And The Loser Is....

"Multi-award winning." 

That has quite a ring to it, doesn't it? Who wouldn't want that tacked on to their name? 

Kudos, recognition, respect. Accolades and honours. We all love that kind of thing. 

I was very pleased with myself when I was nominated for GP of the Year this year in the GPBuddy Awards. My nominator took the time and effort to write about me and the various little crazinesses that I do, and put my name forward for consideration. I am very grateful to him for that (thanks Mike!) and for me that is the true spirit of such an award - having a colleague or friend go out of their way to raise you up and acknowledge your effort or commitment to whatever "cause" floats your boat. 

I assumed that that is how all awards work. I have nominated other people for various accolades, though so far none of them has been short-listed. Perhaps I need to up my gushing game, perhaps I am understating their greatness, but I will persist, and I hope that one day I will be the proud nominator of a Winner. 

I assumed that a person with good intentions would nominate another person with good credentials, and the good judges would evaluate each nominee's merits and acknowledge that while everyone is great, one person is more great than the others. 

And that seemed to be the case with the GPBuddy Awards. Good individuals and good teams got the recognition they deserved, and apparently the atmosphere on the evening was collegiate and warm (I wasn't there, being tucked up in bed across the country preparing for another Big Day in my life at dotMD).

I had got the bug though, and the FOMO, and I wanted to continue the buzz. So I looked into the Irish Healthcare Awards, which seemed to be the Oscars of medical awards in Ireland, and I figured I would throw WiMIN's hat into the ring. The hat-throwing, however, would cost the organisation nearly €300. Hmmm, I thought, that seems a bit steep. But what do I know? It is the Oscars, after all. 

Lo and behold, #SundayWiMIN was shortlisted in the Best Use of Social Media category. Phew, I thought, it would have been a shame if that money had been wasted, when it could have been used to support our mentoring programme, or to subsidise a student to attend our conference, or as a bursary to support research into issues relevant to gender inequity in Ireland. 

So we received nice fancy social media gifs to announce our success at making it onto the shortlist, and I looked up the date of the awards night to make sure I could be there to (hopefully) lift the trophy. It was on a Wednesday night, in Dublin. I guess it is only culchies who are concerned about going out late on a school night.

It was in a once-fancy hotel, in a still-fancy part of town. That's how it goes. At least it wasn't in the very-fancy hotel down the road, because that would be too expensive. 

I looked hard for the part of the website which stated how many free or subsidised tickets would be allocated to the finalists, in order that they could attend to receive their potential prize. 

Oh. 

That would be None. 

I found the section on How to Book a Table. My hurried lunchtime cheese sandwich paused at my lips as I read the price of the tickets, and then read the words "ex-vat" next to them. Per table? Per county? Perhaps they meant you were buying the seat, plus the cutlery and crockery, and all the pots that were used to make the food, and maybe a few shares in the vineyard as well? €280 is quite a bit more than I would usually spend on a three-course hotel meal. 

But this is Dublin, and doctors. They are all hanging around in their Louboutins and Lexuses. What do us culchies know? And it would be uncouth to mention money, right?

It turns out that the event is sponsored, too. Five hundred people at nearly €300 a head plus, what, five to ten grand per sponsor? 

Fair play to them. That is a very sound business plan. Each year there is a chosen charity partner, and I assume the donation to them is significant. 

I have no idea how many attendees bought their own tickets. Most of the finalists were members of large organisations, many within the HSE but some private or charitable. The opportunity for team-building and staff engagement was very evident, and it was clear that many people were getting a lot of enjoyment out of the evening. It is always lovely to dress up and spend time outside of the workplace with your colleagues, and it certainly adds to the team spirit once you are back at the coalface. 

It just seems a shame that the experience has to cost so much, making it more or less impossible for people in smaller organisations, or individuals, to attend or to even consider nominating a colleague. A GP is very unlikely to fork out €300 to nominate their buddy up the road, and their buddy might not be too pleased with having to find a locum so they can hoof up the country mid-week for an overpriced meal in a three star hotel. 

And yes of course #SundayWiMIN didn't win, and of course I'm just bitter, and of course if we had won I would have been singing the praises of the whole enterprise. But a quick scoot around the internet revealed not a single other "industry award" that required an entry fee of a similar amount, the majority having no charge at all to enter. 

I wonder if there were any "nominees" at the Irish Healthcare Awards who weren't "shortlisted". I suspect not. I have to question the integrity of an event which is supposed to highlight the wonderful work done by healthcare workers around the country, which is composed entirely of people, groups and projects who have a spare 280 quid to throw at the organisers. I could not find a single other Healthcare award in Ireland or the UK where such an entrance fee was charged. 

I had a lovely night meeting other WiMIN and chatting with fellow GPs, but I won't be going back unless I am sure that it is no longer a cynical money-making racket. 

(Or until I can find anybody who might collect a brown envelope....)

Kindred

I have a love-hate relationship with cancer books. They are either brilliantly written, which makes me jealous, or they are terribly written, which makes me think that there is no challenge to getting published once you put the words "I kicked cancer's butt" in the covering letter. 

If they are too close to the bone for me, I wince. If there are too many crystals and angel therapies, I sigh. If they are too sentimental, I throw my eyes up to heaven.

I started reading Stephen Bradley's book "Shooting and Cutting" with trepidation, because I wanted to like it. Not too much, but enough. I like his missus on the telly and, from the little I know of him through Twitter, I like him too. 

Unfortunately though, he has the same cancer as me, with massive liver metastases at diagnosis, a large bowel cancer primary, and a few errant lung nodules after the fact. He has children close in age to mine. He works in an industry with which I have long been fascinated and am innately connected, since my granny was an actress eighty years ago (thus making me a Hollywood Expert). Surely I would be disappointed, with so many potential bone-wincingly-close parallels. 

Nope. 

It was gripping, moving, intriguing, enlightening and funny.

He mentions some of my favourite things, like John Creedon, and Muiris Houston, and general anaesthetic. 

He is able to talk blithely about his fellow patients and the doctors who treat him, unconstrained by the confidentiality clauses that hang over the heads of doctor-authors. 

He is warm and kind and gracious about those who have cared for him, which I take as a personal compliment on behalf of all of us much-maligned HCPs.

I read the book in two days, during which time I also watched his movie Sweety Barrett, which is a lovely redemptive tale but also has the added bonus of Cillian Murphy and Andrew Scott at roughly age 12 with the worst haircuts of their lives.

This is a cancer book that I am happy to have read. 

Sheeran

Many years ago, we went for an early afternoon pint in a famous pub in Galway. We had a few shopping bags with us, which legitimised us, made it okay for us to be having a swift one in between the middle-class pursuits of spending money on overpriced clothes and, later on, on overpriced food. 

There was a small group of people at the table next to us, who were very definitely the Wrong Sort. Three men. Too loud. Cider. Obviously had been there for a while. Two of them left suddenly, knocking over a stool and creating a ruckus. The third fella decided he wanted to stay for a chat. I stiffened up, apprehensive and unwelcoming, wishing he had followed his boyos into the street to go and mess up someone else's afternoon. But he started to tell a story, and I found myself being drawn in. 
He described his school days, where he had sat in the classroom, the name of his teacher. He told us that he felt shy and awkward all the time. 

He described how, any time he tried to answer a question, his teacher would say to him, "Put your hand down Sheeran. You're wrong."


I think about this a lot.
About how many of us are told, verbally or otherwise, to put our hands down.