Newcastle, sweet home

Dear folks,

After a hectic week and weekend, I'm sitting here with a large glass of wine (a recurring theme, I fear), the remains of Friday's chicken fajita mix and a bowl of radishes dressed with soy sauce, vinegar and garlic, and ready to update you all on what's been going on in my exciting, exciting life so far. Item 1 on the agenda: the use of socially unacceptable combination of foodstuffs when alone at home to satisfy hunger, and wonderfulness of said unacceptable combination. Delicious.

After a ridiculous week in which I started and completed phase 1 of my first audit, wrote and presented a presentation, headed my first multidisciplinary team meeting, was on-call til 10pm two days in a row, and generally had a bit of a nervous breakdown, on Friday I got home, sank down onto the (delicious, delicious) leather sofa, ate about ten cookies in a row and finally exhaled.

I love cookies.

My love for cookies has, actually, recently expanded to socially unacceptable proportions (as has my waistline.) Doctoring is a great job, and I'm loving it, but sometimes the list of jobs you have to do in one day can seem (and in fact, be) totally unfeasible. Sometimes you sit staring at the list of discharge summaries you have to write that day and something in you breaks into tiny little pieces. And when that bit of you breaks, the only thing that can glue it together is a really good cookie.

Maybe sometimes  a moam sweet.

I've got a good little routine together now - do job, food reward. Repeat. Longer jobs = bigger food reward: perhaps a chocolate digestive. A small job, like rewriting a drug chart, or calling radiography, can be rewarded with a small oat cookie. And a really small but unending job, like a discharge summary, requires a moam sweet for every page.

I didn't realise the extent of my problem (like many addicts) until one day I brought a box of cookies into the office to share, and I ended up eating all but 2 of them. Ha ha! I thought. This was Monday. On Tuesday morning I went into handover and began telling one of the other F1s about how I had started eating those cookies and couldn't stop and she interrupted me.

F1: "Oh, we've all heard about that."
Me: "What?"
F1: "Oh yeah. Everyone knows about the cookies. How did you eat so many without being sick?"

My doctoring reputation is now basically complete. I am now famous in the Newcastle medical world as the girl who ate all the cookies.

Friday evening, Vickers came over for dinner, and it was lovely to see a face from the past. Vickers is still a med student and as we discussed doctoring and so on and so forth I realised how much I'd changed in just 2.5 weeks of doctoring. Mind you, I cannot quite believe it's only been 2.5 weeks. I feel like I have been working for approximately 14 years without a holiday and I'm ready to go on some kind of round the world trip right now.

Then yesterday, Saturday, I went down to London to see Tori for her impromptu birthday party. I say impromptu - it had in fact been planned for months, but as Tori had sent only one facebook message to the invitees, no one could remember it was happening. I texted Kirsty asking if she was going, only to get a text message saying, "What?" Anyway, it was on, and I had a wonderful time, even though the journey from Newcastle to King's Cross was only marginally longer than the journey from King's Cross to Tori's house, partially complicated by the very spatially-challenging map of buses outside Putney Bridge tube station. Turns out, I'm shit at space. Who knew?

It was really, really lovely to see the old faces back together again, and restored me to sanity. Going to Tori's house has always felt a bit like going on retreat into a lovely otherworldly place where everything is always nice and clean and pretty and organised, and you don't have to bring anything because the guest room already has towels and shampoo and everything you could want, and there's always far too much food, and it's quiet, and there's a pool, and all the people you like most in the world, and everyone lies in until 11am and then eats garlic mayonnaise and left over BBQ for breakast. Basically heaven.

We sat and chatted until 1am (!) by which point I felt on the verge of collapse, and a few conversational gems arose:

Tori: "Now Sam's gone back to America we won't see him forever again for seven years."

Kirsty, "Has anyone seen Sunset Boulevard?"
Rachel: (turning round) "What's that? Fight Club?"

And Leo explained the geography of England to us in great and beautiful detail.

All in all, a gorgeous weekend, but as the train pulled back across the river Tyne, I thought how glad I was to be back in Newcastle. It's already feeling like home to me, and I felt very happy as I walked back up the drive to my flat, turned the lights on, and poured myself a glass of wine.

And now the blog's over, I think it's time for a moam sweet.