Tims Times

The joys of being home are temporarily suspended as I attend a Medical Care Course, which is like a glorified First aid course, the object of which is to make sure we can put on plasters correctly and so forth on our fellow crew members. Today we even got to stick needles into each other, real needles with salt solution my partner stuck me correctly in the muscle of the thigh and all went nicely. I then stuck him in the leg bone and he lifted off the bed, on my second attempt it went ok. God bless his pain tolerance. The rubber gloves we had were bright purple, lots of male nurses with big moustaches and a bunch of hairy sailors, in any other country it would have been camp with a capital C. We jointly (chickened) opted out of the trying to give each other an intra-venous drip, based on my performance and that there was a dummy arm with veins and blood which worked every time and didn’t squeal like a stuck pig. Tomorrow we will be learning stitching methods on a dummy. The course leader said that statistically speaking we would have two patients a year onboard, I’ve never had any injection cases only headaches and minor cuts and bruises, just as well. He also said that ” simply speaking the skin is a complex organ “, you wouldn’t read about it!
To position myself at the medical facility each day I have a 100 mile round trip. I am so glad that it is only a short term venture into the rat race, winter in Sweden and commuting equals misery. Sitting behind a long haul truck spraying up water and grit into the windscreen is not fun ever, even in a Volvo with heated seats. Rory Gallagher as a travelling companion eased the journey, I had “Irish Tour” from 1974 on the CD player this morning, mighty stuff.