all, I’m looking forward to going to bed!

Nine to five

…what a way to make a living…

Well, nine to five it is not, but I love my job! I’ve done three whole shifts now, nobody has died and I am loving it. I’m pretty tired already – I worked a late on friday (13 hours), and yesterday I was meant to leave at 5pm but it was actually 8:30pm, but today was ok, I was out by just after six. Only another 5 days before I get a day off…

Actually I feel like a traitor looking forward to my day off – I really like this job, even after only three days – the nurses are lovely, the other doctors (the little I’ve seen of them!) are lovely, I’m really enjoying being able to prescribe things without needing someone else to sign off on them…I like all of it really. But it is quite all-consuming. Life is get up, go to work, come home from work, shower, eat fruit, sleep, repeat.

So I guess I’m appreciating time off much more than I used to. I’m already thinking of things to do on my weekend off, people I can see, fresh air I can breathe.

But for now, I’m enjoying myself. I’m tired, but only when I’m not at work. And I am really, really glad I saw this thing through to the end and became a doctor, because it is awesome.

America, I apologise

I am a travel hypocrite.

This is something I realised today when I visited St Andrews with my mother. And actually, now that I think about it, it’s something that I should have realised every time I go into town, and when I visited Oxford last week.

Basically, I love to travel. I love seeing other countries, breathing in their culture, eating their food [but not fish, it makes me puke] , seeing their sights, walking around their cities. There’s nothing better than stepping off a plane and feeling the vibe of somewhere immediately – it’s like a big box of chocolates (in Brussels that’s almost literal) just waiting for me to dive in and explore.

I live in a beautiful city. It’s very old, it’s the capital, it’s in a country with a lot of culture and gorgeous countryside and loads of history. It’s perfectly understandable that people should want to come here.

And yet, when I go into town, I get mad at the tourists. I get mad that when I go into town to do something specific, like buy clothes, which I hate doing anyway, I can’t get where I want to be because if the huge crowds of Italians with their matching rucksacks, the Japanese standing to attention to be in photos, the Spanish just being rowdy, the Chinese making those little ‘victory’ signs (yes, residents of Ninecastle, this means you! but don’t worry, you are not tourists, you live here). This is particularly true at this time of year, for this reason.

And this bugs me. And I’m ashamed of it. Because when it’s me being the tourist, it’s ok, but I get impatient with other people. What an idiot I am. I know that British people do not have the best reputation abroad, especially when there is professional sport involved, and I do try to be less touristy and more travelly, but still. I’m an idiot. I’m trying really hard to remember how much I love travelling and be patient while others are enjoying their travel experiences.

The worst thing is it’s Americans that have, in the past, bugged me more than anyone else. I know several American people and they are lovely. I read blogs of several American people and they seem lovely also. But for the life of me, American tourists do my head in, and the few that I have encountered have made me think badly of the whole nation.

Is it because they are so obvious? With ENORMOUS cameras and bermuda shorts and white socks and baseball caps and t-shirts that say ‘I love Scotland’? (Would any self-respecting American wear this kind of get-up at home?!) Is it because they complain that the portion sizes are not big enough? (Ok guys, we get that you have to supersize everything, but we like normal sized things over here!) Is it that they complain about our (correct) spelling of words containing ‘O’ and ‘U’ together, and our lack of love for the letter ‘Z’ (which is pronounced ‘zed’, by the way, not ‘zee’)? Is it that they think we drive on the wrong side of the road? And don’t get me started on the hood/bonnet/trunk/boot thing.

Or perhaps it’s just that I have been mildly annoyed with American tourists ever since a friend of mine heard one unfortunate man (dressed, I might add, exactly as described above) saying on the train as it pulled into the city: ‘Oh, look, how cute is that castle? And they built it right next to the station!’ Oh come on!

I have only been to America once, and only for a few days. I liked it. Why do I have such a chip on my shoulder about the US? Perhaps it’s fear of the unknown.

But I’m repenting of my thoughts that Americans are friendly but a bit thick, thanks in part to the two bloggers linked above. It seems that our across-the-pond neighbours are not all materialistic, bermuda-short-loving supersizers. Some of them are deep-thinking, intelligent people who truly love travel and who embrace the differences between others and the US.

So if you are reading this and you are from left of the Atlantic, I am truly sorry for misjudging you on the strength of my limited experience. I hope that you can forgive me.

Rawk ‘n’ roll

Living with musicians is a funny thing. When my parents left for sunnier climes, my brother and his band mates (the drummer lives here, the singer and the guitarist don’t) turned the dining room into a music room. It was already a music room of sorts, in that it has the piano in it (a very old and slightly battered Challen which belonged to my grandmother and which really needs restringing and which will be got rid of over my dead body) and it had a couple of tin whistles and things too.

The ‘dining room’ now contains:

my beloved piano

a Yamaha keyboard which does lots of funky things

a classical acoustic guitar

a not-so-classical acoustic guitar

an electric guitar

my brother’s first bass guitar (white)

my brother’s proper professional bass guitar (wooden)

a practice drum kit with plastic discs instead of drums

my good violin

my mum’s old violin

my brother’s rubbishy-sounds-like-a-shoebox violin

my viola

some fancy recording equipment and mixing desk stuff which I know nothing about

and a partridge in a pear tree (a very musical partridge)

…and of course the dining room table is amid all that somewhere.

Right now, my brother is playing his bass. Earlier I was playing the piano (badly). Drummer Matt drums on anything and everything in sight (he’s very good) including the floor so when you’re in the living room you can hear him tapping away upstairs.

Best of all, there’s always something to listen to, and it’s always good – be it guitar, bass, new recordings that the band have made…it makes for an interesting life. If you are really lucky, you might even hear me playing my fiddle, and I’m not that bad either, I don’t lower the tone too much. And I’m proud (and amused) to admit that in this household of musicians I’m the only one who can read music!

I’ve been rediscovering some old mix tapes of late – one made by a friend of mine (thanks Chaz, if you read this, which I doubt, you are a busy man) back when we were teenagers, and two made by a guy I used to date who was very particular about his music (thanks Paul – one, two, three, four, take the elevator…). Paul’s were made with strict rules in place, not unlike the rules outlined in this book. These rules should be adhered to at all times. Most of them still apply when making a mix cd. Unfortunately, since I am a modern lass and move with the times, I no longer own a cassette player.

How can I remedy this? I thought to myself. And one thing came to mind. iTunes!

It is magic. I got everything on both tapes, including all the weird things that I didn’t think I’d be able to get at all. So a total success! Well done iTunes.

Here are a few songs I am listening to at the moment, and you should too:

Seven Day Mile – The Frames

Mr Banker – Lynyrd Skynyrd

My Sundown – Jimmy Eat World

Given to fly – Pearl Jam

Memphis, Tennessee – Chuck Berry

Angeles – Elliott Smith

Romeo and Juliet – Dire Straits (I love Dire Straits!)

Hotel Yorba – The White Stripes

Messiah Complex Blues – Clem Snide

…so there you go, an eclectic mixture for an eclectic kind of week.

Awesome. What is life without music?

blast from the past

Today I had lunch with a friend from school. We hadn’t seen each other since the day we left high school six years ago. It was ’surreal but nice’. [Name the film, I dare you!]

We talked about what we’ve been up to. We talked about people we knew at school, and what we hear of them. A lot of people seem to have kids. Not many are married (only one in fact). It’s very different from my friends at uni, where a lot are married and nobody has kids. It’s so strange to think of us all as big grown-up people.

It seems to me, from what we talked about, that not that many people are happy doing what they are doing. When did we all stop dreaming? So many of them seem to be working in jobs that they don’t like, or faffing about because they don’t know what to do with their lives. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing what you want to do, we’re only young (we are. We ARE.), but it makes me sad to think that people are unhappy.

I know how lucky I am that I knew from a very early age what I wanted to do (I think I was four, I had teddy bear hospitals with toilet roll bandages and traction and everything), and I’m lucky that I had the motivation to get on with getting there. It’s much easier to get good grades when you have a goal. High school for me was a get-in-get-grades-get-to-med-school affair. I didn’t enjoy it much, mainly because this kind of determination was not common at my school, and so I got picked on a fair bit, and I’m sure it made me less popular that I stayed at home to study rather than going out on the town with school friends.

But you know what? I’m about to start my dream job. I made it to med school (by the grace of God, it seems, because if you weren’t bad or stupid at my school you had to just get on with it, nobody really paid much attention – my career advice consisted of, ‘what do you want to do? Oh, a doctor? Right, better get on with it then.’ Full stop. You’re on your own.) and, more importantly, I made it out the other side of med school.

My friend said today that she thinks I’m ‘by far the most successful’ from our wee group of friends. But what does that mean?! How do you judge success? High school was no picnic for me, and neither was university. I had at least my fair share of struggles, dodgy moments and times when I thought I’d never get to the end of this darned education. But here I am.

I don’t think there’s any way that this is down to me. And I have no idea why I am so blessed to be doing what I love. It’s definitely not down to me. But I’m so grateful that I’ve been given the chance to serve God by doing something that I love.

I’m sure I won’t love it every minute of every day, there will be days when I am stressed and exhausted and when I wish I could go back to studenthood, but on those days, I’ll remember how blessed I am to be doing this job, and I’ll try to never take it for granted.

Impulses

Today has been a day of impulses. It started when I couldn’t sleep last night, so I bought a polaroid camera on e-bay for £2. I always wanted a polaroid. It seemed like a good deal.

Then I changed my blog. I like it here. It’s nice.

Then I went to church this evening (I went this morning too, don’t worry) and randomly said to someone ‘I think I know you from somewhere’ (what a floozy). It turns out that unless I met him at my med school open day six long years ago, it’s unlikely that we’ve met before, but I swear he looked familiar. Anyway, well done to this guy and the guy sitting next to him for being not in the least bit freaked out by a strange girl randomly introducing herself and for being very friendly.

Church today was awesome. Both times. The talks were both on Psalm 42 and 43, and, in a nutshell, were about how God can sometimes feel far away and it’s ok for us to feel like that. Wow, that was a really small nutshell. Anyway, I like to keep things simple.

It got me thinking. I’ve spent a lot of the last few days feeling cross about various things – namely my lack of freedom living in my parents’ house again (although mainly sans parents, so it’s not so bad), missing having my own place, missing my uni friends, missing my social life in general – I’ve been feeling quite sorry for myself. It seems like by choosing to work in the city that I love, I’ve moved away from the life I spent six years building, and now I have to start over, and I admit I was sulking a bit about this. It sounds childish, I am fully aware of that!

It has felt to me for a long time like God’s far away, and because I am so hopeless at remembering to talk to him and spend time with him, I sometimes feel like he’s given up on me. I would give up on me if I were him, I’m pretty rubbish.

But something that was said today struck home – two things in fact. Firstly, when life sucks and God feels far away, the psalmist makes a conscious choice not to give up on it all. Head over heart. I often get the impression that Christians think that faith should come from the heart alone, but sometimes it’s a head thing – hearts make mistakes, they confuse things, they bruise easily, they doubt things. But making a decision to trust God whatever and sticking to it is a head thing, and can bridge the gap between the times when God is close and life is a breeze.

The other thing was slightly less profound – a quote from Adrian Plass which is so simple but so good: “God is nice and he likes me.”

Because he is, and he does. Even when I don’t like me (which is quite often), and even when I feel like lots of people don’t like me, and I lose all my confidence, God likes me, loves me even, and he matters more than anyone.

So I feel good this evening as I’m writing this on my shiny new blog. I feel peaceful. Which is wonderful, given what this week holds. Long may the peace continue!

new day, new blog

hello. welcome to my new blog.

if we’ve met before, it’s nice to see you again. you might have seen me here, where i used to ramble about life as a medic. i’ve decided that there was a bit too much of that and the confidentiality issues were endless, so i’ve scrapped it. but until i can work out how to import the valid older posts, i’ll leave it in the blogosphere.

so i’d like the emphasis to be more on life as a whole for this blog, rather than just another ‘i went to work and it sucked’ blog. no offence to people who feel that they fall into this category, some of them are hilarious.

anyway, hopefully this will develop into a proper blog rather than a mess, as it is at the moment. give me time.

Funerals, flooding, rotas and toothache…a random mixture!

Back home now, Oxford was pretty flooded and I’ve heard it got worse after I left which is bad – Aaron and I went to look at his next house (his lease is up in August) which was on the other side of one of the flooded streets, so we had to take our shoes and socks off and roll up our jeans and wade through it all! Aaron’s house is ok, not flooded, but some of his old flatmates had to move out of their new house because of the flooding – it’s pretty bad down there.

Aaron has a hard time staying away from scary situations! When we were in Israel last summer, we got bombed by a couple of katyusha rockets on our first day, and, rather than going to a shelter (there weren’t any) or a basement or something, we all went to the roof to have a good look! Not content with this, Aaron was all for running down the hill to where the rocket hit to have a look – he was the same with the flooding, couldn’t stay away in the safe bit but had to go wading in! Nutter…

Anyway, no trains were running but I managed to get a lift up to Birmingham with my dad who was travelling from Heathrow for the funeral. All a bit complicated, but got there in the end.

The funeral was my dad’s uncle’s, but he was only 62 and it was pretty sudden so quite sad. It went as well as could be expected though, and I got to spend some time with my dad’s aunt and cousins (who are more my age – there’s a big gap between siblings so the generations are a bit mixed up) which was really good. It’s a shame about the circumstances though.

And now, I’m back home with horrible toothache so I’m going to the dentist tomorrow – is it acceptable to be scared of dentists when you’re a doctor?! I just hate the noises and I hate having stuff in my mouth and I REALLY hate then putting needles in my gums, there’s no squidge there! Will stop being a wimp though, I need to go and get my dodgy tooth sorted…

Oh, I said I’d mention my rota…briefly, it’s a bit weird – I start with 2 days annual leave which is annoying when I already feel like I’m on death row, I just want to get started! Then I seem to be working 4 weekends of the next 8, and I have several days of ‘zero hours’ which I assume are days off, but I think they are just to keep the rota a bit more compliant than it would be otherwise. Still, it seems a bit all-or-nothing – I work a lot of long shifts in a row, then a weekend, then I have a few days off. I don’t know what the other people on my ward’s rotas are like, I guess they are pretty similar. Very strange!