So here were are again- the end of the year and I am filled with the requisite festive cheer.
It’s been a busy month, has December. I have been dutifully attending (or at least attempting to anyway) lectures for the previous three weeks, spending an unnatural amount of time learning about the various causes of diarrhoea and what happens when your colon goes toxic. Now I am taking time out to allow my liver to recover and enjoy what may very well be my last Christmas holiday ever when I have no real work to do.
This will seem bizarre, probably even to those who study medicine, but I do miss being in hospital at Christmas. One of the F1s on my last firm (the first year doctors) is working as I type this at 11.30pm on Christmas Eve, and I am a little envious. There’s something surreally amazing about the experience: the crappy tinsel hanging from the wards as you skid down the assessment ward to someone who’s heart has given up, the absolutely trashed executives littering A&E from hedonistic Christmas parties and standing outside the entrance at 1am, watching my breath condensate thinking that I should really be smoking a cigarette to complete this wonderful picture. I say all of this now, of course, safe in the knowledge that I will shortly be tucked up in bed and I can get up whenever I want and be greeted with a roasting turkey and hopefully a few presents. Having to examine someone’s groin probably isn’t made any more festive by wearing a Santa hat and humming “jingle bells.” Who knows, maybe there’s more research due in that field.
I did intend for this post to be longer than this (in two parts, in fact) but as you will probably have suspected by now if you are even an occasional reader of this blog that I am in fact suffering from what is essentially now a perennial hangover. Christmas brings with it the inherent danger of Christmas parties at work- and working for a few different jobs and societies there are the commensurate number of parties, and the commensurate number of alcohol units. Whilst the Snow Ball may have ended with my duping a taxi driver into taking us home with a somewhat…inebriated friend, the best night out by far was the annual Christmas Bop at the infamous medical student bar- the Reynold’s. In a spirit of half-hearted Christmas cheer I ended up looking like Father Christmas who had fallen on hard times post-bariatric surgery:
Do not trust this man. He is not Father Christmas
In fact, as I have discovered there seems to be an almost ungodly amount of vomitus at Christmas, with one of my nameless housemates vomiting in entirety into a plastic pint glass. I was going to make a joke about her aim being as good as something but couldn’t think of one that wouldn’t leave me seriously injured when we are all reunited in January.
So, in penance for my sins (coupled with the fear that if I left the house I would probably vomit intractably) I was enlisted to clean the house. It seems Jesus doesn’t approve of dust. So with my festive hangover in tow, I learnt that limescale really is very difficult to remove from bathroom surfaces irrespective of the choice of cleaning product. Having then been forced to clean the firegrate wearing my superman pants (that part was voluntary), I am harbouring what must be the only case of “black lung” in thirty years.
But now I must return to the Christmas Celebrity “Come Dine with Me,” and so it remains only for me to thank you all for reading this year, have a very Merry Christmas and I will speak to you all again in the New Year.
