Comedy Crusaders

Friday morning handover round.
08h00.
Our team ( The A-team) is handing over the numerous patients we've spent the last night seeing, to the new team coming on for the day.

Dr MB begins one of his patient presentations. The patient is curled up under one of the government issue blue hospital blankets in the fetal position.

Dr MB: "This patient is a 28 year old lady admitted at 06h00 this morning for strange behaviour. She was brought in by her colleagues for bizarre delusions. She believes that she is a doctor and that she is at the hospital to help people get better. She is not a known psychiatric patient but currently displays signs of mania, psychomotor agitation and formal thought disorder..."

The consultant leading the round, Dr G, then decided to wake the patient, and moved over to the head of the bed. She lifted the blue blanket to reveal....

MY very own pretty little face giggling hysterically from beneath the covers.

I was so dog-tired after our long shift that while the rest of my team were busy presenting and discussing another patient, and with no further patients of my own to present, I decided to climb into one of the empty patient beds and rest my weary head. It seemed like the appropriate thing to do at the time.

Which is when Dr MB and I came up with the idea of presenting me as a patient on the ward round.

Luckily Dr G was a young, newly qualified emergency medicine consultant with a sense of humour. She laughed heartily , and then shook her finger at me for being crazy enough to risk catching patient germs in aid of a little comedy...

She doesn't understand the lengths we are prepared to go to for a laugh in this place.

Doesn't she know that every shift is a war between patients and our sanity?

Nonsensical frivolity is sometimes the only defence against impending work induced depression and despair.

Our next practical joke will involve elaborate co-operation from the nursing staff and fellow colleagues. We are planning on bandaging up my head just before the new team arrive at 08h00 for the next handover, and then shocking them with the story that I had been stabbed in the head by a psych patient and had to have my lacerated scalp sutured up and then bandaged.

I think we'll be able to pull this one off.

I am 100 percent certain that the new team will actually fall for it.

After all, similar incidents have actually happened in the past.

Voltaire said that the purpose of the doctor is to entertain the patient as the disease takes its course.

Hopefully, as a defence mechanism against depression and like some kind of comedy crusade, we'll always be able to entertain each other while our shifts run their course.

:)