A title which either intrigued you or made you skip this one............. If the former, welcome; if the latter, you are probably doing something much more entertaining.
I managed to get your attention, but I would imagine that you are now wondering what on earth I am on about? Bear with me and I will explain.
In the last 10 years or so, an Americanism (one amongst hundreds) has crept into the English language. It is now heard almost everywhere. Things that did not stop were once described as "continuous" or something similar, they are now most frequently described as being twenty four seven or, if you are of a seriously anti-literary bent, 24/7. Some parts of the NHS work all day every day.......but not all.
Today was the 10th treatment of my fun course of 37; for NHS outpatient treatment, this marks the end of 2 weeks as it tends only to work "8/5". Some departments might work up to "12/5", but the key number here is the "5". Please do not get me wrong, I am glad to get 2 days a week off the round trip to the Kent Oncology Centre (KOC) of 25 miles, not least because I can spend some quality time with my horse, but five day working can have some unintended consequences.
(as an aside, I will have travelled over 900 miles by the time I reach the end, or the equivalent of driving from London to Kaliningrad!)
Being a good "patient", I left plenty of time to allow for the traffic and arrived at the hospital about 25 minutes early. Time to listen the the radio and generally chill out before presenting myself to the unfailingly smiling receptionist. All went as usual and I took my place in "waiting area 4" to await my turn in "LA6". The NHS does love its numbers............
One of the screens designed to provide visual confirmation of the electronic voice's summons was not working, but apart from that nothing unusual until one of the radiographers (J) approached me. He apologised that they would be about 10 minutes late as they had suffered a power cut over the weekend. For whatever reason, this had clearly caused either their machine, or its supporting IT, to wobble. 8/5 now starts to become more significant..........there are clearly no hospital engineers at the weekend to check that the hospital's machinery has not been affected by a power cut. Goo job I was not in ITU!
A 10 minute delay is no great inconvenience and it passed quickly; I was duly summoned to change. I am not sure whether I mentioned this before, but the pyjama trousers supplied come in a variety of sizes all the way up to a sort of Macdonald Eater special. A critical part of the induction to radiotherapy is being taught to find a suitable size from the labelled heaps of hospital linen. The label on the shelf is of little moment; the critical indicator of size is the colour of the drawstring; in my case, this is white. 8/5 again...............there had evidently not been a laundry delivery that early on a Monday morning, so the only obvious trousers had red strings, which I think equates to Macdonald Eater.
All this sounds really trivial, but the power cut part does have a serious point. When I was loaded onto the machine I was attended by 3 staff who were running behind their schedule and were evidently a little stressed by it. Given that the delivery of the treatment relies on pinpoint accuracy in the alignment of me and the machine (we are talking about measurements to the millimetre here), the last thing that one wants is stressed staff lining everything up. I have faith that they got it right, but 8/5 working by the support departments was clearly not a help to them.
Enough for one evening or I might nod off over the machine. Nodding off is starting to become a feature of my days now.........an unfortunate side effect of radiotherapy.
I have no doubt that you have guessed tonight's tune already. If you haven't: shame on you!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct949kIS-G0
Sorry it is not last year's Glastonbury performance, but the BBC has not put it in the public domain. Or any other domain come to think of it..................
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