Nelson's Column, Bolg, Blog, whatever...

In an excellent mood today, being the first day when the lovely Gabrielle does my list instead of Dan The Fat gasman, who has been temporarily suspended after ordering six million quids worth of booze through the NHS for his own party. Still, doubled as a leaving do I guess.

Another reason for joy is that the theatre directorate, which usually excels itself by buying the cheapest, crappiest kit they can possibly lay their hands on, has actually come up with something good. It’s called a Preop Glove. It’s a sticky glove you wear to pick up the hairs after you’ve shaved a patient before surgery. Works really well, too. One should never underestimate the positive effect of neat little tools like this.

Slight problem while I was shaving the first patient, as Gabrielle wafted in and I blew her a kiss, and got a face full of old man’s pubes. Arse!

Anyway the big news this morning is all about what a horrid bully Gordon Brown is. Allegedly he does things to his staff like calling them names and throwing phones at them, and they’ve contacted the anti-bullying hotline.

So I’m like: and? Call that bullying? I don’t know what kind of wimps they employ at Number 10, but they wouldn’t last five minutes in the NHS. Here, where we’re dealing with life and death, we have to keep our subordinates on their toes. Especially if they’re foreign or a woman, or they’ve got a squint or something. I made my last houseman do ward rounds in a Guantanomo-bay orange jumpsuit with a bag on her head. And we make the staff grade carry all the notes from clinic, and then trip him up, and make him pick them all up again. Hahaha!

Oh, look! Gabby’s brought some cake in! Mmmm victoria sponge, my favourite! ARSE!! forgot to take the glove off again!!

Anyway, these rumours have been circulating for a few weeks now, and I can’t help noticing that Gordon the Moron’s personal ratings have been going UP in that time, thus proving that the British public want to be led by some sort of fat one-eyed version of Flashman, and not some sort of touchy-feely nancy-boy. So if Dave wants to win the election, he’s going to have to start flushing Michael Gove’s head down the toilet pretty soon. I’m sure they did that sort of thing at that crappy secondary modern in Slough that he went to.

Just about to start the last case when Sir Charles Pimbley-Pombley pops his head round the door. Sir Charles is the chairman of our local clinical excellence award committee, so obviously I went straight over and shook him firmly by the hand…oh AAAAAARRRRRRRSE!!

I am, quite simply, a legend.

All those years trying to eject the great nose-picking arse Dan the Fat Gasman from my lists, and replace him with the luscious, posh totty Gabrielle, all to no avail. Yet in the end it was so easy.

You may remember I was recently alerted to the useful things one can purchase from the NHS supply chain.

Now for some reason,  possibly due to an outbreak of ebola virus in the Anaesthetic Department, they made Dan their clinical director. So all I needed to do was wait for him to drop off over some paperwork at the head end, then make a note of his departmental cost code. Then…

Of course, he was very chuffed. When one of your colleagues throws a big party in your honour, to express their respect and admiration, and to say a big thank-you for all your (cough) hard work, it’s flattering. We even declared the day of the party ‘Dan The Fat Gasman Day’. The whole hospital was invited, doctors, nurses, managers, spouses and partners. And just in case that wasn’t enough to fill the Great Hall, I put out a couple of ads on FaceSpace and MyBook

What. a. night. Of course, everyone responsibly enjoyed alcoholic beverages according to the government’s wise health guidelines, which took about ten minutes, after which we all got completely wankered. A few extras turned up - a couple of thousand teenagers, some skinheads, the local chapter of the Chicken Head Death Motorbike Bastard Squad.

I think the police were involved - I vaguely remember some people with riot shields and a couple of horses wandering around. Unfortunately the hospital got a bit trashed - nothing too serious, just a few broken windows, and the occupational health department got burned down. I woke up in a student nurse’s room wearing waders (never did find out what happened to my toga). 

I must say, give NHS supply chain their due, the booze was endless. And very reasonably priced too, as I’m sure Dan appreciated the next day, when he got the bill.

It all happened rather quickly after that. The Turnaround Team was sent in within days. They said they’d never come across a trust that had rung up a seven million pound deficit by blowing it all on booze. 

Radical cost-cutting measures were taken, including shutting down all non-essential services, like the department of General Medicine. And Dan was sent on gardening leave.

Still, it may turn out for the best. New research has shown that being an anaesthetist can be bad for your health. 

Arsington bloody arse, with an extra pint of arse for the weekend.

There was I, having awoken in a positive mood, enjoying my favourite breakfast of toast, butter, marmalade, butter, coffee, butter and a cigarette with extra butter, when up pops the health-fascist-of-the-week.

Some ‘leading heart surgeon’ has announced that butter should be banned, an issue that’s so pressing he has abandoned his search for an even vaguely convincing toupée.

Apparently only “radical action” can save growing numbers of young adults from heart attacks and clogged arteries.

Oh gosh, mate, are you sure banning butter is radical enough? Why not tackle the genetic causes of heart disease with eugenic extermination camps? What are you going to do when people start smuggling butter in from France? Jail them? Kill them? Will we need a War on Butter?

Maybe we need a pack of butter sniffer dogs? A heavily-armed Metropolitan Police butter squad? Butter rehabilitation programmes? And when banning butter is shown to have had precisely fuck all effect on the nation’s health will you do the decent thing and shoot yourself in the face with a service revolver, or will you decide that cheese, milk, red meat, and Curlywurlies will have to go too? What would it take for fascists like you to actually arsing well stop?

You know what the real problem is here? Heart surgery! It was always an accident waiting to happen.

You see, not everyone can get into medical school. And not everyone who gets into medical school can be a surgeon. And not every surgeon can make it in a tough discipline like DGH hepatobiliary surgery with an interest in blogging.

So some - generally those who lack the delicate touch to do orthopaedics or the personality to be urologists - end up in the sump of the surgeon’s art: cardiac. And the big problem with cardiac surgery is that it only really involves one and a half different operations, with the difficult bits like vein harvesting done by nurses.

So cardiac surgeons are all, quite simply, bored. And, as Shakespeare said, the devil makes work for bored hands.

Some try to take on different surgical operations which are actually difficult, with disastrous consequences.

Others go in search of other diversions. After a bit of digging I found this article. See what I lengths I go to in order to bring you the truth? I read articles in The Guardian by people called Felicity. I actually feel dirty now.

It would appear from the right royal kicking he’s getting in the Bolgosphere that not only is Mr Leading Heart Surgeon an authoritarian git who thinks he has a god-given right to tell me what I can and can’t eat for my own good, it turns out he knows less about the subject than I do.

And the reason his idiotic ideas have gained such a wide audience is because they were spread (har!) by the PR agency that works for big-assed multinational Unilever. And do you know what Unilever makes? I’ll give you a clue: it’s not butter.

Gosh what a great game! Take a groundless assertion, give it to a corporation who could profit from it and expect everyone to do as they’re told because you’re a self-styled ‘leading surgeon’.

Can I play? “Top Middle Bit of England surgeon says smoking is good for you and should be compulsory”. Has a nice ring to it. I’ll give Philip Morris a ring.

Well, thank goodness the weather has improved. Been completely snowed in at home, unable to make it in to work without undertaking a treacherous half-mile journey down a flat road which, although it had been ploughed, salted and gritted, still looked a bit too dangerous for me to risk the new Range Rover on.

Needless to say, Dweeb Urologist Johnson sweated it in 20 miles in a Toyota Prius from the arse end of nowhere, and stopping every hundred yards to dig himself out of snowdrifts and losing three toes to frostbite in the process. All that tells you is how very, very badly he wanted to look up old men’s knobs with a telescope. Luckily, despite the relative confinement, my time was not completely wasted since the routes to the private hospital and the pub looked just that little bit less tricky. 

And of course the Test Match was on. Phew!

Still, back to the treadmill today, only to be presented with this joyous piece of news. What a bunch of arse. As if they don’t get their claws on enough of our money! Luckily I have nothing to worry about, since my financial affairs are in the hands of the top accountants Spudge & Co. I must say, they were a real find. It’s amazing what a difference it makes when you hire someone who really understands the rules in detail. Over the years they have saved me thousands. It’s equally amazing how many people are unaware of some of these loopholes.

For example, did you know that you don’t have to declare income from private patients who’ve died? That saved me a ton of money on its own. 

Or from patients who have a ‘Q’ in their names? Or from anyone who had surgery on a Tuesday? Or that the government throws away all your records after six months, so you can’t be done for anything that happened before then? Or that it is quite Ok to tax-deduct school fees, child maintenance payments, groceries, holidays and golf equipment? Neither did I! See what quality advice can do?

All the same, given the climate, I think I will give Spudge a ring check it’s all Ok. 

UPDATE

Funny. Keep getting ‘number unobtainable’.

Oh, rapture! Oh, joy! Be still my beating heart! It’s Patsy to the rescue!

Just as I though I’d never see that beautiful face or hear that slightly whiny schoolmarmish voice again, my beloved pops up to save us all from the Evil Clunking Fist Brown. She’s going to cajole and persuade and twist arms and call in favours and rally support and FINALLY persuade the Labour Party to grow some testicles and get rid of the useless arse.

It’s going to be the best back-bench revolt ever!!

Serves him right for being so horrible to her when he took over as PM, after she very kindly offered to help out with the government by being Chancellor of the Exchequer or something, and he turned her down flat, the ungrateful Scottish knob.

She did a jolly good job as health secretary, for very little thanks, and that was after a stint at trade and industry, where she did a stout job of safeguarding the British car industry, and before that she had a pivotal role in masterminding Neil Kinnock’s fantastic 1992 election campaign.

And yet there are people - it makes me angry to even think about this - that reckon she’s a talentless bint whose entire career has been one prolonged car crash of fuck-ups and incompetence. Even Johnson the dweeb urologist can’t see what a jewel she has been in the crown of our nation’ s governance.

He turned up in my office the other day and tried to allege that she was the worst health secretary who’d ever drawn breath, but I managed to persuade him, with cogent argument and by shutting his hand in the drawer a few times, that she was probably the best…apart from seven or eight others.

But now she’ll show them! Now she’ll rescue the whole country!! She’ll be kingmaker!!! Perhaps in gratitude the Labour Party will see sense and vote her in as leader, then I can gaze at her gorgeous yellowing skin and slightly weird hair at PMQ’s as she talks patronisingly to the leader of the opposition.

You just wait! Maybe she’ll remember me and I’ll become her ’special’ advisor again. Oh baby. She’s unleashed a groundswell, an unstoppable force, a tsunami! It’ll be her finest hour! She’ll….

Oh Wait. It’s failed. Arse!