Amyotrophia

I cringed to the idea that I’m getting two patients at the beginning of the shift even though I was promised that if push comes to shove we would shift my other one to the ward. That means unless somebody pops in the Accident & Emergency after doing something silly like slashing his or her epiglottis in the middle of the night, I’m stuck looking after two babies weaned off from life support and milkshakes of various types of narcotic drugs. I’d rather have one proper ICU patient to be honest, especially at the end of my fourth night.

The unwritten definition of proper patient: attached to a breathing machine, a lot of wires and completely sedated or even paralyzed.

I don’t normally mind having a chatty whingeing patient, but after doing 34.5 of your 46 hours all night before the weekend, you’d wish for a really chilled, inanimate, unconscious patient to cap the end of your shift.

It doesn’t help that you only spent four hours on your bed Friday morning as you find your main electricity supply switch tripping off every time you turn the kettle on to boil water for your cup of tea. Thank heavens for yell.com! I felt all my muscles have wasted and found myself unable to lift our dog-eared cumbersome Yellow Pages book.

Certified electrician came after an hour and a half which I though was quite impressive considering that it takes an hour for the Pizza man to find our door on a clear day. That was 1.5 hours knocked off from my nine hours sleep day before I go back to work in the evening. Routine checks done by electrician in switch box took another 20 minutes plus 10 minutes to unplug all the various appliances stuck in all electrical sockets.

To tell you the truth, I have enough of them to suck out all the electric juices of an entire city and greenhouse gas emissions enough to eat away a big chunk of the ozone layer the size of an Alaskan village.

Electric power is revived after some tinkering but for some reason, every time kitchen power supply is switched on the whole thing trips off again. Fuses are checked and that sorted, the culprit was eventually found: hiding deep inside a socket box of the cooker was a loose wiring. Another 15 minutes spent fixing the problem and 15 minutes having that well deserved cup of tea until electrician left. Total time lost so far 3.5 hours.

Gave up another half an hour or so to watch day time television as brain still spinning around from all the adrenaline, never mind the biologic clock thrown completely off a maelstrom of bad work schedules and unpredictable eccentric English weather. Tired and sleep-deprived, I can’t help turning up at work feeling like a toilet roll.

To be continued...