I could not help myself, I have to share some of those quotes with you 🙂

But promise me this: next time the government takes its pickaxe to the NHS, don’t just accept what the politicians try to feed you. Think about all the toll the job takes on every healthcare professional, at home and at work. Remember they do an absolutely impossible job, to the very best of their abilities.

Bleeped awake at 3 a.m. from my first half-hour’s shut-eye in three shifts to prescribe a sleeping pill for a patient, whose sleep is evidently much more important than mine. My powers are greater than I realized – I arrive on the ward to find the patient is asleep.

‘I thought it was just herbal – how can it be bad for you?’
At the sound of the words ‘just herbal’, the temperature in the room seems tot drop a few degrees and Hugo barely holds in a weary sigh. It’s clearly not his first time at this particular rodeo.
‘Apricot stones contain cyanide,’ he replies drily. ‘The death cap mushroom has a fifty per cent fatality rate. Natural does not equal safe. There’s a plant in my garden where if you simply sat under it for ten minutes then you’d be dead.’ Job done she bins the tablets.
I ask him about that plant over a colonoscopy later. ‘Water lily.’

Electrolytes are the salts in the blood – mostly sodium, potassium, chloride and calcium. If levels become too high or too low, your body has a way of alerting you, by making your heart stop or putting you in a coma. It’s clever like that.

‘At least you get a warm bed for a few nights,’ I said. ‘Are you joking?’ he replied. ‘I’ll get bloody MRSA in here.’ It’s come to something when the streets outside a hospital have a better reputation for cleanliness than the corridors within.

…the home insurance people asked a standard question about the number of nights the property is left empty. I realized that if I lived alone, the policy would be invalid as it would technically be considered an ‘unoccupied property’.

I explained I had quite bad food poisoning and was in some kind of gastrointestinal meltdown. ‘Fine,’ he said with the kind of weary, simmering passive-aggression I normally only get at home. ‘But phone around and find someone who’s on leave to cover for you.’
I’m pretty sure this isn’t the protocol at Google or GlaxoSmithKline or even Ginsters. Is there a single other workplace where you’d conceivably be asked to arrange your own sickness cover? The North Korean army maybe?

Patients frequently attend clinic with reams of paper they’ve googled, printed off and highlighted, and it’s pretty tedious spending an extra ten minutes per patient explaining why a blogger in Copenhagen who uses a pink hearts WordPress there might not be a reliable source. Then again, if it wasn’t for Google I wouldn’t be able to send patients off for a urine sample while I look things up in panic.

My review of This is Going to Hurt

Photo by Violetta Kaszubowska @ vkphotospace