Day thirty-seven - Tuesday

Lazy morning saw me catching up on some sleep after the late night the previous evening (/morning). Entered A&E around 11am to see the department well staffed, with 3 nurses and Agnes as well as a paramedic student. The only thing missing were some patients!! Very quiet morning. Caught up on some emails and browsed amazon looking at medical textbooks for next year, so expensive! Before long it was 1230 and I nipped off to lunch with Antonio, the Hebridean Search and Rescue guy.

Met at An Lanntair, tracked him down due to his bright green goretex jacket - a give away sign. He'd brought his young son along, he was on baby sitting duty - very good of him to meet me for lunch on a precious day off! Discussed HebSar - they're a very new team at only 3 years old with around 20 members, fully ratified by the Mountain Rescue Council of Scotland (MRCS), and have 3 vehicles. Unfortunately they don't yet have a base, and had only 4 call outs last year. Still, it's good to have the service available, and the more highly trained they become and the more other services become away of their existence I'm sure that number will increase.

An Lanntair, the arts/cinema complex, tasty nachos...

After lunch Antonio took me for a tour round his GP practice up the road, after leaving his son in the temporary care of the receptionists! Very nice place, purpose built building, with around 7,000 patients on the list. He was explaining how Stornoway is no longer really a remote/rural place - the Western Isles Hospital is apparently the largest Remote/Rural hospital in the world! There are plenty of equally remote places in rural mainland Scotland. That said, some of the areas on the other islands in the Outer Hebrides are very isolated, and definitely qualify for remote/rural status.

Antonio's practice, nice place!

Back to the hospital by 1500, there were still no patients... The paramedic student was very disappointed, having chosen a very quiet day to come into the department! Consequently one of the nurses took the opportunity to demonstrate the automated CPR machine to the ambulance man, and yet again Steven was the unlucky candidate for a spot of quadraceps resuscitation. Is an amazing machine, kicks out some force apparently, although I didn't notice Steven limping too badly afterwards!

Steven's legs took a turn for the worse during the afternoon, required a bit of automated CPR

Headed off around 1700, hadn't seen any patients in the department but had been a fun day. Quick bit of cous cous before Skyping Alice! Then jogged down to the leisure centre, only took 10mins, to check out the swimming pool. Quite fancy signing up for a triathlon at some point as my cycling is fine, running ok but my swimming is terrible! I can swim and have done my 5km once upon a time, but this was all breaststroke. I find front crawl a bit challenging, breathing is my problem! Only cost £1.80 to swim, so spent an hour or so doing lengths. By the end was managing to do 2x 25m  lengths of front crawl without stopping, definite improvement. Experimented with a nose clip but felt a bit weird so ditched it pretty quickly. Going to have to keep working at it, I'm sure it will get easier at some point! Rewarded myself afterwards with 10mins in the sauna - really great facilities at an awesome price!

Back to the flat via Co-Op for some essentials and cooked big bangers/mash/veg/gravy - pile the calories right back on! Sticky toffee pudding and chilled out before hitting the hay.