I’ve had mixed feelings about Christmas this year… On the happy side, it was mine and Matt’s first Christmas together!! Like proper grown-ups! We both worked on Christmas Day so we decided that Christmas dinner/supper is going to be chicken and chips (home-made of course to mark the special occasion), followed by a share tub of Ben & Jerrys (is there such a thing as a share tub?) and a few glasses of fizzy stuff! We both worked on boxing day too so we daren’t indulge too much.  On the ‘what have I done to deserve this?’ side, on the Christmas rota it would appear that I’m working almost every shift with Jo. Cos it’s Christmas, it’s a pretty scant rota and Steve is helping us all out by working as a nurse, rather than in his usual Charge Nurse role, but he’s basically having Christmas off and working New Year….happy days…not! Jo is furious with me after I arranged for a dying patient to have one last Christmas. We received a huge hamper of chocolate from her daughte...

I am officially loved up! My dates (yes dates, plural) with Matt have been awesome and so it was with a spring in my step that I returned to work last Monday after my annual leave. I must have looked a proper gorm, smiling from ear to ear with that faraway look in my eyes. In fact, during handover one of the nurses asked me if I’d been overdosing on Krispy Kremes for breakfast again!  I couldn’t wait to see my patients in Eden Bay. A couple of my ladies had been discharged, but I had new ones to get to know and then there was the die-hards – the ladies who seemed to have been there forever but who never failed to keep me on my toes. It was lovely to see them again and even more lovely when they told me that they’d missed me. Jo wasn’t on duty my first day back so I was quite relaxed and spent time catching up with my patients’ progress and finding out what I could about my new admissions. I was regaling them with tales of my dates with Matt and we were having a proper...