Advice given to me as a child (1/5) - Don't run in corridors

As a child, I was seemed to be always being told what to do by various grown ups. My parents, my teachers, my aunts and elder sibling all seemed to take great delight in giving me advice/bossing me around. “Go back upstairs and comb you hair properly,” “Tidy your room,” “Don’t leave your homework to the last minute” they would tell me and, being the good boy that I was I’d (usually) comply.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve realised that some of the time, their advice had some reasonable basis behind it and since I’ve been a doctor, there have been occasions when I look back and think “I really should have listened to what my Mum said.” Here are some of those occasions.

Don’t run in corridors.

-A favourite of various teachers at my primary school.

I’m on call for anaesthetics when the crash pager goes off.

“...Cardiac arrest; renal unit.
Cardiac arrest; renal unit.
Cardiac arrest; renal unit...”

I’m with the consultant in theatre and she says that I should go while she looks after the patient on the table. The renal unit is a fair way away from the operating theatres and I’m feeling quite sprightly, so I decide to run to this crash call. Running through the hospital is all a bit “E.R” and it’s not visiting times so the corridors are relatively empty.

I pick up speed as I enter a long corridor with a T-junction at the end of it and muse to myself that I’ll probably get there before the medical team (which is not the way it normally is). I’m getting closer now, but as I round the corner of the T-junction, out of the corner of my eye I glimpse somebody running from the other direction. It’s the medical FY1 doctor, who’s been pelting down the other corridor to get to crash call. I try to avoid her, but it’s too late and we run smack-bang into each other. Because I’m quite a bit larger than she is, I knock her flying to the ground and then sort of trip over her.

Worse, we are near the canteen and I fall into a stack of used breakfast trays and we both end up in a heap at the bottom of it. As I hit the stack of trays, manage to tip a tray containing some uneaten porridge and cold tea over both of us.

Luckily neither of us were hurt apart from a little bruising, but we did get some funny looks from the nurses and the rest of the crash team when the two of us arrived with me with porridge on my scrubs and her with tea dripping from her hair.