Reality (vs) TV

Pretty much every doctor in England likes nothing better than a good piss-ripping session about the medical dramas that proliferate daily to fill our TV schedules. Whether it be the upside down x-ray, the incorrect management plan or the fact that the fresh-from-med-school house officer has just been left to perform open heart surgery on some old dear while the consultant nips out to the bogs to self-medicate with another hit of stolen pethidine, it does sometimes all conspire to make you think that no amount of medical advisors will ever stop them getting it all so horribly wrong.

To my own mind, however, the truly amusing thing about the medical soaps is how wonderfully glamorous they make medicine seem. If it’s not the fact that everybody is hotter than a page 3 hotty, then perhaps it's the fact that they seem to pass their whole day making end-of-the-bed, life-saving spot diagnoses or cutting people back to health without breaking a sweat and all in time to grab that quick beer after work with the fit patient whose entire previously-insoluble life problems they sorted out earlier with a few well-chosen words!

But O the reality of it! And O how it bites tonight!

‘Venflon needs doing for bed 5 and 26 and there’s a drug chart needs rewriting for bed 15’ was the greeting I received when I stepped onto the ward tonight. Not even a ‘how-are-you?’ or ‘sleep-well?’; just straight down to the nitty gritty of it. I answered my bleep a little later to have ‘dhere’s pus needs took to the lab from t'eatres’ barked into my ear by Ms McFeisty, the leprechaun of neurosurgical registrar on call with me tonight. There’s something in Ms McFeisty’s manner that tells you she didn’t get to where she is today by battering her eyelids and smiling coyly; no, I see scalps taken and the scrotums of enemies crushed beneath a stiletto heel. Think less Goldilocks and more Martin McGuinness with tits. (Oh, I'm sorry: I temporarily forgot that Mr McGuinness is now a noble statesman committed to the peaceful release of his country from the shackles of its colonial oppressors, and not in fact a murderous terrorist in a balaclava who'd have your kneecaps off at the drop of a hat.) Anyway, I entered theatres to find the McFeisty energetically sucking the pus from a young man’s brain whilst simultaneously berating the scrub nurse for not handing her the gauze fast enough. Without looking up she quickly spat out ‘19. IVDU. Cerebral abscess. On cef and rifampicin. Urgent Gramm stain. Results to ITU’. I waited a moment until I was sure the staccato list of instructions was over before I picked up the sample and left. So this is it – the culmination of six years and tens of thousands of pounds worth of education: ferrying pus around the hospital in the dead of night. Isn’t it just faaaabulous, daaarling!