I’ve had mixed feelings about Christmas this year… On the happy side, it was mine and Matt’s first Christmas together!! Like proper grown-ups! We both worked on Christmas Day so we decided that Christmas dinner/supper is going to be chicken and chips (home-made of course to mark the special occasion), followed by a share tub of Ben & Jerrys (is there such a thing as a share tub?) and a few glasses of fizzy stuff! We both worked on boxing day too so we daren’t indulge too much.  On the ‘what have I done to deserve this?’ side, on the Christmas rota it would appear that I’m working almost every shift with Jo. Cos it’s Christmas, it’s a pretty scant rota and Steve is helping us all out by working as a nurse, rather than in his usual Charge Nurse role, but he’s basically having Christmas off and working New Year….happy days…not! Jo is furious with me after I arranged for a dying patient to have one last Christmas. We received a huge hamper of chocolate from her daughte...

I am officially loved up! My dates (yes dates, plural) with Matt have been awesome and so it was with a spring in my step that I returned to work last Monday after my annual leave. I must have looked a proper gorm, smiling from ear to ear with that faraway look in my eyes. In fact, during handover one of the nurses asked me if I’d been overdosing on Krispy Kremes for breakfast again!  I couldn’t wait to see my patients in Eden Bay. A couple of my ladies had been discharged, but I had new ones to get to know and then there was the die-hards – the ladies who seemed to have been there forever but who never failed to keep me on my toes. It was lovely to see them again and even more lovely when they told me that they’d missed me. Jo wasn’t on duty my first day back so I was quite relaxed and spent time catching up with my patients’ progress and finding out what I could about my new admissions. I was regaling them with tales of my dates with Matt and we were having a proper...

So here I am – 5 months into my first permanent role as a staff nurse and I’ve actually managed to have a full two weeks off! I’ve been meaning to have some time off for a while now and had actually booked leave in January – however, the events of the past couple of weeks has made me realise that I need a bit of time to think and to recharge my batteries – just some ‘Me’ time, if you know what I mean.   I won’t lie – I was tempted to go and get a sick note and go off with stress, but that would make me feel like a fraud, there are people who are genuinely off with stress and I didn’t want to go down that route if it could be helped.  Dealing with Jo and her antics has started to become a full-time job in itself. Not only did she pull that meds stunt on me, but she’s since made it really clear that I’m on her radar, and she’s picking and poking whenever she gets a chance. Take, for example, the ward round last week.  Steve, the Charge Nurse has asked me to att...

It’s been a couple of weeks now since ‘Denturegate’ – where I accidentally sent Mrs Wright’s nashers off for plastic surgery, and I’m still not fully over it. I know it might seem a small mistake when you think of all the things that can go wrong in a hospital (just look at the NMC hearings on their website to see some of the life-threatening mistakes that are made), but I really disappointed myself. I thought this job had helped me to mature and get over my propensity to cock-up in style, but clearly not.  I’ve been like this all my life. All the way through school I was the kid who couldn’t control her own limbs – tripping up in the dinner hall with a full plate of shepherd’s pie and gravy, knocking things off shelves as I walked past them, knocking people over even…you can just imagine. Being a bigger kid just added to the comedy and I got used to laughing it all off and got a reputation for being the class clown. I was determined to change that now.  Most of m...

I spy with my little eye, something beginning with ‘N’… Nurse ? More like Numpty... It’s been a painful week. Painful in every sense of the word. Let’s start with the physical pain element and get that out of the way. I nipped into my favourite bargain shop on the way home from work feeling quite smug and prepared for the cold snap that’s been screamed out of every radio station. It’s clearly time for 100 denier tights and I grabbed a couple of pairs for less than the price of a mega kebab with chilli sauce! Happy days!! And that was where the happiness ended. Fast forward 12 hours…stumbling round in the dark trying to get ready for work and I am knackered before I even run for the bus, wrestling into these bloody tights. I swear they must have been sized wrongly, as they wouldn’t fit an anorexic scarecrow. I look in the mirror (just to check I’m not severed at the midriff) and see a giant black pudding ring staring back at me – which reminds me that I haven’t got time (or ro...

Last week we said a final goodbye to Gramps, on what would have been his 67 th birthday. I’d never been to a funeral. I’ve been lucky enough not to have lost anyone from my family before, so this was a first for me, and despite the great sadness and sense of hollow loss, it was a beautiful service. I learnt so much about Gramps that I had never known. He’d had such a hard and tragic life that it was a wonder he kept smiling. He’d lost his Mum at 11 to bowel cancer, and then his Dad had died of a broken heart a couple of years later. He had two younger brothers who he’d tried to look after but they were eventually taken into care and he ran away, and stayed hidden until he was old enough to join the Army. He’d only found one of his brothers a few years before – he’d emigrated to Australia. They had reunited only once before Gramps left us. So sad… I remember looking at his memorial card with the dates of his birth and death. In the middle was this tiny little dash that signifie...

Life is an imperfect merry-go-round - plenty of ups and buckets-full of lows. This week is definitely in the arse end of life and one I hope I don’t have to experience again for a very long time. I’ve been off for the past week – well, I say off. I’ve probably spent more time in the hospital than if I’d been working! It started on Friday afternoon. Mum rang the ward (highly embarrassing; I remember when she rang the school to tell them I’d forgotten to put my knickers on that morning) to tell me that Gramps (my lovely Grandad) had been taken to A & E with suspected pneumonia. I wasn’t overly worried as Gramps has COPD and had become a regular visitor to the hospital. He usually got admitted for a few days while they cleared the infection and then went home, right as rain. I assured Mum that I would pop down there on my break to see how he was doing. She huffed and puffed a bit, but I was quite firm with her and she hung up in a bit of a mood.  I did as any dutiful ...