Hey Jude

Not a post about the Beatles - although I did see the Bootleg Beatles in concert a few weeks ago. They looked and sounded excellent, they even had Beatles-style banter; I think I laughed a bit too loud when they said "Please turn off your mobile phones... because they haven't been invented yet."

They were much better than the tribute band I was in at school.
This is for several reasons:
- we were called The Beatlets,
- we didn't have any guitars,
- there were only three of us (with one, Indian, singer).
Nevertheless, we still played in Assembly once or twice a term for almost two years!
God knows how I got away with not being bullied more...


Anyway I'm posting really because I'm worried about a friend of mine, who shall remain semi-nameless...

She says she doesn't really read my blog, yet she knows everything on it.
She doesn't have anything to say about it, but often she passes on comments from her friend "Jude".

"Jude" seems to be a big fan and appears to like the blog a lot. Every time I see my friend, "Jude" has said something to her about the most recent post. My friend even made me give her my autograph so that she could "give it to Jude as a present".


Now, I've never met this "Jude" - neither has anyone else I know.

My concern is: is "Jude" real?

Or should I arrange for my friend to receive a visit from the... er... doctors who work in the special building...?


...then we can start to make her better...

Fluid movements

Sorry there have been no posts for a while (er... would you believe absolutely nothing's happened?)

Yes?

I've come across a book...

I feel bad that I've slagged off Orthopods in the past, calling them simple creatures.

So I thought I'd give you an insight into the complicated world of Orthopaedic Surgery, thanks to the brilliant book
Advanced Examination Techniques in Orthopaedics.

(My scanner's not working so I've had to take photos - you'll need to click on them to see the picture in its full glory...)





Fig 1.Examination of the elbow

(It's an extraordinary book.)







Fig 2. Flexion of the middle finger

(Written by orthopaedic surgeons)






Fig 3. Abduction of the little finger

(It's carefully tailored to the target audience)








Fig 4. Alignment of the knees

(Examination skills are presented in a way the trainee surgeon can remember)






Fig 5. Flexion of the knee

(The book is exceptionally well illustrated)









Fig 6. Normal heel position when standing on tip-toes

(Very thorough)



What an excellent concept - a textbook that you want to look at!

Which is why I had to give it back to the library - several people have already reserved it... so hard-working these orthopods...



(To see if you've learnt anything, what do you think is being assessed in these two pictures? Answer will follow later...)

Memories

Patients do say the oddest things to me.

A while ago, anaesthetising a completely sane, nice old man, he confessed to me, out of the blue:
"...my teeth were taken out by an SS Officer."

I decided not to ask him if this was
- involuntary,
- in one swift movement, or
- over an prolonged period of time and without anaesthetic.

In any case, I assumed he didn't really want to talk about it as it probably wasn't pleasant. (I s'pose theoretically it might've been. Maybe they had really good dental care during the War. Maybe, right, he was developing really bad dental caries from wolfing down all his chocolate ration in one go, yeah, and then maybe a passing Nazi dentist took pity on him and offered to help by... hmmm, who am I kidding...?)

Anyway, just before getting him off to sleep, I told him to think of something nice to dream about.
"I'm going to dream about previous sex" he whispered to me, with a smile.

(shudder) That's a bit creepy.
I just hope that it wasn't from the same period in his life...

Tech-no-blog-y

Dammit - after spending ages today getting all the photos ready, the blog website for some reason just isn't letting me put pictures up so I'm afraid there'll be a little wait for my Orthopaedics post.


Meanwhile here's some music.... da da daaa... da daaaa...


I hate being put on hold - either you're forced to listen to some unnecessarily rousing classical cliché like Mozart's Eine Kleine Knackeredmusik, or something that's meant to be calming but actually miserable like James Blunt ("Goodbye Mike Glover" - no wonder he left). I'd rather pay to listen to silence.

Sometimes it's amusing when you can still hear them in the background ('ere Tracy, do we have "Doctor A. Andy Department" here?) but sooner or later you find yourself shouting down the phone at them.

But the worst thing is the jarring, half-arsed monophonic rendition of Greensleeves that they used to have on Kingston Hospital switchboard, the one that sounds like a demo on a very very old Casio keyboard; it's like listening to a Spectrum/C64/Amstrad 464 load.

What's that, you might ask?
- well little one, in the olden days, before the Internet, games would take at least 15 minutes to load (although you can now blue-tooth-wi-fi-zapbeam the same amount of data to your iToaster in a fraction of a second), the "computer" used to make a horrid whining noise in the process, and you'd often have to turn the cassette over halfway through.
What's a cassette? (sigh)...

Either way, hold music does my head in.

Or maybe that's just a ploy to get the caller to hang up...
ah cunning... I wonder if the 999 people have worked that out...?

Booking

I'd like to ask you a little favour.

In aid of Comic Relief next Friday, the people at Troubled Diva are publishing a book of humorous blog posts.

They ask for one submission, funny, no pictures, less than 1000 words(ish). This is where you come in.

Could you suggest one of my blog posts? Tell me in the comments section if you found any posts particularly good/funny & I'll email them my submission on Monday evening (so before then please).

Ta muchly
I've got a corker of a post lined up for you next - but it has pictures so wouldn't be eligible anyway...

Medical Imaging

I probably ought to do something about the way I look.

I mean, I'm still gorgeous, with female colleagues continuously throwing themselves at me* but am I happy? Am I really? Well, yes, actually, I am.
But other people aren't.

Number one culprit, as ever, is the hair. Like anyone, I've gone through a few different hairstyles over the years. Some were worse than others, I admit that...

Such as when I had hair down to my shoulders and looked like I belonged on Crimewatch. Or after that when I had a grade 1 all over, except for the fringe, which I either gelled horizontally forwards like a baseball cap, or combed back so that it hid, velcroed, into the 5mm stubble that otherwise coated my head like iron filings.

At the moment, I'm doing fuck-all going for a style that might possibly be described as "Bollywood". It's fairly long, or more accurately, big.

I look like a cat has died on my head.

My hair tends to Afro out after I wash it. Sometimes I wear a cap after I have a shower for an hour or so, just to flatten it down a bit.
I'm gonna cut my hair smart for interviews, but now I know I'm not going to have any interviews for 2 months at least.

So I could grow it.

Or buzz it down - it grows back REMARKABLY quickly. I reckon this is why I'm not six foot tall - all my metabolic processes, since an early age, went into growing my hair.
It's also very thick - many a barber has had to swap their shearing equipment to something more powerful halfway through because normal clippers just can't cope.

Either way, my hair doesn't make me look unprofessional. Yet

The experimental moustache on the other hand...


*Not 100% true. Thinking about it, that's probably a good thing.

Marrakech

I went to Marrakech last week. It's technically in Africa but it was quite hard to believe that sometimes.

I stayed in a lovely Riad (B&B) not far from the main market square where we were constantly accosted by people trying to sell us crap. Some of it was very good crap though - I bought one of the traditional Moroccan items of clothing, a jilaba. It's kind of like a long hoodie. Now I can dress up as a Jedi. Or a Dementor.*

The sales-patter of the people at the stalls was impressive... at first.
"I make you good price" from the older people, "Asda prices, isn't it" from the younger ones.

They expect tourists to barter so they ask for more than the items are worth; we expect them to put the prices up so we barter. We get the items for a few Dirhams less so we feel good about ourselves; they ask for 300 dirhams but reluctantly sell for 250, but they feel good because they're only worth 15 anyway. Everyone's a winner.

We ate at a stall one night run by "Mustapha Oliver - my mother is Nigella Lawson and my father is Gordon Ramsay".
(If this nightmare coupling was actually true, he didn't look like either of them.)
They love their mint tea over there. Hippiechick can't stand the stuff (it is approximately 240% sugar after all) so I drank hers when I finished mine; but then someone would come over and insist on topping up both our glasses.

Very friendly. Great hosts.
But my piss still smells like Polo mints...


*(mental note: must wear it next time I go to the supermarket)