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Thom picked us up from Bristol Temple Meads in the early afternoon (he had just finished nights) which was really nice of him. We went back to his house in Windmill Hill where we’ve been staying since. Thom went bed and Fi and I walked to the new Cabot Circus retail area in Broadmead so Fi could get some shoes for her interview on Tuesday (which she managed to). We went for a great pie and a pint at the pub just down the road from Thom and met up with Claire and Richard (albeit briefly as Claire was starting nights that evening).

I walked Fi to the BRI on Tuesday morning for her interview for the paediatric surgery job on my way to catching a bus to Southmead. Fi nailed the interview, got the job and started work on Wednesday! My day didn’t go as smoothly as planned though. It turns out that I was supposed to go to Frenchay not Southmead to meet the HR lady to hand in my forms. Arse. I really should have read the email more thoroughly. This meant I had to catch a bus in the snow between the two hospitals (cold and not fun). Eventually everything was sorted and I caught the bus back into town and met up with Fi and Thom for some celebratory shopping.

I have never shopped so hard in my life! I bought a couple of nice jumpers, three shirts, a suit, a new coat, a beanie, a leather satchel, a tie and some shoes! Expensive but necessary.

Wednesday was induction for all three of us (Fi at the BRI and Thom and I at Southmead). Thom has worked at Southmead before but I had never worked in Bristol before. The induction was shite (as they always are). It dragged on until 14:00 (lots of lectures on waste disposal, fire drills, security, etc, etc). After induction, I headed up to theatres and watched a microlaryngoscopy done by one of the senior regs called Jules (a pretty cool guy). That finished at about 16:00 so I caught a lift back home with Thom.

Thursday was a real nightmare. It snowed heavily overnight and so we woke to find about 6 inches of snow on the ground. Thom and I spent two hours trying to get his BMW 1-series out of his road, to no avail. I really didn’t want to miss my first day at work (I had flash backs to my interview where I said two of my best qualities were reliability and punctuality). All buses in the city had been cancelled and I ended up walking into Bristol, hiring a car and then driving to Southmead. I eventually got there at noon, having missed my scheduled E clinic (E for ‘emergency’). Although stressed, everything turned out well. I helped out Russell with some on-call stuff (including sorting out an aspiration pneumonia and getting some blood out of a difficult patient). I had a (brief) meeting with my consultant (Mr Hajioff) who seems like a really cool guy and one of the senior regs, Dave Pothier, who is very keen on research, which is great. They are both Mac fans so they’re all good in my book! Dave wants me to write a cross-platform app to help log their otology operations which would be excellent for my CV and they have a couple of other projects I can help out on. I think I impressed them by hiring a car to get to work!

Friday was dreadful weather again. It took me over an hour to get to work. I spent the whole day in theatre which was really interesting. I met another one of the regs (an ST2 named Amit) who seems really nice. The list was supposed to be straight forwards but an adenoidectomy was more complicated that it first seemed and ended up taking around 5 hours (as the chap had to be taken back to theatre to stop a re-bleed). At one point we thought he might have to have an oropharyngeal pack put in and remain intubated in ICU! Fortunately one of the consultants managed to control the bleeding. I left work at about 17:30, got lost (even with my sat nav) going home and finally arrived back at Thom’s at 18:30.

Fi and I braved the snow and ice and met up with Katie and Pauli at Bordeaux Quay. Fi and I ate their before the other two arrived and then we somehow managed to get through 3 bottles of wine (Pauli was drinking pints). Needless to say, I had a hangover yesterday morning! It was great to see those guys and it has just reinforced how much we want to stay in Bristol. I really hope we get long term jobs here.