When A Man Shat On My Hand

I promised when I did the post 'Seven Things...' that I would explain how I once allowed a man to shit in the palm of my hand. It seems a good time to write about this sort of thing because it is pretty much the first anniversary of my blog and this sort of subject is pretty much where I started. I started writing my blog when I had time on my hands, having been in hospital for a while. One of my most popular early posts, The Fug and the Time had a particularly faecal theme.

Twenty six years ago I was a callow Student Nurse learning the rudiments of care: bed making with hospital corners, cleanliness, bed bathing and other basics. These were the days of starched sheets and patients who had to look tidy, I remember the protests of patients who liked to lounge in their beds, sheets askew, only to be told by Sister that they could not possibly be comfortable sat like that and made, at her insistence, to sit up straight.

Whilst bed bathing a man who had recently had both of his legs removed, we were in the process of changing his sheets. This was achieved by rolling him over to one side of the bed, changing the sheet on the other, bunching up the remainder of the clean sheet in the middle then rolling him over the lump onto the clean side whilst the other nurse changed the other half. We had just rolled him on to the clean side and I was smoothing the wrinkles out of the clean sheet when the movement must have taken its toll on his insides, "Nurse, I've got to go to the toilet...NOW". Before my colleague had returned at high speed with a commode he added with some urgency, "There's some coming..." and sure enough the evidence presented itself.

Here is where it becomes apparent to what extent the sanctity of clean sheets and orderliness had been impressed into us, because I instinctively grabbed a clean wipe from the trolley and, as if diving for the catch that would save the Ashes, allowed the offending item to land in my hand. Wanting to be sure that there was no more to come before we transferred him to the bedside commode, I asked "Have you done?..."
His reply indicated that he had misinterpreted my question and actually thought I was offering an even higher degree of service than that to which he had become accustomed:
"Ah, thanks lad, there's more where that came from, nnnnnnnhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh", and with that deposited a load that any man would have been proud of into my waiting hand.

So there you have it, a man shat in my hand. I often wonder whether his misunderstanding caused any future embarrassing moments for him or my colleagues during bed baths as he marvelled at the quality of service that allowed a man to shit without having to leave his pit.

Happy Birthday to my blog!

Seven Things You Didn't Know About Me and Probably Will Not Benefit From Having Learnt

Thanks to Tracey for tagging me with this meme. It is the sort of theme that runs the risk of revealing too much or of being completely inconsequential - I will do my best to strike a happy medium (I shuddered then as I recalled a Ken Dodd joke involving Doris Stokes).

Here are the seven things you didn't know about me:

1. It has at times been convenient to attribute the slightly broken appearance of the bridge of my nose, to a life of toughness and masculine pursuits. The truth is that it attained its slightly wobbly look during a mid-playground collision with Andrew McLung at Stansfield Rd. County Primary School, Failsworth around 1968.

2. Whilst at sixth form of Chadderton Grammar School I shaved a chunk out of my hairline to emulate my then hero Peter Gabriel. It did not have the effect I desired and considering that I had shoulder length hair at the time, the appearance of a tuft sprouting from my forehead, as it grew back, was definitely not a look I desired.

3. I once almost circumcised myself - accidentally. On a trip to the pantomime at Oldham Coliseum I found myself caught midst pee, when the warning bell sounded for the end of the interval. Being far from confident in my ability to relocate my seat in the dark I rushed the proceedings and caught my little foreskin in the zip of my trousers. Further panicked at the zip's refusal to budge either up or down I forced it - I draw a veil over the remainder of the proceedings for the sake of all men reading this post.

4. Having been invited to a Tarts and Vicars party at short notice and having already drunk a couple or so cans of Breaker, I searched for a suitable dress in my mum's wardrobe. Only many years later have I realised that there were two reasons for her displeasure, not simply the fact of my having stretched the waistband beyond its usable limit (she was a size 10 -12; I am more of a 16). It was also, I now realise, the fact of my having considered her best lacy black dress as being suitable for wearing by a tart that upset her.

5. I once allowed a man to shit in the palm of my hand. This is worth a blog post in itself. I say no more, for now.

6. When I was a student nurse we resented the prestige given to even the most junior house officer compared to the nurses who by and large were treated as skivvies despite the high level of skill and expertise they possessed; and, I must add, the amount of time they spent getting junior doctors out of the poop by telling them what they ought to do in certain circumstances. This prejudicial approach extended outside of hospital too; for example when we dined regularly in a long since gone Indian restaurant on King St in Oldham - I forget the name - the staff found it inconceivable that I was a nurse and not a doctor. Clearly a young man surrounded by a bevy of young attractive nurses must be a doctor. I am ashamed to say that we hammed it up to the extent that Doctor Steve and his harem were treated like royalty and afforded many privileges well beyond the odd free pappadum or two.

7. I am fond of saying to people, whilst adopting a tough, manly expression and glowering from beneath my life furrowed brow, "The last bloke that assaulted me is dead." Combined with the wonky nose I mentioned earlier you can imagine the intended effect. What I habitually fail to mention is that although the expression is in all ways true, the poor sod who hit me died of a heroin overdose 2 years after his encounter with me.

That's your lot; all that remains is for me to tag five more people. I am going to cheat a little as you shall see -

1. Mr Woppit: if you haven't read his excellent blog, you should.

2. Bill Blunt: we haven't heard from him for a while and I would like to hear things we didn't know about the ageing hack.

3. Mystic Veg: It would be good to hear seven unknown vegetable vignettes from the allotment plot doc.

4. (here starts the cheating) The Fuel My Blog Blog writers - I want to know seven things about the excellent FMB website that we didn't know

5. (and here is the other cheaty bit) Lisa - who doesn't write a blog. I challenge Lisa to add seven pictures to her excellent Flickr site that tell us things about her we didn't know.

P.S. the hits I get based on the labels I've added to this post should be interesting - I'll let you know.

More of 'Am I normal?'

I'm not normally so introspective, but whilst on the verge of creating a post about my body - I'll not tell you too much about it, don't want to spoil a future plot - I shared a thought, a perfectly innocent thought, with my colleagues. Their reaction was both instructive and fascinating.

I have some weight to lose, roughly a stone, I feel fat and my clothes are uncomfortable.
"Well buy new clothes" I hear some of you shout; but I am made of sterner stuff than that. In order to judge my progressive weight loss I have a method of viewing myself with an objective eye. Rather than rely on the Avery bathroom scales, I consider my appearance by standing naked in front of a mirror, tensing whatever muscles can be tensed and well, jiggling up and down. It is quite obvious - barring obvious exceptions - which are the wobbly bits to lose.

This is the thought I shared with my colleagues and I am ashamed to say that, after listening, one or two of those with a better visual imagination were looking a bit queasy. You can see why I am rather reticent to make future posts about my body. I put it down to Val's and my shared background in nursing, we have shared many a romantic dinner where the dinner table talk has centred on topics that any decent horror movie critic would describe as gore: it is our normal. It is also the shared normal that our two sons have grown up with. When they were younger some of their friends found our normal dinner table chat rather rich for their tastes; we had to learn to be more sensitive to the needs of their more sensitive friends or risk rejections to our tea time invitations.

So we are back round to this idea of normality again. I think I will do the post about my body, then, in the great democracy that is the blogosphere, people can choose the normal they prefer.

Pull up a sandbag, it wasn't like this in my day

My first night in hospital, I am to have my surgery tomorrow. My only other fellow patients are Bert, aged 82yrs, and Harry, aged 87yrs, they have both been in hospital over four weeks having had new hips and suffered the sorts of complications that come as we get older. They attempt to induct me in the ways of the ward but conversation proves challenging because both are fairly deaf, our conversations frequently punctuated by "You what, lad?", but they do a good job of reassuring me that the nurses and surgeons are of the highest quality.

I am visited by one of the surgical registrars who discusses the procedures to be carried out on my ankle and foot ensuring that I sign, again, a consent form that I had previously signed in an out-patients clinic. It seems that you have to really, really know what it is you are having done. The registrar draws a big black arrow pointing to my left foot. I tell him not to worry because I wouldn't let them do the wrong one, "You'll be unconscious" he reassuringly replies.

During the evening Harry and Bert are asleep early so I settle down to television viewing which is a simple matter with my personal four inch telly. After fifteen fruitless minutes I start to become a grumpy old man, railing pointlessly against the paucity of choice across the Freeview channels, for which I might add, I have paid fifteen pounds. Moodily I settle down for sleep at around eleven o'clock.

Now, when I trained as a nurse night duty involved a very important factor, the need to be quiet in order that the patients could sleep. I'm sure that under the strict regime of that time I drifted noislessly about my tasks like a hospital ghost. Things seem to have deteriorated in my absence and the nurses chat loudly about their colleagues (interesting), the state of the NHS (predictable), the coming Celebrity Big Brother (I am so out of touch with what matters) and the plots of various soaps (see Big Brother) until midnight. Harry and Bert seem to be fast asleep judging from the contended sound of their breathing, perhaps the nurses have forgotten that they have a non-deaf patient, I can't wait to meet Staff Nurse Smith after what I have just heard about her!

I pull the covers over my head and gradually drift into the open waters of the deep night. That is when the real night sounds take over, the nurses tip-toeing about their duties, checking we are all still breathing, and collecting filled urine bottles which are delivered to the sluice room and deposited into the pulping machine. Obviously it would be unhygienic to let the bottles and bedpans fester inside the machine all night so it throbs with a deep rythmic vibration that travels up through my bed frame. Harry and Bert seem unaffected by the throbbing and say so with a chorus of snoring, shouting and farting that seems to last for hours.

Eventually sleep overtakes me and I dream fitfully about a gigantic arrow that resists all attempts to stick to my leg sliding off on to the floor then floating around the ward wafted on the breeze generated by snoring and farting patients; eventually the arrow is wafted back over to my bed where it lands, on the wrong leg and no matter what I do I cannot get it off.

I wake with a start to find a nurse stood at the bottom of my bed with a surgical gown draped over her arm. She invites me for my pre-operative shower, instructing me to wash all over with an anti-bacterial shower gel.

Now I know it's getting serious, it will soon be time.