So nearly ended up with a question on #bbcqt. Will be interested if there will be any questions about #Cummings actions tonight given I was directed to think of a different question... 🤔
And yes of course there are other issues atm and it is appropriate to think of them but here’s why the Cummings illegal driving to Barnard castle matters to me...
My closest friend from uni has been in icu for 54 days. On ecmo for 34 of those. Has now made it off ecmo but I don’t know if she’ll leave hospital. She has a 1yo. Her husband was covid positive as was the baby for the first week of her intensive care stay.
In my mind that is what qualifies as exceptional circumstances. He didn’t leave the house, whilst unwell himself and with the baby also unwell. He sucked it up and took care of his child.
He had only elderly local support. Who would have been inappropriate to look after a covid positive baby. He was terrified he’d end up admitted and have no one local who was low risk.
What he DID NOT do was ask a low risk person if they could just pitch up in their spare house. One rule for the unelected bureaucratic elite and another for everyone else. 😡 #sackcummings
If they already have a load of #Cummings questions on fair enough and I look forward to hearing the debate. But interesting that the reflex was to ask for something else. 🤷🏻♀️
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After 5months in hospital, mostly spent in ICU with over a month on ecmo, today is home time for my best mate. No competition, this is my highlight of 2020. Massively proud of Anu. 😁❤️🥰🤩🥳❤️🥰😁❤️🤩🥳❤️🥰😁❤️🤩❤️ Today is a really fucking good day. #MegaProudCheerleader
Anu will say her own thanks in due course but here are a few of mine...
And my most memorable highlight. When my old reg from @RMCH_Theatres@LeDyslexicMedic helped her make a surprise WhatsApp video call from ICU when she was too weak to press the phone buttons. I think my surprised screaming may be etched on his brain forever. 🤣 #TotalLegend
As an ex Blackall SHO ‘reliever’ I can only imagine the relief when the RFDS arrived. ‘Go to the country’ they said, it’ll be ‘fun’ they said. Prior to a month in blackall id been sent to Emerald... The day after I arrived the entire state of QLD was declared a disaster zone.
It did make future ALS scenarios pretty easy tho, I kept waiting for the scenario where you are the solo doctor for an area of roughly 30000 km2, the roof of resus falls in with water on top of the defib what do you do?
A really friendly and really grateful community, the local cops took me to the pub and took me home on my last night in Blackall and put the cop car lights on to make sure there weren’t any snakes hiding on the grass. Good times with a bunch of amazing guys.
When I was doing my higher paeds block we did 24hour oncalls.
One night, having finished the evening pain round, I went off to get some takeaway... I tripped up in the carpark outside the hospital on the way back and figured...
‘oh I’ve just skint my knee...’. On getting ready for bed it became obvious I’d done slightly more than that... (see below).
It’s 100days tomorrow since my best mate of 21yrs sent me a series of whatsapp messages at 4am just before she was tubed. I’ve mostly gone with the ‘yep I’m fine’ line. In truth, it’s all felt a bit surreal going from ‘oh it’s ok she’ll just be tubed for a few days’, to sheer
horror when she crashed onto ecmo. By day 14 on ecmo and no improvement that went to a weird acceptance of the probable outcome. That became an ecmo Groundhog for 34days. A really dark few months, which has turned into extremely cautious hope in the last couple of weeks.
I wibbled a little bit yesterday when she thanked me for looking after her hubbie and toddler and that I was one of two ppl she called that night to ask to look out for them. Me and her brother. 🤷🏻♀️
For me it was the feeling that no-one ever actually said well done. There’s an overwhelmingly negative attitude towards it. It feels like a tick box exercise of going to get told you’re not good enough with little appreciation of what you’ve achieved through the yr.
Would it be so bad to say ‘hey you’ve done x, y and z well, now how about aiming to do blah next yr’
Or ‘hey, we know this has been a total ballache of a yr, we’re really impressed with how your handling things, we know things aren’t going well but we think we can help by doing x, y, z.’