End of A & E

I'm done with Emergency Medicine for the time being. Not for long, as I have enjoyed it so much I don't think I'm going to be able to stay away! I'm starting Oncology next week after a full week off for Easter - I haven't been given so much Easter for a long time!

I had a preview of Oncology recently though. One man - comes in, as his family had insisted on it. Quite non specific about what's wrong, over the last few months he's been breathless, pale, and very sweaty at night. His white cell count was 102. You'd wonder what was going on if the white count was over 10 - 102 is stupidly, ridiculously high. He turned out to have leukaemia. Another man - the day after - came in after collapsing. He had been breathless, and was coughing uncontrollably. I listened carefully to his chest and froze my face to not let my concern show. (I have a terrible weakness of being very expressive, loads of people have told me that.) His right lung sounded so sick - no pleasant whoosh of air. Just ominously quiet sucking, cracking sounds. He turned out to have a really large tumour in his lung. This really got to me, these two patients in succession that I had seen the worry in their faces, and their family's, increase as their time in A&E dragged on. I was crying silently in the toilets by the end of Wednesday.

So winding down from A&E I am far far away from the city, staying with my parents and the boy, surrounded by farms, where I am woken by chickens and lambs, where the buses go every 3 hours and stop at 6pm. Where the church and village hall are the social centres and people buy vegetables and animals from each other. Where the silence is so deep it feels noisy after living in the big smoke. When we weren't living abroad in the Middle East (we followed Dad's job) I spent much of my childhood around here, and took it for granted. Now I savour every second I'm here. Where people aren't rushing, where it's dark and so silent at night, where everyone knows each other, and likes that they know each other. It's so delicious, I can almost taste it.