Welcome to the real Casualty
LIFE, as John Lennon famously once sang, is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.
And 24 Hours in A&E (Channel 4) is just the show to demonstrate how scarily fragile the whole kit and caboodle of existence can be sometimes.
For example, one minute you’re popping down the shop to get a packet of biscuits to go with the brew you’ve left stewing, the next you’re being cut from a concertinaed car wreck by a fireman who’s asking you if you can remember your own name.
And it’s that which makes this “fly on the ward” documentary series so terrifying – it’s just all so random.
Whether it’s slipping and bashing your head on the tiled floor of the frozen section down Lidl (other cut-price supermarkets are available) or partaking of an ill-timed sneeze while overtaking on the M25 at 70mph – you can go from happy-go-lucky to being in a neck brace with blood on your teeth in the blink of a badly contused eye.
It’s a sobering reminder that, no matter how much you try to meticulously plan your own little path through the universe, something will always come along to stuff up your trajectory good and proper.
And, if you’re in the “patch ’em, dispatch ’em! business – i.e. a nurse, doctor or a paramedic – then all that chaos, all that pain and hurt can be condensed down to one 60-minute period.
The Golden Hour it’s called in the trade – namely WATCHING Koko: The Gorilla Who Talks To People (BBC1) broke my heart just a tiny bit.
The archive footage of 40 odd years in the life of an animal – from infancy to old age – who’d been handreared by humans in the US and taught to understand sign language was hugely moving.
So much so I tried the same with my cat straight after the programme had finished.
It’s going great so far – she’s already mastered 15 different ways of saying, “Mate, p*** off and leave me alone, I’ve got my downstairs to lick clean.” the tiny and hectic window of time the beleaguered staff at St George’s Hospital in London – one of the busiest and most advanced A&E departments in the world – has to identify and treat the potentially lifethreatening injuries that burst through its wellworn doors on a daily basis.
First up was Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome sufferer Stephan, 39, who was rushed in with internal bleeding from his femoral artery, caused by complications following an angiogram he’d had the day before.
The doctors examining him were concerned his heart could be under potentially fatal strain, especially given his insistence on exercising his body to the limit whenever possible.
But, despite some touch and go moments, by the end of the programme he was up and running again – quite literally, the lure of the early morning jog proving too much for him to resist.
For Stephan, putting his feet up and watching Bargain Hunt in his dressing gown of an afternoon in order to live that little bit longer didn’t equate to any kind of life at all.
At which point those watching at home probably took a good long look at themselves, patted their muffin topped midriffs and resolved to carpe their diems a bit more regularly.
Me? Well, let’s just say I didn’t enjoy that second KitKat I was munching on quite as much as a result. A gorilla in the midst of playing with her pet kitten