24 hours in A+E: the Garfield edition

"I hate Mondays" says Garfield. He has no idea...

Ooh, Channel 4 is warning us of "strong language and graphic scenes of stab wounds". That's what we're looking for. What does a non-graphic scene of a stab wound look like? A picture of a set of kitchen knives with a banana skin on the floor?

It strikes me that you can see the initial scenes of the hospital corridors containing patients slumped in wheelchairs and random cardboard boxes stashed around, and be left in no doubt that you're looking at a UK hospital.

I can't think of many worse things than being chocked and blocked on a spinal board in A+E and hearing screams, yells and gurgles either side of you but being completely unable to see what's going on.

For all those mathmos tackling NP-hard problems, you should have a look at Jen's bed allocation juggling. If anyone's going to crack SAT in polynomial time, my money's on her.

Why is Monday the busiest day of the week? That seems counter-intuitive to me. Apparently it's because GPs are closed over the weekend so no-one can go to them, so they wait for things to get bad and then go to A+E. Go figure. "Bit chaotic in here, not your average Monday, is it?" asks one punter. Jen grins and corrects him: "Yeah."

Ah, here comes the first stabbing. Attacked outside a local shop, life-threatening haemorrhage. Curled up on his side, BP 66/29, that doesn't look good to me. Lucky he was stabbed in the backside, unlucky there were a couple in the chest as well. I was impressed the guy wasn't screaming in pain as the medics stuck their fingers into the wounds.

I had to love Jen's impression of an AAA bursting: "plop!" Omar, who owned the AAA in question, was faced with an operation to fix it (50% mortality at his age) or leaving it and hoping for the best. His son had to sign the consent forms saying he understood that the operation was risky -- but without it, mortality was 100%. Talk about Hobson's choice. "Are you happy for us to go ahead?" Well crap, he's not going to be happy about it is he? Like Jen says, it's probably worse for the relatives in that situation because at least the patient is loaded up with opiates - the relatives have no such cushion. I was glad for Omar's son's sake that Omar beat the odds.

As Jen reeled off the list of drugs that suicidal Hany had taken (I lost count around number six and didn't recognise half of them) one was left with the strong impression that this was an actual attempt, not the typical cry for help. He'd taken them from his mother, and I'm somewhat surprised she's still alive if she takes all of those in one day. Six years of heroin and crack seemed to have screwed him up impressively, though I suspect gave his system the ability to survive the cocktail he took where a cleaner-living man would have pushed up the daisies.

Sounds like the urology registrar Jacqui is getting fed up of people trying to call her. Perhaps they are taking the piss (badoom tish).