BluE Scrubs

Many people don’t know this but I have a flatmate. She’s been contractually around for a while now but she’s hardly around if you know what I mean. With me doing crazy- bitch on call and she doing crazy- bitch on call as well, we’re mere ghosts to each other.


If we are married we’d both be severely sexually frustrated in a knowing kind of way because you know you can have it but you can’t really have it because of the crazy-bitch on call, of course. You know.

Crazy she is my flatmate. I just wish she doesn’t take one hour every morning in the shower and doesn’t put the milk away horizontally instead of vertically to avoid an oasis of white stuff pooling on the floor every morning which I have to wipe off as she’d be in the shower for an hour and the pool of white stuff takes longer than an hour to evaporate off. Very obvious therefore who had to wipe the milk off the floor while waiting for the shower turn.

Some element of exaggeration in the text above but I find that rather satisfying. Now people will remember my flatmate as the ‘milk spiller’.

At work today I have developed a very strong feeling towards this one particular person. I felt like murdering him, at the time.

I was on my own doing 2 total knee replacement anaesthetics. First patient recovered well, pain free having had sciatic and femoral nerve blocks by me. These are injections to the nerve supplying the legs to numb it, so no pain for at least few hours afterwards.

The operation itself took two and a half hours. So, having started at 9 am, two and a half hours doesn’t leave that much time for the next knee to be done before 2pm.

There I was on my next knee case, on my knees with my head stuck in between this chap’s legs hoping to achieve a result as good as the first.

I was on the sciatic nerve block part when he, the orthopod kahuna walked in. I had a needle in my right hand stuck in this patients right bum cheek and the other hand tweaking with the microampere from the nerve stimulator. I heard this.

‘Why don’t you just do epidural, it’s much better for the patient’.

I almost couldn’t believe what he’s just said.

Allison and Kerry, the two ODA with me did the ‘Oh- my- gawwwd Naj- is- going- to- blow- up face’.

Do you see me telling you to do Austin Moore instead of dynamic hip screw because it’s better for your broken hip patients Mr. orthopod dude? What makes you think you know better?

This is my theory :

I am young he is old
I am a woman he’s a man
I am not a consultant and he is.

He feels threatened because his god complex bubble had been poked by an anaesthetic girl who is obviously not his size to pick on, who also switches the radio channel from his chinese-restaurant-background-music to Galaxy 105 in the OR to avoid some staff dropping dead from boredom or some slit-wrist massacre propagating amongst the ODAs. I do put his CD neatly back in the case.

He is jealous because nobody talks to him. He can’t talk anyway because he’s from a different planet. The minute he says something it's either something completely off tangent or a joke nobody dares laugh at. He thinks Justin Timberlake is a Red Indian, which at the time I thought was a joke.

He always stifled at my jokes, to the point I thought he must be having a serious halithosis problem to not even want to open his mouth like that, can’t be anything else. I honestly think he should just laugh when he wants to, no holding back, just let it out. I am more than willing to tickle him, with some Magill forceps, should situation dictate I do so.

Just to see him at least flash a smile. For now we know, he’s just miserable and he wants everybody else to be as miserable as he is.

Not so surprisingly, the incident flooded the OR complex rather quickly as Kerry and Allison are THE CNN of the OR. At lunchtime the headlines in the pantry were:

Bill: I’d punch him for you Naj.

Sharon: Oh what and an idiot, did you throw him out of the anaesthetic room then? *I shook my head* You should.

Barbara of recovery : Men, Naj, you know what it is. It’s men. Can’t have a woman doing things right.

Debbie: Just imagine him in a leopard print thong Naj.

I laughed so hard at Debbie’s. I think I’ll just do that.