Day 1:
This is the last week of my beloved ENT job, it's vital that I make the most out of seeing all the lovely people who I've got to know over the last 4 months. It's even more vital that I suck up to my consultant extra large amounts so that I might actually get signed off. A pity, then, that I appear to have caught THE AIDS.
03:30 Fever dream time: "Muuaahh no, no don't make the teddy bears log onto myspace" I mumble as I trash around in bed slipping in and out of consciousness like a drugged spy in the movies.
04:30 Cold.... so cold...
05:30 Too HOT, too HOT
06:15 Wide awake. Feeling good, surprisingly good, SUSPICIOUSLY good. In actual fact I feel more awake at this time in the morning than I have since the beginning of the placement. Clearly I am cured.
06:30 So... ill... stupid lying body, I down 2Gs of paracetamol (the answer to every ailment) in the hope it might allow me to survive my 12.5 hour day.
10:00 Kat is on-call and apparently doing all the work as Matt & I doss around in the mess. At first this felt OK because Sri was dossing with us too, having realised that the Med Students that he usually babysits are having exams this week, however he eventually leaves and I'm feeling increasingly bad for being a slacker.
10:30 Eventually it proves too much and we head off back to the ward to find Sri and Kat running around in search of some equipment to fix a guys nose. Apparently the company that provides all the hospitals equipment has given up doing so today and so the shelves are literally bare in the Treatment Facility. Worse still is that we've run out of cophenylcaine, which to an ENT doctor is like a scottish person running out of neat alcohol. Fortunately for, well, everyone really I am super-awesome (/a douchebag) and manage to find the necessary equipment hiding in the filthy stinking Max Fax room (euch). I also find the INGREDIENTS for cophenylcaine allowing Sri to mix up his own special batch in a big jug with three Xs on the side.
"Woooo-weeee" he cries after sucking some of it off of his little finger "that moonshine sure has a kick to it, now I'm gone go shoot me some neegras."
Another life saved.
13:00 Alun is pestering me to do more data entry and in order to do so we have to go and see the all knowing speech and language therapist whose initials sound a bit like a popular sex aid, hence 'hilarity' ensues. On the way we nip round by theatre to find Mr Spikey wearing a scrub top and his ordinary trousers. His abundant chest hair erupts disturbingly from the v shaped collar.
"But WHY are there no scrubs?" he interrogates the Scrub Nurse, drilling a hole into her mind with his very eyes.
"Well apparently they've taken on too big a contract and can't clean the stuff quickly enough", she replies as smoke begins to emanate from her forehead
"Surely, though, it is someone's job" (subtext: YOUR job) "to work that out BEFORE we have to cancel life saving operations?"
"Um yes well I'll just go and see if I can find out what's going on" she says, lying. She's actually going off to a cupboard somewhere to cry. Or to the boot of her car to bring back all the scrub trousers that she's stolen. Either way.
13:30 We find the SALT lady in her office and ask her many impossible questions that no-one could hope to know the answer to from memory, like "You know patient AP, sorry we don't have his actual name, well did he have a laryngopharyngectomy or a laryngopharyngosalpingoophrectomy?". Somehow she actually DOES know the answer to the majority of these and promises to have worked out the rest if we come back at 5pm.
15:00 Matt, Phoebe and I are having fun on the ward using nasendoscope cases as mobile phone protectors (maybe you had to be there). Just as Phoebe is making the n-billionth comment about my sexuality the phone rings.
"Geoff, it's Alun, are you busy" a ridiculous question, I am never busy
"Welll, I do have a FEW things to do" I reply, watching with an increasingly sinking feeling as Matt & Phoebe start inflating a bouncy castle and get out the supersoakers
"Good, well then you can come and help me in theatre, I need you stat"
"OK I'll be down as soon as I can"
"No I need you right now, they're literally wheeling the patient into the theatre as we speak"
As I wander off down the corridor I can hear squeals of delight echoing behind me. No not THOSE squeals of delight, Louise, it's OK. "OK now take a photo of my parachuting off the roof" "I think I'm gonna call this album 'Most fun afternoon ever'"
16:00 In theatre, the table is set to the most ridiculously low position imaginable to accomodate Aluns... habitus. As a result my back is hurting in new and impressive ways. Just as I'm about to fall asleep into the patients gaping wound I notice that blood has started gushing everywhere. This kind of thing happens quite regularly during this type of surgery but nonetheless I'm impressed that, rather than screaming, waving his arms in the area and running around the room in a Zoidberg fashion Alun calmly advises me to suction the blood out of the way while he finds the bleeding point.
16:30 "So you can sew everything up Geoff", Alun says having finished "I know the practise will help"
16:50 I've done one stitch, the operating room staff look on in horror at the prospect of me starting another.
"OK in the interests of time I'm going to finish this, you go and talk to SALT"
Crushed again.
17:00 "And there's nothing that needs handing over on the ward" I ask Ry-an who is skulking by the theatre door desperate to hand me the bleep. "Nope nothing has happened all day"
17:05 As I return to the office, SALT notes in hand, I find Matt looking sad. He's apparently had a terrible afternoon sucking up to his consultant who, for some reason, made him put a cannula in the next patient whilst he watched. The pressure of this situation likely caused Matt to have a small TIA in his motor cortex and the cannulation attempt was not successful. I assure him that he can never suck as much as me and that his consultant probably doesn't really care. Though whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is hard to know.
18:00 I'm busy typing in more boring BORING data when Mr Spikey appears to do a ward round. Before I can even print a list he's off down the corridor so I follow him.
"OK so who do we have that's new?"
"Noone"
"So then who is this person?", he points to the board of patients
"Oh I, I don't really know"
"Fine", he sighs "Then how is the lady in room 7?"
"The tonsillitis?"
"Neck swelling"
"Right... yes"
This continues for some time, as Mr Spikey begins to think I'm more and more of an idiot. The fact that I was off last week so didn't even know the patients this morning never mind the new ones that came in whilst I was in theatre doesn't seem to matter to him: "But you're the F1 you should know everything about what's happening on the ward"
I clearly don't though and I have a good feeling that neither would Matt, who just has the good fortune to have been finishing at 5 today and so avoid the horror. To make matters worse when I try and grab someone's notes out of the trolly in order to seem like I know what's going on I grab the wrong bit causing paper to go crashing all over the floor. As I fumble through the notes in the aftermath Mr Spikey picks up a single sheet of paper from the ground and says "Ah, post-op FESS, fair enough" before asking me more things I don't know.
As the hellish ward round eventually finishes I apologise for not knowing anything.
"Yes, well your ignorance has been noted" he replies.
Ahhhh shit :(
20:30 Alun and I are filling in data (STILL). The bleep has gone off several times but Alun is too keen for me to sort out this audit than to save anyones life. At one point he even answered the bleep himself.
"Hello, ENT registar" "No, it's not the SHO it's the registar" "No I know you did" "Yes but I'm the registrar" "No listen, just tell me what it is you want" "Nope, not interested" *phone slammed down*
"What was that about?" I ask
"Nothing, we'll get Steve to sort it when he gets in"
I have the feeling the poor person on the other end of the phone was just hoping to speak to someone fairly junior in order to ask a ridiculous question and was a little upset when the scary registrar answered. But oh well.
21:15 I eventually hand over to Steve who is less than happy about the fact we've just changed the data that he spent all afternoon analysing and, furthermore, have left him all the jobs to do as well.
Day 2:
08:00 Mr Spikey is doing ward round. Given the fact that I spent the whole afternoon doing audit stuff with Alun I still know nothing about any of the patients and am fairly fearful that he might kill me horribly.
08:45 We do actually have quite a few patients and, as a result, quite a few jobs need doing. As we head off to see the outliers, Brodie magnanimously offers to stay behind and start doing the work. Also he is on-call. Also there is a patient in the treatment room who has been bleeding on and off for a week now and is getting a bit fed up of it all.
09:30 Ward round has gone on forever but is eventually over. It's now time for Matt & I to go and present the M&M meeting with the consultants. The last time I did this I got destroyed by one of the nice consultants because one of the slides (handed over from the previous F1s) wasn't very well written.
09:35 As we arrive in the conference room we find that the only consultant who's actually turned up is, of course, Mr Spikey. On the plus side this means that he can't mention to my consultant how terrible I am at everything prior to my sign off on Friday.
10:00 Steve has finished presenting his audit, during this time my bleep has gone off about 6 times, Ryans bleep has gone off 3 times and Alun has 2 missed calls. Matt, who's bleep was conveniently switched off during this time remained bleep free. On attempting to return any of these communicantes we were all greeted with a busy tone which later transpired to be a result of the fact that Brodie was desperately trying to get hold of someone, ANYONE to help him out but as soon as he bleeped he immediately had a phone call.
10:30 We have survived the M&M meeting, mostly because Mr Spikey's opinion of me couldn't get any lower but also because he spent most of the time reading a paper. Just as we finish Mr Spiderman appears and tells us that it's been a pleasure working with us and we're the best guys he's ever had through. Touching words, especially given the fact I've met him all of twice.
11:00 One of the things Brodie was trying to tell us was that we'd actually missed out most of the hospital on our long LONG ward round this morning. As a result we go awandering off to Paediatrics and other such places before ending up in the Registrars room where Alun offers to sign off any ePortfolio stuff we need doing.
Firstly Ryan does one, where he basically gives himself Excellent for everything and then gets Alun to sign it. Next up is me. I'm trying to pull off the same trick but Alun just isn't buying it and actually makes me have a Case Based Discussion about one of our patients. Fortunately it turns out to be quite a good patient and so Alun gives me good marks and, because he helped, Matt gets the same.
Brodie, somewhere in the bowels of the hospital buried under a mound of paperwork doesn't have the luxury of getting anything signed off.
13:00 Teaching teaching teaching. I've discovered (to my pancreas' disdain) that the shop at the front of the hospital sells fizzy cola bottles and, as apparently the 3 KILOGRAMS of them that I bought in the spring wasn't enough, I load up on them for lunch.
The teaching is on something useless, Smoking Cessation. Matt later comments on the fact that teaching has recently become all about telling us what exciting services there are at our disposal in the hospital and nothing about us actually learning anything. This is generally the way medicine is going at the moment; once upon a time Doctors knew a little bit about everything and were generally supposed to be able to do anything. Now if you ask how to put in a chest drain you're told to 'ring the specialist Chest Drain Nurse'. PICC line? 'Peripheral Access Team'. ECG? 'Clinical Support'. Wipe my own ass? 'Rehabilitation Medicine'. Most people are actually quite happy about that because the fluffification of medicine through the years has created a breed of doctors who exist primarily to cuddle people and not to SUCK IT UP AND SAVE THE DAMNED CHILDREN'S LIVES.
I am not one of those people (except when it comes to those FUCKING cannulas) so I'm likely to get struck off. If I don't get it in the neck from this blog of course.
Day 3:
07:45 Everyone (The teachers, mainly) are on strike today so I'm preparing myself for being bricked as I walk into hospital. As I approach the entrance I see the most unformidable picket line imaginable by the path. There are around 4 people, each looking very tired and very cold, trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to hand out flyers.
"The Government Is Bad" read the flyers "They secretly have infinite money and should give us ridiculous pensions because we WANT them, regardless of whether it financially possible or not"
I'm not going to lie to you. My pension is currently estimated to be worth £66,000 a year + a bonus of £150,000 if I retire at 65. That's a shit load of money. They're not even thinking of changing that amount, they're just thinking of making us work longer which, given that the average life expectancy has gone from Pension Age + 4yrs to Pension Age + 25 years, doesn't seem THAT unreasonable.
I just really hate strikers, it's all about personal gain and screw everyone else. Back in the 70s the entire UK car industry collapsed because the workers were on strike so much that they never made any cars, then when the car company had to lay people off as they were losing money everyone went on strike even MORE. AGHHHHHH.
Mainly though I'm just bitter because I can't GO on strike, what with the dying children and all.
08:00 Ward round: The biggest ward round you could imagine. There are 3 consultants, 2 registrars, 4 house officers and 2 SHOs. And two clinical nurse specialists. It's lucky the medical students didn't turn up as well or they'd have had an experience akin to mine at QMC where you stand at the back of a very long queue for an hour and then are expected to have learned something.
10:00 I'm called to theatre by Alun. This is fine by me because it's my last time to schmooze with my consultant. When I arrive my consultant nods vaguely in my direction but otherwise ignores me. I then stand around waiting for something of interest to happen as he and Alun stare down a tiny tube into someone's throat. Nothing happens.
10:30 Nothing continues to happen and I'm becoming increasingly concerned that Mr Archer is about to get out his beloved LASER out. Kishan has a saying about the LASER that, paraphrased goes "Once he gets out that LASER, you aint going home til tomorrow morning" only more South Indian and with more smiling.
13:00 My extreme dossing with Kat and Matt is interrupted by further ringin from Alun. He's been called down to ITU so I have to go back into theatre to help Mr Archer. Kat comes with me because she's been asked to present something on liver disease. She decides against getting changed because she just wants to poke her head round the door and tell Mr Archer her findings.
13:15 Kat appears in theatre, in full scrubs. Clearly Mr Archer has demanded that she be dressed appropriately. I'm scrubbed into the LASERfest, which essentially involves holding things while Archer isn't using them. This goes on for around 3hours and, when it's eventually finished, Mr Archer disappears leaving Kat with noone to present to whatsoever. She didn't even get to speak (but she DID get to wear awesome goggles that, frankly, should become the latest in fashion).
17:00 Just as I've finished extracting some wax out of a child's ear I'm called back to theatre again. I'm asked to scrub in so I do so but just as I get the gown on my bleep goes off so I ask a nurse to just answer it for me.
After deleting 3 messages, putting the bleep on silent and changing the alert tone to 'The Mexican Hat Dance' she eventually finds the number and rings it.
"It's the ENT ward" she tells me "Apparently Mr Jones has got a temperature of 37.8"
"How long for?"
"About the last 15 minutes"
"Tell them I'll come see him later"
Or indeed never, because I don't CARE. Nurses seem to have learned that any temperature over 37 is high and when it's up in the high 37s well, they're close to death clearly.
17:05 I'm standing with the surgeons in my gown and gloves and everything with absolutely nothing to actually do wondering why I was asked to come down here at all when the bleep goes off again.
"It's the ENT ward" again "Mr Smith says he feels like something's stuck in his throat"
Mr Archer asks me to please go and see him and find out what the problem is.
17:30 Back on the ward I realise why I've been bleeped so many times. There are no real nurses anywhere and the student nurses are following protocol. Fair enough.
17:35 "So the reason you feel like there's something in your throat, Mr Smith, is because there is a GIANT CANCER in there that they just pulled a massive chunk out of"
"But I can't cough it up" he stridors
"No that's because you can't cough up MASSIVE CANCERS, otherwise they'd be quite easy to fix"
"But my Son, he has a bottle of Pirelli's Miracle Elixir in his medicine cabinet. One bit of that and I'll be fine"
"No because that's Hocus Pocus medicine, not medicine based on Science"
I attempt to endoscope him but he is too much of a loser to cope with it so I leave him to die.
Not really, but I decide to wait for Alun to finish in theatre so that he can have a look.
18:30 "Just so you know" says the student nurse who literally ALWAYS has a look of deep concern on her face "the early warning score on Mrs Uti is still 3"
"What's she scoring on?"
"Well her blood pressure is high at 143/85 and her respiratory rate is 18 also she feels really tired and her stomach hurts"
"OK when did she last eat?"
"She's been nil by mouth for 3 days"
"..." "..." "..." "... please give her something to eat, before she literally chews off her own arm"
19:30 "Hi" she says again "her early warning score is still 3 on the same things"
"Yea it's fine"
"But the protocol is that if the EWS is greater than 2 then we come and ask you"
"And my reply is that it's fine"
"OK so how often do you think we should monitor her, still every hour or should we go to half hour... or even 15 minutes?"
"Ummm every hour seems like alot, try every 2 hours?"
*look of horror*
I mean honestly. A BP fo 143/85 is the most borderline blood pressure ever. It's the kind of blood pressure that might worry a GP but only because they don't get as many brown envelopes of cash from the NHS is their patients are hypertensive. In a hospital I'm primarily worried about low blood pressure, like less than 100/70. If you're going to tell me about high blood pressure I want it to be about 200+ systolic. And a resp rate of 18 is WITHIN NORMAL RANGE.
In reality though I was actually much nicer than this because this student nurse clearly means well and I think she might even be in her first year. In my first year I couldn't even take an aspirin let alone a blood pressure.
19:45 My nose starts running and as I sweep away the snot with my hand (ewww) I realise that is BLOOD. It's been doing this more or less every day but it just stops, as was the case in this situation, after a few minutes of pressure. However seeing as it's quite annoying and I'm on ENT anyway I resolve to get Alun to have a look.
20:15 "Fine I'll have a look but you realise Naseptin is just as effective as cautery" he says, following me into the treatment room.
Alun's technique is rough. First he jams a speculum in my nose and lifts it towards the ceiling as if he's trying to rip my nose off. "Hmm yes you do have a couple of vessels in there" he remarks before spraying me up with xylocaine.
This. shit. stings.
"Fuck me" I say, dabbing the tears from my eyes "I just thought patients were being wimps but this shit is horrible.
He then proceeds to cauterise my nose with a stick. Suddenly he says "Ooops... aaah shit" and I feel blood pouring down my face before he grabs onto my nose. At this point Steve appears at the door and the look of concern in his eyes is worrying.
"Steve, great, get the suction... QUICKLY"
Steve gets the suction hooked up and starts draining the blood from my nose "We're going to need to bipoler this I think"(Bipolar is essentially taking some tweezers and running high voltage current through them such that, by singeing your nose to charcoal it stops bleeding.) "I'll warn you, it's pretty painful".
The resulting pain and smell of burning flesh was less than pleasant and I came out the experience feeling a) violated and b) very sorry for anyone that has had to have this done under my watch. Alun sprays some special healing cream up my nose and I tie a roll of gauze underneath it to stop me getting blood on anything.
Day 4:
07:45 Today's the day we reclaim the old doctors' office for our own (/the teddybears indulge in a woodland luncheon). We use our not inconsiderable man strength to cart stuff out of the matron's office and round into the office. This office is HUGE. Possibly too huge, if I'm honest, it feels a bit like working in an empty concert hall. Furthermore the space is horribly mismanaged with one computer one one wall and another on the far far far distant opposite wall. This does, at least, separate us from the disgusting Max Fax scum but just doesn't feel very cosy.
08:00 Alun has called in sick and so Sri is covering. However Sri has decided that as he's covering for Alun he should act like him too.
"Why is this patient on our ward?" he queries
"Well she was thought to have tonsillitis..."
"Does she?"
"No"
"Then get her put somewhere else"
"But she's old and frail and ill"
"Can I fix that with a knife? No. Get rid of her"
11:00 We've been dossing in the Doctor's Office for some time drawing caricatures on the board and generally avoiding doing any work.
11:30 Brodie strides in triumphantly. "I got signed off as Excellent by Mr Spikey".
This causes me to go over some kind of psychiatric ledge the existence of which I was previously unaware. Certainly, Brodie is deep deep deep down a nice guy and he's very good at getting work done but at the end of the day Mr Spikey doesn't know this and it's not exactly Excellent even then. Furthermore I've been told repeatedly that MY supervisor only ever signs people off as 'Satisfactory' meaning that when I apply for jobs Brodie will have an advantage over me that he doesn't necessarily deserve.
Furthermore he also seems to have not inconsiderable success with girls, he got the F1 placements he wanted and he's taller than me.
I decide that a coffee might cheer me up so I drag Matt off to the mess only to have Brodie reappear and almost immediately fire off another put down at me. I'm quite used to this, I think maybe people have the misimpression that I'm quite confident and that constant beratement about liking musical theatre, or making frantic arm gestures is something I can take infinite amounts of. The fact that this is not the case came immediately clear when I told Brodie to "Fuck off" and that I have "had enough shit from [him]"
11:45 I take some notes and hide in the treatment room, typing out TTOs with unnecessarily heavy keystrokes, at one point the computer crashes and I find myself bashing it over the head with a keyboard. Unfortunately Ryan appears soon after this needing help in ITU so, fearing for the patient's life, I go down to help him.
12:30 The patient's throat is still filling up with blood as Ryan remarks that she is fixed and that it's time to write it up in the notes. I'm quite insistant that it is, in fact, NOT fixed and that the 1L blood loss over the last 30 minutes is probably a BAD thing. Reading my "don't fuck with me" expression Ryan backs down and goes to ring the registrar at which point it immediately stops bleeding. Of course.
They take an ABG sample and triumphantly come to me "See, Geoff the Hb is the same as earlier, it's fine".
It is not fine, you retards, because the Hb is concentration dependant so you could, in fact, have only 1mL of blood left in your entire body but, so long as it had the 12mgs of Heamoglobin in it you'd have a normal Hb on your blood gas. CAPICHE?
They did not capiche so I gave up to go cry somewhere.
15:00 I've spent the last 2 hours wandering the halls of the hospital trying to avoid anyone I know and holding back my sissy, homogay musical theatre loving tears when Alun rings me wanting more help with the audit. I already feel bad for having essentially done what I hate most and flake out on work because I'm too much a pussy loser so I agree to help him out.
Brodie has also bought me chocolates to apologise which, though very kind, prevents me from being able to even blame him for my emotional demise.
19:00 Having spent the afternoon being bitter and angry with Alun and Matt I've calmed down a bit. One of the student nurses wonders whether I can help her with a project on one of our patients who has Malignant Otitis Externa. I'm happy to do so, but am sad to inform her that the patient has nothing of the sort and is also not Type I diabetic like she has written. As a result of this she decides to just lie and make up the patient, a similar story to our own when going through medical school because medical school essentially teaches you one thing: "Lie".
By the end of this conversation my already shredded vocal cords had completely lost it but fortunately noone bleeped me for the rest of the evening otherwise they might have thought they'd got in contact with a zombie apocalypse or something.
Day 5:
10:30 It's my day off but, as my supervisor can only meet with people on Fridays I have had to come in anyway. I go to clinic to find him and find Sri
"Ahh Geoff how are you today?" he asks
"Well my voice is fucked" I rasp "and I've got my meeting with Mr Archer today, not that theres any point in even having it because he'll only give me a satisfactory and Brodie got an Excellent so I don't even know why I do this stupid fucking job anymore"
"It'll be fine, don't worry" he says, tenderly patting me on the shoulder and causing me to almost go into another flood of tears
I find Mr Archer who suggests 2pm is the best time to see him. Good so 3.5 hours to kill, great.
11:00 Kat is going off to ITU and will need some help (though she is unaware of this at first) so I go down with her. The lady from yesterday is still bleeding but with out amazing powers of jamming a laryngoscope the fuck down her throat and then endoscoping her in the face we are able to ascertain it's due to yesterdays packs being saturated with blood.
12:15 We're still trying to sort out some kind of Final Solution for the bleeding ITU lady when I realise it's almost pizza time. Kat, having previously lamented the fact she has never actually HAD any pizza because she's always busy on-call and all of us always fuck off and eat it all leaving her with all the work to do, asks if I can save her some.
12:30 The pizza arrives. I immediately grab some slices and put them in a box for Kat (+ Sri + Matt's consultant). The Ophthalmology Registrar appears and asks if he can have some, quite rudely. I apologise and tell him they're saved for some ENT guys.
"Well they're not here are they, give it to me"
"No" I say, closing the box "there's loads elsewhere"
I'm just about to make a crack about the fact that Ophthalmology never come to see their patients so don't deserve any pizza when I notice he's actually really angry and storms off, at which point being me and feeling forever in the wrong I immediately offer him some but he refuses repeatedly.
12:45 The Ophthalmology guy reappears in my face "Is it OK if I take this newspaper" he snarls, eyes bulging "You're not hoarding this as well are you?"
"Man he didn't take that pizza stuff very well did he" I say, feeling pretty upset at the amount of hatred poured onto me, especially given that I was only trying to be nice to Kat
"Yea well I'd have been pretty pissed off too" replies Kishan, who is usually really nice and so crushes my soul further
13:00 I'm just about holding it together when Phoebe makes a further remark about me being a big gay that proves too much. I am forced to run off to the toilet to cry like, ironically, a big gay and, just for extra fun, bump into the Surgical registrar on the way in who tries to have a conversation with me but I am unable to respond.
13:15 Still crying on the toilet I'm rung by Alun. Does he know I'm crying? He always rings me when I am?
"Geoff mate, how's it going"
"Fine, fine" I lie
"I'm just heading off now so just wanted to let you know it's been great working with you, thanks for everything"
Awww how nice, that's nearly cheered me up
"So anyway, can you do me a favour. There's loads more audit stuff that needs doing can you sort it out"
Sigh, not so nice after all.
13:30 I find Matt and we bump into Kat on the staircase "Hey Geoff did you save me any Pizza?"
"No, the Ophthalmology Reg went psycho and then I had to go and cry and when I came back there was none"
"You've failed me Geoff"
That really IS too much so I run away for yet more crying only to bump into Matt on a different staircase. I'm losing man points by the second and things get worse when I realise that the corner in which we're standing hugging it out is in direct view of the ENT ward office. Matt tries in vain to cheer me up by asking Siri on his phone to ring his Best Friend.
"I'm sorry" Siri replies in it's ridiculous overly manly voice "But I cannot access the internet at the moment"
13:45 I return to the Doctors' office only to be confronted by Kat and Kishan who ask me if I'm OK. This of course sends me into MORE tears and with all the laryngitis and the crying I can't even talk properly. Kishan, being a man and a surgeon can't really understand what my problem is but Kat is generally lovely and tries to cheer me up. Which is good because I have my meeting in like 10 minutes and I can't cry in that or else it would be like a rerun of my O&G end of placement review and ENT was WAY better than O&G.
15:00 Mr Archer is signing off my ePortfolio. As he goes down the checklist he ticks everything as "satisfactory", even things he says he thinks I'm really good at. When he gets to the end he says "OK so overall I think I'm going to put you down as Very Good. I've heard a lot of good things about you from the registrars, you seemed very keen to get involved with ENT and I've seen you in theatre and clinic several times. Well done"
And Weeeeee are the Chaaampions, My Friiieeeendss *shred shred shred*
OK so it's not an Excellent but from a man that only EVER gives Satisfactory (which is 2 below Very Good) that's actually not too bad. Obviously I will beat myself up forever about it being less than superlative but it does put an end to my emotional breakdown somewhat.
17:00 Matt has me round for some tea (having, bless his soul tried to cheer my up in varying ways all week) but my broken voice hinders my ability to be very social. Either way, tea is the great healer of all things and I finish the day feeling considerably better.
Tune In Next Week For More "Trust Me I've Just Changed Placements and it's CRAZEEE SHIT". Also it might be more funny and less depressing.
I say MIGHT.
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