Nose

Ah, Internet, the mysteries of small people. They’re such utter cards, aren’t they?

Because, honestly, my latest little person is currently in her crib making  ‘gnah! gnah! gnah!’ noises of severe disapproval at the fact, while I choose to distract myself by typing to you all in vague misery about how she just won’t bleeding stay asleep at night unless my tits are involved.

I mean, she’s really quite a sweet child as long as she’s got something warm and squishy to suck on, really she is. I just had to get it out there that while she does now nap twice a day (no more than two naps, sob!) in her crib and without nursing to sleep to do so, something to do with the setting of the golden orb completely screws with any desire to just go the hell to sleep alone and without props more complicated than a teddy bear and quick cuddle.

She’s now up to a vaguely resigned, ‘nyahhh, nyyyahhh, unhh, unhh, nyah!’ for those of you playing along at home. With the occasional ‘ahahahahahaha…..(pause)…waaaaaHHHHHHHHH’.

Anyway, if you can excuse me, I have three children to successfully wrestle off to the land of nod and I have to get ready for work in the morning, and between you and me, finding something that doesn’t make me look like a shar-pei featured in my abdominal ancestry is rather hard these days.

I leave you with the following (wAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!) observations:

A: Bhaji Nightshift will also go to unannounced about second base with your nose if you get too close (please, don’t get too close, she just did it me ME and I am shuddering at how very, very revolting an unexpected little tongue up one’s nostril can be).

B: My medical students all seem to think that caesarean sections are performed via an incision right over where the gallbladder lives. In MY day etc etc.

G

PS. She’s just shut up. Should I check she’s still breathing or run for the wine?

 

Place

Okay, so I’m rather late to the healing salon party and in a way I don’t think it matters.

Knowing me, I’m probably not writing about quite the right thing, anyway, because gad knows I’ve spent the better part of seven years blogging about the wrong thing in as much detail as humanly possible. Some of the things I’ve gone and written about speculums are dead dodgy, for a start, and there was this time I turned them into a personal art project with mixed results and so on. I’ll leave somebody else to pull my back archives for speculum art because unfortunately I never did create the tag ‘speculum rabbit’ to celebrate the occasion and to be brutally honest the sheer weight of crap I’ve written over the years makes finding the post in question a bit to terrifying at this time of night.

In other words, life has phases, even virtual ones, and for those of you who found my coffee-fuelled ramblings at the frazzled Mama stage, this is my story.

I am a real person.

For those of you who prefer it straight,  these are my kids and this is my life. I have public blogs for both and am happy to share. I try not to get comment linkback here for obvious fanny-related posts aplenty along the IVF brick road way, but a friend acquired here is a friend. Period.

So, once upon a time I wrote about infertility. About dead babies. About my period. About cycle after cycle. About IVF. About miscarriages. About loss.

At the end of the day what I write about is my life so over the years what I write about has changed. My life has changed. I write about my ridiculously funny, wonderful, terrifying, rewarding, life-hogging job, my children, the family I finally have. I even write about my blasted home renovations or at least I plan to when I can get around it because goodness knows if I haven’t already bored the socks off of the last reader, then writing about paint colours should do the job for me.

I write about my life and that’s all I can do. I’m not good at other stuff. I like to write about my feelings, my day, the things I probably shouldn’t put on social media. I’ve done it for seven years and I guess this blog is seven years of me, in a slightly neurotic nutshell.

I don’t have the time I used to. I  adore working in obgyn, but it’s pretty much a lifestyle option. Accordingly, I have to pony up and pass some real ass big girly part doctor exams one of these days.  I also have three children.

Something has to give. I don’t write as often as the post come into my head. I simply can’t anymore.

But I write, anyway. Half the time i should really be doing something else, like folding the neverending pile of washing, but instead I write to you all.

Because I want to and it’s as simple as that.

I write about my infertility, about my losses, about my children, about my work and about ME. I can’t change it. I can’t sex it up any.  My place may not be squarely in the infertility blogosphere any more, but I am here nonetheless. I can’t say I fancy chasing fresh readers in Mamablogland because what I write isn’t conditional on how many people read. I just write. From both sides of the stirrups.

I plan to keep writing. I aim to be funny as piss if I can do so, because personally that’s about  the best coping strategy I have and goodness knows I’m going to be stressed enough over the next half a dozen years to need a little light relief. A vent. I don’t think there’ll be any new stuff about IVF. I could be wrong, but for so very many reasons I think that part of my life is done. But if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be on the other side of the stirrups, then I guess I’m your lass. The one with the bad reproductive past history.

I can’t control my audience, who and how many. It doesn’t matter.

I write because I want to do so and I thank you all, whatever brings you here and however many of you there may or may not be.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Bhaji is being a right bugger and has just escaped from her baby straightjacket for the third time in an hour and is duly flailing looking for the boobie. Yes, I am cussing myself for that particular sleep association right now.

g

Break.

Hi, I’m Geohde.

I think last wrote something around these parts some time in the Jurassic era but then I swear a Brontosaurus ate my keyboard and a Tyrannosaurus decided I looked exactly like the right kind of sympathetic ear to unload a lengthy diatribe about all that Nasty Predator bad press and how difficult it is to find a good knitting circle when everybody thinks you’ll probably use their ribs for needles and so on.

Yes, I’m making things up and, no, I have no earthly idea when I last posted, either of content full stop let alone content of quality, I’m honestly too plain old tired to check the date. Perhaps we should stick with ‘a dinosaur ate my homework’ and THAT my friends is a shame because I work in a positive pent-up stew of human experience and the inability to share in a timely fashion clearly crimps the old style somewhat.

There was the amusing time I worked two weeks straight with the exception of my birthday at thirty six weeks pregnant, pissing off my boss with the request in the process and still sadly being denied an actual full weekend as such to whinge about my sausage legs while laying sprawled on the couch watching reruns of something or other on TV.

There was also the almost as funny time that LS decided the Internet connection didn’t seem quite ship-shape and in a fit of ‘fixing’ or ‘improving’ things managed to break it rather impressively. That took three days to fix, all done in bits and cranky pieces at the end of my cover shifts. At thirty seven weeks pregnant.

I can’t say I handed out overmuch sympathy to the whimpers of Internet withdrawal.

Lest I forget there have also been the slightly droll times LS has been interstate on Matters Professional, leaving my heavily gravid self to do it all solo. There’s been quite a bit of that, actually, and really he’s just bloody lucky I haven’t gone into labour when he’s four hours away by plane just to spite him.

I guess I could mention the time that at almost thirty eight weeks pregnant I found myself leaving work two hours late because extracting twins by c-section from somebody with a BMI in the 60s turns out to be rather hard work. The anaesthetist couldn’t hit a vein with a standard length cannula and an ultrasound machine and that was just the beginning of our collective troubles. The bit where we converted to a general anaesthetic mid-stream was kind of hairy, but I think the kicker was when she just kept on trickling blood post operatively and I had my hand to my elbow through abdominal wall and still had no earthly idea if her uterus was actually responding to enough oxytoxic agents to make cement look all soft because I couldn’t feel it.

That was today and I hope she’s okay.

Tomorrow is my last hurrah at work, I am hoping to finish in a knackered blaze of sharp with a scalpel in hand and THEN ladies of the Internet, I plan to get some bastard I work with to actually recheck my enormous fundal height and my blood pressure because I haven’t had an obstetric visit myself in nearly three weeks on accounts of the clinics being overrun with too many pissed off pregnant women as it is (without losing a staff member to the other side of Angry Wait) and my legs, they dint to about my knee and my vision has been a little starry of late and honestly saying  I feel a tad on the second hand side is missing the chance to abuse the delightful expression ‘like refried shit’.

Mostly I’m just writing to say Hello and I Haven’t Given Birth Yet. I’ve also gone and pushed back my own c-section to two weeks hence because I need a bloody break before I can face a newborn.

G

PS. Am contracting like a b!tch almost all the time these days and somehow I don’t think it agrees with me.

Touchy

Dear Random Probably Better Remain Anonymous GP,

Well, THAT was a touch awkward, wasn’t it?

I mean, I get that the A word in a seventeen-year-old makes most people kind of jumpy, really I do.

It’s just that when the seventeen-year-old who had the A word is your patient, nominated YOU as her GP during her brief stint for the scarlet A and thusly we sent you and you alone a copy of her confidential discharge paperwork, we all kind of expect from the Big Hospital perspective that that means you have some kind of general clue about events.

It’s rather awkward indeed to phone you when the aforementioned seventeen year old fails to turn up for her post op review with us of Big Hospital and also won’t answer her phone and have you get all snibby about myself as a representative of Big Hospital breaching her confidentiality by mentioning she needs some kind of post-A-word follow up.

Because, really, as her primary health care professional who allegedly fulfilled ze old duty of care by bothering to read the paperwork we sent and confirmed was received, you should have known already.

It’s actually kind of embarrassing, n’est ce pas?

Also, she is only seventeen you great bollocking arse. I never met the girl but I bet she was and is sh!t scared and I doubt anybody knew. Can you imagine how lonely that must be? Reach down a little deeper into your biopsychosocial gland for some bleeping compassion next time.

In a similar vein, when I am trying to patiently explain that all I care about as a fellow health care provider with one temporarily shared patient is that the patient in question has seen some sort of doctor, had a period and got some bloody contraception organised I get a little miffed when you refuse to disclose and attempt an earful of lecture on same. On grounds of confidentiality.

Would it be overly cynical to assume that had I be discussing bunions, the reaction would have been rather different?

Random GP, I am left with but one conclusion. You’re a bit of a d!ck.

I just hope you recall the bloody patient. Also, yes I did hang up on you, it wasn’t a bad line.

Love

G

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Primary.

Dear Internet,

My cankles forbid me from hanging them down for very long so this missive shall be brief. Also, I’m bloody ravenous and since it is the restaurant of me, myself and I cooking this evening for myself and two moderately discerning consumers I really had better be Getting On With Things.

But, Internet, guess what I got to do today?

After a year of holding other people’s bloody bladder retractors I got the be the primary operator.

Doing the caesarean is much better than retractor action, in case you wondered. Obviously.

I didn’t get out of putting in the catheter before hand, though. Funny that.

Some things about the pecking order will never ever change and I just have to live for the day I get somebody else of my own to peck into doing that one. Probably.

G The Slightly Bigger Girl who Does Operations. Sometimes.

Bonus.

LS is on a plane-slash-overseas doing conferenc-ey things trip and I probably should by rights be sitting on the couch on my ever expanding arse eating ice cream and watching singing competitions on the box (in my underwear no less) without fear of judgement, but instead I thought I’d say hello to you all.

Hello Internet.

It’s been thirty almost two long LONG weeks of vomiting my guts up and if one more person tells me how big or low or all baby or bleeping radiant I look it is going to end in bloodshed. Other people’s. I am good at making people bleed, I do it for a living except for the bits where I try to stop other people bleeding to death, instead.

Also, I write you this missive because I have somehow cleverly conned the twins into thinking that 7pm is the New Bedtime, despite the fact that one can still hear only slightly older children kicking about some kind of ball in the street and it is still dead bright outside. I am not a woman to look a gift horse in the mouth. I said it was bedtime and I guess I should take up professional poker or something because three year olds, especially in combination, are usually remarkably canny suspicious bastards about that sort of thing, yet mine drank their milk and fell for it hook line and tuck-in-goodnight.

Lucky me I guess, at least right up and until the suspiciously canny bastards wake up at four aayy emm or something, but then again since I have to sort out all matters domestic on my tod for a week, an early run up at the get-exceedingly-whiny-twins-and-self-dressed-and-out-the-door-in-time-to-catch-peak-hour game might not be such a bad idea.

Did I mention I am working approximately fifty hours next week in the third trimester with rapidly expanding cankles with three year old whinebots all on my own? Oh, good.

There’s always coffee. If no adult sees me drink it then the trendy judgement never happens, either. Take note, baristas everywhere, on that last bit because the only other thing that is liable to make me bother to move my creaking frame anywhere fast with a scalpel is in response to a spontaneous and repeated offer of decaf.

Yours,

G

PS. I think I told you about the poor, poor woman who had one monochorionic twin die at twenty weeks and then went into labour and lost the other at twenty three weeks and had a nasty case of chorioamnionitis and also managed to come about as close as it gets to bleeding to death afterwards. I should really stop whinging about my life, huh?

PSS. Edited for the grammar. The shame. It’s probably still all wonky and clearly I need more sleep.

Knacker

You’ll never guess this one from the thirty week pregnant full time working mother of very active twins who are currently very busy indeed being princesses with regrettably but one crown between them and don’t ask how THAT is working out because the answer is the obvious ’not very well’, but, guess what?

I am knackered. Pooped. Stuffed. 

I am also utterly shagged out (but only in the metaphorical sense in case you wondered because I can’t think of a single sensible reason that anybody in my whale-shaped swollen state would actually still feel like expending extra energy in sex), buggered (clearly my local vernacular has some unfortunate turns of phrase for colourful descriptions of ‘tired’ and I think I shall simply move straight along without bothering to issue a formal disclaimer) and thoroughly over it, under it and through to the back teeth with it.

If you can’t hear the exhausted sigh emanating from your speakers, Internet, it’s only because I’m too damn tired to record one.

I have another eight weeks of work to go.

I have one whole day in october where I am not either working or on call and thus working at the whim of somebody else’s decision that today is not their day to get out of bed and do some work already.

I think this turn of events is rather unsatisfactory.

Unfortunately, nobody really cares what I think.

Anyway, in case you hadn’t worked out the general drift, I am working this weekend until the heady time of nine thirty pee em, straight through next week as per usual and then I get my one precious work-free October day before I start the next working week early on Sunday.

My cankles can hardly wait.

Really, the whole thing is about as welcome as a fart in a crowded lift set to ‘express all floors’ and if it wasn’t for the minor amusement to be gained from telling anxious grandmothers to be that their daughter, the one currently wailing and flailing in the chair like the world’s most dramatically pregnant pork chop, isn’t even technically in labour yet and that, no,  we don’t do epidurals in the corridor but she is welcome to ask again when we get to birth suite, I don’t know where I’d be.

Actually, yes I do. Asleep in MY bed. Not flailing. I prefer to snore open-mouthed at this gestation, me.

G

Hung.

 While I would like to live the version of my life where I did not update my blog for days on end mostly on accounts of being tied up in such serious matters as choosing between point and non-pointy toed shoes in the morning, unfortunately that is not quite the reality.

If I can shove my rapidly swelling feet in them and they match, that is the end of my shoe debate for the day. Also, I only end up getting something or other nasty all over them sooner or later. Leather, meet amniotic fluid. No point, see?

Plus, I still seem to be working about fifty billion hours a week, give or take, all ending at about ten pee em after starting at eight ayy em and I’m just too bleeping knackered to log on when I get home and download from my brain all those ridiculous moments that spring from being a professional private parts inspector these days.

Yes, dear Internet, in other words it HAS been a busy week and in it I have seen more cervixes than most reasonably lucky heterosexual men get to greet in a lifetime.

Some of them repeatedly and believe me, it is probably not a good thing when I could pick a person merely by reviewing pictures of bits of anatomy only seen with the aid of a metal thingy and a damn powerful torch in a line up. I really should have made this exact point to the crazy lady who had a little difficulty in believing that gastro and labour are different processes because I thought I was going to go bloody spare if I heard one more time how the baby’s head was coming NOW and she could feel it in her cervix and I was a rotten doctor for not believing her and really didn’t care although I had been dutiful enough to examine aforementioned cervix about fifty billion times to prove that nothing was hiding up there but leukorrhoea and so on. And on. With groaning et dramatic abdomen clutching and ‘ I’M HAVING A CONTRACTIONNNNNNN’.

Then she’d get the rampant shits again, neatly proving my point that some people can’t tell their cervix from their large bowel and really should just calm the proverbial down already.

It was a good thing that after the fifty billionth review personal I got to hand that particular gem of a case over to the night resident and let them meet her up close and personal because by that point I had had enough histionics for a lifetime and I still didn’t know what colour her eyes were and in case you wondered, yes, she did go home the next day with admonishment to Be Good for crying out loud and have the sense to have her next bout of gastro in the comfort of her own home and not on a labour ward.

Sigh.

Anyway, I do know this isn’t much in the way of an update because I have not once pointed out that I waddle most amusingly these days on accounts of beginning to look like a small gestating truck but that is because all my workmates think it is funny to quack whenever they see me lumber along and I figure I’ve had my dose of duck jokes for a lifetime. Plus, Bhaji Nightshift seems to be plumping for option ‘sideways’ and despite that I seem to still be measuring solidly ahead and thusly I am also getting delightful cracks about dropping this child between cases at work.

Perhaps I should start pointing out the size of my bottom, instead.

Now if you shall excuse me, my computer has hung three times in writing this, I am at the threshold of a standing-height drop reboot attempt and I had to repeatedly discuss a patient called something very similar indeed to Amanda Blows with a straight face today and quite frankly I don’t know whether to laugh convulsively or cry right now.

See you on the flip side of a week of solid nightshift.

G

Thirteen

I’m back.

I’m (mostly) awake.

In the daytime.

I would apologise profusely for the type-y hiatus but I think I did mention that minor matter of the case of the dreaded nightshift. This particular case of the dreaded nightshift did, as usual, knock the circadian stuffing clean out of me along with my type-y inclinations. It’s jolly hard to type, even to moan about my lot in life (something that we all know motivates me greatly), when all I would rather be doing is lying blearly eyed on the couch in approximately my second best dressing gown sans the dried up child snot on the trim eating, well, anything that didn’t run away fast enough.

Don’t ask how I ended up with snot on the trim of my favourite dressing gown.

I start nightshift again in two days.

Also, on the matter of eating things that only move slowly or not at all, well, I think I should by rights be making a small beeping noise whenever I move backwards and should from now on avoid all beaches even in the middle of winter as it is here because otherwise the local whale-helpers would probably try to roll me back on in.

Did I mention that my thighs seem to have made rather intimate and rubb-ey acquaintance with one another of late? Dignity prevents me from describing what has gone and happened to my bottom but I think it needs it’s own postcode.

I do know I am waffling and have yet to mention the titular reference of my last run of nightshift at Hospital Small and Peripheral but that is mostly because the inevitable Small and Peripheral Obstetric Hospital nightmare finally happened. To me. At 3am. You see, to speak slightly obliquely, in Whizz Bang Big Hospital somebody’s baby would not have a prolonged and non-recovering bradycardia of thirteen terrifying minutes duration because we could have chop-choppey-ed the asphyxiating mite out by about the seven minute mark. Less at a push.

Instead, if there isn’t a theatre short of a thirty to forty’ish minute call out available, well, you call. And wait. That’s how I know the bradycardia lasted a full thirteen minutes before starting to recover and that’s also how I know the baby was born with lungs full of meconium from gasping away in utero. It’s also how I know that the best start in for an otherwise stone cold bloody normal child in life is not all acidotic, fitting, intubated and cooled to minimise brain damage.

Helpless does not begin to cover how that wait felt.

The way I see it, that sort of shite can go on in all the small private hospitals all they like and if anybody wants to choose that small risk for a glass of red with dinner and a private room, so be it, but in the public system where women are not given a choice on where they deliver we should simply be doing better than that.

More nightshift it is,

G

Various

Amusing side of coming out about one’s gestation at work at nearly twenty weeks:

1. The medical staff genuinely (mostly) seemed to have no idea.
2. The midwives all knew it already.

I guess that means I know who all quietly just thought I should get a gym membership already and stop with the insane eating were, and that none of them had the nerve to tackle my ever expanding waistline (or suspicious lack thereof under multiple billowy shirts) over it.

Also, don’t ask a doctor to spot a poorly concealed pregnancy, not even an obstetric one because they probably won’t.

It is a nice relief to be able to finally point out that yes, I AM fat right now thank-you-very-much but I am also pregnant and therefore excused. It’s slightly less nice to find that some arseholes who were always pushing for more blood out of my time poor stone at work are all smiles and ’rest, dear, it can wait’ now they know. I could have done with that when I was puking my guts up fifty bazillion times a day as opposed to the modern day one to three’ish.

Sadly, it wasn’t much in the way of fun at all to be noticeably pregnant and deal with the poor couple who terminated their pregnancy at a belated and unfortunate twenty three weeks and five days on grounds of being horribly poorly ill informed about the prognosis of their pregnancy back at sixteen weeks when it all really began to go to hell in a hand-basket.

Pregnant abdomens around women who have just delivered a baby that gasped for a minute and then quietly died are just cruel.

Actually, I am quietly so bloody angry about that last case because to walk around for two whole months allegedly having obstetric care and being told everything will be okay when everything was never going to be remotely okay ever again was just one of the cruellest attempted ass saving manoeuvres I have seen in some years.

G

Creepy.

In brief, for it has been a long and trying week Chez MII and associated multiple employment endeavours:

• Random creeps who don’t put their headlights on when they are driving at night categorically do NOT have the right to beep and carry on like raw prawns when a random tired driver like your truly hasn’t turned their invisible car ESP on and cuts them off. Random creeps do not glow in the dark. Random creeps who then proceed to tailgate me up to the secure gate of my work carpark before driving off when they seen the boom/swipe entry will have their registration documented and phone calls made (pointless thereof, but anyway). To be honest, I still think that this particular random creep thinks that they were in the right but unless the sun shines out of their arse in ways that failed to illuminate their presence for me, I’m sticking to my point of view. Turn your fucking lights on at night. The end.
• The local newspapers will still write articles about various people being saved by the miracle of the good old ‘resuscitation machine’. I prefer to think of it as fifty bloody tired residents and some things that go beep when they need attention but my world view lacks romance.
• I am officially certified to dart the vague of contraceptive recollection with implanons at 3 yearly intervals. I can’t decide if this is funny, ironic or just one of those things. I mean, I can also stick my fingers halfway up to somebody’s tonsils and touch their baby’s head before I rudely break an amniotic sack and, as a parting gift, screw a small probe into the scalp that can’t escape all in order to track a heart rate better. I am assuming that these sort of things count as a life skill on some level. Mostly it just makes you wish the gloves were longer. At least I usually don’t get covered in poo doing it.
• Watching 16 week pPROM trainwrecks arrive and fall to pieces after almost half a dozen weeks never gets any easier. The ones who tell me devoutly that NOTHING will go wrong scare me the most because, unfortunately, I can tell you from experience that wrongness probability isn’t inversely related to strength of conviction. It’s a bloody scary place to be and the universe is a very even fan sprayer. We do get the odd good outcome, but we also get stories I don’t think should be retold far far more often.
• On a slightly different note, losing a first baby at full term unexpectedly is fucking awful but it’s worse when it is followed by nearly bleeding to death and then last-ditch uterus-ey conservative things that somehow end up a day later in the land of a necrotic uterus, fallopian tubes and, um, ovaries. The lot. At least the pPROM lady with faith plus a tiny growth restricted baby with abnormal dopplers and a tiny thorax minus functional lungs can potentially have another baby if it all goes Bad as signs suggest it shall. Someday. Hopefully. Losing your bun and then losing the whole oven, stove top and damn kitchen? Actually, it’s all horrific, isn’t it?
• I think it’s bedtime, I’m going to vomit if I don’t go to sleep because I’ve just worked fourteen days straight and many of them have co-incidentally been fourteen hours long. Seventeen weeks tomorrow and I was sprung by a consultant today. Fuck. That sound I think I just heard was my job next year whizzing away to the owner of an empty uterus.

G

PS. Pardon ze swear.

Tongue Fur.

Hi, Internet.

It’s been a while, and it’s certainly not for lack of material to whine write about. It’s the utter lack of time to be profusely bitter in writing that’s the utter bastard and I’ve yet to figure out a way around that particular doozy. Also, I apologise about the title, but I do actually have a question. Yes, about tongue fur.

Shall I digress?

I currently work on what can only be called a suitably diverse unit and by ‘diverse’ I mean generally either non-english speaking, confused, drug and alcohol affected, subject to an official investigation into how the baby got into the fourteen year old in the first place, and the shooting up when claiming to go for a ‘smoke’ like.

I actually don’t mind it because there aren’t many jobs where you can teach somebody how babies are made and rescue them from thus far quite successful unwitting attempts to achieve three unplanned children, all under the age of two.

I’ll wait while you do the match and return when you’ve finished boggling, too.

I do prefer it when I can find an interpreter, though, and don’t have to wing it so much because while diagrams and gestures get the message across, I can’t say it feels especially graceful. Plus, I’ve yet to discover the best mime for ‘mirena’ or ‘implanon’. Condom, on the other hand, is dead easy.

Don’t ask, I shan’t tell. The secret condom gesture is going to stay that way.

Anyway, I am mostly writing to apologise for the lack of writing and in doing so have possibly generated a big neon sign flashing  ’Geohde Actually Goes to Bed By Eight PM But Doesn’t Want To Tell Anybody’ because that’s the pathetic truth on days where my Contraceptive Fairy duties allow me to escape in time to do so.

I hate to whinge, because I am down to about one miserable hardly-worth-the-acid vomit a day and it is usually in the evening, but I am kind of sick of feeling sick. It’s the fatigue. Fatigue is a bastard. The term morning sickness is an utter lie made up by some sadistic liar I swear because the morning (apart from the whole late untucked shirt fat-clothes I Am Not Pregnant dash into work, that is) is about my best bit of the day and it is all downhill from there.

Perhaps it’s the tongue fur.

I’d be interested to know what you all think because never before in my life have I been so obsessed and prone to repeated gagging by the results of microbial hijinks on the back of my tongue. Mere suggested presence is enough. By three pm I have to keep slipping off to the bathroom to scratch the back of my tongue until it just about bleeds and retch up a storm, just to feel normal for about an hour. At best. Because it otherwise feels like someone shoved a plush pile carpet back there while I wasn’t looking.

Yes, I wash my hands very thoroughly afterwards. And before. You all know where else I put them all day.

Please tell me that this sort of morbid fascination with oral carpetry is but temporary and, you know, kind of normal on some level?

I’m beginning to think I’m all weird and if you’ll excuse me, it’s past my bedtime by twenty five minutes.

G

Absence

I guess you’d have have to have been living under the same rock of gibbering misery that I was on my last two months of permanent (12 hour-long-a-pop seven-in-a-farking-row plus working-like-a-blue-arsed-proverbial-on-my-alternating-week-gaily-referred-to-as-’off’ after seven sequential twelve hours nights) nightshift to miss the fact that I haven’t been writing all that much for, um, let’s go out on a limb and say ‘two months’.

I’ll just repeat myself, because I feel the urge now it is all past tense, but those parenthesis need repeating. Permanent (12 hour-long-a-pop seven-in-a-farking-row plus working-like-a-blue-arsed-proverbial-on-my-week-gaily-referred-to-as-’off’ after seven sequential twelve hour nights) nightshift.

I think I averaged about a mere fifty hours a week on my ‘off’ week and, well, eighty four hours a week on the official one.

Hey, did I mention the past tense?

Thank feck for that, because there is very few things more miserable than perpetually being awake at 3am in theatre, scrubbed, sitting between an unconcious woman’s legs madly trying to grasp a recalcitrant cervix, succeeding, showing an instrument through the hole and THEN spending the next hour of your life dutifully wiggling the uterus-ey thing up-and-down like a macabre puppet so the boss with the more savoury view can deal with an exploding ectopic in a timely fashion.

It’s amazing how much blood some people can stash in their peritoneal cavities when Tubal Babies Go Bad.

Anyway, speaking of my own gestation, my g-d but I have been miserable on that score, too. I am now mercifully enough at the point where I only vomit about three times a day, although I gag about a billion times, give or take. In case you wondered, the times to avoid being directly in the line of oral fire are 1. when I am brushing my teeth in the morning 2. wen I am brushing my teeth at night and 3. when I am driving home from work and so fucking tired I just vomit anyway just for the sheer hell of it. On the freeway. That one’s like death and taxes.

I’d steer clear of my temper ALL the time because nausea makes me pretty nasty.

Now for the bit I’ve been getting to, weeks 6 to eleven or thereabouts:

Notes to self:

1. Just because my phone claims to be able to take five megapixel pictures doesn’t mean they won’t all be five megapixels of grainy shit. When it gets worth it I shall use a Real Camera.

2. My god but the size my arse is already getting and, yes, in case you wondered I am already up a disgusting five kilograms. It’s the nausea, the only time I feel remotely better is that five seconds of hot chip bliss before I’ve eaten too much again.

3. Stand BACK from the camera, Geohde, it’s not helping getting closer.

4. For scale of the problem at the early end of the series given what in person at the time looked unquestionably pregnant but now looks merely one-pizza-too-many, see the jean-fastening adaption. My guts are normally flat, I promise you. They look like THIS on the outside and THIS under the clothing.

G

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Absent.

I think you’ll just have to kind of imagine me slinking back into the blog at this point, hunched back and somewhat (further) prematurely aged by the life-force suck that is working eighty six hours in seven straight days. At night.

I do apologise for my absence at a critical juncture and I can promise you that I wasn’t trying to build up dramatic tension. I was just bloody knackered.

Anyway, it’s been an interesting week of nights, if I do say so myself and I now know lots of things about tertiary hospital obstetrics I didn’t before, namely:

1. Twenty four weekers are farking tiiiiiiny when they’re born. Tiny. Red-skinned. Fragile. The ones born alive let the sadddest miniscule squeak of protest out, well before the paeds intubate them, they do. The paeds never will remember to check the gender in the flurry and so I’m usually the one that peeks and tells the parents they now have a daughter.

2. I can cut a sample of skin from a fresh stillbirth for a karyotype, but I can’t stop apologising to the baby when I do it even though they don’t know about anything anymore. It’s horrible. Especially on the poor ones that have been dead for weeks. I also hate the terminations for unsurvivable foetal conditions. We use intracardiac lignocaine.

3. At one point we had four dead babies in the dead baby room. At once. Three of them were triplets, all in a row in the crib. That room was never empty, even on a good day.

4. pPROM is not funny at twenty four weeks either. Especially when there’s pus coming out of the mother’s vagina at delivery. See point number one about twenty four weekers in general. We get a lot of those.

5. My week ended quietly shitting myself a new one while holding a retractor in theatre. Fresh blood spurted everywhere unexpectedly during a caesar for stalled labour at full dilatation. It went uterus-rupturingly bad. I watched it peel clean open almost all the way around  in a Noveau Caesar Scan fashion below our incision while my boss was getting his exercise trying unsuccessfully to extract the deeply impacted head. The baby had already been stuck for ten long, long minutes. We had to cut the muscle of the front of the uterus in between the incision and the rupture to get the baby out- it was wrapped like a contracting band around the kid’s face. We had to get clamps big enough. Theatre emergency buzzer was involved. Hearing that baby eventually pick up and squak was the biggest relief ever because it all came This Close to emergency hysterectomy and sometimes you lose the uterus and the baby. Actually, when you can see the edge of the tear right on the edge of the uterine arteries it doesn’t get much closer to losing at least one of them.

Anyway all of this says nothing about what you came to hear but I have the most vile morning sickness in that I always feel deeply wrong and partially pukey and a scan booked for Wednesday. There better be a bleeping baby is all I can say although the way work is going, I’m not sure I’m brave enough to risk another pregnancy. Plus, I must be getting old or something. I mean, I had TWINS and never felt like I’d eaten a moudly sandwich all the time.

G

Seventy.

I kind of feel like this may warrant an accusation of drive-by posting but in my defence I have just been awake all flipping night and half of the day for five nights and THEN up for thirty plus hours straight to refracture my circadian rhythm into dayshift mode. For tomorrow.

Ergo, am flipping tired.

Also, most of the time due to historical turf war issues on the low risk unit I am working on at the mo that I can’t be bothered whining about (because since when was excluding a team member from handover good clinical practise in any discipline?), there isn’t much for me to do. Finding out who is in labour is like a state secret unless they’re actively hemorrhaging to death or there’s a blue face out and shoulders NOT out and I have learned to react very quickly to the without-warning scary shit and for the rest sigh gracefully, insert IV’s bloody fast, fill in forms without whining and just read the news and drink copious cups of ward tea all night.

That god for tea.

On my last night The Social Tea Drinking with other expats plus still halfway right accent (if I haven’t mentioned it before I am unfortunately slightly foreign everywhere on accounts of my confused accent, I go back home and am asked all about what it was like being born and growing up where I live now and when I am where I live, well I get called a pom all the time. Or as one cranky registrar once said with much disdain ’One of those british doctors’. I had fun telling him I trained at the same university HE did and also finished before he did and had other degrees to my name HE didn’t because I am not subtle when pissed off, but I digress) was better.

My last night I got to ‘birth’ or deliver a low risk woman who didn’t actually need someone as intervention-happy as a doctor because the midwives were all ex-pats from the same neck of the woods and it is very hard to deny somebody who is trying to make your workload lighter after you have drunk tea with them for thirty combined hours. I did it without a hint of scalpel waving I must mention, we’re not all Caesarian nutters, you know.

Anyway, That Kid Was Huge and I am bloody glad that I was there and she didn’t try to shove the kid out with merely the aid of scented candles while standing customary human height above the hard floor because not only was it vaguely horror movie-esque to see that giant head and enormous cheeks come slowly looming out from horizontal as it was, but a difficult birth is hard enough on a bed.

Plus, I repeat, HEAVY.

If we’d done it in standing saying ‘omm’ a lot, I would have had a coronary and the poor kid would have hit the floor head first when I eventually disentangled his shoulders working upside down and back to front in the wet, slippery dark.

It was nice to break the delivery drought,

G

PS, the thing I meant to say but got distracted was that my midluteal progesterone was seventy. Something working like it should for once never ceases to shock me silly.

What’s it for?

Opening disclaimer- spell check is busted. Now you can all tell how badly I pay attention when typing before nightshift.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

ArrragggggggggghhhhhfuckitfuckitforthesweetloveofallthatisholyworldSTOPtryingtopissme off. You’re all remarkably successful. MissionbleepingAccomplished and now here’s you gold star and just bugger off. I don’t care where you shove it as long as the prickly bits do some damage.

Thank you. Also, do excuse me.

Of course, dear readers, I was referring to none of you in the above opening salvo, it’s just that my god but if one more person tries to press my damn buttons at work I may have to resort to pretending polite confusion lest I otherwise accidentally bite their yawping annoying head off.

In other words, if you HAVEN’T heard the sound of one hormonal and very, very, very tired (and accordingly whiny) woman screaming and beating a local wall in frustration lately, Internet, well you musn’t live within about four timezones of ME.

I don’t think I have my usual benign tolerance of The Stupid and The Rude at this point and that is a blooping big shame because I am now resorting to making up swear words. My potty mouth is already foaming with soap as it is.

I think it all started when the pimply fourteen year old attendant in the pharmacy stared blankly at my brand and dose specific Very Clear (plus helpful ’it’s always kept behind the counter’) request for supermegadoseantideadbabyfolate. Then she, in an act nearly but not quite as bad as asking for a price check on extra small condoms over the tannoy, said to me with air of puzzled confusion in front of about fifty other tinea cream, thrush pessary and tampon purchasing medicinal punters, ‘Um, what’s it for? Have you looked on the shelf?’

I mean, honestly.

It’s for not having dead babies, lovvie and you should feel very happy indeed that I didn’t say exactly that in front of you. I actually plumped for befuddled silent opening and closing of my mouth in You’ve Got To Be Shitting Me confusion. I thought the Unwritten Law of Pharmacy was that nobdy asked what the end user planned to do with the product.

Especially in front of half the bloody shop.

I think things only got worse when followed by a horror day at work, one made worse by having the pleasure of telling a twenty seven year old foriegn medical graduate at the end of the shift that her nascent reproductive career had hit the skids at at resounding nil for one thus far, as per one unfortunate ultrasound showing a convincingly empty for nine weeks uterus.

The thing that I DON’T think she was expecting was to be told that having passed nothing tissue-like and with a beta of over six thousand plus aforementioned scan meant that as far as I was concerned she had an ectopic until proven otherwise and ergo she could not stay at Petite Satelitte Hospital (the one with nada theatre without about an hour’s start up run at things give-or-take in case you haven’t been playing along at home about my current workplace) over the weekend while we waited to see what happened.

Actually, I make full allowance for the fact that miscarriage sucks (go on, ask me, I’ve had two and worse) and I know on some level she was probably at the stage of grieving otherwise known as Purposless Eyeball Gouging but for feck’s sake I am but human and  there was no need for her to turn into a raving bitch and try to eat ME alive in return.

I may suck at many things, but not even the worst obgyn can cause a miscarriage by talking to a person the wrong way. Ergo, Not My Fault. I try to (in an I’ve-Walked-That-Mile sense) be understanding, but after a certain point I have to give up on all that schizen and skip straight to ‘judgement’.

It’s self-protective.

That’s the only way I could deal with the angry verbal tirade all in one long, loud abusive rant on how she’d been bleeding with some clots and surely that wasn’t possible with an ectopic so how dare I suggest such a reproductively imperfect thing.

Insert sigh here.

I mean she HADN’T told me about horrifying pain and passage of gory no-mistaking-it lumps of tissue so as far as I am concerned clots wasn’t doing it. Anybody who has had a miscarriage at nine weeks knows that the whole show is a bit more upsetting than nondescript clots. Also, progesterone + pregnancy = lining to shed regardless of where the misplaced bun lodged.

Repeat sigh.

I didn’t accuse her of having the clap at some point, I just did the right thing and labelled her a pregnancy of unknown location that UNTIL said location was known couldn’t stay at small hospital sans theatre for safety tube-explodey-bleedy-fasty reasons.

Grr.

Unfortunately this sort of patient (RantingAngryBintAvecRoomfulOfGesticulatingStirredUpRelatives) is exactly the kind of patient who would uncahritably rupture a tube, bleed out, die and sue you from the grave if you acquiesced to their wish to go home already and not be transferred.

All I can say is please for the love of all that is holy random people in emotionally charged situations I am trying to be nice because I know as well as anybody how horrible this sort of thing is but don’t shoot the messenger. It’s not cool.

I think I need another sigh.

It takes all kinds. I still don’t know whether to be sorry for her or want to hang her fron her flaring nostrils until she learns some blasted manners.

G

PS: The rampaging mother hen of the woman who had had a missed miscarriage and was waiting for theatre (non-urgently because nothing was on fire it’s just that nothing was growing any more chez ute and she had two other children at home and a rather full life in general and besides, she would have sooner or later actually miscarried on her own so the curette was medical politeness, medical politeness I heavily advocate but not in favour of bumping thirty year olds with cervical cancer fom their surgery to sort out) who called me a stupendous five times to hassle me that her daughter would simply DIE if she waitied any longer for surgery was nearly as bloody bad.

As usual in this paritcular situation (RampagingMotherWithLittleInformationPlusGuiltIssues), the patient herself was fine with the wait. I had to call her to discuss the situation and get her to call off the dogs already.

It’s been a long week and now I start nightshift. Goody.

Breaker.

I feel I may have to start this post with a small disclaimer that oh by god but I am miserable with fatigue today.

You see, LS was on call last night, and given he was called in twice so was I. Well at least as far as sleep deprivation goes, although on the plus side I guess I didn’t have to follow through and get dressed and go give women in labour the epidural and he did. On the minus side I didn’t get paid for the two interruptions to my repose and nor did I earn anything but brownie points for dealing with Saag’s 5am nightmare.

Since I try to study the only time I can these days i.e. before I go to sleep I am getting to the land of nod at midnight most days.

My night time schedule was very busy last night what with the three awakenings between midnight and six am. I feel the urge to note that I’m working a fourteen hour cover tomorrow, the rest of the week and the entire bloody weekend this week.

May I repeat my observation of how miserable I feel?

Thank you.

It doesn’t help that the pre-op clinic is always full of people with piles at 9am who clearly haven’t thought things through very carefully before coming to see the doctor because my goodness but if I have to smell one more poorly wiped bum before breakfast (and coffee) I may just resign.

I guess it beats running out of the clinic of bum to be on the receiving end of the clinic of front bum one hour away, but that would be getting to the point. I had my scan today.

…and that’s about it really. It’s all become quite ho-hum, even if I have never met the scanner before and don’t know their name. Hint to person in question: don’t introduce yourself while rolling latex over a probe. Most distracting ice breaker and all of that.

Anyway I have about eight follicles on each ovary after six days of stims but only four of them are measurable.

Like I said, ho-hum.

Since I’ve now had cycles nearing twenty eggs from a blah-de-blah number of follicles and 12 eggs from 20+ follicles I no longer place much stock in all of this measuring malarkey other than to note if my ovaries look like they might imminently explode.

Now, if you shall excuse me, I think I need a nap.

G

Action.

ArgahamanIhatemyjobIamsobloodyTIREDallthetimewoeisME.

Etc.

You get the idea.

I apologise, deeply, for the lack of updates Chez MII regarding the snail’s pace dowregging from hell (a.k.a. The Blog With The Bursting Sharps Bin Just Begging For A Toddler To Investigate And NO Don’t Freak, I Do Keep It On The Top Shelf And Not Even Saag At Her Finest Mountain-Goat Peak Could Reach The Bloody Thing).

Actually, I don’t have much at all to say about THAT matter other than: Last Pill Today, Hasta La Vista and Kiss My Migraine Headache On The Way Out And Don’t Let The Hot Flushing Door Hit You In The Ass Oestreogen (It’s Been Nice Knowing You).

I could finish this post there and bid you all a good night on the grounds that I do tend to drivel on (okay, and ON) when short of material plus also have a distressing tendency to tell you entirely too much about my job, but that’s probably why half of you visit.

Isn’t it?

Regardless, suffice it to say that my current surgical job is again partly in the Land Of Bum and my GOD but the first time I see the owner of a stretched out anu.s from an operating theatre in the supermarket I am going to be REALLY glad they all get a general anaesthetic and so only ONE of us will remember anything about how one of the surgeons showed me how to give the closest a.ss shave this side of a abdominal-perineal resection with the side of a scalpel blade held Just So.

On THEIR ass.

Surely there’s got to be a market for that kind of talent, but if I never see another an.al fissure or a goddamn prolapsing pile in my life it shall be entirely too soon. Makes me worry no end about my own rear end going out on the blink because I’d probably have to move overseas by now to get treated by somebody I haven’t worked with.

Doubly regardless, I know the old gent who’s wi.lly I was extremely professionally shoving a 10pm catheter into was only trying to make light conversation, but it just isn’t right to be asked how one’s love life is going when one has an eighty year old wa.ng in hand at the time.

Because THAT my friends is as close to any action I have got in some time and at the rate this job is killing me by inches of overtime I fail to see an improvement on the horizon.

Goody.

G

Ahhh.

Since all things reproductive completely suck right now on accounts of complete bleeping lack of anything resembling reproduction, unless you count a vanishing bank balance and school opportunities for my spawn, I thought I’d talk about something else.

You’re right, I haven’t been entirely accurate and I suppose I may as well emphasise the point for my own records and so I shall try again.

I do not have the pleasure of ‘successful’ reproduction outside of a bank account stripping day two in vitro high low of a sum total of 16 cells out of 12 eggs from, um, twenty follicles and (let me check my uterus in case I have been absent minded here as to lose one embryo is unfortunate but to lose TWO could be regarded as downright careless) zero ongoing pregnancies.

Actually, I may as well crunch the numbers since my ‘about’ page is positively neolithic.

Total stim cycles to date: 2

Total follicles: a billion + 20

Total eggs retrieved: 17 + 12 = 29

Total embryos: 15 + 3 = 18

Total DIPLOID embryos because haploid is so not eukaryote (and my biology is rusty so don’t check up on that for me please)? 12 + 4 = 16

Total fertilization failures? 2 + (silent FUUUUUUUCCCCKKKKK) 9.

Total embryos transferred? 7. The rest carked it along the way.  Or didn’t fertilise. In case I’d forgotten that bit.

Total time I have bled like a haemophiliac at a dracula convention stink after about day 9 on a cycle relying on ‘luteal support’ in any mode other than hcg booster? Why, Doris, that would be every farking time. Still seems to shock the shite out of my clinic like it’s news when it happens. It’s Olds and in I am getting old and this does not help matters.

My plans to ever do a fresh transfer again without a serious reworking of The Plan? Zero.

My plans to ever cycle again without getting exactly what I want in terms of protocol, stim dose and luteal support? Zero. 

Sum Total PO quotient? On a logarithmic scale.

How far do you think I can push this moderately well informed and rather jacked off paying consumer thing anyway? If it wasn’t for all the medico stuff, I’ve now done enough cycles to have a needle collection that would make a junkie slobber.

The reason I have time to work all of this out?

I have changed to the most fabulously slothful job this side of heaven. Today I had a dizzying ONE patient. I am used to about thirty old crumbly ones. This one was 40.

I was so stressed from the risk of serious medical overservicing that I had a steadying lie down in the sun for 40 minutes at lunchtime and then went home. And got vomited on, but some things never do change.

Mabye I should bloody cycle again, if only for something to do other than file my nails and feel guilty about not studying about extracting babies from jacksies. I mean mostly they sort of find their own way out, right?

 In summary I plan to refer myself to Rival Clinic and cycle again at Old Clinic in the meantime (if Old Clinic will bend their rules and let me, if not it truly is goodbye, adios, thanks for all the KY).

If that goes tits up, well, I think I am screwed. Two babies out of nearly thirty eggs is a pretty shoddy bottom line when it comes down to brass tacks. Shame the little sods are so darn cute.

You know you’re tired when…

Dear Internet,

I don’t know quite whether I should actually really share this information or not, since you may all think rather less of health professionals as a result, BUT, um.

You know the 14 hour shifts are getting to you when you seem to have written a sentence involving the word ‘plant’ at several notable locations where almost anything else probably would have been more fitting.

From the patient perspective I guess it is always nice to know that one had excellent tastes in gardening pursuits but when one is stuck in hospital on a ventilator and with the GCS (conscious state) of a  housebrick after a nasty drunken high-speed driving misadventure convention has it that the doctor might be a bit more interested in, I don’t know, boring stuff like probability of future vegetable status.

Calling one’s patient an ‘excellent plant’ in the notes is probably poor form even if it was completely in error.

Right?

PS. I am guessing that filing in most of the death cert right up until the TIME in advance of the always-end-of-shift inevitable because one just HAS to go home on time and get some bleeping sleep is probably a touch on the morbidly cynical side, too.

Gad but I am tired.

Back again tomorrow.

G

PS. Oh yeah, about that minor IVF thingy. Another scan Monday. I dug up my last stim and I had more follicles last time around and am therefore wishing I hadn’t bothered checking. Age ain’t nothin but a rapidly depleting pool of antral follicles, people.

Upside

Don’t get too close to the blog.

Really.

I am diseased. Unwell.

I have gastro, and although this means I am intermittently struggling with the evergreen conundrum of which end to stick over the loo first (answer: get a bucket and vomit in comfort with the knowledge that BOTH ends are covered), I can’t really see many other negatives.

After all, I now have to be 48 hours symptom free before I go back to work, meaning I have the rest of this week off, and if I am (un)lucky enough, Monday as well. Besides, I know where to steal zofran from and that stuff ain’t cheap.

My co-resident may not be so impressed since I seem to have shared with her before going home and she had a job interview to contend with, but personally speaking I was never so happy to vomit in the middle of a resus code in my life.

Don’t worry, I got the arterial blood gas before losing my coffee all over the linoleum. Doctors don’t eat breakfast.

G

PS. Saag and Naan are responsible for oversharing.

Twenty One.

Clearly the title isn’t a birthday reference because I am clearly long past that particular age. I mean, I listen to AM radio. I wear seriously large underwear.

Sadly for me this time around twenty one is not a reference to those heady times spent getting drunk on the weekends in clothing containing enough glitter to make a chameleon look like a disco ball, but a reference to the number of days I am about to work straight.

As in in a row.

On, and lest I forget I have four 14 hour covershifts included in the mix, just for kicks.

Think of me when you see your families and fail to run out of clean laundry, won’t you?

This should be interesting since I am already prone to giggling inappropriately whenever I remember the poor elderly lady from yesterday screaming ‘it’s coming OUUUUUUTTTTT! Turtleeeeeeeee!’ in The Emergency Department when the nurses ignored her impassioned pleas for a vertically positioned shit for slightly too long.

Actually, I think that particular nurse must have been having a especially bad day because I can’t think of any other explanation for the immediately proceeding ‘Look, stop carrying on, you DON’T need to go to the toilet and I am busy right now!’.

I imagine dealing with a fresh shit in a bed didn’t improve things for either of them.

G

And so it goes.

Denizens of the Internet, just in case you wondered (although I guess you’ve all probably figured out that owning two screaming two year olds means that stabbing oneself with teeny-tiny doses of FSH is rather less of a dramatic affair the 4th transfer around) I’m stimming.

Apparently.

I mean, I’ve been jabbing for DAYS now and sometimes I’m still surprised that I get the right end into my flabby gut, what with all the leg pulling and yelling for ‘Mama, NOW!’.

As I recall, the LAST time I did this, there was a little less flab to choose from and a lot less distraction. Needle Time was a serious time Chez MII. It’s somewhere between the fifth verse of the Hokey Pokey song and bedtime these days and usually also right after I’ve burned my hand getting dinner out of the oven.

Okay, don’t frown at me like that because I know my nose is growing, a LOT more flab. Can we move on, please?

LAST time I could get down to the muscle layer with my baby subcutaneous needles and this time I’ve got the excess skin of a shar-pei on a Sumo Special diet to contend with. Not only is the old grey mare not what she used to be, half of her bits are no longer in the last known postcode.

Regardless, my first monitoring scan is Friday and could you all think firstly egg shaped thoughts and then follow it by ONE egg shaped thoughts?

I’m only on 33 IU but my ovaries are right tarts when it comes to the stuff and quite frankly I hope I am not canned.

Finally, I think my shining moment in my paid life this week was a by nessecity loud phone call to a resoundingly deaf but mere sprightly 70 something daughter of a 99 year old who was dubbed Not For Resuscitation on the grounds of ‘why?’. It devolved to something blunt and farcical like  ’IF YOUR MOTHER’S HEART WAS TO STOP BEATING OR SHE WAS TO DEVELOP A GENERAL DISINCLINATION TO BREATHING WE DON’T ACTUALLY PLAN TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT (except order pizza and take a wee break), (as loudly as possible) DO YOU UNDERSTAND?’.

Then I turned around and recognised half of the senior executives of my health service in uniforms right behind me, where they were up until that moment having a carefully guided sanitized tour of our much maligned ED.

Sorry about that one, boss, except I’m slightly more sorry that I first muttered some expletives and a general opinion that I was only nice from the teeth outwards to the incredibly ungrateful lady with back pain who gave me a face full of abuse about why she wanted a CT scan NOW after I carefully explained why she didn’t warrant one.

The suits probably found my parting reference to tontine inhalational therapy a little inappropriate as well, I’m gathering.

Tact never was my strong point.

Depressing.

Dear Internet,

Hi!

It’s the blogger who never has time to write to you all any more mostly on accounts of I don’t even have time to keep a critical mass of clean laundry to avoid underwear shortages.

I’ve had to enter the land of Rationing and I’m about to do two weeks straight of nightshift. I cannot possibly see how this will help matters.

It also will probably not help in the Propensity For Blazing Row Over Dumb Shit With Spouse Department, or the Potty Training The Don’t For The Love of God Pull Your Nappy Down And Sit On The Throne AFTER Thou Has Given Birth To A Giant Liquid Turd Department, OR for that matter the Life, Where For A.R.T Thou Police Check? Department.

Two weeks of nighshift it is and I only hope that on this spin of the non-merry-go-round I do not see any more 40 somethings with last-ditch IVF pregnancies, Bad Scary first trimester screening results, and now bonus Was That My Waters Or Am I Just Bleeding Instead?

Also, I could do with seeing rather less nice people dying of brain cancer. It’s always the nice people. The biggest undisclosed risk for dying of something cryingly awful seems to be being a nice type. It never happens to the ones that get on my wick.

Trust me on this one,

G

Miracle Worker

Sometimes I really wonder if people think I have a magic wand stashed amongst my collection of medical goodies, ready to wave over the un-fixable and magically make it all better, really I do.

It’s either that or certain staff at a Certain Nursing Home keep getting rather a lot of brown trousers when their incredibly demented Please Keep Comfortable Do NOT Resuscitate (or pretty much do anything) in the event of Something Happening residents actually do start heading down the proverbial plughole, because I don’t have any other rational explanation for why I keep getting old people who are peacefully trying to die sent to my emergency department in a great hurry the back of a Wee-Waaaaaahhh without any dignity whatsoever.

I mean, what on earth is it they want me to do?

In the last two days I have had, in no particular order, a ninety four year old who is certainly not exactly a candidate for an operation sent in with vagin.al bleeding, and an eighty seven year old with a known giant inoperable pelvic tumour sent in with possible blood loss from another personal orifice.

Heavy sigh.

I hate having to ring the nursing home in question to explain that the advanced care directive is a legal document and the poor patient really shouldn’t have been sent here in the FIRST place because now in the SECOND place they’ve been catheterised, cannulated and thoroughly messed about before I even saw them and then I have been obligated to violate their remaining dignity by examining them in a very personal fashion and on top of it they’ll be waiting at least eight hours for transport back home to quietly possibly die.

They always act like that is news.

Also, pointing out that very ill demented people really DON’T need a work up to determine if the cause of said bleeding is cancer after all (which it almost certainly is) on accounts of there is nothing anybody would or could do about it anyway seems to be even more late-breaking in the newsflash department to the staff of Certain Nursing Home.

Thank g-d the families have been so bloody (if you shall pardon the pun) reasonable about the whole mess.

G- the-spent-three-hours-today-trying-to-get-her-red-tape-together-for-an-upcoming-FET. And failed. And is pissed.

Hosing.

I fell a little bit like I should begin this post with a typed version of the heavy innnnHHHHHHHHHaaalation and exhalationnnn of fatigued resignation I feel, because you see I am three nights into my second week of nightshift running and I am, put quite simply, bloody knackered.

Oh, and I have my period, too, just for kicks. Whoopee.

Can I tell you how fecking sick to the back teeth I am of menstruating? 

Irritatingly enough, given that I stopped bothering keeping any record at all of what my fair-weather menstrual cycle is doing some time ago, I can’t even have the satisfaction of angrily counting up just how many utterly random periods I’ve had since I stopped taking the pill back in, um, 2004 (or was it 2005?). I can’t even bore you all by making an educated guess as to just how much shares in tampax are looking like a good proposition in these unstable financial times.

Except for those times where precisely nothing happens for months on end, I suppose. Then I keep the pee-test people rich, instead.

Regardless, I am menstrual, cranky and about to hear about a billion worried-well cretins turn up and completely miss the point of an accident and emergency department, yet again.

I mean, I understand that gastro is unpleasant enough because goodness knows I personally once thought I was going to DIE when I was vomiting out of my nose at 3am, but if you’ve already been to hospital two days prior and been sorted out and are noticeably NOT vomiting any more or even feeling remotely queasy please try not to look so surprised when I point out that you’ve already been TOLD how to deal with the expected watery diarrhoea and that it shall get better on it’s own and in it’s own damn time.

Go Home and Be Good. Keep your shit to yourself, I beg of you.

Besides, Dying Swan With Brow Wiping Mother In Tow, I don’t really believe you’ve been to the shitter 13 times in the hour prior to presentation if you then utterly fail to go to the can ONCE in the next four hours I have to spend pointlessly investigating you for something serious.

Dying Swan, You Have Gastro.

You’re going to live, I promise.

Coming to emergency to have this diagnosis re-confirmed just means that now about five other people in the waiting room are going to get gastro, too. I hate to sound judge-y but most people do not wash their hands well enough. That’s not a personal judgement, it’s plain fact because that’s how you got it in the first place.

While I’m dwelling in the vaguely revolting area that is eating traces of poo, better known as faecal-oral transmission, may I respectfully suggest you stop cooking for the rest of your family? Just a thought.

It  took me six painful hours to get rid of Dying Swan.

I’m not even going to discuss the woman who felt like coming in to Emergency to annoy us all with her three week chronic headache for which she hadn’t even taken a pain reliever in the last two because clearly there is no helping some people when it comes to judgement calls and their health.

I will however mention that last two patients of the night, one of whom I used to work with and very briefly scanned the triage notes before  blocking my ears, closing my eyes and uttering ‘la la LA LALALALALA for I cannot see this woman who I know and whose mother I know because NOW I also know she’s had the clap and at least one ectopic pregnancy and that is too much information already’.

Working near where you live has it’s drawbacks sometimes although it’s brilliant on the petrol bill. Additionally, it’s farking sad because she’s my age, got married ten years ago, is onto her second blown tube and, surprise! No babies.

The only thing that trumped it was the 40 something with the bloody lucky pregnancy that turned up hosing out excitingly in that distinctly becoming-very-unpregnant way. We had to wake up the anaesthetist and send her to theatre, and THEN we had to mop up blood from the waiting room, the wheelchair, the floor and empty the suction canister of nearly half a litre of the stuff.

The poor thing.

Wish me luck tonight and if anybody has had a fit of inspiration as to what I do at what was meant to be my IVF appointment in a few days other than rush is saying ‘Um, ABOUT THAT, well, uh. My Bad, I Guess Not’ and bolt out again (minus quite a lot of money), I’d love to hear it.

Suggestions welcome.

Adios Arseholia

I really am not a bad person, so I just can’t understand why some people morph into instant arsehats when I speak to them in a professional capacity, really I can’t.

If you haven’t worked it out from the plaintive tone, my last harrah in the land of KY rectal exams sucked so deeply on so very many levels that I nearly went back in today ON MY DAY 19 HOURS OFF on my OWN time, just to get some return yelling in. I figured it might make me feel slighty better.

Don’t worry, I didn’t do it, but only because Naan took a giant crap right on the only carpeted surface in my bathroom (a rug) while I was busy in the shower shaving my bikini line. That was my morning gone, in a turd between the toes fiesta.

Since I was for modesty’s (such as it is with twins who both poke me in the crotch and shriek MAMA’S FAN-FAN at strangers in public) sake facing the other way at the time of the Free-Range Turd,  I turned around just in time to catch the rise from squatting position and ever so slightly too late to stop her then treading in her own excrement and then sprinting around the bathroom.

That is how I came to possess only 50% shaved privates today.

Anyway, I was moaning about work and it goes like this:

1. If you ring me up just to relieve YOUR frustration by screaming at me because I do not intimately know the plan that the plastic surgeons have in mind for one of the SIXTY patients I am covering, a patient I happen to not know from a hole in the ground on accounts of they belong to another unit entirely, you can damn well put up with my sarky observation that my ESP is clean and broken and just shut up already. My pager went off six times in one minute while you were yelling at me and I really just don’t have the time for ritual floggings. Try calling the plastic surgeons instead, and asking them to, I dunno, WRITE SOMETHING in the notes for THEIR patient. I’m busy organising a central line and ICU bed for somebody who is actually Sick, as opposed to abusing random cover doctors for not being psychic.

2. If you are walking around my hospital with a staff tag on, the appropriate response to a referral is NEVER ‘I don’t work in this hospital, ask somebody else tomorrow’, because well, my operating definition of working in a hospital involves wandering around with a staff tag on and refusing to do any work if you can possibly avoid it. That would be YOU, Lazy Locum Registrar.

3. If it’s your last day and you can’t get an IV started in a patient just have the balls to call up the anesthetist and ask them to help you out. THAT is what the anesthetist and their portable ultrasound machine is goddamn FOR. Eveybody fails sometimes. The appropriate response is NEVER to tell the nursing staff to ask ME to do it later when you have happily fucked off home, because that  my friends is pretty nasty and may possibly result in the words ‘little shit’ escaping my lips. Also, and for the record, the lady in question had veins like hosepipes.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s nightshift tonight. Also, some bitch from switchboard rudely WOKE ME UP at 7am to yell at me because I didn’t return my pager to switch but left it on the ward office desk for the next poor sap on accounts of I left work after 10pm. When the main switch office is closed.

Arsehats, all of ‘em.

Bet you’re all insanely jealous of my life right now.

Break out.

Dear Internet,

Geepers, but I think there’s cobwebs on my keyboard.

However. 

Rather than merely apologising profusely yet again (because I know how dull that is) about how much my busy arse fails you all these days when it comes to moaning to the world at large about how much my life happens to damn well suck the chrome off a towbar right now, I bring you important news.

Huzzah, for I have but two covershits to go in the Land Of Bum.

Yes, I am aware that I left an ‘f’ out of covershift and it was Utterly On Purpose.

Let’s not bother to pretend that anybody is shocked at this point if I disclose how much I hate busy ward cover when I should by rights be eating copious amounts of chocolate in the resident’s quarters while surfing the ‘net except I can’t because people who really could do with some iodine in their diet keep shitting me to tears all damn day  HAVING A LIFE.

I am here chasing spiderlings out of my figurative online space to say that in two days my official hours shall halve.

Okay, so UNOFFICIALLY they won’t and I AM kind of working a circadian-breaking ungodly amount of rotating nightshifts, but hey, I have twins. I am good at getting my underwear on after two hours’ sleep.

Just don’t expect it to be on the right way around is all,  and if I am frowning when I am asking about your chest pains it’s because the tag is running my c-section scar red raw and I can’t scratch my crotch until I’m out of eyesight, okay?

In the meantime, I leave you with the following newsflashes:

1. Putting an IV in a demented man who is doing his best to bleed to death out of his arse at 10 pm plain old sucks. Especially when you have to resort to IM sedation retrieved from the psych ward to avoid having your head knocked off while doing so. Also, when performing a rigid sigmoidoscopy on such a patient KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT at all times. Just saying.

Don’t google that term, please.

2. No, I didn’t put a catheter in him, even though I should have. He went apeshit when I went near his ARM for sweet christ’s sake, can you imagine what would have happened if I went for his penis?

3. The surgical ward is a Very Bad Place in which to have a heart attack. THAT by the way was only detected because I figured that bleeding freely out of one’s arse shouldn’t result in such combative behaviour and went hunting for other explanations.

The sad thing is that in regards to number three above, my boss was most unimpressed and ask I refrain from looking for trouble in the future.

See you on the flipside,

G (with the IVF appointment in a few weeks. Eep!)

PS. Also, despite claiming every second I was at work as paid overtime (instead of the traditional medical model of being paid in bitch and moan and bitter thoughts in hope of climbing the greasy pole to Better Things) and being paid a budget breaking mint as a result, guess who got first class feedback for services sleepily rendered and was asked to consider changing well-laid plans to enter OB training next year in favour of surgical training?

So much for the rumours that claiming overtime was instant career suicide. I have three new referees who all want to give me a job.

Don’t laugh, that really was what happened to me.

Go figure, eh? When you really have nothing to lose, people go and like you anyway.