Stolen from Mental Nurse

Your Score: Commander - ESTP

60% Extraversion, 40% Intuition, 73% Thinking, 46% Judging

It's all about action with you, isn't it? You're outgoing and right to the point. Fast moving, fast talking and often fast spending. Your motto is "Just DO it."

Wow. You move faster than the Flash on a treadmill. (Yes. I could have thought up something cleverer than that. But honestly, you're just not worth my time.)

To carry on the superhero theme, you're comparable to the Hulk. Except you're uglier. And you're slightly more intimidating. People flinch when you're around for fear you might exert your dominance and order them to do 50 press-ups.

Perhaps if you calmed down a little, people wouldn't be so scared of you. Of course, something would have to be done about your face. Is plastic surgery an option?

This insatiable appetite for action means that you're not exactly into long term commitments. You get bored incredibly quickly and tend to jump in and out of relationships like the Energiser Bunny.

Eventually you're going to run out of people to bounce to, and you will end up a very lonely and hated individual.

*****************

If you want to learn more about your personality type in a slightly less negative way, check out this.

*****************

The other personality types are as follows...

Loner - Introverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving
Pushover - Introverted Sensing Feeling Judging
Criminal - Introverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving
Borefest - Introverted Sensing Thinking Judging
Almost Perfect - Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving
Freak - Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging
Loser - Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving
Crackpot - Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging
Clown - Extraverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving
Sap - Extraverted Sensing Feeling Judging
Do Gooder - Extraverted Sensing Thinking Judging
Scumbag - Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving
Busybody - Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging
Prick - Extraverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving
Dictator - Extraverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging

Link: The Brutally Honest Personality Test written by UltimateMaster on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Off work on the sick

I have been off work sick for just over a week now. The ugly, black monster that is depression, self-harm, suicidal thoughts and general don't care lethargy has washed over me again. It's a shame really because I was rather being to enjoy my new job at the new hospital.

Work have been great about it though. They've been really understanding and my consultant has told me not to come back until I feel ready to work, not when I think I should come back. I still feel guilty though, I should be out there helping people, not wallowing in my own self-pity like some emo-esque teenager.

My new GP is an absolute love too. I am back on the anti-depressants, back on the mood stabiliser, back on the sleeping tablets, back on all the tablets I stopped taking many years ago in the great belief that I was absolutely fine and didn't need pharmacological intervention. Now I am wishing that pharmacology worked faster on the body.

I am holed up in my little room, crying, listening to maudling music and planning ways to escape my life for a few hours. I wouldn't say I was actively suicidal, not like sometimes, but I am thinking about it strongly. It's a thought that is always in my head and pops up at the most inconvenient of times. I have been cutting myself again, quite badly, and it's only because I am an A&E doctor that I haven't had to get treatment for it.

My GP is worried about me, my parents are worried about me, work is worried about me. In fact the only person who doesn't seem to be worried about me, is me, and that's only because I haven't got the energy to think anymore.

It doesn't matter where you are in the country...

Bank Holidays working in A&E are on the whole always the same. Full of DIY accidents, sporting accidents, drunks, people who have had accidents whilst drunk, overprotective parents bringing their kids in 'cause they can't get to see a GP and all the time people telling you to hurry up because it's a Bank Holiday and they don't want to spend all day in A&E.

Well, guess what? It wasn't my first choice of location to spend August Bank Holiday either, but I had no choice in the matter, unlike the majority of the patients I saw who could have waited until they got a GP appointment in the morning. So don't moan at me, because the mood I was in today, I was highly likely to moan back at you and the general public doesn't like that!

Got a day off tomorrow and then start a week of nights on Wednesday. I haven't done a whole week of nights in my new job yet. I've done a couple here and one there but not a whole week of working 8pm until 8am. I guess I'm a little scared as it's new territory for me, and I was scared starting at this hospital with the usual self-confidence doubts, but I've had good feedback from the rest of the staff, so I just have to let the positives prevail and push the negatives away. Sounds easy on paper!

But how strange the change, from major to minor

I spent most of the day in the minors department today, as opposed to the rest of the week where I was in majors. Now unlike most of my colleagues, I don't actually mind working in minors, I believe it is part of my job and I tend to get annoyed with people who work in A&E for all the adrenaline rush of a Casualty episode, and sometimes minors can be as interesting as majors.

I do however, get annoyed wth Emergency Nurse Practitioners (ENPs) telling me how to do my job in the minors department. Unfortunately minors seems to be overrun with ENPs, apparently it speeds things up and allows for more patients to be seen, in essence though it slows things down and means that I cannot get on with whatever I am attending to. Today I was told by an ENP how to check for concussion and that the patient that has arrived in minors didn't need a CT scan to rule anything out as "minors don't refer to CT, if triage think they need a CT then they get sent to majors" and "they've only had a minor bump on the head". Just a minor bump on the head that left them forgetting all of yesterday evening and meant that their left pupil wasn't reacting at the same speed as their right one today.

The same ENP then called me away from my patients 8 times in the space of 4 hours to ask me my opinion on her patients. I have no problem with people requesting a second opinion, in fact I'd rather have an ENP ask me my opinion on a case than assume they can deal with it and miss something dangerous. The department has quite a lot of ENPs in minors though and if everyone of them asked for my opinion (or another doctor's) twice an hour then the doctors wouldn't get round to seeing any patients.

ENPs are meant to be able to see patients alongside doctors and therefore clear the minors waiting area in half the time, but if this particular ENP was anything to go by then the waiting area would clog up and go twice as slowly. I'm sure they do a very valued job and I'm probably being unreasonably unfair but when I start to assess or treat a patient, I quite like to complete the treatment without that many interruptions (within due reason) and I don't like being interrupted by the same person so often. Maybe she saw me as a soft touch, or maybe Friday was just my turn to be her oracle. I guess I'll never know.

Success!

For those of you who are interested, and those who are not, I finally found out what the backing music to the TfL "You're Better Off By Bike" advert is.

Straight Lines by Dawn Landes.

Hallelujah!!! It's been driving me mad for weeks.

Long time, no see, and all that jazz

Gosh, it's been a while. I don't really know where to start. I'll start by saying that I was one of the lucky ones, I have a training post in London, in Emergency Medicine. It's in a busy hospital and isn't one I'd come across before (I studied in London) although I did know of it. They are also encouraging me to sit my MCEM exams which is good as I have said before that my previous workplaces weren't that bothered about my post-grad credentials and thus led me to believe that I wasn't worthwhile when it came to exams etc.

The fiance and I are no longer. He is working in Birmingham at the Defence Medical Centre and in the last few months had become so obsessed with his job, and possible promotion, and trying to get sent back out to active service (something I coudn't understand) that we barely spoke to each other either by text, phone or email, let alone saw each other. We decided that a long distance relationship wasn't going to work out and he seemed more concerned with his career than he did with the idea of marriage so we called it a day. I did all the screaming, crying, sulking malarky and am now feeling quite relieved and free. I quite like being single again, sometimes it's nice to go into a bar and flirt with people and tease them a little, whilst having absolutely no intention of taking it any further. Oh dear, I've just realised that could make me sound like a slutty, bitchy tart, which of course I'm not, I just haven't been single for oh such a long time.

I am refreshed to say that I am slightly more enlightened with being a doctor than I was 3 months ago. I think most doctors can say that now. I know a couple of people who have emigrated to find a job, a few who were unsuccessful in finding a training post, one guy who has had a change of career entirely and has decided to become a teacher and one girl who gave birth to a baby girl earlier this week so doesn't care about her career at present. It's been a rough time for the medical profession and I am alarmed to say that the majority of Joe Public has had absolutely no idea what it is like. I have had comments of "it's healthy competition, you get it in every job" and "it's only bringing medicine in line with the rest of the employment system" thrown at me over the period that MMC was in crisis. Let me say that I know what the rest of the world is like and I know that job-hunting is tough, but I don't think you can assess doctors on their ability to write creative answers to stupid, inanane questions without looking at their qualifications, experience and medical abilities. I just hope the government has learnt from this mistake, although I get the impression that because the NHS hasn't ground to a halt this month they probably think that it was a successful process!

I did however, have a horrible incident in the department yesterday. One I have never experienced before, and hope not to again. It was an anti-semitic attack against me. I have worked in lots of hospitals and no one has cared about my religion. My surname is very stereotypically Jewish and when I went to treat the man yesterday he spat in my face and told me he wasn't going to be treated by a hook-nosed terrorist like myself. Charming. The hospital have barred him from the department on racial discrimination grounds but it scared me. Anti-semitism is becoming amazingly more common of late and that scares me too. The Jewish cemetery near where I live had been vandalised, my aunt's house has had graffiti sprayed on it, I know my cousins have been subjected to abuse on their way to school and the local synagogue is running at a much higher security level than ever before.

In other news, can anyone in the London area please tell me what the backing music to the Transport for London "You're Better Off By Bike" TV advert is? It's driving me mad. All help mucho appreciated, ta!

I am not dead...

But I can't honestly say that I feel alive.

MMC and MTAS still stink, the fiance is back from Iraq and is looking forward to working in Birmingham without any consideration for the fact that if I get a job I won't be anywhere near Birmingham, I am trying to calm myself down over the one interview I have and am trying to resist the urge to run away and quit this profession. Oh, and I'm trying to stop bursting into tears on ward rounds or when in ICU or Theatre, I wish I was back in A&E but then I don't, then I sometimes wish I wasn't anywhere.

So if you were wondering where the posts had gone it's because frankly I can't see the point in posting, I can't see the good or positive side to medicine anymore and I don't want to bore people with my pathetic whinging, but thanks for the concern about my lack of posts, that means a lot to me, it really does.