Cortina Landslide

I once saw this guy, Rick Miller, perform Macbeth on his own -he played each role, as a different character from The Simpsons (it was called MacHomer).

Here he does Bohemian Rhapsody.



(I'm quite proud of the title I came up with for this post!)

63 and pregnant

A woman went to the GP's surgery, where she was seen by a young, new doctor.

After about 3 minutes in the examination room, the doctor told her she was pregnant. She burst out of the room and ran down the corridor screaming.

An older doctor stopped her and asked what the problem was; after listening to her story, he calmed her down and sat her in another room.

Then the doctor marched down the hallway to the first doctor's room.

"What's the hell's wrong with you?" he demanded.
"This woman is 63 years old , she has two grown children and several grandchildren, and you told her she was pregnant?!!"

The new doctor continued to write on his clipboard and without looking up said:

"Does she still have the hiccups?"

Staggering

Thank you for all your kind words after I passed.

I followed your encouragement & celebrated; I... er... may have had a little bit too much to drink...

On Wednesday after the exam, I was invited to join the Examiners for a glass of champagne. Why not? I thought. I'd paid for it after all (recalculated total: about £4000 for exam fees plus books, courses, travel, accommodation and the 1000Euro fee for the Irish exam which I don't need to take any more (non-refundable)).

I'm sipping away - then across the room I notice the difficult examiner who'd fired unneccesarily harsh questions at me in my make-or-break 2nd Viva and convinced me that I was going to fail again. I started striding over towards her.

I hadn't eaten all day. I hadn't drunk all year. Half a glass-worth of champagne molecules were competitively bound directly to the watchamacallit receptors of the thingamajig cortex.

I was pissed. On a pathetic amount of alcohol. Homeopathic quantities. You'd get more pissed sniffing a Alco-swab. There's more alcohol in an ant's fart.

"You bitch!" I thought to myself, as I got closer to the Examiner.

"Thank you so much" I said to her; I then proceeded to confess how little I actually knew about the subject.


She stopped me and told me I'd better stop talking or they'd change the mark.

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I went out celebrating on Thursday and had such a momentous hangover at work on Friday morning; not too bad in the head (thank goodness, given the beeping and noisiness of the operating theatres) but desperately nauseous - I was terrified I was going to chuck up over the patient. Would've been role reversal I suppose...

I've almost got my sense of smell back. Pity, I'm in Gynae theatre tomorrow...

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I'm not too good with booze.

The last time I'd got properly hammered was after a slightly disastrous gig in Nottingham (in that there wasn't a stage and I had to make my own microphone stand).

I'd got a cab to get to the venue because I've never been to Nottingham before. But come kicking out time, Captain Alcohol and his army had convinced me of four increasingly stupid facts:

1) I know exactly where I am
2) I know exactly how to get to my hotel
3) I can walk it in under an hour
4) I know a short cut

So I confidently marched off in one direction, only pausing once, five minutes into my walk, to make a 180 degree turn.
(Well, technically it was a 540 degree turn - and I bet it looked fucking cool). I stumbled on into the night, totally unaware of Nottingham's reputation for night crime & violence.

Next thing I know, I'm in my hotel room, eating a mouthful of Gaviscon tablets, with a chunk of my thumb missing. Only twenty minutes had passed.

Perhaps beer pixies gave me a lift in their Alco-taxi in exchange for thumb-flesh? We'll never know...

Failure to fly

So I took my FRCA postgraduate exam again yesterday.

It was my fourth and final attempt.

Since the end of 2005 I've spent more than £3000 on sitting the bloody thing (plus revision courses and two dozen textbooks). I've taken one stage of the two-part exam (either written or oral) every six weeks or so; each time I passed the written exam but then failed on one particular Viva (30-minute face-to-face interrogation with two examiners) so had to start again a few weeks later.

The first exam I sat yesterday was that same Viva. It did not go well at all - I came out of it thinking there might not even be any point in staying and doing the rest of the exam, it was that bad.

The other Viva was a bit hit-and-miss too, with one examiner repeatedly asking for more detail on topics I didn't really know much about. I couldn't have been more depressed when I went to the OSCE session (2-hour series of 5-minute stations testing various practical skills) in the afternoon.

Afterwards I just had to keep my mind occupied so I went into the British Museum, just around the corner from the Royal College where I'd taken the exam.

There I had my mp3 player on while I wandered zombie-like amongst the entire history of mankind. Enormous 3000 year-old ancient hand-carved statues & I'm shuffling miserably between them with high-volume random electropop in my ears. Fascinating relics from lost civilizations & I'm barely looking at them as I'm blasting my brain with noise just to stop myself thinking "I've failed. That's it. No career prospects."

It just wasn't working.

So I had a nap. On a table. At the British Museum.
(I'd woken up at 4am so I'm sure it's allowed)

When I woke up it was dark outside.

I went back to the Royal College to check the results board.


I passed.

I fucking passed.


So now I don't have to fly to Dublin on Monday to do the Irish equivalent exam. Drink anyone?

Like a Polaroid picture

The Big Exam looms...
The Fear & The Misery are once again knocking at my door.

Normal posts will resume in a few days
(whatever "normal" might mean...)

In the meantime, here are a few excellent videos.
Love and enjoy.
And shake it.

- S -

Temptation

I read this story on a forum elsewhere but had to share it with you:


"I was happy. My girlfriend and I had been dating for over a year, and so we decided to get married. My parents helped us in every way, my friends encouraged me, and my girlfriend? She was a dream!

There was only one thing bothering me, very much indeed, and that one thing was her younger sister. My prospective sister-in-law was twenty years of age, wore tight mini skirts and low cut blouses. She would regularly bend down when quite near me and I got many a pleasant view of her underwear. It had to be deliberate. She never did it when she was near anyone else.

One day little sister called and asked me to come over to check the wedding invitations. She was alone when I arrived. She whispered to me that soon I was to be married, and she had feelings and desires for me that she couldn't overcome and didn't really want to get over. She told me that she wanted to make love to me just once before I got married and committed my life to her sister. I was in total shock and couldn't say a word.

She said, "I'm going upstairs to my bedroom, and if you want to go ahead with it just come up and get me." I was stunned. I was frozen in shock as I watched her go up the stairs.

When she reached the top she pulled down her panties and threw them down the stairs at me. I stood there for a moment, then turned and went straight to the front door. I opened the door and stepped out of the house. I walked straight towards my car.

My future father-in-law was standing outside. With tears in his eyes he hugged me and said, "We are very happy that you have passed our little test. We couldn't ask for a better man for our daughter. Welcome to the family."


The moral of this story is:

























Always keep your condoms in your car."

How did I get here?

Sometimes I like to just stop and take a minute to see where I am; it never fails to amuse me.

Today I had more exam practice with various senior colleagues; I would sit in a room with one of them as they asked me questions and we discussed the answers afterwards. One topic we covered was diabetic ketoacidosis - including the type of overbreathing that patients adopt to try and get rid of carbon dioxide, Kussmaul breathing.

I went off into a bit of a daydream for half a second when my Consultant & I were discussing it, sitting in his very small, windowless office.

All of a sudden I realise that I'm trapped in a cupboard with an old man heavy-breathing at me like some kind of perverted pensioner.

I stayed calm. (Might happen in the exam, you never know)


Like the time when I was doing my Gynaecology placement as a student, and my boss happened to be a long-term family friend - one day she had another student with her, who by complete coincidence was another (unrelated) family friend. Normal clinic takes place, and I have to do various supervised, medical studenty things.

Suddenly it occurs to me that I have two fingers inside a total stranger, with Aunty peering over my one shoulder and my 'cousin' peering over the other.

No-one even offered me a samosa.

Sepia

One of the specialists at the hospital very kindly gave up part of yesterday afternoon to help me revise Paediatric Resuscitation & practice CPR on different sized manikins. He's a really nice man.

Although he does spend much of his working life on his knees, kissing dolls...

Petty Crime

There's so much to say regarding Tom Petty's 1994 song "Mary Jane's Last Dance" and its video... so I think I'll let you guys say it.

Make one point each (in the comments section), be nice and enjoy.

Over to you...
- S -

Ev'rybody Needs Good...

...Advice.

It used to be that a career in Medicine meant you were as good as guaranteed a job for life. With hard work, exams, research, you could go into any specialty you wanted and maybe one day become the best.

But now, in a desperate political bid to please the public and provide more doctors at Consultant level, the career structure is being given a total overhaul and the process is being streamlined.
What it boils down to is that half of all newly-qualified doctors will be fast-tracked and called "Consultants" after only 7-9 years experience, with the remainder staying as temporary trust grade doctors but doing the same work.
Everyone can have a job, but you won't have much of a say where in the country or in which specialty it will be. The flowchart even has a suspiciously large yellow box with the option "Leave Medicine".

We're desperate. The application forms are being published soon. We need to be told what to expect and how to boost our chances of being able to follow our own chosen career path once MMC (Mismanaging Modernising Medical Careers) comes into force.

It's a very unstable time. We need guidance. I turned to this week's edition of BMJ Careers to see if the British Medical Association, the largest support organisation for doctors, have any helpful words.

Biggest story? An interview with Dr Karl Kennedy from Neighbours.

um...

Phoney

Last year, my mobile started lying to me.

I would receive say, a saucy text from my girlfriend, and the phone would tell me it was from one of my consultants.
Highly embarrassing as you can imagine
(I sent them a reply anyway. Things got a bit messy...)


But just over a week ago my screen broke suddenly for no reason* and Orange sent me a replacement the next day. Unfortunately the bastard SIM card refused to save any of my numbers so I had an empty addressbook in my new handset & I entered just the important ones straightaway.
And that's when the problems really kicked in:

- Sarah & her dad accidentally swapped phones for a day - awkward to say the least...

- I split up with Sarah sadly (but not because of the above);
now I think I've short-circuited the new phone because of our conversations since then (men are allowed to cry sometimes, shut up)

- my phone's 200 message memory is full already - I try to reply to each txt I get but I just can't win, someone always complains - friends, patients...

- I haven't got the number of every single person I've ever met on my phone... why does no-one bloody say who they are when they txt their whole addressbook on New Year's Eve?!


But my brother received the stupidest txt ever:
"This is my new number, please delete the old one"

That was the whole message.

WHO ARE YOU?! Idiot...

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Incidentally, I tend to use a disposable camera because the one on my phone is unhelpfully stupid - when people tell me how rubbish my disposable camera is, I drop it on the floor and say "OK, do that with your camera then?". Thus I win.

Anyway, I can't find my disposable camera anywhere in the flat
er... I think I've thrown it away...
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Why 2k+7?

Happy New Year. And all that. Had a combination of the absolute best and worst Christmas holiday ever. Don't ask.

I'm just glad to be back at work.

There's a fine line between putting someone to sleep (as in giving them an anaesthetic) and putting someone to sleep (like the vet or the man in the special Swiss clinic does); that fine line was completely obscured by my first patient today - shwasbloodyenormous and a disaster of Titanic proportions (literally), waiting to happen.

The surgeon was not having fun. At one point he shouted "Right, that's it. Wake the patient up. Now. I want to tell her she's ruining my operation because she's too fucking fat." Aw, bless.

Another surgeon yelled at me a few weeks ago (he wasn't pleased that we diagnosed his first patient with a heart condition and cancelled her operation, simply because there was a large chance she'd die on the table - oh, sorry...). But we put on a Seventies CD during the next operation and he was dancing around (a bit) & singing along and forgot all about it! Sorted.

Simple creatures, Orthopods... Sometimes I wish I was one.
Or a squirrel.