Don’t make me laugh

[Yes this is another medical related blog but you’ll all love it. All 3 of you]

This one‘s for all the people I amuse at dinner parties (like I go to dinner parties… really I mean just dinner) with rude x-rays.

This one is written by a guy I pulled a shoulder with once

Hat-tip to Vinny for the website.

How you can mend a broken heart

Roughly 4 years ago I started to blog (on a different site) and this was one of my very first.

long time no blog people, my apologies. Busy with lots of different  stuff. I was on a course with work last week. Interesting experience.  You get thrown in a room together with all these random punters who  become your “group”, we were group E, we rocked. It was a life  support course so it was lots of role playing and pretending that the  dummy in front of you is having a heart attack, and then shouting  CLEAR and shocking them with the defibrillator thingy. But it’s not  hard not to get into it, and all of a sudden the whole group is  pretending to treat this plastic dummy and saying calming reassuring  things to it.

You also get all that wonderful small talk, trying to engage in  conversation with this random punter. “so.. where do you work then?”  My job becomes that much of my identity that i find it hard to engage  in conversation with people on any other level. I always had this bit of a thing against small talk and superficiality. How we have a  complete inability to say what we actually mean and instead stick to Coronation St and the footy, nice safe topics.

So by the end of our two day course, we’d bonded to a certain extent,  we knew each others jobs well and a brief insight into our  personalities. And i suppose they knew i was a decent enough guy,  that i was involved in “church stuff”. But none of them came in  contact with the JESUS of the gospels. I made sure he was hidden deep  under layers of banal superficiality.

By the way the dummy had an extended period in ICU but recovered to  walk out of hospital and to full recovery only to be killed testing  air bags 2 months later.

After 4 years of resuscitating actual people I’m not sure I’ve learnt that much more about. We do it infrequently and it is almost universally a failure. If you’re sick enough to need CPR then you’re almost definitely stuffed. Except if you’re a newborn baby when a vigorous towelling and a bit of a squeeze on the chest seem to do wonders.

So 4 years on I’m back on an APLS (Advanced Paediatric Life Support) course (apparently someone started a mock course called Advanced Faecal Life Support – in honour of Mr Hankey the Christmas Poo) in Newry.

And I realise that I kind of know all this stuff already. Shouting at a manequin and pretending to intubate dummies is not so realistic once you’re actually done the real thing. Alas it’s a little piece of paper I’m meant to have so I can’t moan too much.

This type of thing breeds arrogance in me – “won’t you all just shut up with your nonsense protocols and realise that I am the king of all things…” Something like that.

Started at 8am and finished at 7pm. And it’s meant to be a wee dossy day away from actual work…