Where there's no sense there's no feeling

Theresa and Jane

I have long thought that when an animal is injured or sick, , 
the dumber it is, the more likely a prognosis will be good.
This is especially true of animals that have experienced catastrophic injuries or infections.
Theresa is a case in point.
Weeks ago I found a festering infected injury under her wing.
This was a result of some strenuous lovemaking by Boris and Bingley, who unfortunately could not rein in their sharp dinosaur claws at the the apex of passion.
The injury looked necrotic to me and smelled dreadful.
I cleaned it with a strong antiseptic,then sprayed the whole area with purple antibacterial spray and left her in her own run with the slate female Jane for company.
Now Theresa has all the brains of an average rice pudding.
She eats, she sleeps and she walks.
That's it! 
She does very little else....oh apart from getting mildly excited once in a blue moon over a few spoonfuls of dog food and even then her excitement only manifests itself with a ever so slight quickening of her usual plodding amble.
If she were human.... she would be  Miss Scofield in Alan Bennett's play A Woman Of No Importance


Yet, I do have a soft spot for the old girl. She was a charity case several years ago and arrived in the field sat vacantly in the boot of a farmer's car, she was thick as mince then and is thick as mince now.... but there is always something quite sweet about an animal who merely "plods along " in life.........and  so yesterday I decided to check on the state of the wound and if it was no better, I would arrange, with my brother in law, to have her culled.
She sat blinking stupidly in my arms when I cornered her and with a heavy heart I raised her wing to have a look at the infected wound.
But there was nothing there....absolutely NOTHING.A few purple feathers and some pink skin that was all.....the wound had vanished.
Not a huge deal in the great scheme of things I know..... but it's nice to have a little victory just once in a while.............

Postscript

The weather has been so kind today, so we got the "queeny"tea cups out and had a rather spiffing lunch in full view of our amused neighbours!

working tonight!

Keep with it

Adduct or Abduct?

As a nurse I should remember the difference between adduction and abduction
One is the ability to bring a part of your anatomy towards your body's midline, the other is the ability to move it away.....whatever the word, this morning I am having a little trouble "spreading my legs" so to speak.


This inability dovetails quite neatly next to yesterday's blog about feeling "old" and somewhat worn out....sometimes a person just forgets that they are indeed a creaking gate rather than a buxom young thing!


Yesterday afternoon I was standing in the lane talking to Della from Pen-y-cefn Isa farm. The weather was glorious , so it was one of those days that villagers stopped to chat over the garden wall and through the field gate.
As we chatted I heard a call for help and up the lane I sped a neighbour calling frantically from his back garden. I knew his wife had been ill recently and thinking I was every inch the Intensive care nurse, I sprinted up the lane and launched myself up and over the chest high wall which led up a steep bank up behind their house, leaving Della and Chris who had just arrived home from work, standing there somewhat open mouthed


Now I am not known for my physical prowess!
I was always picked second from last for games at school......
Indeed in 1990, when I took part in a charity assault course with a team of nurses, the whole team ( which included a lady of pensionable age) all had to stop to "help " me over the 6 foot wall!
But that's another story
Anyhow, like I said, I am not the body beautiful, but the combination of adrenaline, a strong coffee and foolhardiness gave me a "spurt on" so to speak and I cleared the wall like an Olympic athlete, and rolled somewhat theatrically in the dust in a "Starsky and Hutch" way before bouncing into the garden.


My neighbour's wife had, as it had turned out, taken a bit of a minor tumble and was absolutely fine once I had got her into the house, more than could be said for my 50 year old groins who couldn't quite believe that they had been stretched way beyond their usual limitations so to speak.


This morning I am walking a little like a constipated and delicate old mincing queen...


Has anyone got a remedy for an over stretched gusset?
answers on a postcard please........

Just To Get On Tom's Tits

* I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

I will be turning 50 in one weeks time.
and I have said this all before
Suddenly I feel middle aged 
I felt even older this morning when I was handing my patient over to a new staff nurse on the unit.
Over half my age and with a shit load more chutzpah than I ever possessed at that age, the staff nurse with his over confident air, even tan and perfect teeth, was just that little too bouncy and youthful at 8.00am for my liking.
Even at 23, I was never like him.
I was the shy guy with no dress sense and a bad haircut.
I was the one with bits of my dinner splashed over the front of my jumper!


This morning,as I was giving report, I could see him excitedly planning his work for the day, and with plenty of exuberance, he launched himself into his clinical work like a Labrador puppy mouthing a bone.
With my sagging jowls feeling even more "saggy", and my eyes looking like piss holes in the snow I left him to it and walked to a colleague in her side room on the way out . 
Gently I leaned my weary head on her shoulder and said tiredly "I wish I have perfect teeth and energy to die for!"
My co worker who is  a motherly welsh woman, knocked heads with me,
almost bumping my £5.99 reading glasses off my head


"..at least you can make me laugh" she said.......


" I bet Woody Allen is always being told the same thing" I replied

* The title is one of Woody's more thoughtful quotes

Bitter & Twisted

Monday it was all about a spunky Irish Staff Nurse,
Yesterday it was a piece about modern art
Today, we are back to normal,
It's a blog about a bitter and twisted white guinea fowl called Angostura

Angostura merrily ripping the arse feathers from a clueless Boris

In this world  mean animals are just as common as mean people.

Often there is no reason for it, as it is fairly rare that an animal has experienced an abusive and dysfunctional upbringing that could be blamed for ingrained antisocial behaviour.

Some animals are just bad tempered bastards, plain and simple!

I have once such animal, and her name is Angostura.

Angostura is a white female guinea fowl.

She is around two years old, and was brought to me by a poultry keeper from Prestatyn who asked if I could take her because she was just  too noisy to keep in a built up residential area.

The real reason for him re homing her , I suspect was a somewhat different story

Anyway, for those that don't know, guinea fowl can be incredibly noisy.

Males and females have distinctly different calls, but both can fire off warning calls with the intensity of an average machine gun when the mood takes them. In a town, this ability is an obvious no-no. In the country, however, these calls can be a vital alarm, warning me and everyone else within the village envelope that a fox is lurking somewhere out in the long grass.

My resident guinea fowl, Hughie, little Ivy and Alf are cracking watchdogs.

They will chatter angrily amongst themselves if they see so much as a cat that they don't recognise, and will scream a warning to anyone that is happy to listen if the animal farts in the wrong direction.....Angostura,however, is a somewhat different kettle of fish.

Most of her day is spent plotting murder and mayhem rather than watching and warning the field population. She is a bitch and is not a happy bunny.

The recipients of her bad temper, are the slower, weaker and more gentle of the field birds and in this respect, Angostura is no different than the average school yard bully.

50 times a day, and with her little black flinty eyes burning with uncontrolled anger, she will suddenly zoom in on a victim,  gallop up to it,  and then will grab a gobful of feathers before ripping them out with a somewhat theatrical flourish.before running away.

It's not a nice personality trait.

This morning I had had just about enough of her, for not only had she happily removed most of Boris' bum feathers as soon as his back was turned she had started to notice Sorrel's tiny single baby who had been hidden away in the allotment nursery cage with a worrying intensity..so it was effectively one spat too far when I spied her tugging at the tail feathers of a passing Indian Runner Duck at feeding time

Picking up a couple of tin feeding bowls and hissing a somewhat undignified "YOU ROTTEN LITTLE MISERABLE BASTARD!",I proceeded to chase the tiny nine inch bird around the field flinging the bowls at Angostura as I did so.

The chase carried on until I lost all my puff, and as I stood in the centre of the field all red faced and breathless, Angostura  retreated quite unscathed to the top of the Churchyard wall, where she watched me silently with her black, hard little eyes.

My neighbour Mandy who was pottering about her front lawn when all this was going on,

didn't batter an eyelid

She's well used to me after 6 years of such behaviour

Angostura 1

John 0

Christina's World

I am not really a fan of modern art, but every time Chris and I have visited New York, we try and make time to visit The Museum Of Modern Art on W53rd Street.
Years ago, one painting caught my attention and my imagination. It was Christina's World by Andrew Wyelth  Now, I had no idea just how famous the painting was in America, I was simply drawn to the picture's strange story of a frail, faceless woman in a field.
The inspiration for the painting was a lady called Christina Olsen, a probable polio sufferer, who Wyelth had once seen crawling across the Olsen family farmland. The model for the painting was in fact Wyelth's wife Betsy, who introduced him to Christina in 1939 and the two families became close friends for many, many years
Interestingly Christina, her brother Alvaro and Wyelth are all buried in the same cemetery , near to the Olsen farm in Maine
When I first saw the painting, I fell into conversation with an elderly New Yorker who asked me how the painting made me feel. I told him that I thought it was in many ways a powerful piece and that it reminded me of patients I had nursed with  paralysis.
This was before I knew any history of the painting, and my companion not only explained to me all about Christina Olsen but also took some time explaining that Andrew Wyelth was grieving for his father and nephew, who died in a train accident, when he painted the work.
"That's why the colours are all muted and the subject is so melancholic" I remember him explaining
I have loved this painting ever since.
To me it isn't a sad piece of work, but a hopeful one
It portrays someone who lives in a small, safe life......
A woman who looks into her world rather than gazing wistfully away from it


(We have a postcard of the painting on our fridge in the kitchen....I caught myself looking at it over morning coffee...hence the post! x)

Eunice Remembered

Funny how memory works.
One minute at the ungodly hour of 7am I am trying to give a cockerel his daily antibiotic
The next I am standing like a loon with a small smile upon my face, remembering the antics of a lumpy, much loved eccentric Irish nurse I once worked with by the name of Eunice.
Eunice was a ward manager's dream of a nurse.
She was a middle aged grafter; a carthorse of a nurse who would slog her guts out for a shift and still retain her loud,innately naive and essentially good natured personality, a vital aspect of keeping morale up in a high stressed environment.
Possessing a broad North Irish accent that could cut bread, Eunice could, at times be, incredibly  insensitive ( and loudly so!), but as she often "put her foot into things" without any maliciousness  whatsoever,  her faux pas were generally viewed with some affection.by staff and patients alike.
Three "Eunice" episodes come to mind.....
Well with a handful of squirming cockerel, they came into my mind this morning.


Once we had a bit of a gangster admitted several weeks after he was the victim of a drive by shooting He possessed a little bit of a "bad boy" reputation,especially when nurse/patient relationships where involved, a fact that resulted in the more nervous of the staff giving him a wider berth. Eunice either forgot or chose to disregard this fact and I remember seeing her cheerfully whistling her way up the ward corridor with a tray of tea things when she spied him sitting up in bed in his side room all buff and bare chested.
She looked at him for a moment and yelled
"och YOU'RE a fine figure of a man!"
The patient half smiled at the comment and Eunice continued
"Have you an extra nipple there? so  you have?"
The patient looked down at his chest and frowned
"It's a bullet hole scar" he said rather testily
"Och it looks just like a nipple to me!" Eunice shouted cheerfully and went on her way!
You couldn't make it up!


Another time, I recall meeting up with an incredibly distraught family in the public cafe which was situated by the main entrance of the Spinal Unit.It was one of those unexpected meetings that had to be dealt with "then and there" and using all of my counselling skills and sensitivity I found myself on my knees holding a mother's hand as she almost hysterically vented her grief and anxieties.
Eunice came out of a nearby hospital shop weighted down with chocolate for the ward staff and bounded over.
Without a thought she pushed between me and the relative and slowly inserted a family sized MARS bar into my uniform pocket, where it poked up next to my pens and scissors! 
"Excellent for stress" she bellowed before skipping off, leaving me and the relative ever slightly bemused!


But my overwhelmingly affectionate and sweetest memory of Eunice was from Lodge Moor Hospital, which was the first rehabilitation unit I worked with her . I had finished my morning shift early and was walking up the long, long pre war main corridor for home when I heard her shout "Hold onto yer drawers!!".
In the distance I spied one of the electric porters "buggies" coming towards me rather erratically ( you know the ones you see in 1960's movies towing the catering wagons) and as it got closer I noticed that Eunice was driving it. Four or five  shopworn rehab nurses were perched precariously on the back of it, all of them waving quite gaily and as it shot past me , I heard Eunice yell
"we've all had a bad shift and couldn't be ARSED walking back from the diving room"
Open mouthed I then watched the buggy turn the wrong corner , and with a loud bang it careered into the WRVS tea bar, scattering old ladies and overturning tables as it did so.
You could run by the seat of your pants in the nhs then.....
Today
You would be shot!
hey ho