Welcome to the working week

My time here is over for a while. Till September at least and then they’re taking me back for another 8 months for more anatomy teaching. Me teaching them I hope…

I’ll also be moonlighting at this

So between now and then I’m gloriously unemployed.

Well not exactly. I’ll be heading back north to work at my old shop in Craigavon.

I’ve missed the work I must say. The anatomy stuff was/is a lot of fun. You learn a lot and teaching is a lot of fun, but now it’s over I find myself getting a little bit restless and needing a bit of a challenge.

Dealing with patients is good for you. In the way that being amongst people is good for you. People are good for you because it’s hard bloody work. Good, hard, bloody work.

In emergency depts. the work is often literally, good, hard, bloody work.

Stanley tells me that medicine is a moral act. I’m inclined to agree with him. Moral acts require virtue (at least that’s my take from reading the first half of this) and medicine has certainly been morally formational for me.

If patients were people that I just happened to come in contact with, i could go around believing that I owed them no real duty as human beings. It would of course be untrue, but I live like that most of the time.

When I’m in a hospital as a certain professional, there exists a certain covenant (as Paul Ramsey would have termed it), a relationship that is more clearly defined and understood by both parties.

When I talk to patients if I want to practice virtue before them, it requires all kind of moral energy. Patients have a tendency to kick your sinful, selfish little ass and remind you of what it means to love people.

On most days I could do with my ass kicked in such a way.

[The photo above is the famous Vesalius one. Worth reading the link about him. There’s lots of that kind of thing on the display in the Long Room in TCD at the minute, including the skeleton of Cornelius McGrath, borrowed from our “office”. Incidentally, an 8 ft wall mount of the Vesalius hung on the wall of our dissection room, one of the many things we might not have room for in the new building on Pearse St.]