Sorry for the posting pause, which may of course be a relief to some of the Readership. It’s been quite the week re. the grind at work. I was on call last weekend, which is always rather stressful and also frustrating. Seeing as there’s a National Health Service and all that, you’d think that a busy hospital would have more than one emergency theatre (OR, GPG) running on evenings and at weekends. Wouldn’t you? Well, think again. Weekends mean a game of Whose Patient Is The Sickest? with other surgical specialties, to see who gets the coveted theatre slots. Here’s the deal: patient needs surgery. Sister in Charge is found and patient is booked onto emergency list. And then we wait. And wait. If patient is very sick, then they may not be able to wait and will have to jump the queue. This involves negotiations with all the other specialties who have patients ahead in the queue. Getting in ahead is known as bumping. I had a couple of minor things on Saturday’s list, then about 8pm a patient rolled up in A&E, being Very Poorly Indeed. I saw patient, then went to find other surgical types and gynaecologists and whatnot and say: here, this is my patient. My patient has X, Y and Z. My patient trumps your patient. So can I go first? I won that one, and headed merrily to theatre, whereupon I found myself literally up to my elbows in Vile Nastiness. I can still smell it.

Sunday was a complete disaster, as not only did I get bumped along all day, then thought that my complicated begging and pleading was going to be successful and I’d get to sneak a super-quick case in between two others. Alas, the consultant in the other specialty threw a total wobbly and said no. It got worse, though. Being the NHS, a second theatre can be opened for Life, Limb or Testicle (I am not making this up), and had been opened for something very urgent. Usually the second theatre staff, who are called in from home, will only do what they’ve been called in to do, then scoot. But in an outburst of benevolence, they offered to do my case. So I rang the ward (2 minutes after the first call to cancel the patient) and in an uncharacteristic burst of speed for that particular ward, they’d given the patient a drink, thus preventing them getting a general anaesthetic for four hours. Game over. I’d been sitting around for three hours by this stage, so I went home in high dudgeon.

The week itself has been busy, as my consultant’s on holidays. Peace and quiet, no nagging; it’s been wonderful. Patient from Saturday night clutched my hand on Wednesday morning’s ward round, on hearing that they were being discharged, and said fervently, “Miss Blade, you saved my life!” Miss Blade tried to look modest, and failed. The boys snickered. I didn’t save anyone’s life (they weren’t that sick, although they felt ghastly), but sometimes it’s nice when patients get a bit overenthusiastic.

In other news: well, there is other news. Something quite incredibly surreal happened on Tuesday night; details will have to wait until I get my head around the strangeness of it all, but I think this might turn out to be jolly good. In fact, I was turfed out of theatre on Wednesday for being too giddy.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 8:58 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.