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Birvidik

Vessel Name: Birvidik
Vessel Make/Model: Victory 40
Hailing Port: Jersey C.I.
Crew: Bob Newbury
About: Liz Newbury
Extra: 11 years into a 10 year plan, but we get there in the end.
Social:
24 August 2024 | Or Dostoyevsky revisited
11 August 2024 | A Farce in Four Acts
11 August 2024 | Groundhog day
11 August 2024
11 August 2024
24 December 2023
22 November 2023 | Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
14 August 2023 | A farce in three acts.
14 August 2023 | Sliding Doors
14 August 2023 | The Game Commences
11 March 2023 | Joseph Heller, eat your heart out.
24 December 2022
26 August 2022 | or 'French Leave'
03 August 2022 | or 'Fings ain't the way they seem'
18 June 2022 | or Desolation Row
22 March 2022 | or "Every Form of Refuge Has its Price
28 October 2021 | and repeat after me - "Help Yourself"
Recent Blog Posts
24 August 2024 | Or Dostoyevsky revisited

The Crime of the Century

It's a constant source of wonder, the human brain. It has a computing power of one exaflop (1 000 000 000 000 000 000 floating-point operations per second), a capacity not even approached by CPUs until this year when the new supercomputer, 'Frontier' came on line, but it's ofttimes as thick [...]

11 August 2024 | A Farce in Four Acts

The number 17 bus

You don't see one for months ...

11 August 2024 | Or Current Affairs

Act 1 - ♪Ground, ground, get aground – I get aground…♪

"What do you do all day?", ask the uninitiated with tedious regularity. Well, judging by recent events, our days are filled to overflowing with getting into trouble, getting out of trouble, clearing up the mess that trouble had left behind, and writing long, rambling blogs detailing the aforementioned [...]

Dancing with Doctor D - act two

30 July 2021 | Second movement – Accelerando, Doloroso
Bob&Liz Newbury
Three hours later I was wheeled into theatre. (Calling operating rooms 'theatres' is a peculiarly British practice, which confuses the hell out of foreigners.)

They stuck a line into the venflon and started squirting in the propofol. I always find the actual going under a tad unsettling. No longer having the blind confidence of youth and its concomitant sense of immortality, I'm never completely sure I'm going to come round again. The possibility that this sterile technological tableau vivant of bright lights and beeping machinery could well be the last thing you ever see or hear is a weird sensation.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Newbury."
"Good afternoon, Death."
"Please be so kind as to follow me."
"Do I have any choice?"
"Not really."


It's the sound that comes back first. Low, murmured voices and the hiss of ventilators gradually became clearer and more distinct as the sounds of corridor and ward traffic joined the melée. Then came vision, at first just a white haze, like flying through cloud. This slowly resolved into lights and figures, windows, doors, and furniture. Last to return were self-awareness, movement and finally speech.

I felt like I'd just been on a bender with Oliver Reed. My lips hung open slackly and a skein of dribble trickled out of the corner of my mouth. My tongue lay swollen, loose, and unresponsive. "Boa Tarde" I said thickly to no-one in particular. "Ah! Boa Tarde, Senhor Robert" said a lilting female voice, later identified as belonging to the unlucky nurse who had been charged with ensuring the wellbeing of the drooling foreigner in recovery bed three.

It took her nearly an hour to make me presentable and fit to be trolleyed out of theatre without causing mass panic and waves of revulsion in the corridors. I know I was in a state of advanced befuddlement, but even I could see that we weren't going back the way we came in. It turned out that someone else had disobeyed standing orders and read the case notes. "Because of your heart condition", the nurse informed me, "we have decided not to take you back to your room. You're going to the SO". The Sala de Observações is a sort of halfway house between the ward and Intensive Care. I was taken there and ensconced in bed J, where I found myself sharing the SO with three elderly gentlemen, none of whom looked at all well. It didn't occur to me at the time that there were four of us there fitting those descriptors.

The unexpected change of abode posed a couple of problems. My personal belongings, medications, toiletries, wallet, smartphone, clothes, dentures, glasses and wedding ring were all stashed away in the locker in room 36. I was in no fit condition to traipse halfway across the hospital flashing my bum at all and sundry, but I managed to sweet-talk one of the nurses into getting me at least my phone. When she came back, I rang Liz who was, I'm sure, greatly comforted to receive a call from someone who purported to be her husband and was obviously in the advanced stages of either tetanus or strychnine poisoning.

Most people, or at least most sensible people, are afraid of surgery. This is a perfectly rational response. What is not quite so rational, however, is which aspect of surgery they are most afraid of. Slips of the scalpel do occur, but the one you've really got to watch out for is the gasman. The anaesthetist's job is to poison you to within an inch of your life without quite finishing you off. Almost dead enough for you not to wake up halfway through and sue the arse off him, but not quite so dead that you stay dead and your next of kin sue the arse off him.

They're pokey buggers, anaesthetic agents. They sod about with all sorts of basic physiological processes, and they can hang about in the system for ages. So I laid back and dozed, waiting for my well-toned liver to metabolise the crap out of them. About half past midnight, everything turned to shit. All my usual medications had worn off, but the anaesthetics were still hanging on in there. I went into a cracker of a post-anaesthetic crisis. In the absence of my bisoprolol my heart went into atrial fibrillation and my pulse rate climbed to 200 bpm. Blood pressure soared uncontrollably to 195/150 and alarms started beeping, flashing and wailing, prompting ill-natured grumblings from my fellow internees. The nurses came hotfoot from their station to be confronted with the bridge of the Starship Enterprise after a surprise Klingon attack. Very sensibly, they turned all the alarms off. No-one can think with that racket going on.

I looked at the dials, and then at the pair of perplexed young nurses looking uncertainly at the readouts and muttering darkly about sending me across to ICU and dumping this shitstorm on some other poor, unsuspecting, sucker. The BP measurements climbed inexorably upwards to 200/160. BPs at this level cause the blood vessels to leak like a garden hose after a wrestling match with a porcupine and the subsequent collapse and shut down of systems throughout the body. I felt a tap on my shoulder:

"Good evening, Mr Newbury."
"You again, Death. You don't give up easily, do you?"
"Comes with the job. Sorry."


My thoughts turned to Liz and a wave of hollow emptiness and unbearable loss flooded through me as I contemplated the awful possibility that the view from the bus window stood a good chance of having been the last time that I ever saw her. I contemplated phoning her, but dissuaded myself on two grounds; it would do her mental equanimity no good to be woken at two in the morning by a hysterical phone call from a pathetic blubbering husband feebly blathering on about how much he loved her. On top of that, if I didn't die I'd look a right tit the next morning.

The on-call medic arrived. She didn't look much older than the nurses - a hell of a lot of responsibility on young shoulders. She squatted down beside me. "We've got to get your blood pressure down." she said. "No shit, Sherlock" I replied. She looked understandably confused by the idiom.

She tried captopril to no effect and nitro-glycerine, which fared no better. Then a thought struck me. My meds had been locked away in room 36 for hours. I've had atrial fibrillation for decades. I can recognise the symptoms and the ECG trace of a severe attack, and this one was a cracker. "Try bisoprolol, 5mg," I suggested.

She thought about it for all of five nanoseconds before dispatching one of the nurses to pharmacy. I chewed it to speed up absorption. I was expecting it to take two hours to take effect. It started to kick in after less than half an hour. By three in the morning everything was stable. Bp 125/67, pulse 75.

Act three follows ↆ
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Photo Albums
31 January 2017
15 Photos
23 May 2009
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inclusionWinds v2.0
AURA