Just Shoot Me...

So it turns out I haven't finished embarrassing myself just yet.  My brain and body tend to work in a tag team sort of fashion but this time it was aaaaaaall body.

This story starts off with a little bit of history about my hip.  When I was born I had congenital hip displasia, which means that a newborn with this condition either has a dislocated hip or is more prone to dislocation.  There are several treatment options including splints, surgery or, in my case, the double nappy which makes the wearer seem as if they have constantly just left a fresh parcel for mum or dad... 

It wasn't overly hi-tech, but it seemed to do the trick.  Now fast-foward twenty five years.  For the past few years I have noticed a slight ache in my left leg.  Like a responsible adult I have ignored the crap out of it until it started impacting my life.  When it is at it's peak I get such a pain that I have trouble walking.  That seems to be the threshhold for getting something done and no longer ignoring it.  I have had a bunch of doctors visits and seen an orthopaedic surgeon or two and it turns out that I have trochanteric tendanopathy and bursitis... = Lots of stupid pain + lots of money spent.

Anyway, I am in the process of getting it all sorted with lots of needles and physio.  In the mean time I need to earn a wage to pay for all the crap it needs.  Unfortunately it turns out a leg is pretty important when it comes to working so I have had to have some days off.  Yesterday I was determined to make it to work and get me some dough.

It was a lovely shift, I was chatting with patients and their families.  It was about three hours in and I had just helped my patient into the toilet and was giving her some privacy.  I shut the door, turned around and took about two steps.  Fuck, I thought, I can't walk.  The pain was shooting in my hip joint so I stood there, on one leg looking about for someone to rescue me!

One of my nursey friends walks down the hall and stops and just looks at me.  I can see his head turning to the side like a puppy who doesn't understand why eating dirt is bad.  Once I tell him what is going on all hell breaks loose!  There are nurses coming at me from all directions!  A couple run out the back and get an office chair so they can get me out the back and out of the hall, running into a couple of bookshelves on my way in!  One of my nursey friends is hugging me, giving me tissues (I wasn't crying!), offering me tea and coffee and crouching down in front of me.... I was waiting for her to throw herself at me in a hug again!

I can feel everyone staring at me, doctors included... Soon I am given a hot pack and I am getting a cab called.  One of the nurses scampers in and hands me hot packs and pain killers like a convert special ops and pretty soon they are organising a wheel chair for me.

Can I point out that at this time EVERYONE KNOWS what is going on.  I am told jokingly that there are two options, they can send me home in a cab or they can put me in a bed but that means that some one has to do swabs... And one of them goes up your nose, just imagine where the other one goes... Not to mention the jokes about if I were a horse and all...

Eventually they get a wheelchair (The first one was stolen! Who steals a wheelchair, really?) and I am wheeled though the hospital where nurses I don't even know are asking me what happened! One of them says to me 'You know the place is in trouble when the nursing staff are in the wheelchairs!'

All in all it was waaaay more excitement than I had planned for the day.  The worst part will be going back to work on Sunday...

Patient Zero

As you may or may not know by now, I am a nurse.  It wasn't a life long ambition or a secret dream.  In fact, it kind of came at me out of the blue.


After doing time at McDonald's I had landed a job with Council Laboratory where I was able to fulfill the dream of being a Lab Assistant.  I loved the hell out that job, but unfortunately it was only a one year contract with no promises of renewal. So, when my contract had done its time and no position had become available, I applied for a job as a Lab Assistant with a pathology company.

It was a job any old monkey could do and with the bullying from a coworker I pretty much hated everything to do with it.  So boy and I quit our jobs and tried to make it in Tasmania.  While it was pretty there, jobs were few and far between.. Three months of me staying at home playing video games came and went so we decided to pack it all back up and move back to Queensland.

I managed to get a job doing the exact thing I hated except it was now in Brisbane.  The people were much nicer and, although I was much happier in this new position, I could still feel I was missing something.

All day every day I scanned barcodes, typed codes and processed samples.  The tedium was almost too much to bare.  The job was so monotonous that the only thing that kept me going was thinking about the people whose blood I was processing.  The lab was a part of a hospital with a large oncology ward so we quickly became familiar with the regulars details.  I never saw any patients, just names, dates of birth, addresses and tests.

Sometimes my colleagues and I would imagine actually meeting the patients.  We would talk about them as if we knew them closely, even though we had never even laid eyes on them.  People with interesting names of dates of birth were the favourite.  'Hello John Smith, sixth of the sixth sixty-six' we would say as we processed the specimens.  I can still remember a few of them.

But there was one.  I don't know why, but I always remembered him.  I often wondered how he was going and how his day was.  I would wonder if I had ever met him in the hall and smiled hello only to never know it was him. This went on for weeks - months.

Then one day I came into work.  There was paperwork sitting on the sorting bench.  As I picked it up I realised they were blood test results.  All over the page there were numbers highlighted in bold.  It was his test results.  I was no expert, but I knew enough to know what had happened.  There was no way he made it another day after that night.

After work I went home and cried for the man I had never met and now would never meet.  Not because I thought I could have saved him or anything like that.  Not because I thought I was better than any of the nurses caring for him already... but because... I don't even know.  Because I could have given him a smile or a kind word.  Perhaps I could have done something meaningful instead of punching numbers.

I know now that day was the day I decided to be a nurse.  On a day like today, where a patient thanks me so much for just calling their loved one to say they are out of theatre... or smiles at me because I smiled at them, I think of Patient Zero.  A man who died so I could finally understand I needed to be a nurse.

Valentine's Day

My boyfriend and I have never been big fans of Valentine's day.  Our feeling has always been that if you love some one then you shouldn't need an excuse like Valentine's Day to show it: it should be a year round thing.  That and the fact that people waste sooooo much money on commercial things - flowers, chocolates and poorly constructed plush animals from sweat shops in China - when they miss the whole point of a day like that. 

I have always felt that Valentine's Day was a kind of cop out, a commercial sell out and have never had any part of it (not the giving part anyway), so I was glad to find that my boyfriend felt the same way.  I am also sick of all the *I love you forever, honeybun! xoxo* rubbish you see on FB - I feel like I am in that diner in Pulp Fiction - except without Samuel L. Jackson to sort those annoying lovebirds out...

Well, that was until I walked in the door tonight.  This morning I got a kiss and a cuddle (with my eyes still firmly clamped together) before boyfriend went off to work.  I had a good day at work, followed by a late night gym session.  Exhausted, I dragged myself in my front door.  On the steps sat a flower. The most wonderful flower I have ever seen in my life.  Eat your heart out flower shops!!!!

Add caption

It is a paper daffodil (my most favourite ever flower in the whole world!) made by the sweetest and most loving boy I have ever known.  So, even though I normally do not partake in such a public show of lovey dovieness, I dedicate this Substitute Carrot post to my wonderful boyfriend because I love him more than anything! And also because I do not have the patience to spend 2hrs working out how to make a daffodil out of cardboard like him.


xoxo
Hambo :)

Welcome to 2012 - Year of the Zombie

Merry Christmas, happy new year and what ever else I have missed out on since my vacay from the Carrot.  I must admit that I had grand intentions of posting Christmas and New Year stories but turns out that Tasmania is quite behind the times when it comes to internet access so here I am blogging back on the mainland.

So 2012 is the year of the Zombie apparently.  Last year I was involved with filming for a project called The Public Zombie Announcements.  Check it out! Below are a few set pictures as well as the two episodes that have been released so far. Enjoy!

So click on these links to see the episodes and please share them with your friends, on your blogs WITH THE WORLD!

Episode 1: Unlife After Death

Episode 2: How Not To Kill Yo' Zombie Self

HEY! GERONIMO!!!

So, since I have all but abandoned posting on my blog I thought I would make an amazing and spectacular comeback! But then I realised that, well... I got nothing.  So instead I thought I would share this with you:

 

 

This is a song by a Brisbane band called Hey Geronimo.  I worked with them on the Plants Vs Zombies part of the film clip with a brilliant make-up artist (who also invited me to the project), Brian Craddock.  Although we only have a small part in this clip you can recognise me by looking out for the zombie with the red starting flag... Yes, I may have been pole dancing with it.  And please don't be upset that they have no idea how to play PvZ (I was one of the few there who had ever played it) because the sunflowers were arranged to be aesthetically pleasing and not to be tactical... Everyone  knows you put your sunflowers at the back....

If you don't hear from me, I'm not dead.

I just got MW3 hot off the shelf from a midnight release, so if I am absent send an intervention party, not a search party.  I hope to write about the amazingness of this game but right now I am conserving my energy for work and CoD and breathing. Anything else can take a back seat... Breathing almost didn't make that short list..

The Start of a New Blogging Era... Wild Cam

 This was going to be a spectacular blog post but because I am obviously technology illiterate this is the best I can do.  Click below to see today's post. Enjoy!

It's on YouTube now! YAAAAAAY!!!!