Nothing To See Here

Before anyone jumps ahead and starts prepping their bunkers: no, I don’t think there’s an ‘outbreak’ of anything. If I genuinely thought we were looking at a public health crisis or a cinematic plague, I wouldn’t be wasting time writing a blog; I’d be filling in very different, very official forms and calling the CQC. What I am saying is that I’ve started writing these observations down because I’ve noticed how quickly the human brain tries to smooth things out. You see something weird at 2 AM, and by 10 AM after a coffee and a sleep, your brain has filed it under ‘Normal Weirdness.’ I’m resisting that smoothing process. I want to keep the sharp edges of these encounters visible. Our memory is a terrible record-keeper; it likes to make sense of the world even when the world isn’t making sense. By documenting the specific way a patient’s eyes didn’t track a light pen, or the exact greyish hue of their skin that didn’t match their vitals, I’m keeping a receipt. If this turns out to be a bad batch of ‘spice’ or some new chemical cocktail doing the rounds in Greater Manchester, I will happily admit I was being dramatic. I’ll rename the blog ‘People On Something Watch’ and we can all have a laugh about it. But until then, I’m keeping the log. It feels like a safety rail in a dark hallway.