Day fifteen - Monday

In for board round at 0830, caught up with Helen on the walk in and heard a bit about her weekend back on Orkney. Followed the surgical round, then attached myself to the surgeon running the 'trauma clinic' in A&E, basically a fracture clinic seeing regular reviews of fractures. Brett headed off shortly after the rounds as he was going to come back later in the day for a twilight shift.

The clinic was really interesting, saw lots of fractures on patients of all ages. Saw vertebral wedge fractures ('broken back'), ankles, wrists, arms, fingers - the whole lot. Ages varied from just under 2 years old to 70s. One of the most attractive things about working in a hospital like this - you'd just see everything. Bit like a GP in many ways. The surgeon I was following does a whole range of operations, varying from orthopaedics to urology. It was interesting talking to them about the future of surgical jobs, as many training posts are nw so specialised that surgeons finish training only being able to do a handful of specialised operations, quite a narrow repertoire. This means that in the future in order to cover the whole range of operations hospitals will need to employ multiple consultant surgeons, whereas in the past they just employed one 'general' surgeon who did a bit of everything. This role is now pretty impossible to train as though, due to working time directive and restrictions on the amount of operating time we'll get as trainees. Good for patient safety I suspect, bad for doctor training. No one wants to be treated by a doctor who's just come off 48 hours straight, but there may be an argument to say that those doctors (often those who trained in the 'good old days') may well have been exposed to much more and consequently have much more experience than it is now possible to acquire at a similar stage of training.

Quick lunch in canteen and caught up with the action on the wards. Then joined the surgeon for an afternoon of camera's in various orifices, mainly colonoscopies (camera up the back passage) and cystoscopies (camera into the bladder). Some interesting pathologies and a good refresher for some GI anatomy. Although the day had been really interesting, it had been very passive from a learning point of view. Didn't get hands on at all. But I guess it's good to mix it up every now and again!

I find when writing this blog it's difficult to decide which things that I have seen/done in the hospital are appropriate to write about. Obviously there's times where things don't go perfectly, or you see things being done in a less than ideal way, however these are often not very appropriate to write about - bit of a shame as these are often the things I want to write about and are in many ways the most interesting! Ah well, I'll leave these to the numerous anonymous blogs out there.

Decent weather in the afternoon

Nipped up to the library quickly to print off some violin music before grabbing a lift back to the house with Tom. Settled into some practice, did about an hour. Really enjoying it, hope I'm not annoying my hosts too much though! On our group whatsapp plans were made for a curry at the Spice Tandoori in town, so I walked down for 1900. I was the first to arrive, so took a seat in the waiting area and flicked through the local paper on the table. One article caught my eye, about the Corran ferry that I'd taken last Thursday at an excruciating £7.30 each way. Turns out the fares are very controversial, and that locals buying tickets in bulk get a crossing at the price of £1.93. That's nearly 400% markup for tourists. Surely that's not justifiable? I understand making it cheaper for the locals, and that there should be a markup for seasonal visitors to give money back to the local economy, pay for jobs and local amenities etc but 400% markup? Seems excessive to me.

Article about the Corran ferry fares

Everyone arrived and we got seated, we needn't have booked as there was plenty of space with it being a Monday night! I was sat at the 'qualified doctor' end of the table, surrounded on all sides by F1s and F2s! Unfortunately Brett and Helen couldn't make it down. I split some curry bits with Neil, so ended up having fried chicken bits and veg samosas for started, followed by half chicken tikka balti with half lamb tikka balti, on pilau rice with garlic naan, all washed down with a pint of Cobra. Was really good - I might even go as far as saying it was the nicest curry I've had... Not that much of a curry aficionado but it was very tasty. Also Eleanor's dish had the kudos of being brought out on a burning hot steaming metal pan - drew some appreciative noises from the rest of us.

The steaming curry dish!

Got a lift back to the house with Tom again, and as the weather was looking good for tomorrow we made plans to head out. I was keen to do the Forcan Ridge up in Glen Shiel but didn't have a map. I called in upstairs and John quickly located one in his battered suitcase, followed by a quick rundown of potential routes in the area and a glance through his Munro logbook - there's still a few gaps in it, interesting though that he did the Forcan ridge in 1987, before I was born! After Skyping Alice I turned in for the night, ready to get up for a fairly early start tomorrow as it's a 1h20m drive to the start...