I think that I have the 'curse of the observer' at the moment. We dropped our first patient off at the hospital (a 36 year old female with a two day history of a cough and a headache. No, she hasn't taken any of her own painkillers), and have come away with a student nurse.

She is training to be a paediatric nurse and since picking her up we have traversed the length of our patch without a single call. We have even made it back to our station (unusual in itself) and have been put on a rest break. Which is why I'm typing this now as I won't have time to write anything tonight.

The 'Curse of the observer' takes two forms. The most common is that *nothing* happens all shift, or the calls that you do get are so utterly simple that it does the observer no good at all. The other, much rarer, form of the curse is where everything goes wrong - large patients who you can't move, people run over by trains and sick people seeming dropping out of the sky.

I'm guessing that we get the... peaceful type of the curse*

Today, just for fun, I'll be asking everyone who is in pain if they have taken any of their own painkillers - and if not I'll ask them why. Lets just imagine that it's the world's worst piece of research.

*People in the NHS never use the 'Q' word, it is seen as tempting fate, so a shift is 'peacful' or 'controlled', never 'Q***t'.