Funny blog content

The other day during the nursing handover we were astonished to discover that one of our patients has been doing his own FBC - full blood count.

He gets all the blood taking equipment ready, puts on the tourniquet, finds a good vein, draws the blood, makes a slide and examines it under a microscope, counting the different numbers of cells in a random selection of high-power field views, and then analyses the rest of the sample to get a haemoglobin level and all the other palaver.  Pretty amazing.  But then I guess he has a fair bit of time of his hands, being a patient with nothing else to do.

Sadly, it was all in my mind.  He does indeed do his own FBC - but it's the fluid balance chart.  He merely keeps track of his fluid input and urine output volumes.  I preferred my version.

Don't look down

When you were a kid, I am sure you played that game where the floor was lava and you had to clamber over the furniture to make your way around the room without touching the ground.  Our hotel room here in London is like that because the carpet is so filthy that we're pretty sure it would be fatal to come into contact with it.  Fortunately it's easy to move around the room without touching the carpet because the room itself is about the size of a postcard.  I had to fold myself up in the fifth dimension in order to put my pants on in the morning.

The good thing about staying somewhere really awful is that you don't feel bad about making it any worse.  This morning I got a tickle in my nose as I was popping the eggs into the saucepan to boil.  I screwed up my nose to try to stop sneezing but to no avail.  The eggs went into the water and I turned around and sneezed, trying not to sneeze onto our breakfast.  Turns out I had a bleeding nose, so I sent a fine spray of blood across the bed.  Normally this would horrify me, but today I just looked at the carpet and shrugged, thinking that now the bed fit in so much better.  God knows what the "cleaners" will think we've been up to.