‘Grand Rounds’ will be stopping here next week.  If you don’t know what it is then you can have a look at this weeks edition.  Essentially it is a round-up of medical blog posts.  If you want to contribute then please feel free to email me your articles for inclusion.  My email address is hidden behind sneaky anti-spam technology.  I was involved in the first couple of these, but then got too lazy to send in articles, so now I just read it.

A big thanks to all the people who sought out their local ambulance stations and similar to feed them.  A personal extra big thanks to *version 3.1 who, besides having the best fancy dress costume ever, left a lovely package full of sugary goodness at my station.

Also, thanks to everyone who wished me and my fellow workers a merry Christmas.  It’s all appreciated.

Big news tomorrow…

I’ve been nominated for two awards in the 2005 Medgadget Medical Blog awards.  Go figure.  So the other nominees in the Literary award decided that we should all write something interesting.  My arm was twisted and I agreed.  We were given the first section of the story, and had to continue it in under 999 words, and had to contain at least one lyric from a Christmas song.

I wrote my story, counted my words and found that I’d brought the word count up to 1,425.  A bit too long.  So what you see here is the edited version.  I’ll stick my first draft in the comments of this post.

Other nominees, who will probably show me up for the hack I am can be found at Barbados Butterfly, Bloodletting, The Cheerful Oncologist, The Examining Room Of Dr Charles, Simonscapes and Intueri.

And no, I have no idea what I’m doing in a Literary award either.

——–

It was a dark and stormy night.

I struck the match and the flame burst into bright orange-blue life. It danced on the end of the matchstick as it neared the ragged edge of the cigarette dangling between my chapped lips. Soon, the smoke that lazily trailed from the glowing end of the cancer stick filled the entire elevator. My fingers plucked it from my mouth and I exhaled, mindlessly watching the plume of wispy grey ash travel towards the cylindrical fluorescent bulb that poured antiseptic yellow light onto us.

The elevator ungracefully jolted to a halt and the doors swished open. The man with a goatee in a long white coat and black patent leather shoes shot me a dirty look as he stepped off.

“We’re in an elevator in a hospital,” he derisively muttered, enunciating “hospital” as if he was introducing a new word into my vocabulary. “What kind of idiot smokes in the hospital?”

The elevator doors swished shut, but not before he noticed the solitary third finger of my right hand poised in the air. At him.

He looked offended. I didn’t care.

The elevator lurched back into motion as I chuckled to myself. His expression was certainly more amusing than the duties that awaited me.

Reluctant to acknowledge that I was near my destination, my tired fingers apathetically dropped the cigarette and I watched the sole of my left shoe squash it, along with its orange flame.

The elevators doors swished open. I then looked up.

Before me was one of those hospital signs, arrows pointing in different directions, leading the sick, the dying and the hopeful to their often final places of rest.  Turning left I stalked towards the intensive care unit.

My quarry had led me on a merry dance this year, I'd chased him through Tokyo, but he'd given me the slip in the Odaiba district.  I'd traced him to Toronto where I saw him descending in a glass lift, unfortunately I was rising in the adjacent lift.

I’d finally nailed him tonight in New York.  I’d hit him with the car I was driving, but the crowd of people who appeared seemingly from nowhere stopped me from finishing the job.  He was wounded, probably soon to be dead, but I needed to be sure.

So I found myself in the hospital, charming the receptionist into telling me that their only trauma case was indeed still alive, and had been taken to intensive care.  It was nearly midnight, so gaining access to ITU would be a little trickier than I would have hoped.  Sometimes my job is just an absolute nightmare, I mean, what kind of psycho enjoys killing things?  Still it would be nice if just for once my target didn't make such a fuss.  That’s the problem, none of them want to 'go gentle into that good night'.  But they all die, eventually.

I pushed open the door to the ITU, ignoring the 'All visitors must remove their coats' sign with '...even doctors' scrawled underneath it.  The lights were dim, and I could see two people in scrubs sitting at the nurses station, faces cast in sickly screen from the numerous monitors positioned there.  Somewhere a radio quietly droned, "Silent night, Holy night. All was still, all was quiet...".

"Detective Alan Trophos", I whispered putting on my best 'I'm the authority figure here' expression, "I understand you have a patient hit by a car tonight?".

"Bed four", replied the plump woman reading a frayed paperback book, "but he's sedated and intubated, you won't be able to talk to him".

"The body", I replied with a grin, "can give evidence without speaking".  I lifted up what I hoped looked like the sort of suitcase that detectives use to gather forensic evidence. 

"I'll just need a few moments alone with him.  Nail scrapings, that sort of thing", I smiled what I hoped was my best attempt at flirting.

"Go right ahead", the other woman said, "He won't mind, and he'll probably be dead by tomorrow".

I crept past the two women, the ITU seemed to inspire me into the same silent reverence that churches do.  The desire to speak only in a whisper and to walk softly was a strong one.  I pulled the curtains around bed floor and finally took a long look at my quarry.  I pulled over a plastic chair and took hold of his hand.

"I know you can't hear me", I whispered, barely above the sound of the machine that was breathing for him, "but I'm hoping you can <i>feel</i> me".

Was that a flicker under the taped closed eyes?

"Your time is limited", I continued, "we can't leave you floating around like a loose end.  You are put here to do your job, and then leave.  Much like me".

The machine kept up the steady rhythm, breathing in, breathing out, keeping the oxygen passing into the lungs, keeping the body alive.

"That's why they have me, someone to make sure that you don't run on past your time.  In a year I'll come for your successor, and the year after, and the year after that, as I have since they started worshipping you".

I turned off the monitoring machine, I didn't need any alarms going off.

"Imagine what would happen if the Spirit of Christmas continued throughout the year?  Imagine humans being nice to each other all year round?  The Gods of Strife would have a fit.  A couple of days a year, that’s the deal".

I slipped the dagger under his breastbone into the heart.

"I wish that goodwill for all men could last forever, but that's not what The Rules say".

I felt for a pulse, so weak...

The pulse stopped.

Suddenly the tinsel around the bed seemed to lose the glitter, the radio started playing an R&B number, and far away I heard a clock strike midnight.  Midnight of Christmas day.

Christmas was over.

——–

Yes, I know, I’m sorry, but I don’t ‘do’ fiction.

…Enter ‘Prostitution’ Mode…

So I got my copy of Blogged: 2005 last night, indeed I am in it, but had I not been, I still would have bought it for myself.

The blogosphere is a wide and varied place, and Tim Worstall does an excellent job of collected some varied posts from mainly UK based blogs to highlight some of the news events of the year.

It covers most big events of the year from the Iraq war (pro, and anti), ID cards (all anti, but then is anyone besides the government in favour of them?), the July 7th bombings, the election (both here and in America), all the way to shaving your man-spuds in preparation for a vasectomy.

One of the main strengths of the book is that if you don’t like the writing of the article, then the next one is only a few words away, and while the majority of the book is based on the political side of things (obviously, as most of the big news events of the year are political) there is still room for bits from non-political bloggers.

I sat up all last night and read it through, cover to cover and I suspect that there are going to be a few new blogs added to my daily reading list.

In a slightly Doh! moment (at 4 am mind you), I wondered why the book stopped at October…

And yes, I’m one of the contributors, and so is Nee Naw (who kept very quiet about it).

Having talked to the publishers (The Friday Project), I can report that they are very nice people who ‘get’ the whole idea of Blogging, so I hope this book does well, both for them and for Tim.

…Exit ‘Prostitution’ Mode…

You see, sometimes I make mistakes.

Thankfully not yet of the fatal kind.

However, yesterday I did link to the wrong person.  I can only blame the incoming brain-rot that affects all public service staff.  So in a bid to right this wrong in an honourable fashion I will now direct you to the proper link, and inform you that Tim Worstall is indeed a fine writer, and often makes me go, “Urh?”.

This is a good thing.

Now, time for a cup of tea, then clean my flat, and then to make a start on part one of a series of posts about Joan.

You may have noticed a new addition to the sidebar on the right of this page.  It’s an Amazon Associates link to a book.

A book on the best of Blogging in 2005.

I may, or may not be in it...

Do feel free to buy it, and get exposed to some blogs you might otherwise not know about.

If lots of people pre-order it before Friday, then it might enter high up in the Amazon.co.uk charts.

For some reason if this situation occurs it would make me happy.

My writing on this blog will be better if I’m happy.

Feel free to blame Tim Worstall for this advertisement.

Who I am and where and what I am, for those just joining me.

My name is Tom Reynolds – except, that this isn’t the name written on my cheque book.  It’s a pseudonym that I cooked up years ago, and when I started blogging I thought that a bit of anonymity would be a good idea.  Lots of people, even those who know the truth call me Tom, which is fine by me.

I work for the London Ambulance Service (in the UK).  I’m an EMT-3, which means I’m one of those people in a green uniform who looks after sick people.  At the moment I am a solo responder working on an FRU, or ‘First Response Unit’ (or is it ‘Fast Response Unit’?).

I drive around in a fast car, getting to the sickest patients as quickly as possible.  At least, that is the idea.  Often my patients aren’t that sick at all.  My ‘patch’ at work is pretty much all of East London.  It is 33 miles in circumference – which is from where I live to Southend.  There are a lot of people in that area.  I am a very busy person.

I’ve been writing this blog since July 22nd 2003.  So that’s coming up on two and a half years.  It seems much longer.  I now consider it my second job.  This is not a bad thing.

L.A.S. management know that I blog, they also know who I am.  No it doesn’t make me worried.

There are various ways of contacting me, all of them can be found here.  Email is the most reliable way to talk to me, because if I’m not at work, or on my computer, then I’m normally asleep.

I love getting comments – I know this makes me someone needy looking for validation.  But that’s fine.

There are things going on in the world that make me angry – I used to write about them here, but for the past two years, I consider it ‘going off topic’, so now I stick to ambulance stuff on the whole.

I have a secret blog that no-one knows about.  I dream of writing fiction, or comics.  These two facts may be connected.

Actually…I dream of getting paid to write.

I’m thirty-something, and was born on the 28th of November.  I have a brother (1), a mother (1), and no idea where my father is (1?, 0?).  I like my bachelor lifestyle – but would like to become someone’s stalker.

I am currently preparing my next big post – which might take a day or two, but will hopefully be worth it.

Warren Ellis did this, so I thought that with my new-found desire to write stuff, that it’d be a good idea for me to do it as well.

I’ve been having a think recently, a dangerous thing for me to do I’m sure you will agree.  I’ve not been thinking about the state of the world, how to solve global warming or even just how to stop bloody idiots from pushing their prams out in front of the fast moving car making all the noise and lighting up the street with blue flashing lights.

No, dear reader, I’ve been thinking about ‘Blogging’, more specifically the ‘Blogging wot I do’.

It seems to me that I currently have two part-time jobs, each of which take up more time than any full time job.  So on one hand I work 38 hours a week or so racing around the streets dealing with the sick (or supposedly sick).  On the other hand, I maintain this blog, as well as keep up with what is going on in the ‘blogosphere’, answer emails about this blog, and try to come up with new ideas.  While I haven’t timed myself, I have a feeling that I do spend a considerable fraction of my time blogging, and doing the work around blogging.

Except for this weekend, when I took some time off both my work activities.

Please realise that this isn’t a moan – work can be enjoyable, and in my case it is, I love my paid work, and I love blogging (or at least I do when I haven’t got writers block).

I just think that I have made a transition from ‘blogging’ to ‘writing’. Don’t ask me when this happened, I have no idea, but I’m thinking that I am now a writer who writes in a blogging format.

So blogging (at least for me) has now become a style rather than content.

It’s at times like this I wish I’d done something more academic in college, rather than learning to reflect on how to best wipe someone else’s arse.

There also came a point where I started considering myself a ‘professional blogger’.  Again it’s something that I can’t quite put my finger on – but it may just be because writing this blog has become such a big part of my life, and because I’m now considering myself unpaid  Public Relations for the LAS.

So, what does all this waffle mean?  Ultimately very little.  I love blogging, and will continue until I completely run out of things to say, or get the sack for saying something I shouldn’t.  Maybe I’ll start writing on some different subjects, maybe even on completely different formats.  Whatever happens I’ll be sticking with the tried and true on this site.

Working on different subjects/formats means that I’ll be working more hours on my ‘second job’.  Work that I don’t get paid for.

Am I bloody mad?

Apologies to you all, I’ve had this rattling about in my head for some time, and I just needed to get it out ‘there’ to clear some room for some other stuff.  It gets crowded in my head sometimes.

So on Friday, I went into London to meet up with some of the folks who blog while working on the Underground.  Once more I found myself in a strange pub looking for people who I only know from their writing (and it is writing, but more on that in my next/previous post depending on how you read this blog).  Somehow though, we did all manage to find each other, and a very enjoyable time was had by all.

Discussion ranged from safely blogging about work, picking up stalkers and how we seem to have these little microcosms of blogging circles all the way to how badly our jobs suck, and the fun we can have at work despite the best attempts of management.  I also gave career advice to two people.

I now command you to go to the blogs of the people that I remember being there (and if you were there, and I haven’t linked to you – please do let me know).  And why do I command you?  Well, it does my ego the world of good to get emails from people who I link to telling me that their pagehits have gone through the roof.

And this is why I should never hold any position of power…

On The District

Ninja In A Bowler Hat

The Station Log Book

London Underground Life

Version 3.1

Some more posts to come today, maybe even something medically based…

Guess where I’m going to be on Friday?

Come and join us if you want.