The Witching Hour

Ah, nights - ya gotta love 'em!

Well, actually you don't. They're shit. I am but half way through my punishment and I've already had enough. Here in the rarified surroundings of my hallowed institution, we get to cover both neurosciences and neurosurgery at night. One can only imagine how thrilled the patients, their famillies and attendant lawyers would be to learn that the doctor looking after them doesn't know a monkey's fuck about what has or is about to happen to them. By now I've given up trying to delicately bat away questions about what exactly various surgeries entail and have instead decided that it's far more fun to just make up what I think my happen. Spinal decompression, I explain, is much like loosening your tie and undoing that top button on ya shirt when you've got a headache - it gives the cord a bit more room to breathe, see? Nobody seems to care anyhow.

Most of the work is mundane. Like a machine I process the new admissions, producing beautiful crafted clerkings for elective surgical patients that I know nobody will ever read. What do the surgeons care if vibration sense is decreased in the left leg or there's a hiss of mitral regurg? All they do is drool and dribble over the prospect of fresh flesh to cut. A starved patient with a beating heart and normal bloods will do them just nicely thank you.

Still, there is the odd bit of fun to keep you ticking over. Last night one of the epileptics went crazy. I heard the nurse screaming as I was cannulated some old dear down the corridor. I popped my head round the door just in time to see Cathy being chased into the female bay by a man wearing only white briefs, screaming in Italian and waving his clenched fists around in a murderous rage. In the carnage that ensued we managed to wrestle him to the ground but only after he'd knocked one old dear flying off her commode, sending a river of rancid piss dangerously close to my knees. Somehow he'd managed to bite his tongue and, as he arched his back and writhed under the weight of four burly security guards, blood pouring from the sides of his mouth, alternating between blasphemous Italian and maniacal laughter, I did have the distinct in impression that I might be in a remake of the Exorcist or the like. In the end it took one and a half hours and 50mg of diazepam i.v. to fully exercise his demons, after which he was carried like a limp rag doll and dumped back on his bed to 'sleep it off'. Cathy complained loudly that she needed danger money to do this job and I nodded soothingly and reassured her that diazepam is long-acting. All the same, it beats clerking.