Accident Hospital Kiss and Tell

I've had a few brushes with famous people - famous at the time, or who went on to be famous. Don't get too excited, this isn't someone who is a household name, like Bob Geldof (yes, I have a tale about him). But it is someone who went on to become somewhat famous in his own field.

I first met Doctor G_ (for that is what I shall call him for the time being) one Saturday, not long after the whole Doctor House Officer debacle. I'd been asked to see an old lady on Ward C who had a chest infection. When I examined her, she had really thick, stringy sputum, really hard to cough up, and this meant she needed nebulised saline, and was also possibly dehydrated. So I checked her fluid balance chart, and it looked like she'd hardly drunk anything for the last couple of days, which was a bit terrible.

Off I trotted to the ward office to report back to the doctor - Doctor G_. '.......And she's probably really dehydrated looking at her fluid intake, she definitely needs fluids pushed...'

'No she isn't.'

'You what?' I couldn't believe he'd snapped at me like that. It made it worse that he wasn't even looking at me as I was telling him stuff, he was half writing notes and half just looking out the door behind me, like he was waiting for someone.

'She's not dehydrated.'

'She is.'

No she's not.'

Well we could have stood there like that for an eternity, but since I was the more proactive of the two of us, I dodged into his eyeline, stared hard at him and said, 'come with me.'

At the lady's bedside I triumphantly waved the fluid balance chart under his nose. 'See?'

'Nobody fills those in, ' he said, walking off.

'What do you mean, 'nobody fills those in'? Of course they fill them in - there's bits filled in here,' I'm now chasing him down the ward as he walks away.

Without even a backwards glance he said, 'no, nobody bothers, they aren't necessary on this ward, sometimes they fill in the urine output or the odd glass of something unusual, but nobody fills them in, she's fine.'

This was RIDICULOUS! Here was a newish junior doctor (he was the February intake, so maybe not as dangerous as the August bunch, but still first year post qualifying) telling me how the Acci works! ME! A SENIOR I!!! Yes, I was proper up myself in those days.

I wasn't about to let THIS lie, so I followed him into the office again.

'We ALWAYS fill them in on the Burns Unit.'

'Yeah, well, we don't fill them in here. HEY!' he shouted to a staff nurse who was walking past, 'do we fill in the fluid balance charts?'

'No, not really,' the UTTER TRAITOR said.

'Well that's really stupid, ' I said, in a proper paddy now. 'What's the point of having them if you aren't going to use them? They just confuse people who work on wards where things are done properly. I think this *not filling things in* is really unprofessional....'

He was LAUGHING at me!

'STOP LAUGHING!!' But I was finding it really hard to not laugh as well, because I realised what a tit I must look.

After that I didn't really see that much of him, mostly only on-calls or lunchtimes just to say the odd word to, as you do. Forgot all about it really.

Until a doctors' mess party that I think he must have been organising, because he wanted to borrow a couple of mix tapes I had. I got there and handed them over to him, and then later in the evening he came over to talk about the music, and we chatted for a bit. Then for some reason we went to his room, not for sexual purposes, that was for sure, we were just sitting on his bed drinking and talking.

Doctor G_ didn't intend to stay a doctor if he could help it. He was writing a series for the BBC, he said. If that worked out, he would pack in the day job and become a full-time writer. Yeah. Me too. He had real hang-ups about his job and all the other people he worked with. He felt like he'd never fitted in as a doctor, because he was from a very working class background and everyone else was so middle class. Now this was something I could really sympathise with, because I often felt the same thing. No one would ever refer to it, but you could see people judge you the minute you opened your mouth. So we were bitching like that and then he started going on about how people were really unhelpful to him, and that I really DIDN'T agree with.

'I've always been nice to you!' And it was true, there were a few times I'd helped him out, we always tried to be helpful to the junior doctors because we knew they had it really tough, and I for one remembered how it had felt when I started.

'Oh, I know YOU have, but the others haven't. Most of the physios and nurses, they're all so up themselves, that's why I've always liked you....'

I didn't really pay attention to the last bit because I was defending my colleagues. 'That's not fair! It's probably because you are sometimes so arrogant and dismissive - I mean, remember the whole fluid chart thingy?'

'Oh yes, that. That's when I first thought how nice you are - how funny you were when you were angry, and when you laughed...'

And he kissed me. I was SHOCKED! I should have seen it coming, but we'd been talking for a long while, and drinking all that while, and the fact that I felt no spark at all had me convinced this was 'friendly chat' territory. So I jumped backwards, sort of stumbled off the bed and said, 'oh, sorry, I erm..., I have to go back downstairs.'

Off I ran like a very fast running thing, the main thought on my mind being did a half-snog that I had not really partaken in count towards the points competition? (see previous link)

Luckily, it did. Unluckily, I always felt a bit awkward around him after that, which I covered up by being super-polite to his face whilst ridiculing him behind his back to the other staff. I really was such a bitch. Yet another thing to be ashamed of.

Long after he'd left the Accident Hospital, a couple of years or so, there was a TV series on BBC called cardiac arrest, written by someone called John MacUre. In the first episode there was an incident where, during a ward round, a junior doctor turned away and threw up out of a window. That actually happened, it was one of those incidents that entered Acci legend; and the whole way the series was written, the sorts of things that happened, it was so Accident Hospital - I just KNEW that Doctor G_ had written it.

Of course, I was right, Doctor G_ is Jed Mercurio (John MacUre was a pseudonym whilst he was still a doctor, I think), although when I knew him he was Ged.

He went on to write 'Bodies', probably the book that best captures how hospitals really are. It became a brilliant TV series. He's done other stuff too, but I haven't watched or read those.

So there we are, a teensy claim to fame - I snogged Ged Mercurio before he had his nose job. DAMN! I'm STILL a bitch!

More Than a Job Part 3 - Living the Dream

I was destined to work at Birmingham Accident Hospital. Fate took a look at me, and took a look at that little gem tucked away on Bath Row, and she knew, she just KNEW that we were meant to be together. Carlsberg doesn't do hospitals, but if it did.... If the Accident Hospital were a man, I would have married it and lived happily ever after, shagging its brains out nightly. I make no bones about it - this is the alpha and the omega of hospitals, there never has and never will be a hospital that can touch it in my eyes.

From the minute I knew I wanted to do physio permanently, I was plotting my escape back up the M6 and into the welcoming arms of the Acci. My first attempt was a dismal failure. A senior II post came up that was rotational through the trauma and orthopaedic hospitals - and one of the 6 month rotations was the the Acci. I went, I interviewed, but inexplicably (oh, ok, all too obviously due to someone being better than me) didn't get the job. I was gutted, especially as my housemate had done my tarot cards and been convinced I was leaving Wales for my dream job in the next few months. She did them again - 'no, you're definitely going, DEFINITELY.'

A month later, the Birmingham Orthopaedic Physio Big Boss phoned me to say that a job had come up and did I want it, 'but I have to warn you it isn't rotational through the hospitals, it's permanent at the Accident Hospital.' Luckily she wasn't in the room, cos her hand really wouldn't have been safe from being bitten off.

The Acci never was for everyone. Most people didn't like it for the same reasons I loved it. It was fast-moving, chaotic, no time to think, SUCH hard work - but SO interesting, so enthralling, what you were doing was the ultimate in worthwhile. Life shrank, because the Accident Hospital was work and play - it was a small hospital, we all were so bound together that we were friends instead of just colleagues, there were loads of parties in the Doctors' mess and the Nurses' Home, we'd go on hospital trips to Alton Towers, Snowdon, Carding Mill Valley. You either got it or you didn't. You either found it confusing, unstructured and frightening, or you loved the excitement and the challenge and the thrill.

I began in February 1988, and at the start I struggled, horribly, and it was especially difficult because another lassie began a couple of weeks or so after me, and she was so much better than I was. The tables had turned form Wales, and now I was the rubbish newbie. Oh, I still loved it, loved the day-to-day work, loved what I was doing: but I couldn't do it fast enough or to a high enough standard. It didn't help that two of the senior staff sort of bullied me - would follow me around criticising everything I did (and not in a constructive manner) or check up on me when I wasn't there, then accuse me of not doing things I had done, or doing things I hadn't done!

Luckily, my immediate senior was really supportive, and with her help I got through it. It didn't really help that at this time I was at a bad place in myself, on a majorly self-destructive downer - drinking too much, too often, being incredibly promiscuous, and generally seeing just how far one person could go without having a nervous breakdown or dying. Of course, I was majorly in denial about this, and remember having a right hump when on a night out someone I actually really liked goes, 'hey, Karen, I've put your song on' and it was this:

"Here you go, way too fast

Don't slow down you're gonna crash.....

.......So what do you want from me?

Got no cure for misery

And if I go around with you

You know that I'll get messed up too"

To be fair, this wasn't anywhere near as mortifying as the time a sort-of-boyfriend Acci doctor requested a DJ dedicate Pet Shop Boys 'Domino Dancing' to me, but it was along the same upsetting lines.  

But things were changing. The two pseudo-bullies left, I found my feet, and I met the nice boy M_  that I horribly cheated on . I was calming down, becoming more focussed on work, and becoming a valued member of the physio department - I was helping other people now rather than the other way around. In 1990 I became the Burns Unit Senior I - and that was where my life became about my work. I wanted to be the best Burns physio ever. I made a comprehensive pack which educated the students on placement in little sections over their three weeks with us. I read everything there was to read on the treatment of burns. I went to watch skin grafts, I went to dressing changes, I went on every ward round and answered questions the junior doctors couldn't answer (and the consultants shamelessly used this as a means to belittle them - basically saying 'oh look, even the physio knows and you don't'). I loved that job. I loved being a senior, I loved setting an example. If switchboard couldn't contact the on-call physio, they contacted me because they knew I wouldn't moan or bitch, I'd just come on in. I loved it! It felt like being on ER!

However, two years in, I knew I was feeling a bit restless. Burns physiotherapy is really quite routine - you do the same things day in, day out. The skill was in motivating people who were in pain and feeling really ill, to do exercises that hurt, or made them feel even more ill. And also in dealing with the sort of people who get burned.

Ordinary people rarely get serious burns. There would be the odd one-off accident, the rare work accident or the very occasional fireman who would get burned; but usually the serious burns, the ones who ended up as in-patients, were people with drug and/or alcohol problems, people who were homeless (you'd be surprised how many were set alight by stupid idiot yobs) or people with serious mental illnesses. This was the challenge, and this became the part of the job I liked the most - the learning how to relate to people that other people found it really hard to deal with. I was always in love with the Accident Hospital; and it was at the Accident Hospital that I began to learn to love my patients.

I remember the day I knew it was time to move on. I was in theatre and the consultant asked one of the junior doctors to correctly adjust the dermatome for harvesting the skin graft. I could see he was baffled, so I whispered, 'hold it up to the light and adjust it so you can just see a sliver of light.' I realised there was nothing left to learn. I'm pretty sure I could have done a skin graft myself - I certainly could tell at dressing changes if they had taken and I was starting to be able to recognise the different smells of different infections. Maggots under dressings in summer no longer made my skin crawl. It was time for new challenges.

Even so, I probably would never have left if the decision hadn't been made to close the Accident Hospital and move the staff first to the General and eventually to the Queen Elizabeth. We fought to stop it, but once it was confirmed and bound to happen, I couldn't stay. Seeing the closure of the Acci would have been like watching the death of a beloved relative. I was the first rat to desert.

I cried on my last day. Walking away, knowing I'd never again walk through those corridors in the still of night, never again feel the heart acceleration and the adrenalin rush that a big burn or a major trauma would bring, would never, ever be phoned again in the middle of the night to come in and help save a life.... I cried. I loved the building, I loved the atmosphere, and I loved the people, the teams, in it. Even now, if I close my eyes, I can smell the physio gym, the changing rooms, the oh-so-distinctive Burns Unit smell that would linger in your nose even when you were long gone from the Unit. I regularly dream I am back there, and I'm sad when I wake up.

Those five years, I lived the dream. I just wish I had been the physio and the person I am now, I'd have been able to give so much more. The Accident Hospital showed me my future, although that future wasn't going to be trauma, or burns.......