Boxing day reflection

It is sometimes good to look back.

Not all or too much of the time or you can end-up a little lost in wondering whether the past matters more than the present or the future.

It is all relevant, forget the past, you repeat it, focus too much on the future, you are stuck in worry and uncertainty, the present, well, that’s is mostly OK although even Mindfulness needs some down-time.

I am writing the blog directly into WordPress, which is the engine that drives my blogs. All 800 and more are posted on here, right from the start when my ‘thing’ was patient safety and all through the years exploring my identity, questioning the status quo and rallying against the Overlords. It has been a waltz of person-centredness, care, compassion, creativity and imagination, anxiety and worry, focus and hesitation. A pot pourri. A left over trifle, when the sponge and the jelly have collapsed.

This is a look-back; and, why not? The folk on the telly get away with it.

Another component of this blog which will probably only resonate with fellow bloggers is that I am typing it in ‘blocks‘ – this has been a battle for over a year.

All my previous blogs have been written in ‘classical’ which is essentially me copying and pasting from Word into WordPress. Blocks are odd paragraphs that were introduced by the tech guys, for reasons I have yet to understand and which for me make the whole process of blogging more difficult.

Boxing day down-time (raining outside) seems a good occasion to test-out the blocks; there must be something good about them. (I am not one for reading the instructions, prefering intuition – for blocks you need to read the rules.)

Moving back to the past, rather than do a ‘best of’ – here are some of the blogs that have been read the most over the years (this has nothing to do with my blogging prowess, more the chances of folk typing a searchword into Google.

Folk might not have realised that my number-one, most-read blog is about death (some people won’t be surprised by that), you can read it here. It is strange as a number-one as it is very personal, revealing as much about me as anything I have written.

Death – tradition – Jewishness – family – education – self-consciousness

all contained therein.

Over the years I can only recall one person feeding-back to me about this blog and I have wondered as to what those of have read it have thought. Most, probably, ‘nutcase,’ Others perhaps, ‘life, death, here is someone who has stopped in the moment.’

You can tell me what you think. Thumbs up or down. Let me know.

My number-two most read blog of all time is what you might call a medical classic – not because it is amazing, more as it cuts to the the heart (I think) of modern medicine, what it is to be a patient in 2021. The NHS is an amazing institution – the only organisation I am proud to be a recognised as a member, yet, it has its flaws. One is the objectification of people as patients.

You can read the blog, Medically Fit, here.

Well, what did you think? I have created a whole lot of blogs on this topic, you can find them here.

There is a feedback button for any comments. 👈

It’s funny. I’ve been lecturing medical students at Sheffield University of the past 12 years (mostly on old people – the lectures are usually called ‘Age and Ageing‘ after the title of the British Geriatric Society journal.) In that time I have only had a smattering of feedback, usually with students coming to me when I have finished talking to let me know they appreciated what I said.

Very rarely students have logged-on to this blog.

12 years, almost no feedback.

This blog hasn’t had much feedback either, mostly (I think) because you need to have a WordPress account to leave a message.

When I asked the university for feedback on my lectures they told me the students had feedback fatigue and they were only asked their opinions of really important topics ‘Is Sheffield the best place to study in the UK?’ kind of thing.

Sorry for the cynicism.

My third alltime top blog is called ‘Catheters, old men and dementia‘ which is about what it says. My suspicion is that this is a go-to for young doctors who are faced with old men who have dementia and urinary catheters – a sometimes fraught clinical situation; the catheter is in the bladder because the (usually) old man’s prostate is too large to allow him to pee without a tube, the old man, because of his dementia lacks insight into the tube’s importance; he tries to pull it out. The scenario plays-out at 3am when the young doctor is called to the ward to ‘sort it out’ (aka Google) (top-tip for desperate junior doctors = DO NOT US SCISSORS!) (This is tantamount to ‘crossing the beams’ in Ghostbusters and requires the involvement of a urologist).

Is that enough?

One more?

Long-lie is a subject close to my heart. It describes the scenario of an older person who has fallen at home and becomes stuck on the floor.

Every year in our country older people spend their last days of life in such positions, calling for help, stuck, in pain, slowly dehydrating.

I suppose it is an anti-reflection of the Christmas spirit.

In post-Covid UK it is an old man or woman who, after 12 hours on the floor is discovered by their carer who calls an ambulance (30 minutes to get through to 999), waits 10 hours for the ambulance to arrive, which then spends two hours outside A&E with a futher 14 hours on a stretcher in that department.

It all almonds and emotions after all.

You can clap if you like.

More blocks or back the way things used to be?