All posts by Brian Kellett

Blogging, Fiction

CLBD-7 A Fiction

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So the previous post is a part of a piece of fiction that I occasionally type stuff into. It’s about a world where a new and contagious form of dementia ‘CLBD-7’ has changed the world in unusual ways. It’s a first person piece (mostly) written by a journalist writing a retrospective since it was discovered.

If you click on the ‘fiction’ category you can scroll back and see how it started.

This is a first draft, which is what they will all be, and I’m not entirely sure why I’m posting it up, it really should go through at least one editing process, but I think it’ll force me to write more of it and maybe even get it finished.

It’s meant, in part, to be a metaphor for how the NHS is collapsing, and while I started writing it in 2009, I really need to get it out before the NHS actually collapses in a pile of flaming Brexit disaster underfunding.

Anyway – no-one really reads blogs anymore, so who is going to notice.

Fiction

KEywave Dynamics

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In my time as a journalist I’ve been to countless Start-ups all across Europe and the US and, no matter how ‘fresh’ or ‘disruptive’ or ‘innovative’ they are, they all have one thing in common. They all look like a toddler’s day centre.

Anton, the CTO leads me through the white walled offices to a meeting room and my heart sinks when I see that the seating is beanbags. I fucking hate beanbags ever since I threw a vertebral disc covering the riots of ’20 and if I sit in one I’m going to need a forklift to get me back out. I think I’m going to have to rely on Judith for assistance later. If I can get her to stop staring at the back of Anton’s head like she thinks it’ll explode.

Anton fiddles with his watch and a projector screen descends from the ceiling in front of me and the usual corporate branded background fills the screen. In a stunning lack or originality it’s a navy blue with a single white wavy line going from left to right. In the lower right corner it announces that ‘Keywave Diagnostics works closely with the NHS’. 

Well, of course they do – they get to stick the NHS logo on things, get access to NHS data and then, when things go wrong, slink off and blame any problems on the NHS proper.

I need some coffee.

“By utilising the delays evident in peri-clubbed individuals typing patterns we can make an accurate diagnosis on those who will show symptoms within the next 12 months”, and at this Aton presses his watch face and a slide appears with graphs and numbers and ‘milliseconds’ dotted around it.

I take a look, Aton keeps talking and keeps flashing up slides of people typing at keyboards and pretty looking graphs. My eyes unfocused when he starts listing healthcare stakeholders being consulted on the blah de blah de blah.

It comes down to this. If you have people who are used to typing, like most of us are, even if only on a touchscreen, then you can analyse how they type -their speed, their accuracy, how long between keystrokes. Keywave’s contention is that people who are soon going to be showing symptoms of CLBD-7 have a marked change in they typing habits. For example, the little finger gets left behind sometimes in people who have CLBD-7 but are not showing the more obvious signs. (he went on for some time about why we evolved a little finger – good for hooking things apparently) What this means is that they are far more likely to type a double capital letter, as the slow little finger gets left on the shift key. So they are more likely to type ‘THe cat sat on the mat.’. Likewise the time it takes them to hit individual keys gets ‘slurred’, instead of a constant tap-tap-tap, they instead type in bursts, taptaptap…taptap…taptaptap.

It’s all fascinating stuff, but I ask what the benefit of this is, there is no treatment and so early diagnosis runs roughshod over the whole ‘ignorance is bliss’ aspect of life. Knowing that you have CLBD-7 is pointless without a treatment, and we don’t have a treatment.

Aton looks sheepish and it’s only after some pushing that he’ll admit that the date is also useful to ‘selected third parties’, which to my mind means ‘health insurance companies’. 

It’s only after we leave that Judith suggests something more sinister – if the information is shared with the government and NHS in general, they can use that when modelling health rationing. Why fix a patient’s dodgy knee if they are going to be a gibbering wreck in a year’s time?

Ambulance, Community Nursing, Health, NHS, Responding to media

Ambulance or Nurse?

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The Independant have an interesting story where, due to the shortage of ambulances the plan is to send community nurses first for patients over the age of 65 who have had a fall.

This is a bad idea.

But first, as a quick update on my career, I went from nursing into the ambulance service, and then returned to nursing. At the moment community nursing. So I’ve done both of the roles that the article is talking about.

The ambulance role is very much different from community nursing. When a community nurse sees a patient, it is not in an emergency situation. If you have a leg ulcer, or cancer, or a surgical wound that’s not healing as it should, then the community nurse is ideally placed to see to your needs. However if you have fallen and either can’t get up by yourself, or have broken your hip, then what you need is an ambulance.
This isn’t to say that comunity nurses don’t already keep people from going into hospital. Community Treatment Teams (CTTs as they are known in my patch, your acronym may vary) work hard to stop people with chroninc and acute conditions from needing to visit A&E. Unfortunately trauma is something entirely different to the heart failure, asthmatic and palliative patients that these teams see.
An ambulance crew are trained to deal with these acute traumatic incidents. Community nurses are not (as an aside there was some research about how nurses are really bad at first aid. And they are bad).

The plan is for a nurse to give a painkiller, including morphine, and then wait for the ambulance. At least I assume they are supposed to wait. I know I’m not going to give Doris with her fractured hip 10mg of morphine and then leave her on the floor. A big problem with this is that, as a community nurse, my day is already packed with patients (and as the government wants to kick more patients into the community, that will only increase). It is more common than not that I work through my lunchbreak, just in order to do the bare minimum for my patients. Community nurses do not have the time to play at ambulances.

What happens if the nurse overestimates the amount of morphine to give the patient, they’ll need a BVM, and training in how to use it and naloxone and how to give it, maybe some other drugs to counter potential bradycardia. And remember, a nurse doesn’t then have the option to load the patient into the back of an ambulance and whizz off to hospital. They’ve got to sit there.

And then who is going to supply the morphine, where will it be kept? Morphine is a Controlled Substance and needs to be kept in a special locked cupboard inside another locked cupboard. Who is going to provide a stock of morphine just in case it’s needed.

And then there is…

…but you get my point.

This is, yet again, an example of short-term thinking to patch up huge holes in the NHS that have been caused by successive governments. Both the ambulance services and the community nursing trusts need more money, and odd blue-sky thinking by people who are several steps removed from actually meeting patients is not the way.

Blogging, NHS

Post-Bingo NHS

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I took a look at my blog the other day. ‘Last post Jan 18 2016’, so nearly a year spent noodling around on Twitter rather than actually writing anything. I’d started a new job and that needed a fair bit of my attention, then there were games to play and food to eat and things to build. Then before you know it you’ve stopped writing and replaced it with reusing other people’s writing by ‘retweeting’ it.

Urgh.

No one reads blogs anymore, or so goes the common consensus, but when I use twitter I’m often redirected to a website, a blog or a whatever you call a Tumblr thing.

I also wasn’t angry. Well, that’s a bit of a lie. I first started writing because I was angry about things and writing about it got it off my chest. I’m still angry but I came to realise that not many people cared about the things I cared about, and so my writing didn’t exactly save the NHS, fix the planet or stop tech people from doing really dumb things.

But, maybe I do have it in me to write again. There are more and more stupid things happening, and while you may mutter about ‘echo chambers’ and ‘shouting into the void’, perhaps there might be a bit of value in starting to write again.

(If you are curious about the title, ‘bingo fuel’ is a term for the amount of fuel you need to land a plane safely. I’ve got a horrible fear that the NHS is past that point and is truely doomed. I hope for everyone’s sake that I’m wrong)

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No Fear of Death

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In my last post I was asked in a comment why I don’t fear death, what brought me to that attitude towards it.

I would guess that due to the amount of death, ‘near death’, and ‘about to die’ that I have seen due to my work it has driven me to think about it a bit more than a ‘normal’ person would.

The two things that influence my thoughts about death would be my atheism, and my grasp, tenuous as it may be at some times, of logic.

Firstly, my atheism, means that I have no fear of a Heaven, or Hell, no Limbo (and sadly no Valhalla). So I don’t think that there is anything after death. You die, and you stop. Stop thinking, stop feeling, stop worrying about work, or family, or why the cat keeps scratching your sofa.

And if I stop thinking, then there is no consciousness, and therefore no experiencing of anything, including time.

So when I am dead, that’s it – I won’t feel anything because I won’t exist anymore. When I sleep I have no experience of time, no feelings of pain, no nothing. I don’t worry about if I am going to wake up because my conscious mind ceases to exist for the time I’m asleep.

(I know that with the different phases of sleep and with dreams the analogy breaks down somewhat, but I think the general point is made).

So, logically, why should I be scared of death? Even if I die in a horrible and painful fashion, I’ll not remember any of it, because I will no longer exist. So ultimately it won’t matter how I die, because even with a long drawn out death it will end eventually.

And I don’t plan on having a long, drawn out death. If I become terminally ill then I shall scream for the really good medications, and when I’m fed up of that – well, there are ways out of the situation.

As I have no sense of self before I was concieved, I will have no sense of self once I have ceased to exist. All of which, in my mind, is comforting, that no matter how bad things get, in the end all worries, all pain, will cease.

Of course, if I’m wrong? Well won’t I look foolish as Anubis weighs my heart against a feather.

But that’s a bridge I’ll worry about when I reach it.

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Nightmares Don’t Work On Me

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I’m not massively scared of anything. In part because I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff, in part because once you are not scared of dying a lot of fear goes away.

So when my brain wants to try and scare me with a nightmare it has to get a bit ‘creative’.

So it tries to frustrate me – Last night I dreamt that there was an older Star Wars ‘sequel’, it made no plot sense, the lightsabers were plastic toys doused in lighter fuel, and David Cameron had a guest role.
Bad enough, but my dream went further, the creators of the film had managed to hijack IMDB, so when I looked up the film (in order to avoid any other films the director had made) it loaded malware onto my computer.
And then every time I tried to delete it, it would reinstall.

Nightmare.

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New Year Resolution

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Normally I don’t care for New Year resolutions, in my view one day is much like another. This is something that is also reinforced by shift work – I barely had any idea what day it was, let alone the date. Heck sometimes I didn’t know my own name.
So, one day is very much the same as another one, so why wait for a special date to make a change in your life.
However, this year feels different, in part I think it’s because I’m not in work (I am technically,but it’s… ‘complicated’), so it seems to make sense to mark a certain date, especially with things that have been whirling around my head for quite some time.

Also, if I write them down I’m sort of honour bound to follow them. I may well explain some of them in more detail at a later date.

1) Blog more – As in blog at all. I used to love blogging, then I sort of fell out of the habit of it. Partly because of the reason for resolution 2. Planning on writing something a few times a week, luckily hardly anyone will see it as my days of being a world famous sexy internet ambulance god are far behind me.

2) Play less MMOs – These are a terrible timesink and at my age I’m starting to foresee myself on my deathbed cursing the hours spent playing yet another endless treadmill.

3) Sort out my diet – I successfully stopped being a fully tubby bastard and am now only half a tubby bastard, which wasn’t that hard, but now I have an addition reason to sort out the rubbish that I eat.

4) Get TRUTH BASTARDS done and out into the world – This is a project I’ve been noodling around for a number of years, but never sat down and cracked on with it. Hopefully following Resolution 2 will mean I actually get something into a presentable state.

5) Stop tiptoeing around fuck nuggets – No longer am I going to let complete idiots annoy me/hold me back/make me angry – instead I’m going to either ‘sort them out’ (as we say in my part of the world), or just ignore them completely.

I think will do – I don’t want to be too energetic or enthusiastic. I am English after all.

Burning hatred, NHS, Politics

What a Difference A Day Makes

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What a Difference a day makes.

On the anniversary of the 7/7 bombings,

In the Commons, MPs paid tribute to the actions of NHS workers and members of the emergency services in the wake of the bombings.
Speaking during health questions in the chamber, shadow health secretary Andy Burnham described the actions of NHS staff on the day as “heroic”.
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt praised the “extraordinary bravery” of the emergency services.

And then one day later

Public sector workers, including civil servants, teachers, nurses, police officers and members of the armed forces, face another four-year pay freeze as a result of today’s budget.

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Thoughts on 10 years later

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There is a reason why I tend to keep off the internet when the 7/7 bombings anniversary rolls around, it’s not because of any traumatic memories (I did nothing more than turn up to cover my colleagues who dealt with it all, while I had one ‘Maternataxi’ job).

My thoughts on the days around it can be found here

What makes me angry is that on the anniversary there is a big hoo-ha about how ‘London stood as one’, with no hate but just a determination to keep on living and muddling along as we did before the bombing.

And it’s true – we did.

But then the media realised that they would sell more papers, get more eyeballs, and have a bigger influence by villifying muslims. By causing hatred and fear. And now we end up with groups like the EDL and ‘Britain First’. Two organisations that came into being based on the lies that the media has spun.

So something that should have unified us has, instead, just divided us. And it seems it’s going to continue that way – all for the benefit of media mogals and shareholders.