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.