I am alive.

I have finished the ITU placement (well, kind of, I have time to make up but not thinking about that now, can do it next year, sod it I'm far, far too tired and burnt out and have an exam a week today OMGARGH) and am still vertical. Kinda.

I should probably try and say something witty and intelligent about this but it's half ten and I only just staggered back through the door, so I can already tell that's going to be an utter non-starter. Instead I'll confine myself to making random comments in the hope that someone out there will find them interesting enough. I'll do a full debrief later, maybe, but for now I'm too tired to be even remotely coherent. Just. Too. Tired. Three long days in a row have scrambled my capacity for logic beyond retrieval (without anything short of a good long sleep, that is).

That said, I do want to do some kind of debrief on my experiences in the last eight weeks, but since I'm too fried to be funny that means only one thing - I'm going to havr to resort to making lists, because it's about all I've got the brainpower to do at the moment.

The Specialist Placement: A Vaguely Approximate Number-Crunching Summary:

• Days spent in HDU: around 10


• Days spent in ITU: All the rest of them.
  
• Weeks spent feeling like I didn't have a damned clue what to do: 6.5


• Weeks spent actually feeling vaguely comfortable: 1.5


• Night shifts worked: 4


• Night shifts I was meant to work: 6


• Sick days: 3


• Amount spent in canteen: about £70


• Amount spent on food for night shifts: £20


• Amount spent on crap from Macdonald's: £25


• Bottles of Lucozade drunk: 25 at the very least.


• Cups of tea drunk: Thirtyish.


• Breaks hastily curtailed to get away from crap TV: 3


• Illicit trips to water cooler: Twentysomething.


• Arterial blood gas syringes stuck in analyzer machine thingummy: at least 25


• Operations seen: 3


• Operations I want to see: many, many, many more.


• Largely pointless trips to theater suite: About a dozen.


• Percentage of practice hours spent thinking about Ken Hidaka: 15%


• Percentage of practice hours spent feeling exhausted: 45%


• Personal phone calls made: 3. All on breaks or after work and with permission, mind.


• Amount of uniform tunics which went pink in the wash: 3


• Hours spent waiting for bus: Far too many to wish to recall.


• Hour-long bus journeys spent listening exclusively to Moonflower: 3


• Bus journeys on which I didn't write a word: 2


• Notebook pages covered in my irredeemable scrawl: Around 30


• Notebooks used to scribble in: 2


• Chapters of 'Seuche' completed: Near as dammit 2

Things I Lost on the Bus Route of Thieves:

• One-month bus pass (nearly expired).


• Umbrella.


• Umbrella slip cover thingy.


• Half a pair of gloves.


• Approximately 40 hours of my young life.


• Confidence.

Conclusions:

• If I can handle working in an ITU and begin (by the end) to feel I had a vague idea what I was doing, I can't see why I shouldn't be able to handle anything a bog-standard ward would throw at me...
  
• ... Too bad that I am ruined for ward work. RUINED, I tell you. I'll never settle to it after that. It's going to be too dull for words, my deah. All due respect to those who can handle that, but I'm getting the feeling I'm really not cut out for it.


• Twelve-hour shifts plus two-hour commutes plus Too Much Time waiting at bus stops equals my health is ruined. I really cannot work that way. I could manage the shifts if the commute was better. Or I could manage the commute if the shifts were shorter. Add them both together and I'm sleep deprived and shattered.


• I really, really want to work in an OR. Really.


• I am missing my family and desperately want to get out of London for ma week or two. I need a break, the year's been hectic and I won't miss 2005 when it's gone. It wasn't a bad year by any stretch of the imagination but Jesus, it's been hell in parts.

Cannot think of anything else to say. Or any way to make this amusing. But for those of you who carer about such stupidities as my fanfiction, I have nine pages (not sides, pages) of 'Seuche' in my notebook, which means that Chapter I-think-it's-23 is nearly complete. Meaning that hopefully I can post Chapter 19 very soon. I'm going to try typing up my terrible scrawl sometime over the weekend, and we'll see how it goes. Here's hoping I won't get distracted by icon making again...

Oh - and a Happy Belated Advent.

I guess this means I shouldn't feel bad about humming Christmas carols at work today. Now can I go home, please? Come on. It's almost Christmas, right? And I'm missing my dad like stupid crazy, and I still haven't seen my parents' kitties!

And I want to write Ken fic. But don't I always?