All Bleeding Stops Eventually: A Lenny Moss Mystery

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From 10 July, Radio 4 will interrogate the current challenges facing the NHS and consider suggested solutions with four-part documentary series The NHS: Who Cares? presented by Kevin Fong. The series will bust myths as it takes a hard look at the realities of the modern day complexities of providing healthcare fit for 21st century Britain. In Al Smith's two part drama, All Bleeding Stops Eventually, the NHS is examined from the viewpoint of a doctor who becomes a patient. Write because you want to show something. To show that the world is shit. To show how fleeting love and happiness are. To show the inner workings of your ego. To show that democracy is in danger. To show how interconnected we are. (Each "to show" is active and must be personal, deeply held, true to you.) Tactical Combat Casualty Care Guidelines[ http://www.health.mil/Libraries/Presentations_Course_Materials/TCCC_guidelines_090204.pdf] C was circulation, the pumping of the heart. You had to take care of those things in that sequence to stabilize the patient. Establish an airway and respirations, then take care of the compressions. I guess you’re hoping that somewhere in this pointless, rambling discourse, I have a point that ties all this together. And I do, sort of. It is this:

Invest something truly personal in each of your characters, even if it's something of your worst self. The final criticism, which often comes from professionals, is that we can’t expect “lay people” or “civilians” to do these things, let alone do them correctly. They, rightly, point out that out of people who learn CPR, only a percentage of them will actually perform CPR if the time comes, and only a small percentage of that group will do it correctly. This is true, but it is all the more reason to give better training to more people to increase the numbers of people who know these skills, choose to do them when needed, and do them correctly.Steve Rogoff is a family physician and author who lives in Kauai with his wife and 3 children. Raised in Los Angeles and graduated with honors from Berkeley, he began writing more intensely while living in South America during a gap year between medical studies at UC San Diego. It was there he found his voice, writing two collections of short stories, Colors and Shadows and the unpublished Dark Side of the Light, as well as his first novel, Nazca. Florence Nightingale was an activist, a social reformer, a statistician, and a bold nurse who defied stifling British conventions to change history. An indisputable pioneer, Nightingale died in 1910 aged of 90, leaving behind an inspirational legacy that benefits everyone’s medical care today. Which leads me to another of my favorite old medical phrases: Tincture of Time. A tincture, for those of you who are not pharmacists in the 1910’s, is a concentrated liquid herbal extract, made from soaking plants with assumed medical properties in alcohol. So, Tincture of Time is the “medicine” of just waiting for a patient to heal themselves. Sometimes, that’s the best thing to do. Or the only thing to do. If you’ve already tried all the actual medicines. Ideas may be deeply embedded in the interactions and reactions of your character; they may be in the music and poetry of your form. You have thoughts and you generate ideas constantly. A play ought to embody those thoughts and those thoughts can serve as a unifying energy in your play.

I found a brief solace in the stoic saying, but cynicism returned. Whoever had written that saying had never been in a situation like this, a patient bleeding an infinite supply of blood.I tried to remember when I first heard the phrase. It might have been during my surgery rotation in medical school, or it might have been while learning image-guided procedures during radiology residency. Or it might have been another time entirely. The wisdom of this phrase lies not in its literal meaning, which is like most medical sayings- one part reassurance and two parts dark humor. For those who have never heard the phrase, it has two meanings. The surface meaning is this; be calm, because you will follow your training, and stop the patient’s bleeding, saving the day. The “humorous” second meaning is that the patient will run out of blood, his heart will stop beating, and the bleeding will stop that way. Obviously, that is not an acceptable outcome for us.