Thinking: Parts of your arm where you’d normally stub out your fag

“Apparently if you hold ice to parts of your arm where you’d normally stub out your fag, it sends a similar message to your brain without making you smell like a barbcue.”

I came across the above line in ‘The Tied Man’ by Tabitha McGowan. It made me laugh out loud. It’s a brilliant moment of character revelation and neatly contradicted my expectations of ‘normal’.

Once I’d stopped laughing I started thinking about what ‘normal’ is…

• A resting heart rate of between 60-100 bpm.
• ‘Normal’ oxygen sats for patients with COPD.
• The typical features/health profile of someone with a long family history on the eastern seaboard, outrageously described by some as ‘normal for Norfolk’.

A friend and I abused each other for a while by describing the other as ‘normal’.  It started to freak me out. I started to think she might mean it.

I don’t want to be normal. I want to be me.

That said, bag of contradictions that I am, sometimes I think it would be quite nice to be normal. But it takes so much effort. It makes me think I should act, look, say ‘normal’ things. Which is where it gets difficult, because I don’t even know what that means.

Being ‘normal’?  It’s not worth it: it’s what teenage angst is made of.

I think everyone has their own ‘normal’, their own day to day reality. And that makes everyone’s ‘normal’ different. Which really means that there can be no such thing.

But how do you improve services in healthcare if there is no ‘normal’ patient following a ‘normal’ pathway through their ‘normal’ experience of their ‘normal’ condition?

With difficulty?

Or, is it about differentiating between ‘normal’ as in routine and efficient, and the individual experience of that routine for those not normal humans who are co-producing that care.

And I really do want my healthcare (and your’s) to be efficient and as ‘routine’ as possible.  I want it speedy, accurate, and right first time.  But…

Every patient and every patient journey is unique, as is every member of staff and every staff member’s day. We have to treat every new interaction as the brand new experience it really is for those involved.

We can’t assume that we ‘know’ what this service or that care is like because we can’t assume that everyone else ‘sees’ it or ‘does’ it – experiences it – like we do.

If we really want to change things for the better we have to get the right people in the room, and engage across boundaries and between professions, and with patients, to ensure that we truly understand what’s happening – what’s ‘normal’ for each of them, in order to change the system effectively – so the new improved ways can become ‘routine’ for everyone – but never ‘normal’.

Reading: Other0001: The Tied Man by Tabitha McGowan is a newly released first novel, available on kindle.