28/10/06

Cead Mile Failte Rowhat to all you funky monkeys & peppercorn leprechauns… which means 100 thousand welcomes in Irish…

Well, we are still in Ireland on the Ring Of Kerry but we are coming up to the end of my 10 week term working here and tomorrow we will be heading out to Portugal, so we thought we’d better catch up on another travel blog before we leave.

But first of all, here is another gory medical story just to make this blog read a bit more interesting…

Firstly and thankfully there have been no more FREAKY medical cases like the guy who slit his throat, but I did get this one call a few weeks back which was pretty weird and went something like this:

Phone Rings with Ced’s funky “Run DMC-Walk This Way” ringtone

Ced: Hello
Call Centre: Hi, we have an urgent call for you to go to a remote beach 45 minutes out of town since the Garda (Irish Police) have just found a body.

Ced: …um… What??? Excuse me…? I’m sorry, could you say that again???
Call Centre: The Garda have just found a body on the beach and they need you to go out and certify the body as deceased.

Ced: …um… is the body dead?
Call Centre: Yes… apparently it is a dead body.

Ced: …um… well… if the body is dead, then what’s the urgency?
Call Centre: …um… well apparently the tide is coming in and they need you out there to certify the body dead before the tide comes in and washes it away…

Long pause

Ced: …oh… ok… that makes sense… ( but actually thinking …WHAT THE FECK???!!!)
Continue reading →

8/10/06

Hey there friends, family and other furry animals

Well, after our last blog about the guy that slit his throat, we got so many emails full of nice words and pats on the back that we were quite overwhelmed by it all, so I thought I’d better start this blog off by firstly thanking all you dudes and dudettes for the nice words and support…

…And also to set things straight since I really don’t deserve them because I really didn’t do anything special that night, as the dude had mostly stopped bleeding on his own, so my resuscitation effort was actually quite minimal!

I actually didn’t mean for the last blog to be a “poor me” story, so I am a bit embarrassed by that… I actually wasn’t that traumatised by it at all.

However, as you can tell, I was pretty pissed off at the inefficiency of the emergency response team afterwards, and I think most of it was due to me converting my adrenalin induced stress response into anger… which was TOTALLY not very Jedi-like of me to give into my anger like that… I totally could have turned to the dark side…

In anycase, just to balance things out since the last blog was so negative, I thought I’d do a more positive blog on one of the COOLEST experiences of my career. Continue reading →