Wednesday 6 May 2009

I should have got it done years ago

Walking down the corridor I spy Andy, one of the surgical SHOs who gives me a wave. He’s just come back from a holiday in Spain and is looking extremely orange tanned.

“Hey mate, how was the trip?” I enquire

“Absolutely brilliant,” comes his chirpy response. “Seven days with nothing to do apart from lounge around and drink beer.”

“Nice one, I’m almost jealous.”

“You ought to be.”

“And you seem to be doing a reasonable impression of Dave Dickinson at the moment…”

“Hey… don’t you start knocking our Dave! Anyway the tan’s not the only thing I got out there”

“Oh really? What else did you get? The clap? I’ve told you about this before…”

“Cheeky twat!” and he punches me on the arm. “No, I was talking about this…” And he gives me a conspirational look and rolls up his shirt sleeve to reveal a rather large tattoo on his right arm.

“Oh, you got it in the end.”

“Yeah, what do you think?” I study the design for a moment. It’s actually rather a good one. Admittedly, it doesn’t really go with the cuff linked shirt that he’s wearing, but with a different outfit I reckon it’d look really good.

“I like it,” I conclude. “It’s a bit bigger than I thought you were going to go for, but I think it looks really good.”

“Yeah, I thought there’s no point getting one unless it’s a big one and I really love it! I should have got it done years ago.”

“Well, you did keep banging on about it for ages, so at least I don’t have to listen to that anymore. But honestly, it looks good. I’ve got to get back to ITU though, I need to put a central line in before the patient goes to the CT scanner at 11:00. I’ll catch up with you later.”

“Yeah, see you mate,” replies Andy and off he flounced back towards the surgical wards.



3 comments:

LavanyaLea said...

so he's covering it with long sleeves? what happens with bare below the elbows (our hospital's been having DoH visits, re H1N1 so everyone should make sure they follow bare below the elbows AND have that mini alcohol gel tucked on their waist!)?

bobna said...

This whole story was BS, you are either talking about yourself or you made it up completely.

Harry said...

don't you just love constructive criticism like bobna's?

and, to follow up lavanyalea's questions, what's the hospital really going to do about it? it's not like they're going to make him pay for tattoo removal (or pay for it themselves), and if you follow what the govt says there's a shortage of doctors so theyre hardly going to sack him, not to mention he's training as a surgeon, i thought those were rather necessary in hospitals? and took a while to train? if he's passed some postgrad exams as well (like your FRCA? is it MRCS that he needs to do?) theyre hardly likely to fire him because he has a spot of ink on his arm.

so he wears short sleeves, a fully healed tattoo isnt going to transmit any more germs than plain uninked skin :S

like you said before, people get a lot less fussy when the brown stuff hits the spinny thing, if someone kicks up a fuss about a non-offensive tat just because it might be visible while he works, theyre an idiot.