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...