sunday morning
o8.10h and I’ve been at work for over an hour. In theory I was meant to get up at 05.45h so I could have the hot bath that helps me to move first thing but I was having this really good dream where I was in the pub with my best friend and my god-daughter and I was proudly wearing a nurse’s uniform which was an adult-sized version of those thin, scratchy ones you get for kids. With me I had another uniform, in a suit bag; I was pointing out the long sleeve and covered buttons to my friend and saying, ‘This one’s for when I’m Sister!’
You may laugh, but bizarrely enough I do actually have a job interview for the post of Ward Sister tomorrow. Those of you who are familiar with the Carry On films will have an idea of how my brain is imagining my potential promotion: Lots of ‘Ooh, Matron!’ moments, plenty of scrapes involving hiding lost goats in the sluice and escapees running wild in the community with axes. Well, hopefully not the last one. Things like that look very bad in The Daily Mail.
So yes, job interview. I decided not to tick the ‘do you have a disability?’ box when I did the online application, because if I take enough pain killers and just grit my teeth, I’m fine. I’m fairly certain the drugs don’t affect my judgement, which renders me safe to be dishing them out to other people. There’s an old operating theatre stool in our clinical room which I sit on behind the hatch when I dispense the patient’s medication. It makes me a bit short, but it helps. I suspect at some point very soon I’m going to have to see the Occupational Health people and get some kind of risk assessment done on my ability to work et cetera. Boring but necessary, I suppose.
the first one
Difficult, always difficult to know what to put in the first post in your new blog. Do you launch straight into the meaty stuff and hope that people will get the gist? Or do you hold back for a bit until you know people are reading, and save them the hastle of rooting through your archives? Is it presumptious to even assume for a minute that anybody would bother reading at all?
Whichever: if you’re here because you’re backtracking and want to start at the beginning, then Hello – this is as far back as it goes. If you’re here because you’re here now, and you’re waiting for the exciting stuff, then hold tight – I’ll be writing as often as I have the time and the inclination. If you’re here because you’re a complete stranger and you happened on me and my hip and my blog by accident then Hello to you too; it’s always good to meet new people.
For the record, I’m at work as I write tonight. I work on an adult mental health ward in a smallish seaside town in Wales. I was in horrendous pain this morning but I made the executive decision to double-dose on my Diclofenac because that’s the only way I get any actual pain relief, and that only lasts about three hours. One tablet’s meant to last for eight. It’s a bit crap, to say the least. I was trying to explain to my son earlier how it feels, and the best I could come up with was, it’s like when someone gives you a dead arm, you know, when they punch you really hard right in that little dent just below the shoulder? Well it’s like that, two seconds after the school bully’s thumped you, only in my hip. If you look at my thigh (of which I’ll probably spare you the treat), you can see where it is because there’s a reddish ring that marks the spot, with a sprig of purple veins as a garnish. The whole thing has my original surgery scar running diagonally through it. And yeah, it hurts, lots.
