2 “i’ve risked my life” and “lines in the bathtub”

00:00

We had this patient and she used to be a nurse. So during night shift, she just kept coming to the nurse's office and we had to just give her some paper to like, so she would just start drawing on a paper. And she was just convinced that she's on a night show with us, she just wouldn't settle in a bed. So it was just really sweet. What the hell is my job?

00:20

We stayed with her the whole night and she kept trying to be like, you know, do you want to come to bed? And she's like, OK, well, I'll have a rest for like five minutes, but wake me up so that I can go into the next patient. So we try and get her to bed. And like five minutes later, she'll be up and she's like, all right, I've had my rest. You can go now.

00:34

and trying to get us to go on our break. I mean, it's very common, especially with people who have dementia. Dementia like really flares up when there is something else going on. So that can be a big factor. A serious infection can cause confusion. So, yeah, hospital wards can be really funny places sometimes because people can think they're in all sorts of places. So I start my day. I go into the office, get my hand over, discuss my patients. Then I drive around.

00:59

whole county so I will go and see the patients. Usually I'll have sort of three to four patients in the morning. I'll go to them, assess them, make sure that they're okay, check on the vital signs, how they're doing, maybe listen to the chest, listen to the heart if need be. If they're alright we'll proceed and I'll usually give them the prescribed antibiotic dose and yeah I'll see three three or four patients in the morning.

01:25

I'll come back into the office, we'll discuss people in more detail, come up with some plans of action or do an online handover with the rest of the team. So I might be in a random village one time and then I'll drive to different places in the county and wherever I am for lunch. If, you know, if I don't have much time before I need to see my next patient, I might stop somewhere in a cafe, grab some lunch. Quite a lot of people are just really friendly and, you know, if you just say that you work for the NHS, people give you discounts. This thing called

01:54

blue light card, it's for the emergency services. Most people are just really happy to give you discounts if you say you work for the NHS, which is nice. And then I will see another few patients in the afternoon. Same deal. Sometimes it'll be the same patient on a sort of two times a day antibiotic course. And sometimes it'll be different patients, but, um, lots of people stopped doing the discounts after the pandemic, which sucks. Um, I mean, some stores that I've like been reliant on like going in there being like, Oh, I work for the NHS and getting a nice discount. And then people decided that.

02:23

They don't want to give us the discounts anymore, which is sad. I miss some of the good discounts. We had some really good discounts and we had a pizza place close to us, really good pizza. And they were just giving us like five pound pizzas. And you go there and be like, oh yeah, I'm working for the NHS. They'll just give you like, you get one pizza and like, actually, do you want to like take some for your colleagues? And we'll like get like, Michael and I work in a hospital, just to get like 10 pizza boxes just because.

02:44

I said I work for the NHS, it's like chucking things at me. But recently as nurses, we went on strike, um, demanded better pay. People were really supportive. We had so many people just showing support, beeping the horns, coming to us with gifts. They were very successful in mobilizing people and getting people to talking. And in the end, a pay deal was secured that I think was quite widely regarded as really insignificant, but it was accepted in the end. So it was a 5% uplift. You know, I've risked my life, went and worked.

03:13

um, in acute COVID wards, looking after patients when things were really not okay. And it's just really heartbreaking. I don't know. I think all of us have felt that sort of shift and disappointment when we have lost friends, we have lost patients, we've seen like some really traumatic things. And at the end of it, we kind of thought, you know, at least people recognize it. People see what has happened, recognize what we've done and treat us better.

03:38

So I was working in an acute setting and I had a patient who had came in really unwell, let's say confused as well. And this patient kept asking for a cigarette, just wanted to go out, but it was like really unstable on their feet. And we were trying to come up with ways of, you know, being like, well, you know, you, you're really not safe to come out, I'm going to give you some, you know, nicotine replacement things and trying to, you could just see the disappointment. I could really feel disappointed whenever, like we've given this person different types of nicotine replacement. Couldn't really see that the person is just like not interested in that actually.

04:07

keeps asking, you know, can I go for a cigar? Can I go outside? Can I go for a cigarette? And after a few hours, finally worked out that actually this person trying to communicate something totally different. What this person wanted this whole time was to call their mum, speak to their mum. But whatever was happening in the brain just wasn't coming out. It kept coming out as I want a cigarette. What they were trying to say is like, I want to call my mum and got the mum on the phone on a video call. You could just see like the tears running down the face. They still couldn't say what they wanted to say.

04:37

things were coming out completely wrong. It was some kind of a, you know, something was happening in the brain, things were not connecting properly. The communication just wasn't happening in a linear fashion. And so that's something that's quite interesting in a job where you have to really like think on your feet and figure things out. So you might hear one thing actually means something completely different. It's a little bit like that nightmare that people, well, I have, when you try to dial 999, there's an emergency happening, but all you can do is press random buttons. You're smashing the buttons and nothing's coming out.

05:21

When I was age 10, the teacher said to me, what do you want to do for a living? I said, I want to be a prisoner of conscience because I'd just read about Nelson Mandela. And I was reading a book called Journey to Gerber because my parents were really political. What the hell is my job?

05:46

Our building is in a shopping centre, which makes it fairly unique. You need to deal with everything like there's some leaks in the roof currently, which put a stop to the show last week. So I'm dealing with that from literally getting a bucket and going and trying to place it under the leak to talking at a really high level about a million pounds refurbishment that's needed. So it's just the building's just, yeah. But I think the most important thing about what we do is we don't...

06:15

just focus on the bricks and mortar. Like it's important and it's an important place for communal gathering and community. But actually we need to be out into our community. We need to be taking theatre to the doorstep of people. Cause some people just won't ever walk into a theatre. Even though we're, you know, we think we're really welcoming and we're in a shopping centre and you can literally get your fruit and veg opposite and then come into the theatre if you need to. Like some people are still never gonna come in here. I didn't go to the theatre when I was a kid.

06:44

It wasn't something that we did a lot of, but I can it. But someone came into my school and did a drama lesson and I just loved it. And then I found a youth theatre that was free to attend. And then I always thought I was going to be an actor. And my dream of being an actor, I remember being about 12 and thinking, well, I don't know I've made it. When I'm laid in a bath.

07:08

learning my lines. That's what I thought being an actor was like, in these luxurious, fast, and blitzed footballs, learning my lines for my first show at Adidas. I'm a bit bitter. So that's why I wanted to be there. And then when I got to college, I realised, and I wasn't an actor for a bit, and then I realised that actually it's the rehearsal bit that I'm interested in, and it's the people bit that I'm interested in. And so that's why it kind of skewed up into a totally different direction. But I like to think that what I do is political still.

07:38

Like it's maybe not quite to the extreme that I thought of when I was 10. I don't know, I don't know what kind of screwed up vision I had. But I knew that I wanted to do something that makes a difference and that I think changes the world. And I think the arts do. I think theatre does. Last week we did a great thing where we did a call out to the community and said, okay, what is the food that represents, tells about your best recipes? And then we chose the best starter main and dessert. We got a pro team of...

08:06

chefs to make those meals while the community member like basically told them how to make it and then meanwhile another group of community people curated the evening's performances and it was like everything from some tiny little girls hardly moving a baton like I think they were meant to be batons as well but they literally just stood there with their baton doing that through to like this amazing like Malayne family who were like

08:32

It was like a mum, a dad, a son and a daughter, and the daughter was maybe like three, and she was on the drums, and the mum was singing and the dad was on guitar. So it was just brilliant. And we did that out in the community, and that was fantastic. And that's not strictly speaking theatre, but it's part of our civic engagement and making people feel like we're them, I suppose. This morning, I was walking my dog whilst listening.

09:02

to the Secretary of State for Culture say some uninteresting things about how they feel about culture in this country. But then like last week, I was watching Intergalactic Bingo. So it's like everything is totally, every single day is totally different. Sometimes I'm in a room with actors and we're making some theater and having arguments and debates and making things happen.

09:27

And then sometimes I'm sat with this spreadsheet going, how the heck do we pay for this? And then sometimes I'm looking at a bit of marketing copy. Sometimes I'm talking to an artist and trying to figure out how I can help them get their foot into the industry. It's just every single day is different. I genuinely don't think I've ever had two days the same.