The People that You Meet

While I was in St. James' Hospital Burn Unit I had the chance to meet quite a few different people. These were mostly nursing staff, but I also met doctors, surgeons and other hospital apparatchiks. The purpose of this page is mostly to provide a brief (and very biased by my experience) introduction to the people who show up in the E-diary narrative.

My apologies to anyone who feels misrepresented here. This page records my memories, whether they reflect reality or not is a different problem. Even more, though, I want to apologize to anyone I may have missed. I know that I have forgotten the names of some of the nurses that I especially liked. On the whole, the nursing staff was a great bunch of people. I hate to leave anyone out who is deserving of credit.

Elena (or possibly Helena)

Head night nurse on alternate weeks during my in-patient stay. She's a wacky lady and very obviously competent. At least she gave me that impression by always answering my questions and elaborating on the answers so that I could understand the context.

Joanne Harford

My Physical Therapist. She's great. She seems to be the only one who actually thinks that the electrical nature of the injury makes a difference.

Mr. Declan Lannon

The surgeon who was on call the night I of the accident. He also did my debridement and skin grafts. He's great. He bothered to check my arm for compartment syndrome instead of performing an automatic fasciotomy. And he explained things without being condescending or making me feel like I was wasting his precious time.

Norma

Paula

Mary

Finoula

Zito

A Filippino (male) nurse. He was a real easy guy to get along with, and it was fun to have a well-travelled Asian to talk.

Bernie

Bernie was an older nurse from Northern Ireland (sorry, I don't remember precisely where). She had a sunny disposition with us in the Burn Unit and seemed to be quite competent. As far as I'm concerned, she did some of the better wound-dressings I had during my stay. In fact, because of the vagaries of the nursing rota, she ended up doing both the first and the last bandages of my inpatient stay.

Peter

I'm guessing that Peter was an orderly - he never really assisted with anything medical (although he once did a below-average job of patching up my granuflex, it was an unusaul circumstance), but he took care of a lot of the odds and ends of making the ward work. He was persistently nice and ran a lot of errands for the other patients in the unit, too. I never asked, so I can't say too much really.

Dr. Alan Byrne

Irish General Practitioner.

Roddy McConnell

Private Physical Therapist. Specializes in golf and upper extremities.