…as my Professor not infrequently exclaimed.

I have been shortlisted for the job.

The job is a part-clinical and part navel-gazing-academic post, designed to get people with previous research experience a bit of postdoctoral time. The longterm aim is to end up with a part-academic career, e.g. Senior Lecturer. It’s what I’ve wanted since I came back from Over There. Gosh, but it’s scary, though. I have to do a three-slide, five-minute presentation on “How I would develop my research over the next two years at University of Astro City.”

Erm, I would blog more? Spend more time on the Hindernet? Post some photos? It would be just like old times!

I need to go to bed now, so I can lie awake and fret at the ceiling.

I’m at the bloody rota again. Oh, how I wish people would stop taking holidays (except for me, of course). Speaking of which, my boss is off, so I’ve been having exciting times.

Here’s what I’ve recently removed from unsuspecting members of the public:

• Freckles x 3
• Pimples x 2
• Manky spiky bits of fingernail x 1

A while ago, I was asked to talk to the medical students’ surgical society about growing up to be a surgeon. I told them it was brill. Well, what are you to say? It’s brill in parts, and dead boring in parts, and you spend a lot of time massaging other people’s egos, wow goo. You get a laugh every day. Everyone lies, House is right. The pay is good but the hours are still a bit uncertain, as are the chances of future employment. Anyway, there were fifty or thereabouts at the talk, and now I’ve been asked to speak to a bigger group (about 120) on a particular aspect of my particular thang. Hmm. Many people. I’m distinctly remedial when it comes to teaching, and I waggle my hands around too much.

On the plus side, I do have some super-minging photos to show. It would be a shame to waste them?

I must be spending too much time at work. Mental Arithmetic turned into Arithemetic. I don’t know what Arithemetic is, but an emetic is something that will make you barf like there’s no tomorrow. In fact, it will make you wish that there’s no tomorrow. It used to be standard treatment after ingestion of nasty things, until it was appreciated that yakking it all back up caused double the damage, not to mention the risk of inhaling yer own boke. Yuk.

Anyway, we use lots and lots of local anaesthetic, even in people who are asleep. Saves waking up with the feeling that one’s leg is hanging off (even if it is). There are, broadly, two kinds: plain stuff, and stuff with Adrenaline in it. The Adrenaline stuff is magic (I don’t mean real magic, like Santa, I mean pretend chemistry magic) because it causes all the ickle blood vessels to constrict, therefore reduces bleeding. Except that Pharmacy have run out of it. So instead of bottles with 1:10 000 strength adrenaline already in them, we’re giving up on counting in our heads and resorting to writing on the drapes with a surgical marker to work out how much of 1:1000 is required in 20mls of plain to get the right concentration. Whilst a decimal point astray is unlikely to have Shipmanesque results, it’d be bound to lead to lots of shouting. Add to that the lack of a stool for the short SHO (she stood on a wobbly drill box instead), and the fact that instrument set 1 had no scissors, set 2 had blunt scissors and the first decent pair was found on set 3, and then tell me what is wrong with the hospital? Bad, bad, bad management. Buy cheap, buy twice. My hairdresser’s scissors cost over a hundred pounds a pop; ours are under fifteen. I know we need so many more pairs, but it’s ’cause half of them are shite. Oh, but I could go on and on. At least the electricity is still working. For now.

Hours and hours of operating today, but I got to do rather a razzy operation (under supervision of Da Boss, but he kept mostly out of it), which was facking awesome. There’s no other expression for the buzz from some good operating. Today, I do not hate my job.

Now I am dog-tired, working on the rota, and thinking of bed. In other jolly news, I have an announcement. No, not that. Wise up. It it this: for the first time since July, I weigh less than 11 stone. Hoo Ray. Married life = massive waist/butt expansion. Upcoming sister’s wedding = sensible eating plan. It works, slowly and boringly, but it works.

I got home on Sunday night, and drove the hour-and-a-wee-bit down to Mammy, then fell dribblingly asleep for quite some time. The presentation went well, apart from a random question about free radicals (there is nothing about free radicals in my research, and all I know about them has been gleaned from face-cream advertisements scientific research into ageing in glossy magazines journals). Anyway. I spent an awful lot of money. I got two textbooks and was swithering about a journal subscription. We haggled a bit and I signed up for the journal, and he gave me another textbook for free! Value $210!  US$! Oh, it’s so exciting!*

So now I’m home. Mammy’s had her spring-cleaning groove on, and the Sister and I were instructed to book some time off work to clear the attic. I’m currently wondering if I’ll ever again need my first-year Latin exercise book. Although I am of a mind to keep it for blue days, when I could look back and see that I was, once, albeit briefly, a 9/10.

Between that and sleeping in, I haven’t yet got round to sorting out my *spooky riff* Logbook. We have to keep a log of all the operations we’re involved in, and I use an online version through the surgical college wot I belong to. It has to be produced on Friday for the annual progress interview. (Head of School alert! Dean alert! Shit!!!) Mine is currently a leetle behind. I was so good until, oh, November….

I really must go and do the logbook.

* Yes, I am being sarcastic. I have enough insight to realise that it’s exceptionally sad to get excited about textbooks. But any new book is exciting to me.

Not you, the Dear Readers, of course not. Just everyone else in the world. And I mean everyone (except The Mammy, who doesn’t read blogs, but is learning the joys of Hindernet shop-browsing). I was on call this weekend: 8am Saturday until 9am today, then a full day of work today. I hate people.

Reasons That I Hate People:

1. They are stupid. Would you ignore your child long enough for it to play with Combustible Liquid and a lighter? Or maybe teeter, unsteadily, on a fence, whilst using electric hedgecutters? This when you have already cut a lump off yourself doing exactly the same thing? It’s depressing. This one time, at Band Camp in Casualty, I saw a guy who’d been mowing the lawn in his bare feet. Seriously. Another time, my colleague walked into the ward to see a woman with a cigarette poked through the round hole in the oxygen mask, thumb poised to click the lighter. I could go on, if you like. My conclusions are: (a) people should have to get a permit to reproduce and (b) some people are just too stupid to live.
2. They are liars. It’s got to the point where I just assume, right off, that everyone is telling me lies. “I was walking down the street at 3am, reading my Bible, and someone jumped out and stabbed me!” “Doctor, it was mistaken identity.” “I have no idea how that got there!” No, there is a glass up your ass because you put it there. I don’t give a shit why or what for, and I don’t care how hard you fell, that’s not how it happened. I swear this is true: someone came into the hospital once with a whiskey tumbler in their Bee Hind. As they were being whisked off (sorry) for emergency surgery to extract it, the wife drew the surgeon aside and asked if they could give it back…as it was part of a set. If there’s anything worse than a liar, it’s a dirty liar. These people could be your friends. You might be visiting them tonight. Bring your own cup (is that why it’s a rule at Women’s Institute meetings? Argh!).  My conclusions: I have difficuly with normal social interactions, because I have to remind myself that my family members are not liars.
3. They are always f*&^ing complaining. It is not my fault that it is sore, it is because you got drunk and you threw a punch and you hurt your stupid, lying hand. Did I give you that rash? Exactly why is it my fault that you weigh more than 170kg (but that’s as high as the scales go), and we’ll have to send the houseman to soap you up in order to get you into the CT scanner: did I force-feed you? I am sorry that the clinic was running 90 minutes behind today. There were about 95 patients to see, there weren’t enough clinic rooms and so we weren’t hanging around chatting, we had nowhere to put you, unless you want to take off your clothes in the waiting room. I am genuinely sorry you had to wait, but I have been working for 53 hours now, and will not have any lunch, will have to drive across town like a maniac for another clinic this afternoon and go through the whole damned thing again. By the  time I get home, I’ll be literally shaking from hypoglycaemia and will have to eat a meringue nest to get in enough sugar to prevent me from passing out. I’m serious. My conclusions: damn them all to Hell. Except the old boys. I’ve got a soft spot for them.
4. Women don’t like women. I called a girl in today, at clinic. She was quite a bit younger than me, and had been operated on by one of the consultants, Mr X. I love Mr X. He’s kind. funny, smart and has been enormously supportive of me when I have been having surgical angst. His patient looked down her orange-foundationed nose at me, curled her lip and walked as slowly as she possibly could into the clinic room, to show her dissatisfaction. She wouldn’t even sit down, just stood and looked sneeringly, and said, “Am I not here to see Mr X?” “Why yes, of course you are,” I said. And then I couldn’t hold it in any more. “Don’t panic!” I snarled, “I’ll just get him for you.” What she didn’t know is that he’d already asked me to call him when I got her into a room, and so she didn’t have to be so snippy. Just because I have boring hair, and boring middle-aged clothes, and boring low-but-functional heels, doesn’t mean that I am some piece of dirt you found on the sole of your oh-so-hip pink shoes. Anyway, yours are too flat and I hope you get fallen arches. My conclusions: Bah.
5. Even colleagues sometimes annoy. I’d better not talk about this one, just in case.

Anyway. It was a relentlessly busy weekend. I did get to bed both nights, but I’m absolutely whacked and I am going to potter for a bit and go to bed. Poor darling Batman was home, but he said that any time he saw me, I was sleeping. Not quite true, as we went to the cinema on Friday night, and I endeavoured to stay awake for the whole of Angels and Demons. Not bad, but not nearly as good as Star Trek, wot we saw the previous weekend. Ab. So. Loo. Tee. Lee. Fantastique. Especially Bones. For your viewing pleasure:

(I don’t hate Bones.)

I must admit to being somewhat gratified to receive a telephone call from Over There:
“Oh good, you’re not dead! I only just read your blog, and you had the rash, and then you disappeared.”
It’s nice to be missed. I once did an online test, that reported that I had a very high chance of going to Hell, but also that I would die alone and be eaten by cats. I am resolute: no cats in this house.
I have been working, working, working. Or idling. Or running around the country at weekends. Last weekend, though, I went to Gotham. Lovely sunshine, and a bit of downtime.
Work contines, unabated. Was shouted at today for not knowing what the tarsal plate is made of – it’s a very useful structure that stops one’s eyeball dropping out and rolling across the floor. “Cartilage?” I pondered.  “No!” roared il capo di tutti capi, the Grand High King of All My World, the man who has more influence on my future happiness than most anyone else. “Why would there be cartilage in your eyelid?”

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, humbly. “I had a brain fart.”

(Note: not the thing to say. But anyway. I’ve always said stoopid things when under pressure.) (And it wasn’t a brain fart. I just didn’t know the answer. Sunshine? Marshmallows? Baby poop? Could have been made of anything.)

“Indeed you did. It is a fibroglandular structure.”

Well, that’s nice. I am going to bed, to lie awake half the night and bemoan my (a) stupidity and (b) lack of studying. I am a bit of a funny mood. I read Direct Red last night, the sort-of-memoir of a female ENT surgeon. Meh. Immature. Superficial. Waste of £11.99 and three hours of my life. But then, maybe it’s just jealousy, because I’d give my left kidney to walk into Waterstone’s and see my name on the shelf. One day. One day.

I was on call at the weekend, and as it’s taken me four attempts to write this much of the sentence correctly, then you might wonder why I am not asleep. I should be, you know, but I had a couple of emails that had to be sent or else my liver would have been removed by untrained hands and fed to me without the fava beans. And now I’m all past my sleep. But it’s true: sleep deprivation is bad for fine motor skills. And very bad for spelling, it turns out.

Anyway, I could be operating on you. Wouldn’t that be nice? I’m on call from home, which is sort of OK. Phone rang at 01.09am on Sunday morning. It was one of those A&E (Emerg, Pirate Girl) docs who was born sans first name. “Hello,” says he, “Is that Miss Blade?” “Why yes, it’s Fresh,” I said. “Yes,” said the whelp, “this is Mr X in A&E at St. Anywhere’s.” Ah, I thought, another one of the unfortunates. It is not necessary to reinforce your cleverness by insisting on using your title. You are (a) junior to me and (b) not yet clever enough to be lying in your own bed at the taxpayer’s expense. Anyway, he told me All, and that he was sending the patient home but could we review them? Ah, but had he done X, Y and Z? And considered the possibility of a Relapse? Or that they might just, you know, swell up and die? Not so clever after all, my old son. But then, neither am I. I frightened the shit out of him and then told him they needed to be admitted, so to organise the transfer. They were coming a distance of some ten miles, by ambulance, and it took two hours and forty minutes. Our ward phoned at 03.50am, and not-so-clever me had to get out of bed and schlepp across town to see someone whose main diagnosis was: Too Stupid To Live. Anyway.

The whole point of this is that I’m not used to having Husband beside me when I’m on call. I bounced out of bed each time the phone rang, and bolted next door into what’s laughingly called the study. “Don’t get up!” said Batman, “It’s all right to answer the phone.” Well, I needed a bit of paper and a pen, but the main reason for getting up was that I always make it a point of principle to sound, whatever time it is, that I’ve just been idly filing my nails or arranging some flowers. It removes the element of satisfaction that A&E people get from waking up normal, decent folk in the middle of the night. I’ve spent a lot of time perfecting this, and I sound more awake when I am sitting up straight at the desk. As I explained to Batman at 03.50am after he’d been woken for the fifth time (phone, 2, fidgeting wife waiting for second phone call, 3): “Never let the B*&^ards know that they woke you up! Actually, remember that! That’s a great title for a blog post!”

See? I am always thinking of youse.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all the Dear Readers, and thanks for leaving such lovely comments. Youse are more of a tonic than you’ll ever know.

Back to business. Still married, which is a bonus. Batman’s still working in Gotham, whilst I’ve just started year three of my six years of surgical training in Astro City. It’s essentially an apprenticeship, so I’m stuck here and he’s stuck there, but it’s not as bad as you might imagine. The airlines are very happy. Married life has, so far, taught me several things:

1. Husbands are very nice for warming cold feet on, especially when they are so very obliging about it.

2. Husbands need proper dinners or they get a bit disconsolate. My rotten cooking repertoire is now up to two (yes, two!) dinners: lasagne and Very Good Brown Stew/Casserole. The stew made him lick the plate.

3. If you have a very small kitchen (yes, we do), then make a firm rule, early on, that only one person is allowed in the kitchen at any time, unless expressly invited to enter the kitchen by the person who is already there. Batman is too tall and long-limbed to manoeuvre around with hot plates.

4. General nuisance eg tenants x (One busy life + another busy life) = much rushing around at the weekends.

5. Husbands always drive. When did I become the wee submissive wife? It must be some genetic thing, but now he always drives (and it’s my car!).

6. Weekend marriage is the way to go: all the good points without much in the way of laundry or unpleasant bathroom emissions.

7. I like being married to Batman.

I am sure I’ll have some more fascinating pearls of wisdom in the future. Batman and I were talking about the blog, and he reckons I was better when I was blogging more. I reckon he’s right. Work has been utterly exhausingly draining. One of the bosses is a very senior person, and I actually think I’d set my hair on fire if it’d impress him. I have been standing on my head a lot, it feels, and he’s quite disinterested. Actually, we had a conversation that went:

Him: You know, you trainees are standing opposite us in theatre and we are thinking how to get rid of you. Will you be consultant material? Would you make a staff grade? Or will you make it through training at all?

Me (thinks): !!! So which one am I?

After a fortnight of this, I chatted to my Educational Supervisor, who tells me it’s confidence, or lack thereof, that’s my problem. Imagine! No shit. So I responded to this by arguing thusly with a good, but very forceful, registrar colleague:

Me: So Mrs X has got Q syndrome. She’s not doing well.

Him: Yes, but there’s nothing we can do.

Me: (thinking out loud) But the question is, should we take her to theatre? Would there be anything we can do that would change the outcome? Or is the Q syndrome so advanced that surgery is not an option? I really don’t think there is anything we can do.

Him: Why would you take her to theatre? She is going to die. She has Q syndrome. What happens is that blah, blah..

Me: I know, but it’s blah, blah, blah.

Him: No, blah, blah. (We’re in the tea room, and it’s getting louder and louder.)

Me: Listen, I spent two years researching Q syndrome, you know this. So do you want to take me on about it? Go on, go ahead. Make my day.

Him: *mumph*

I am not usually an Intellectual Snob. But you know what? It felt good.

Being a trainee surgeon involves a fair bit of navel gazing, self-doubt and insecurity. It’s part of the deal. We’re shite. We’re all shite. We’re the worst trainees the world has ever seen, and the future of surgery is Bleak with a capital ‘B”. Yes. Well, that’s the way it feels sometime. However, I’m lucky in having possibly the finest boss the world has ever known. He’s also my Educational Supervisor, and the other day, I felt the need to unburden myself about a difficult case:

FB: So, I did *such and such* the other night. Drrreadful. Horrrible. I am so hamfisted, I felt like I was operating whilst wearing boxing gloves.

BossMan: Yes, well, those can be difficult.

FB: Do you ever, I mean did you ever, well, you probably didn’t…did you ever feel like you just didn’t have the technical ability to be a good surgeon?

BM: No. Never. *Impish grin* And you are being stupid.

FB: Dunno…

BM: Yes, you are. And do you know that when dogs do something stupid, you are supposed to hit them on the head to reset their brains?

FB: Oh? *THWACK*

FB: Ah…

*THWACK*

Twice, on the upper forehead. Hard. It’s been quite some time since I’ve had a manual attitude adjustment, and you know what? It felt kinda good. And I think I might be a surgeon one day, after all.