So, I arrive at work today feeling all refreshed and keen after the long weekend. It’s just after 08:00 and I walk onto the intensive care unit, where I’ve been rostered to spend the day. The consultant, Dr Amduno, is already on the unit and as I walk on, he says, “Michael, could you go down to the medical and give Nathan a hand with a patient down there? I’m sure he’ll fill you in with all the details.”
“Sure,” I reply and do a U-turn and head towards the medical unit
Nathan is another anaesthetic SHO and he’s been working all night. When I find him, he’s with one of the registrars, fiddling with the portable ventilator. Nathan tells me that he got fast-bleeped to see this man who was fitting. The usual treatment hasn’t worked, so he intubated the patient and was in the process of preparing him for a transfer to the radiology department for a brain scan.
Nathan has got the man’s physiological parameters under control, so there wasn’t a great deal for me to do. I made myself useful by helping roll the patient so we could sort out his knotted hospital gown.
Nathan looks after the patient’s head and I grab the man’s hips. With the help of a couple of nurses, we roll him onto his side. As we hold him in that position while another nurse sorts out his gown, I feel something warm and wet against my leg.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this, I say to myself. When we roll him back and I let go of his sheets, I see that there is indeed a large damp patch on my right thigh. I touch the patient’s sheets again. They’re soaked. Oh no. I pull a face and look at the nurse.
“That’s not saline is it?”
She looks at me sorrowfully, shakes her head and replies, “I don’t think so.”
I look at the clock. It’s 08:14. I’m less that a quarter of an hour into the working week and I’m standing in clothes that are damp from a stranger’s piss. Whoever said that being a doctor is lamorous work is definitely lying. I wonder why they never show things like this on telly…
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