The Sun On My Face

I've always made it my policy that if I see good clinical practice I let the person involved know what I think.
Last night I watched a young doctor deal with several complicated scenarios. These included a cardiac arrest, the admission of a desperately ill young man and several other knotty medical issues.
She competed her tasks with a cool and precise professionalism and in a brief lull in the proceedings I told her exactly what I thought of her.
I think she was surprised but pleased with the feedback.
It was a hard shift all told which she summed up beautifully to the tired group of nurses just before dawn
" I will be so grateful to feel the sun on my face in the morning" she said with feeling

Sunday

I was going to say it's a lazy day today, but already I have walked Mary in a power walk, ambled with the others, cleaned the cottage, prepared a roast lunch and cleared the ash from the woodburner.
It's fat club weigh in tomorrow and because we went out for a nice meal with friends last night where I had a baked Alaska to  myself, I need to keep activity levels up.
A farm lorry broke down on the school crossing this morning which caused a temporary gridlock in the village, a traffic jam only beaten by the moment Winnie decided to open her bowels on the zebra crossing at the end of school one summer's afternoon.
I stopped to say hello to Mrs Trellis who was on the way to church. She told me she was off to Spain on her holidays.t
Some new people were moving into ( or moving out of) one of the rented cottages on the main road, and I had to walk into the road with the dogs in order to pass their white van.
Short term lets do nothing for the village community. People come, they sleep, keep to themselves then go. It's a shame.
I spied Sandra C in her wellies as she ambled to her allotments behind Bonc terrace and Terry M who was out walking his dogs gave me the thumbs up when I called to him that the next Flower Show Meeting was due next week. Trelawnyd Val, who, comments here from time to time has agreed to join our committee though made it very clear that she doesn't DO scones! 
She will be a very welcome addition to our team of twelve.
Cameron the teenage boffin, is no longer the short geeky adolescent from last year, sporting longish studentish hair like Carl's  from The Walking Dead I caught him out jogging, a practise run for a half marathon he's doing to raise funds for his School's cricket pavilion.
I promised we would sponsor him , I think he's off to University this year!

The weather is warm and clear today, and all I can hear through the open cottage window is the crowing of the bachelor cockerels, the cheep cheep cheep of the sparrow flock on the stone wall and the dulcet tones of the Prof as he yells lustily at Winnie for accidently stepping on the tulips

3-0

I played the Professor at badminton yesterday

He was so competitive

I fucking won 3-0 

Not bad for a fat man

Retirement

" You're not old enough" 

" You'll be bored" 

"Really?" 

" What are you going to do with yourself?"

These are some of the reactions I have had from people when they hear that I am due to retire from nursing in August this year.

I've even had a lecture on just how the baby boomers should have paid more tax throughout their working lives from one person and a thinly veiled snort of disgust from another who equates retirement with waiting-to- die, old lady behaviours. 

Envy, resentment and irritation, I can understand, for many of the younger workforce coming through the system,  have to work until they are 65 before they can leave but the generalised negativity I have felt about Early retirement has surprised me.

I have worked since I was eighteen. Two years as a bank clerk, thirty five years as a nurse. I've trained four and a half years as a student nurse in mental health and general nursing and have spent another year specialist training in high dependency and spinal injury nursing. 

I have worked as a ward manager on an acute Spinal Injury Unit, facilitated good practice within sexual health care and like many of the specialised staff on rehabilitation units all over the world worked long unpaid hours providing extracurricular care to patients, many of which became firm friends.

I have also worked part of most weekends as an intensive care nurse for  over a decade.

I have mentoured, guided, disciplined and supported more staff than I care to remember and I have provided end of life care to patients and their families over a hundred times during long sad shifts.

I have been spat at, punched and slapped by patients and their family members.I have worked night shifts, Christmas days and most public holidays and have not had a pay rise for the past few years.

As a manager, I fought fires on a daily basis

And so I am looking forward to my retirement. 

I think I deserve it.

I hope to work occasionally, perhaps in the local hospice, a place which is more suited to my skills and experience, but retirement will ostensibly free up our weekends to do other things. 

Relatively soon we will move on from the village to pastures new. The Prof will blossom further up in his academic world and there are so many new things to do  learn, experience, travel to and enjoy.

I will also write my book, 

I may even have time to support Mary in some puppy care

It's time to move on.

Red Handed

Some of the stolen daffs! 

I was caught stealing this morning.

It all took place during a particularly heavy downpour which the old dogs and I got caught in after delivering a cheque to the trustees of the village hall. The cheque was a donation towards the Hall's decoration from the Flower Show committee, part of last year's donations ...and it was the only dry thing on me when Jean Smith opened her door to receive it. 

She offered me a spare coat, but I told her I was beyond caring, which was true. By the time we got back down the lane we all looked as though we had been thrown into a swimming pool. 

Now the piece of land behind our cottage has recently been sold. It is also covered in daffodils, survivors of the recent land clearance, so realizing that I couldn't get any wetter, the dogs  and I traipsed onto the plot and I helped myself to the flowers, something I have done for the past decade.

I had picked around two dozen daffs when the white van bounced through the gap in the wall and a middle aged guy sat in the drivers seat and frowned at me.

Red handed I decided to front it all out so I waved the flowers rather gaily at him and walked over as he got out of the van.

"Are You the new owner ? " I asked

" I am " he said

" I'm sorry but I've been stealing your daffs" I trilled lightly

" So I see" he answered without smiling.

It was all rather awkward for a moment until Winnie, who was sick to the back teeth of getting wet, pulled herself free of me and marched quicksticks off the plot into the direction of home with all of the grace of a pygmy hippo!

" She's a big girl" the man noted as she thundered past and as I agreed, I could see that the ice around the stolen flowers had suddenly been broken. 

A good job I thought later, upsetting neighbours is never a good idea.

 

Bollocks!

Sorrel gets somewhat nervous when negotiating trains home, so as the 10.04 virgin  train to London arrived three minutes early I got on with her to help locate her seat.
The fucking train left the station at 10.02!
The two elderly ladies sat across the aisle hooted with laughter when they realised, so much so that I nearly punched both hard in the face for their trouble.
I pressed the intercom to the driver which is located above the door but nothing happened. The train roared on, Sorrel looked more anxious and the two crones cackled harder with laughter.
Things got worse as after I disembarked at the next station, I missed the train back because, in the wet, as I was running down the steps of the pedestrian bridge, I lost a croc which slithered underneath the wooden decking.
A fat lady on an invalid scooter kindly lent me her crutch to fish the bloody thing out.

I'd left my coat in the car back at the original station and noted then that I had not bothered to buy a car park ticket before as I thought I 'd only be at the first station for a minute or so.

It then started to rain heavily!

Being Caught Unawares

In just a few days we have celebrated Mothering Sunday and Sorrel's birthday.
It's kind of " mother" overload, which is strange as my own mother died back in 2002.
Last night we all flopped in the living room to watch tv after a rather impressive meal out at the Chester  Grosvenor. The channel 4 documentary 24 Hours In A&E was on which proved to be somewhat of a busman's holiday for me and a rather gruesome spectacle for Sorrel.

One story featured a " before and after" moment with a prickly and somewhat lonely old lady called Wendy who had shattered her ankle after falling at home.

She was feisty, opinionated bordering on rude, brittle and at times incredibly vulnerable as we watched her negotiate the frightening world of being a patient.
Dovetailing the shots of her medical care, we got to glimpse the " real"  Wendy. Her hair brushed up and back, a neat little pullover covering thin shoulders, she talked about her previous two husbands with a mixture of righteous indignation and sad regret and tempered this with the brittle repartee so evident in her casualty clips.
It was clear that she had probably given the producers a run for their money.

It struck me that I was, in fact, looking at my mother, and immediately I told The Prof and Sorrel so for the similarity between Wendy and my mother was so striking that I was amused, and suddenly rather moved by it all.
I had literally seen a ghost and although I made light of the programme, and the similarities between Wendy and my mother, I found myself turning my head away from the rest of the living room............... with my eyes gently stinging.

" Beach Balled sized Lady Nuts"

Things are cranking up nicely towards next week's wartime finale as The Walking Dead's narrative underlines that no one is "mr nice guy" in this brave new world.
Oceanside is nearly on board with " Team Rick"
Sasha is down but not out
Rosita has brought Dwight back into Alexandria to help,
Eugene is an asswipe
And a ton of redshirts are being set up to die next week, which is a shame as new characters such as Oceanside's resident dyke Beatrice and Polynesian Cyndie are rather more interesting than some of the main characters like Aaron and the vapid Eric.