I'm going to be on the telly!!

So, there was a house party friday night, where I met this really cool girl, she had broken all her bones in an accident some years prevously, and I was fascinated to hear all about it. 

This week at work (phew, getting up to date!) has been quite eventful.... I have been being taken around the hospital, to view the departments.  I have a uniform now - it makes me feel a bit mre official, despite the fact that it is more reminiscent of a beauticians outfit than a nurses.....

The hospital is very clean, there are cleaners everywhere scrubbing every inch of the place.  However,the resources and facilities are very basic.  The beds are scrawny springy contraptions, with mismatched bedding, sagging ominously in the middle.  The wards are quite stark, the lack of equiptment is startling.  I am shown the "injection room" - the equivalent of our treatment or CSSD room, there is quite literally, nothing in it, aside from a small trolley, with a cute assortment of bottle, and a CARDBOARD sharps bin.  The infection control risk assessment health and safety nurse impulses I never knew I had start fizzing and popping.

the nurses look very swish, their uniforms are beautifully laundered (not like mine! I am a disgrace!) and they are wearing high heels and immaculate make up (again, not like me, I look like I got dragged through a hedge backwards!).  But I am unable to ascertain what they are actually doiing, they bustle and they hustle and they fustle, but I cant see what is actually happening.

I am taken to see their "poorly patients" and I wantch as they clean and dress a grade two ressure sore.  Again, inside my head the "project 2000" in me is screaming "noooooooooo".  But I stand mute, and when asked my opinion, givea neutral response, I advise turns and fluids.  I begin to concoct a training session on pressure area care in my head as I am taken round other departments. 

On the ground floor is outpatients.  I am taken to a small kiosk where a woman sits with a very strange apparatus in front of her.  It is a huge glass jar, stoppered with a rubber bung, out of which come two rubber tubes.  In the jar is what looks like frog spawn.  After an elaborately sign languaged inquiry, I am told it is egg white and oxygen, and people are lingin up to buy a cup of it for it's healing properties.  I am taken to the front of the queue and given a cup of froth and a spoon.  It tastes quite sweet and frothy.  I eat it all up and say "mmm".

the rest of my time I spend in the office, it is very peceful and pleasant, and my colleagues cook a meal at lunch time, using a large rice cooker, in which they first cook rice, before setting it aside and frying mutton and vegetables to eat with the rice.  It is always very tasty, and at other times there are cakes and bread and tea to have.  If we are alone in the office, Z goes to the shop and buys us Mantuu, steamed bread with salami sausage in the middle.  Oh I eat well at work!

One day I wake to my alarm, and reach out to press snooze, as usual.  Only I dont press snooze, I unwittingly turn it off.  When I wake - sleepily thinkng , hmm that seemed like a long five minutes - I find it is 8.05am.  I am due at work at 8.20.  After staring in disbelief at the time, wasting precious seconds, I leap out of bed, into my clothes, out of the door and into a taxi.  Chigeerei! I say, straight ahead!  I tell him when to Baruun gar teeshei eegeere (take the right hand turn) and we are soon at teh hospital.  I am denied entry to the lift by the very stern lift attendant, so I run up the 5 flights of stairs, falling in to the office at 8.30.  On time, but resembing Worzel gummage on a bad day.

I have barely got my breath back when I am told I need a photo for my ID badge, and a camera flashes in my face.  oh dear I think, my vanity stinging, that wont be a good photo, but never mind, almost no one will see it.

I become aware of some excitement in the office, and I am pulled down the corridor being told through giggles that I am to "make a drama".  I am propelled onto a ward where I am aghast to see a film crew.  My instructions are to pretend to discuss a set of notes with another nurse.  this I do with aplomb, having done Am Dram before (daaahling).  But after they have finished filming my boss comes over and is fiddling with the front of my tunic.  I realise my button has been undone, and I have just been filmed with my bra on display.  Wonderful.  But worse is to come.

We then have to all walk down the corridor together, with my boss nudging me saying "we're like top models" and my interpreter in fits of giggles I give in and start laughing, turning just intime to see tha the camera is still on us.  Oh well.  I am soon released form "set" and go off with Z to a "physical meditation" session we have been invited to participate in.  It is very calming and soothing, we do gentle exercises, it is somewhere between tai chi and yoga and five rhythms hippie movement class.  I am feeling relaxed.  Until the door opens and the film crew burst in.

So - fame and fortune here I come - I am to be on a TV show, I dont know whichm what channel or when, but I am just waiting for the autograph requests to start.....