So, another week of nights is over; I’m less sleep deprived than normal because I had another allergy shot today and felt that attempting to get into central London and get jabbed with needles with no sleep at all – at a time of day when I’m already normally feeling nauseous would be attrociously foolish. Instead, following the arrival of the builders I laid down in the bed and let sleep wash over me.
I’m feeling much better than I normally do but hesitantly suggest that I suspect it’ll screw with my sleep patterns. Since they are challenging enough to get back on track – this is probably a bad thing.
These nights have been fairly much horrendous; one of them was bad enough that I reached the stage of looking very fed up and ranting almost continuously. It was when it had taken me 2 and a half hours to finish filling in the second and third child-socialwork-discussion form simply because there was no one else available to cover triage (so every time a patient bboked in I’d stop and triage them) – not counting the two hours it had taken me to give up on the idea that there might at some point be someone available to cover me before I attempted to interleave the referral and the document completion. The words insanely busy and desperately short of our own staff sprung unbidden and frequently to mind. Sickness and vacancies can really screw with the skill mix…
Spent some more time in charge – and it was non-disasterous.
Anyhow, as the nights flew past I contemplated how people abuse the ambulance service, the emergency department, and I suspect public services in general.
And the lack of realistic expectations. I don’t expect pissy ‘that long’ responses to a wait time of an hour for minor injuries. Frankly I think that’s pretty bloody fantastic. And when I say ‘no, I won’t be putting you ahead of everyone else because you’re in a hurry’ (albeit more politely), whining at me isn’t likely to improve things. Potentially severing am artery while you wait might make me reconsider, but then you’re unlikely to make it to whatever you’re endevouring to hurry for. And perhaps if you *are* in a hurry, attending the ED at 0200 with your two week old provlem is not the best bit of planning.
Sorry, that turned into a bit of a rant.
What has kept me occupied over the last week has been poling around the nets looking for a GT 550. Not the suzuki two-stroke triple, temptingly insane though it is (they seem to have aquired somewhat of a cult status) but the work-a-day Kawasaki. It seems I’m not going to be in luck though, because I want one with a dinky MZ like faring and a top box, which is also a runner, and in fair shape… And they seem to go up in price somewhat quickly… Or in the vase of the one I really wanted it for removed (presumably sold locally :( ). I’m also pondering the Rotax ‘zed; or maybe even no bike, but having endured riding in winter it’d be nice to get some summer riding in. I am, essentially bored of kickstarting. Wuss that I am. I’m becoming weak and feeble in my old age ;)
The other fun thing has been doing the podcast. I’ve been really enjoying the research for the show – I need to relax a bit at the start of the show, and Nikki’s promised better software for me to use (and John’s apparently repaired a better quality capture device) so we should be upping the quality of the show soon :)
So far we’ve not hit the bandwidth on my hosting here; I’m assuming that it’s never going to be awesomely and suddenly popular; so if it starts to get close I’ll pay for more bandwidth :)