Trying to mow the lawns yesterday I kept being interrupted by phone calls from nurses calling to say they were sick and unable to work the next day.
By the time I worked out what the first woman was trying to tell me, with her feeble voice and occasional gentle cough, we’d wasted quite a bit of time. She was trying to get hold of the recruitment agency. I told her she had the wrong number, but by the time the next person rang I knew more was required. I felt sorry for them, it’s an almost unconscious thing to make yourself sound sick when you ring up to say you’re ailing, the last thing you need is having to do the same performance in front of someone else. Eventually we managed to track down the source of the misinformation vis a vis my role in the nursing resource management hierarchy (i.e. none), and I wasn’t bothered again.
This morning I’m back in my beloved neurosurgical theatre. Unfortunately it’s a spine but on the plus side, the patient is supine. Yes, you can reach the cervical spine through the front of the neck, and it’s much less problematic if you avoid all the exciting stuff in the midline.
We are under strict instructions not to let the surgeon know what’s happening in the football World Cup final. Spain and Argentina are currently nil all. He wants to go home after finishing the operation and watch the game with no spoilers. I can’t imagine he’ll manage to avoid finding out the result somehow, but anyway we’re doing our best to keep him in the dark while he’s operating. I’ve been telling everyone who’s come in, such as the radiographers, not to spill the beans. Strangely enough, it seems like the majority have no idea what I’m talking about. Weird! They probably don’t know Ryan Fox won the golf this morning.
….
Well, in the end, it was his own PA who let the cat out of the bag. Yikes! Does she not know him at all? He finished the operation, checked his phone, and for some unknown reason she had told him the results in a text (“I know you love football, wasn’t the game amazing, Spain winning with the only goal of the match in the final minute! Incredible!”) Luckily he wasn’t angry, just disappointed.