Intensive care.

Everyone is asleep, except me and the nurses. Night shifts like these I have not known before, where I am not bleeped more than perhaps once a night, and I may even sleep too, in a bed made up for me in my own private room (smells a bit funny) with ensuite toilet facilities (though no mini soap in pink paper wrapper, or paper folded pointlessly into a point). And there I lie, dreaming about noradrenaline, positive-end-expiratory-pressures, chest pathology and naked ladies all in a jumble, only to emerge blearily into a brand new day refreshed (and probably smelling a bit funny), to stagger home via the bus and two or possibly three train journeys to my home where the light beams brightly in all day long.

One of my patients, a septuagenerian in after a large bowel op, is lying on his back arms held up in front of him, as though boasting of a perch of mythical proportions, or trying to bunch subjects up for a group photo. Occasionally he shouts, or waves his pale legs dangerously towards the edge of the bed, and we rush forward by turns to stop him pulling the oxygen mask off, or an arterial line out.
A lot of my patients never leave the unit. This is particularly distressing when someone who you initially had a conversation with slides inexorably into being a body with a cluster of increasingly intractable problems and another cluster of concerned and multiplying relatives surrounding it. Rocks and a hrad places, vicious circles, catch22s in abundance.

Tomorrow I'm going to lie in a park with my lady love, fail to revise for my exams, stick two mental fingers up at any sort of procrastination guilt, and languish shamelessly in a seam of utter dissolution and torpor.

By the way as I no longer live in the East of London i suppose I am writing under false pretences. However i'll keep the name for this blog as i may at least waylay those in search of the Wisdom of the East. Well the only nuggets I can offer are as follws:
1) peel or boil all fruit or vegetables
2) Nag Champa is the finest of Indian incenses
3) Herman Hesse