Sitting at a bistro table in the sun, Edinburgh has stretched itself out in the light and warmth; though in truth it’s not as warm as we’re all pretending.

We’re cold pints and calamari, I’m telling Kate about the This American Life episode where they double blind taste tested squid rings versus deep fried pig rectum.

We stil eat the calamari.

Out of the bar, a waiter.

Black apron, neat tie, neater facial hair.

He drops something on top of a barrel beside us.

“Anyone lost a…sock?”

We laugh.

“Just found it lying in the doorway…weird.”

We joke about checking our feet, but we’re confident we haven’t lost any socks, thanks.

He returns to clearing tables around us.

In the interests of confidentiality, I shift into sign.

EEEEESH. AWKWARD. LOOKS LITTLE BIT LIKE MY SOCKS!

EXACTLY SAME YOUR SOCKS. EXACTLY. Kate answers.

She’s right, it does, black and grey. I have dozens of the things, because I figure nobody ever faced death wishing they’d spent more time pairing socks.

She continues, YOUR TROUSERS NEW TODAY?

YES CLEAN, NEW

She’s laughing.

MAYBE DROP WALKING? THAT YOUR SOCK DEFINITELY…WANT IT?

NO!

We return to beer and snacks, finish and settle up.

“Last chance…” she teases me.

“I’ll buy another pair…”

Because what it if wasn’t?

Surely there is little worse than dropping your underwear in a public place?

Except maybe rescuing and adopting someone elses?

She dolled up

And he with a yard of cashmere tartanry

Around his ears.

Two muffins (blueberry,

Two croissants (chocolate)

And a cake to share;

For pudding.

So yesterday we all, as a flat, went off to a Go Kids Go wheelchair course. I’ve heard about these guys from Kate and Sean before, they’re a wheelchair skills teaching charity for kids and young people with mobility challenges.

The thing that’s truly awesome about Go Kids Go is that, if they wish, everyone works in a wheelchair. Kids, siblings, carers, parents, grandparents. You want a chair? They’ll give you a chair for the day.

My main drive for the day was similar in my drive to learn sign language. I feel it’s important that anybody involved in the care of kids is able to contribute to that slow, osmotic learning that happens with every child on every day. With a kid who can walk and talk, you’d correct their pronunciation, or hold their hand as they tottered along a low wall.

If I can’t expand the kid’s signing? Or talk him through how to navigate everyday life in the chair? Then I’m not a carer.

I’m a watch-dog.

So off we went and met another half dozen or so families, all of whom had kids with varying degrees of mobility and ability. Big empty gym hall, huge array of wheelchairs, both adult and kid sized and a clear message that if you want to be on a chair, then you go ahead and grab that chair and play.

We raced up and down the hall, we played British Bulldog (with all the aggression and brutality of the bipedalist variety I remember from school). We danced and wheelied, we practiced falling out of chairs and getting back into them. The thing that struck me most about this exercise was the enormous emphasis the trainer placed on independence. Sure, you’ve fallen over backwards in your chair, but here are the skills to make sure the handles of your chair hit the floor before the back of your skull does. And sure, you’re now lying on your back in the chair, belted in and immobile.

But you know what, I bet you can unclip yourself and get out of the chair in whatever way works for you.

For some kids that was bracing their arms against the floor and shuffling. For others who evidently had great abdominal strength but little lower limb control, they crunched their bellies and flipped their floppy legs out of the chair and over somewhere where they wouldn’t get in the way. For some it was a matter of blithely standing up. For others it came down to deciding when to ask someone else for help.

But throughout, it was down to the kid on the chair to decide how it was going to work.

I’d had reservations, I must be honest.

I was worried I’d feel silly. I was worried my desire to learn skills would eclipse the kids who were actually there to participate. I was worried I’d be self conscious.

I was an idiot.

The simple act of putting everybody on a chair created an atmosphere of total equality. As people arrived through the day and joined in, it readily became impossible to tell who was using a chair for the first time or who was a regular.

Actually, that’s not entirely true, as there were several kids who operated their chairs like stunt drivers. They were plainly not on a chair for the first time.

But predominantly the immediate labels of “able bodied” or “disabled” became meaningless. By lunchtime I was reminded of Iggy Pop.

Except clearly, you can substitute “on a chair” for “being a woman”.

By the end of the day I was more uncomfortable standing up than sitting down and it became the most natural thing in the world to wheel over to a kid, tap them on the shoulder and shout “Tig! You’re it!” before wheeling away as fast as my pathetically under-developed upper body could carry me.

We wrapped the day up with a short game of basketball and I had a beautiful illustration of something that, I fear, many of us have done in the past.

Because whenever we see someone on a manual chair, particularly a kid, we’re so quick to say “Oh…they must have terribly strong arms…” and while it’s meant well, it’s often said with a pitying subtext of “This is the thing we can congratulate them on, poor loves, it must be terrible…”

The whole game ran for ten minutes, I played for five and by the end of things, my shoulders, chest, forearms and wrists were alight. The regular wheelchair users? Even the ones who were tiny? They were ready to go another half hour.

“Terribly strong” doesn’t come close to it.

My eyes are tired.

Itchy, dry.

They feel like my contact lenses have been in too long.

I keep thinking I should take them out before I go to sleep.

Then I realise I’m not wearing any…and laugh.

Then I realise that you normo-vision freaks have never had the joy of peeling the ‘front’ layer of your eye off and bathing the under layer with cool, clean saline; such as those of us who were contact lenses might.

I’ve also had a few moments of thinking “Oooh, I can’t see well, I’d better put my specs on.”

Do you poor fuckers really spend your days blundering around unable to manually adjust the focus on your eyes?

0800

Terrible nights sleep. Hopefully I’d be tired after the op. All advice is that the best thing to do is go to sleep afterwards as apparently it helps the cornea heal.

1100

Sat in the waiting room of the laser clinic, the sun bright and cold outside, four others sitting around and waiting to be seen. I wonder if we’ll become a little happy band of laser victims, cheering each other on as we go in and out, like contestants on a reality TV show. A woman walks out of the treatment rooms, squinting and smiling before pulling sunglasses on and walking out with her husband…”I’m not too bad….” she mentions, sounding surprised. I’m feeling optimistic.

In the corner, rolling coverage of the Boston man hunt. Newsreaders struggle to say something original over and over.

Sitting next to me a young woman reads aloud from a Penguin Classic paperback. I wonder if I can figure out what the title is over the next few hours?

1120

One woman is taken through “just for a chat…” and returns a few minutes later, clutching her coat and handbag across her chest.

1130

Reading woman is still reading, just subaudibly, I can only hear S’s and T’s, a random collection of hissing clicks that make her sound like a coffee machine cooling down.

1135

It’s Virgina Woolf “The lady in the looking glass”.

If you’re reading Virgina Woolf, surely you can read to yourself without imitating white goods?

1140

The receptionist checks my paperwork, he’s a friend of a friend and teases me. “If you fill this out wrong, we don’t give you any anaesthetic…”

“And then you use a hammer for the surgery, right?”

“And a chisel. Just to make the flap, then the surgeon uses the power of his mind.”

1200

The surgeon takes me into a room and runs through questions. Do I understand the risks of infection? Have I read the information leaflets? Do I have any questions?

“Only one…you’ve seen my notes, do you foresee any difficulties?”

He laughs at me.

“If I did, I’d be discussing them, you’ll be fine.”

1230

I’m taken into a side room asked to confirm my name, date of birth and post code. There’s a short chat about eye drops, the importance of avoiding infection post operatively and then I take my glasses off, drop them in my bag and am led through to the treatment room. I saw it on my first visit, it was clean and reassuringly clinical, a long bed in the middle with large machinery hanging over it.

I’m pretty clueless without my specs on and the assistant with me introduces me to the people in the room, they’re friendly, but I can’t see their faces so it makes little difference. I smile and say hi, then lie on the bed and shuffle my head into position.

The procedure itself is difficult to keep up with. There are various phases that I don’t understand well enough to describe in detail, but my eyes are anaesthetised with drops and a range of lights flashed into my eyes. At times the surgeon tells me to look up, or stare into a red glow. I’m aware of ‘seeing’ things in my vision, though I suspect they’re refractory artifacts landing on my retina. At one point I can see a system of blood vessels, at another a circle with rainbow coloured spots over it hovers in my vision which I wonder is the Wavefront aspect of the procedure, where bumps and dips over my cornea are smoothed over.

The laser ablation itself is almost comically sci-fi. There’s a loud BZZTing noise and the smell of burning flesh for twenty seconds or so. Then the laser is swung away from my eye and I’m able to look up at the surgeon placing the flap of cornea back over my eye. Nothing hurts, but it’s odd to watch someone working on your eye from the eye itself.

The left eye is less comfortable, though I’d been warned that it tended to be as you’re anticipating the less pleasant bits. I’m worried that I’m blinking, as I can feel the muscles in eye that would make me blink contracting.

“You guys have a speculum holding my lids open, don’t you?”

“We do.”

“Cool, I think I@m blinking, but I’m not, am I?”

The surgeon chuckles.

“No, we are in complete control…”

Once we’re done I’m sat up and immediately struck by the fact that the world looks sharper. It’s not perfect by any stretch and my entire visual field is foggy, as though the room was full of smoke. But looking through the smoke it’s immediately obvious that lines and edges are more defined than they were beforehand.

I sit in a recovery room for ten minutes, call Kate to come and rescue me and get a lift home.

1300.

In the car on the way home the anaesthetic wears off. It’s horrible. Both eyes feel intensely dry and itchy and it’s sore to hold them open, it’s as though I’ve opened an oven too fast and had a blast of hot air across both eyes. I suddenly just want to go to sleep and it’s all I can think of as I walk through the front door. Thankfully I’ve lined up some painkillers and a sleeping tablet by my bed side table so it’s a matter of taping the eye shields on, taking some meds and lying down.

1700

So, I guess I slept. I wake up, put drops (antibiotic, anti-inflammatory and artificial tears) into my eyes. Drink a cup of tea and eat some dinner. Phone my Mum (because that’s what you do, right?) and watch a little blurry television. After a few hours my eyes are knackered again so I repeat my meds and head back to sleep.

0000

Wake up, pee, eye drops. Confused by being able to sort of see on waking, panic that I’ve left contact lenses in.

Oh wait….

0800

Awake, eyes gritty and dry, but vision in right eye pretty good. Left one still hazy and blurry, but undeniably sharper than before. My left eye has a circle of bloodshot-ness from the suction cup, but my right eye is largely white and clean. I wonder if this has something to do with the difference in vision between the two of them? A day of drops and rest, I think.

I said I had an exam.

Last night I got my marks.

10/12

Pass mark is 9.

That’ll do, pig.

So I’ve worn glasses since I was about ten, my parents noticing me scrunching my face up in an attempt to focus on, well, almost anything. There is surely nothing more attractive than a pudgy pre-pubescent kid trying to make his face implode and pushing that imploded face RIGHT up to yours so he can see you better.

Back off, kid, you’re creeping me out.

I had a lovely collection of plastic NHS frames and, when I went to high school, graduated up to some highly alluring steel aviators. Step up, ladies, it’s all for sale.

And I broke them, a lot, adding the requisite tape and glue as I went along.

Are you getting a picture yet?

Teenage years brought daily disposable lenses and many thrilling hours of poking myself in the eye in the mirror. Daily disposables certainly allowed me to avoid the rigmarole of cleaning and storing, but they were essentially made of cling film and not really designed to be handed by a ham fisted teenager.

So I stuck to specs, wearing lenses only on occasion, mainly when I want to wear sunglasses.

Earlier this year I was out in the UAE and Sean suggested laser surgery to me. I was less than convinced, as I firmly believe that something will go horribly wrong and I’ll end up looking like this guy.

But he was insistent. He’d had it done, his wife has had it done.

And I’d be all up for “Maybe I should discuss this with a doctor…”, except he IS a bloody doctor. And he’s not even going “Well…these are the risks….you should know about the possible outcomes.”

He’s just saying “You’re a bloody idiot, go and do it.”

So I came back to Scotland with the intention of doing exactly that.

And what’s why tomorrow I’m going to go and have a man shoot lasers into my eyes.

My eyes.

Lasers.

Oh and, AND.

I’m going to pay him money for doing it.

There’s an enormous part of me who thinks that what I’m doing is fucking stupid. My vision with lenses and glasses is just fine and I’m aware that the surgery carries a risk that I may come out the end still needing corrective lenses. Or, even more excitingly, I may end up MORE short sighted than I was before.

Fun!

But on the other hand, there’s a much higher chance that I’ll have a day or so of discomfort and from there on in I’ll be able to do such luxurious things as waking up in the middle of the night for a pee and not having to blunder about in the darkness.

I’ll be able to swim! (I can swim already, by the way, I’m not expecting the LASIK to turn me into Flipper…)

And I’ll be able to travel away from home without the constant worry of having a spare pair of lenses with me, or losing my glasses

It’s not even as though I can sell them afterwards if I don’t like the results…I don’t think EBay has a section for “Burned body parts.”

Also, I’m not sure how I’d ship them.

There’s an entire story to be told about how I chose which person shoots me in the face.

With lasers.

A weekend of night shifts hammered me into the ground like a cheap peg, leaving me last night grumpy and brittle.

Digitalkate and I went to the cinema because I couldn’t bear to sit and think and en route I decompressed, pouring out images and thoughts from my new Worst Job Ever.

I told her about listening to a relative screaming.

Over and over.

The problem with your worst job ever, is that as you gain experience and exposure, the things that would rattle a non-medic diminish in one direction down the scale.

In direct proportion, the things that get through the armour, the things that have you snapping at your housemates and tearing up in traffic?

Those things are, by their nature, exponentially horrific. If they’re awful enough to affect front line workers, they are of a scale of awfulness that many people, thankfully, never have to face.

They’re stories that I’d normally write, but in the face of increased public awareness of clinician’s privacy responsibilities, I won’t be writing about any more patients.

For those of you who have asked, this is the same reason my archives are private.

My registration is too precious to risk.

I’m sorry.

Instead I’m sitting at my desk and writing about my morning.

How I got up later than I planned

How I’ve a Sign Language exam tonight that everyone tells me I’ll breeze.

How I’m not so sure.

How I’ve procrastinated from what I need to be doing, but in doing so I think I’ve figured out why our dishwasher is broken.

How I’m going to have to focus on some overdue paperwork this afternoon.

This will be Trauma Queen from now on.

I suspect many of you dear, sweet people won’t mind in the slightest – you’ve told me enough in the past that you’re happy to read whatever I have to say.

That’s a nice thought and one that I’ll hang on to, I’m just not convinced that I’d want to read it…though I guess I don’t have to, right?

So, having just returned from a trip to Milton Keynes (because Dubai was getting boring), I've had quite enough of sub-Birmingham England for the week.

I entertained myself on the train by asking friends to come up with new tourism slogans for Wolverhampton and Milton Keynes. My suggestion was “Wolverhampton….because other forms of deliberate self harm leave visible scars.” and “Mlton Keynes….precisely as lovely as you think.”

I'd like to point out that all of this was pure conjecture on the south bound journey, having never visited either city before in my life. Having left Milton Keynes, I can now confirm that it IS exactly as lovely as I'd thought.

I had to change trains in Wolverhampton and afterwards my new slogan would have to be “Wolverhampton…you thought it was gong to be rough, but fuck me….”

Contributions in the comments, please chaps…

Posted with Blogsy

Ahhhh, my sweet friends.

My sweet, Christian friends who discuss my sinful gayness and rampant atheism and stretch their arms out to me – “My brother, my family….I love you.”.

Yeah, those guys. You know those guys?

They disowned me because of my life choices.

Someone outed me to them; mentioned that I’d never read, nor watched the Lord of the Rings.

And they all got a bit cross with me, invited a whole bunch of folk over on Boxing Day and we sat down and watched the BluRay version, start to finish, six discs, fourteen hours, lots of beer.

I’d had this theory that 90% of the movies was just midgets striding through fields, forests, plains,swamps. And I still hold to that.

But it was all so wonderfully shot and the story ties so much together it was far too much fun to dismiss.

So instead I got a bit pissed, got welcomed into the fold and sat up until four in the morning.

And now I’ve downloaded the whole thing as an ebook, I’m slowly plodding, like Frodo and TheOtherOneWhoDefinitelyIsntFrodo’sBoyfriendHonest, through the whole epic mess.

Then on the 27th I went to watch the Hobbit, which is three hours of a dozen dwarves charging about and being dwarfy and Gandalf busting out the deus ex machina every time anything remotely bad happens “Oh no BrandyFart! My beard is tangled! What shall we do….oh, fuck it…here comes Gandalf, never mind..”

Also, tales of peril and danger are all very well, but all the stumpy little bastards survived to the end of the movie. There were twelve of them. Twelve. I couldn’t even recognise them all, let alone remember their names or characters.

All I’m saying, is old JRR had a bag of disposable characters, some of whom he could have bumped off to make the peril more perilous and make us think that bad things might happen to this happy band of leprechauns.

But he didn’t. And now I’m cross with him.

That said, I’ll still go back and watch the other two Hobbit movies when they come out. Just to prove myself right, of course.