Texidor's minge

I was looking for some info for a case presentation on Texidor's twinge that I have to do on Friday when I googled "Texidor's twinge" and found Vegas' blog entry was first on the list. Nice one, this must be a peer reviewed site (what's the inpact factor?).
Very tempting to tackle the boredom with references to Texidor's minge on powerpoint but i am sure I will forget to change them before Friday so I had better not, don't you think? Might find out who is still awake though...
Much excitement on the children's ward today as the Christmas decorations are put up. Well, a little bit anyway.

I lost myself

Well, I seem to have lost myself in for a while there. It must have been all the excitement of a trip to the big apple and the realisation that I only have to work 10 more nights and then I'll be a GP reg and not have to do any for a year. Bring it on, make it right...
NYC was, as I image it always is, pretty cool. I have some tips for anyone going there:

1. Get the bus from the airport (unless you are loaded and can afford to pay a cab to sit in a traffic jam for 40mins)
2. Don't go up the Empire State, go up to the Top of the Rock (aka the Rockerfeller building) instead, at dusk, and get a A1 view of the Empire State and downtown, and Central Park and uptown.
3. Eat in Ruby Foo's (oriental), Bond 45 (Italian), and some place in Chinatown where the dumplings are filled with gravy that smells (and so my wife says) tastes of old socks, cash only of course.
4. Stay in Hotel Night if you want boutique cool with Bose sound systems, but a room the size of a box of matches (comfortable bed, I didn't go there to sleep).
5. If you need paracetamol, get DR acetomitophen (or whatever) they taste like smarties, not like chalk.
6. Take a trip to Ellis Island and look up your ancestors.
7. If your feeling strapped for cash, take the Staten Island ferry instead and look at the Statue of Liberty.
8. Walk, don't run.
9. Have a look at the Met (they guilt you into paying their 'suggested donation') and goto the new Moma.
10. Spend some dollars.

Last time I was talking about the beauty of nights or something alike that. I don't see it anymore, sitting here drinking NHS coffee (tastes a bit nutty), probably because it's not my last night. I went to the on call room yesterday, a bloody oven next to the main corridoor to the delivery suite, constantly slamming doors and no bulb in the desk lamp. Also, those rooms are vistited by the supernatural shadows of the people who used to work in this workhouse (which was converted into the hospital). One of the Obs and Gynae SHO was woken up by a severed hand pulling the covers off her shoulder (sounds a bit far fetched, I agree, but that's not the only story I have heard about this place). So I lay awake, watching out for the chill in the room and any body parts, but nothing happened. I read half of the Peter Kay autobiography from The Book People, and the bastards took it away in the day so I can't finish it.

Better go, I'm sure there's something I should be bidding on in e-bay.

It's over now

I think that I have discovered the beauty of nights. I can only realise this at the end of them, of course, at the beginning and middle there is no beauty at all, just the long, stressful, cold 12 hours when anything can happen stretching out in front of you.

But here it is, watching the sunrise and knowing that on the way home you will pass all the people on their way to work and you are on the way home. In the middle of a set of nights this doesn't work because you know that on your way back to work the bastards will all be on their way home...This time I'm at the end of the set so I can see the beauty.

I want to be a part of it

Cheesus, it's been a while since I was here. I was away, locked in a room revising but those days are over now and it was worth it, passed the exam. In the quest to get more letters after my name than are in it I'm not doing badly and think that I can stop now.

I know I should be asleep now, but I can't. I'm sitting here at work with the buzzing lights and no place to rest my head since the on-call room has been developed into a new outpatients department so that the old one can be demolished to make way for the new PFI hospital which hasn't got approval yet. So that's why I'm here, rambling on to no one. I wondered what it must be like to be a radio DJ, it must be like this.

On the bright side, there's only 7 hours to go and then I'm off for the week and heading 'cross the way to NYC. Nice one.

Looking for la bomba

I came pretty close to finding it on Friday at the Barbican with a band called Ska Cubana, but then a drunken excuse for Madness came on stage and screwed everything up... but the headliner was a singer/guitarista called Silvio Rodriguez (he probably spells it differently to me) and although I hardly understood a word it was great. Made all the more entertaining by the tone deaf lady in the front row who just couldn't help herself throw her head back, thrust her arms in the air and sing a different song. We tried to tell her, and I almost threw my shoe, but they were too valuable (it was a bit wet outside).

The rest of the weekend has been spent reacquainting myself with an old friend called Key Topics in Otolaryngology, I really don't know why we lost touch for all of a week. It all comes flooding back. Not the knowledge, but the negative conditioning of sitting in this room writing this instead of learing about perilymph fistulas and tympanosclerosis and different types of ear wax. What a lot you are all missing.

There's always a light at the end of the tunnel (and it's not always a freight train coming your way), going to NYC in November and might be meeting up with the big man Mazzo all de way from Italy over there. Nice.

Something for the weekend?

I had a great weekend at work. Highly recommended if you get fed up of a nice relaxing weekend lie-in. It was not the most exciting weekend that I have ever had but it wasn't the worst on-call either. Several interesting things happened, the first one is that the mess moved upstairs to a room a little bit smaller but actually freshly painted (woo-hoo) but the removals men didn't bother to put the TV or Sky anywhere near a plug socket and a minor anastamosis was required to get Sky working again, although most of the channels remain cancelled in a cost-cutting exercise. And there's no milk and the bread looks like Lister's abandoned experiment.

I stepped into the canteen between seeing patients and found the name "Choices" somewhat misleading. It appears as if the only choice was whether to have chips AND beans with the ham and cheese slice (or re-fried cheese omlette for you veggies out there). I was glad I had my Sainsbury's Thai Veg soup to heat up in the microwave, only need to attach a plug first.

I am looking forward to being a GP in my own little office where the patients come to me. Roll on February...

ping, one down

Good news, I passed the exam, part one. Now I shall celebrate with a Coors light and a chinese take-out. Living it up, eh? Then I can start revision for the viva...

Fitter, Happier

More productive. Regular exercise at the gym, I'm lucky if I go 3 times a week, but my new resolution is to do this. I went today, good start. I was on the cycling machine, watching the seconds tick by and I thought, 'there's another one gone, am I happy that I am spending this time doing this? Isn't there something better I could be doing?' It can get a bit depressing to think like this, so I changed the display to see how many virtual km i had done, that got a bit depressing so I changed it back to seconds... To be honest, at that time it was a pretty good thing to be doing, watching myself burn off kcal (so very slowly) to repay the good times that I have had this weekend with my wife in France.
Just around Calais. I agree, probably not the place that you'd choose to go if you could go anywhere in France and there are plenty of English fatties wandering around with a crate of John Smiths tucked under the arm of their No 9 England shirt, Eastenders wine warehouse etc, but there are some nice places there too and some great food and drink. We stayed in a hotel that cost 30 Euros, a 'Premiere Classe' (the irony was not lost on me), but it is comfortable, clean and cheap. Everyone has a balcony (to enter their room as there are no internal corridors).
The sun was shining, we drove around, mostly on the right side of the road, and stopped at most of the supermarkets that were open to see if they have to same food as us over there. They don't, the food makes the supermarkets here look like a shitheap. Thanks Tesco, thanks Asda price for buying up the crap the rest of Europe doesn't want.
I may be slightly fitter than yesterday, a little bit happier, not yet in a cage, on antibiotics...

Retrospectoscope blues

Life can get a little tiresome. I was revising for an exam until last Tuesday when I sat it, and I think it went ok, but I can't really tell. Looking back through my retrospectoscope I can only recall the questions that I got wrong when I look up the answers. I'm hoping that I can't remember the ones that I got right because of course I know that they are right, right? Find out in 4 days, then I have to start on the revision for the viva. Better pass that part, that's half a grand down the drain if not.
The nights are drawing in now, the days are getting slowly colder, soon it'll be winter again and another year will have passed by.
Still, on the bright side, the weather for the weekend looks good and I am going to France with my wife to buy garlic and french bread. Nice.