Patient power gone mad

I'm glad that acute medicine has become more 'user-friendly'. Back in the day, my A&E rotation was spent in a musty, airless bunker. Fear and sweat ran down the walls and with no natural light or the faintest whiff of the outside world it had a gambling-hall quality to it. There were no clocks and no shifting seasons; just uniform clinical green and the condescending sneers of middle graders. In the middle of a 12 hour night shift, with no breaks, I would find myself in the 'K-hole' as I liked to call it. A sort of mild, hallucinatory, out-of-body feeling similar to 'jamais vu', in which I could assess, work up, thrombolyse and ship off an MI to the medical assessment unit in under 20 minutes flat. I was a legend, a grafter. Slipping out of the 'K-hole' I would realise that I was covered in puke, shit and blood and that my life was pretty much owned by the Trust. But in the 'K hole' I was Apollo, the God of healing. his was a time when morality was pretty much turned on its head, and the only things saving us from meltdown were the pert nipples of staff nurses. Outside the cubicle we would laugh at the drunk guy who had scalped himself on a barbed wire fence (whilst leaning out of his car window to puke) and I would even find myself high fiving my colleagues when we learnt that the expected triple A had bled out on his way in the ambulance because it would mean we could leave on time! I feel sorry for my colleagues still living and working in the cave, shielded from the sun, and the seasons. Hidden from humanity. Each time you glissade into your quiet consulting room offer them thanks and pray that God will see them through yet another Godless night. Kev