OPs off

They aren't goping to do A's ovarian graft taking operation. They couldn't in the end get agreement from a tissue bank to store it for us. Ms M put in a lot of effort but no dice. This means that A's chemo can now start without further delay and that will probably happen next week when her oncologist gets back from her hols. For my part there is progress with my project but some frustration with the paceI'm forced to go at.
There is going to be lots of trouble next August with jobs and junior doctors. They haven't sorted out the transito the new training system and I'm afraid there may even be strikes and protests as junior doctors will be forced to change specialty or move to new areas by a computerised national job matching scheme.

Go to the right A&E

Had a rough on call on Thursday night at K. 55 year old man who had a valve in his heart replaced two weeks earlier turned up.
I spoke directly to the guy who did it for him. As soon as I said pain in his back he knew what I knew. He had come to the wrong hospital. We couldn't fix it here.
Very quickly he'd be too unstable to transfer and he needed a scan. Within a few minutes he was too unstable to scan. He arrested and died. Aortic dissection.
A good friend of mine, the casualty officer who had been with him since he arrived was really distraught. We fought hard for a good two hours but we had no chance really. I gave half a thought to opening his chest in the A&E department but I decided I had no answer to the "and then what?" question. No matter what I found in there there was no way I could fix it. His fate had been sealed when he picked he called the cab for K.
The moral of the story people. If you've had reacent heart surgery and something happens in the line of chest pain or breathlessness, go to the hospital that did the surgery or you will probably die.

Dr Mr Dr Sturgeon

Well that was a really miserable post.
The good news is Prof loved my idea and I am enthused to the extent that I couldn't bare the idea of leaving it half finished. That means I think I'm going to go the whole hog and do a PhD. A PhD also has currency outside medicine as everyone knows what it is and a PhD from I (the ninth best university in the world no less) would be handy if I wanted to get work in the world outside medicine at some point.
It will mean three years in academia rather than two. But I hope to be able to secure funding from elsewhere so that I won't have to spend the whole time going to the C.

Thursday at the C

I've been doing a lot of shifts at C this last seven days. The next year stretches ahead seemingly endless. I have to persuade my bosses that the direction my project is taking is the right one. It has taken a direction that is fairly close to the opposite one they had suggested. Thing is I'm worried that my spirits won't take it if they insist I have to do it their way. Coupled with the misery I endure for 24 hours at least once a week things would be too grim to continue. I've never quit anything I've started, at least not in relation to my career, anyway. It would be a difficult gap on my CV to explain but that matters less than my mental welfare.

Pain and gain

A significant weekend. Great news on one hand. A and I are officially parents. Parents that is of seven embryos. They were conceived in a Petri dish on Thursday and we heard that we'd had a great result the next day. Seven embryos from nine eggs. A testament to the quality the materials they were working with I say. They are currently frozen in a flask of liquid nitrogen in the Homerton. Ready to be stuck in the oven at gas mark 6 for nine months at our convenience. Once A's chemo-radio-hormono-therapy is all over and done with we can go ahead or wait longer if we wish. Biological clock on pause.

On the down side the torment that my wisdom tooth has been giving me has taken a step up in magnitude. I've been on soup an smoothies and horse sized pain killers for 24 hours and the dentist isn't going to fix it until Saturday. Also the car has been a nightmare. Some oiks smashed a rear window and nicked a pair of old speakers I was planning to sell for a fiver at the car boot sale the next day. The glass firm told me to bring it in to them the next day as it would take them that long to get the replacement glass for my old Audi. However the next day the damn thing wouldn't start. Had to call the AA out. The guy did the usual thing and sold me a shit replacement battery for a million pounds. When I got to the glass place the firm denied the existence of my insurance company and still didn't have the glass and wanted me to cough up £325 for a new window and a windscreen which also needed replacing. I was completely losing my rag at this point. Hungry due to an all liquid diet, tired from the codeine and sleep loss, in pain and totally frustrated. A had to take me home before I did harm to myself and others.
Managed to sort it all out whilst waiting 3 hours to see the dentist this morning.

Giving it another go

Due to the clamor of my hungry readership I have decided to continue to write this blog, having let it come to rest in a siding for these last few weeks. So much has happened. For a start the electrical installation below no longer works but I'm getting round to that.

I think the reason I stopped was that I fell somewhat out of love with computers. My machine at home's hard drive packed in and it took me three weeks to get everything back to normal. The machine at the lab makes me feel guilty if I do anything except research work on it and the one at C is so pig slow that uploading a new entry takes five minutes or 'times out' completely. But now my relationship with the computer has had a significant rekindling. It stems for the creation of an amazing home cinema set up.

A has been investing in some really cool technology of late. My speakers which were my 30th birthday present are incredible. They sound wonderful and do justice to my recently upgraded hifi components. Every breath and russle of whiskers is right there between your eyes you can almost touch the positions of the instruments. But importantly they look fantastic. This got me into a geek frenzy and I went out and bought the centre speaker that matches them and then two rear effect speakers that look like picture frames. In fact they are picture frames. I got a home cinema amp and a subwoofer. All of this off ebay at fractions of true value. Now A is at home getting things delivered is a breeze.

Once I set all this up and was impressing A with the birds chirping behind us, the telly from the skip looked very sad indeed. A and I had been planning to buy a decent telly for some time and we toyed with various notions of getting a oldschool but better TV and having a projector for special. But in the end we were in John Lewis and there was an LCD which some idiot had brought back. It was a peach and I couldn't find anything wrong with it. They were asking £400 less than its normal price. This put the price at the same level as the same set being sold online. John Lewis however offer a five year guarantee and this included screen replacement for even a single dead pixel. The dread of LCD purchasers the world over. Imagine a single black dot in the middle of an otherwise amazing picture and the manufacturers telling you tough luck.

On the wall in the living room it looks incredible and it is now all connected up. I bought a new graphics card which enables my computer to use the screen as a second monitor. I installed that and expected the computer to grind to a halt once more. My confidence had taken a real battering following the hard drive incident. But it worked first time and the downloaded HD content looks stunning. Even the soundcard is behaving and talking to the cinema amp properly.

Thus my decision that computers do, once again, rock. Where would we be without the internet? My reference resource where I lived was a dictionary a thesaurus and the readers encyclopedia. Now I have the infomation I need, within seconds, wherever I am, even perched on the porcelain!

Star dressing room

Just finished my effort at making a corner of the bedroom into a glamorous dressing room for A. It was a massive nightmare to fit the light strips round the mirror without any wires showing. They're all hidden behind the mirror.