Category: General

I know I seem to be becoming more granola as time goes on, but let me just remind my brain that I do not need a pickup.

In other news, possible podcast forthcoming.

So, today has been a day of trying to catch up on the many days where I’ve failed to do anything useful due to an addiction to Chuck. I’d been working on my 52 week (or in my case, 156 week) programme from work last week, and done a fair amount of laundry, but that’s it.

Today the carpenter’s been and gone, and he’s put the final bit of skirting in the lounge; I’m pleased to see that he couldn’t actually do it with a single bit of wood, the curve is too tight, or at least, it’s too tight to do without expending a lot of money on pressure-steaming a bit of wood; so it’s made of laminated MDF now.

The filler’s drying and will get sanded and painted later this week.

I’ve switched it so the AA cover now covers Chester for our trip to France later in the year, booked the Volvo in for a service, arranged the return of our rug (uncleaned, I’m going to have to rent a carpet cleaner), I’ve attempted to contact the vancouver nursing people (but, uh, their office is in Vancouver, and isn’t open at 3am or whenever it was that I tried to ring. Oops). I’ve got a couple of piano quotes, organised some money transfers to pay for more mog works, and emptied the shelves in the office – and e-mailed the builder about the crack that’s appearing.

Over the weekend we went and looked at houses in Cornwall for my mum, I’m hoping that all goes well for her…

And now, back to developing my knowledge. I hope I get the SSN position after all this bloody work.

So, for the past week I’ve done an average of one load of laundry a day; we’ve done multiple loads ever since the washer/drier arrived… And I’ll grant the pile of laundry is smaller.

But not as much smaller as it should be. It peaked at around 5′ high with the dead washer/drier; but it’s still more than one laundry basket full…

Gah?

‘The scrappage scheme was announced as part of the Budget on 22 April 2009 as a temporary measure to support the motor trades sector. ‘

Oh, not to save the environment then? No? I’m confused. You said it was to save the environment – instead it was a temporary measure to prop up an ailing industry that’s not even ours¹ at the expense of our frail environment (considering it takes an old car roughtly 100,000 miles to put out the amount of pollution required to produce one new one).

Well, that seems wise. I trust our government completely now with making good environmental policy, don’t you.

¹ since we don’t actually make cars anymore. All the companies supported are based… outside the UK. So propping up foreign companies² is a great plan for the UK government.
² At the expense of UK industry – and the cutsy idea that we could, say, do something towards building a green economy.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

Bad things:
– The court thing is making me super stressed. I feel faintly nauseous (at times, actually quite), and since I can’t find the information I need I’m spending the morning ringing the appropriate court trying to catch the individual who deals with civil claims.
– The DAF has been unsold. Sadly the buyer’s finances did not work out, and so I need to sort-her (fix exhaust, paint, etc) and sell-her… again.
– I’d forgotten how stress feels, proper stress that doesn’t exit my brain after a few minutes. I hate this.

*sigh*

So, I’m in Somerfield buying myself a treat* for doing the civil claim stuff**, and I get to the till – pop my stuff at a safe distance behind the person in front (there’re no ‘next customer’ dividers and wait). I get to the front of the queue and while the woman in front is paying someone arrives behind me and starts shoving their shopping right to the front of the conveyor mixing my (thankfully only) two items in with theirs.

I have to pick mine out of his collection and hand them to the cashier who’s looking quite confused.

Since when was that acceptable behaviour?!

*le sigh*

Anyway, paperwork calls***.

* Technically two treats, a book from the charity shop, because we just don’t have enough books*** and a maple/pecan pastry.
** Not the one I plan to bring against C/Ware, but the one that is being brought against me by Dragon EVs.
*** Paperwork and money are the things that give me the most stress. I know my bloodpressure is probably up, and I have a raging headache, and I feel faintly awful. Great. I hate that man.

So, back onto a few days. Well, a few days off. Well, two weeks if I’m strictly honest.

Which means I’ve just come off nights.

Some of the worst nights I’ve experienced. The first time I’ve ever been in charge (which was surprisingly okay, if very stressful). The patient volume this week has been incredible. Prolonged cold weather means lots of sickening older people, people with rubbish lungs, or rubbish circulation getting unwell.

The people the GPs and crews were sending/bringing in seemed much sicker than I’m used to, and in some cases really tested my abilities. The department actually ran out of some fairly important drugs, not the hospital, thankfully. But when you’re completely exhausted and you open the drug cupboard and see a space where the antibiotic you need for the septic patient should be, it’s really quite distressing. Thankfully our sister department helped out, and so did ITU, and eventually quite a lot of wards found they were donating drugs to the ED.

And equipment. Our ECG machines, overworked and battered* as they are started to fray – thankfully we got a loaner and with some cunning application of MZ skills one of them was persuaded back into working. Of course, that didn’t help when we ran out of paper.

Incidentally, I hate equipment manufacturers. We don’t, unfortunately, have one standard type of monitor, or one standard type of ECG. Two brands of ECG machine and they have two separate types of paper. Which means that we get through a lot more of the paper for the older machines (reliable, work almost all the time) than for the new machines (flakey as hell, crappier trace). The paper is not interchangeable. Guess what we end up using more when we’re more pushed? Yeah****.

I’ve never been “in charge” of anywhere before. It’s scary. Suddenly the life and death of everyone in the department ultimately resides with you. Where you assign patients to, it matters. You need to think about the skills, the knowledge of the nurse who’s going to admit & care for them, the abilities and familiarity of agency staff with the department. The equipment available in the bay they’ll be going in to. I apologised to ‘my’ resus nurses, because I used them more than I imagine I normally would, just because we had 2 agency staff who I were new to the ED.

I also had one of those phases. For a night and a bit I could not, for the life of me, get a cannula in first time. Quite often I stuffed up the second time as well. It was frustrating, and the more frustrating it got, the more it became a self fulfilling prophecy. Finally, I got my mojo back, and eventually ended up cannulating someone that the doctor’s hadn’t managed. More luck than pride, but it made me feel better, and it meant we could start getting her the fluids she so desperately needed.

But it wasn’t that that made me feel good. One night this week I had a proper sick patient. A complex, difficult to manage, really deeply unwell patient. And the Doctor and I worked as a team, then the specialists came down and we all did the proper team thing.

His blood pressure was a nightmare, we didn’t want it too high – just around 100 systolic – because we didn’t want to make the internal bleeding worse. But at the same time we needed to perfuse his organs. We knew we were diluting down what blood he had, so were trying to be sparing, but he was totally fluid dependent (as soon as we stopped fluids, his blood pressure would drop – stone like)*****. I found out this morning that we did it right. He’s in ITU recovering from a whole slew of procedures in theatre.

And y’know? I feel like I did good :)

* I’ve noticed other departments seem to treat equipment with a lot more respect. We tend to slam ours into doors, floors and walls**.
** Not on purpose, it’s just we’re…well, in a hurry***.
*** Just ask my hand which met, ironically, the helium cylinder for blowing up kids balloons, and now has a big gash in it.
**** And just guess how many different Oxygen sats probes there are, or ECG leads, or even sodding blood pressure cuffs.
***** We were holding off the O-negative (universal donor) blood for the minute, waiting for the crossmatched blood.

So, I’ve narrowed it down to the Flash plug-in. Disabling it results in a happy clappy machine. Enabling it leads to Urgh-splutch events. Unfortunately, much of the internet is Flash based these days.

Anyone got any suggestions? I tried uninstalling/reinstalling Flash, that didn’t solve it…

So, something is making all the browsers on my nice shiny laptop crash. As in properly needing force-quitting crash. In fact, for the first time in my ownership that I recall the laptop had to be forcibly powered off and restarted yesterday after one of these instances.

I don’t know what it is, I’ve got as far as “it’s probably a plugin of some sort” because it affects Chrome, Firefox and Safari. iPlayer kills it stone dead straight away. But it seems to be happening on random pages. I was thinking flash, so I might rip the flash plugin out, and try that.

Was working *fine* yesterday, though, and I’ve not installed anything for a while (apart from Chrome a few days ago). Bah.