By Scarlet Pughe

The diary of a bottle of ketchup 

After a long and occasionally stressful day at SCA, I love to unwind by catching up with my family. I have a relatively small family so it’s easy to stay in touch with everyone. I always want to hear stories about their week and what adventures they’ve had. However, there is one member of my family that entertains me much more than the rest. For the purpose of this blog they shall be called ‘Marc’, mainly for legal reasons but also if any of my family reads this, they won’t be so pleased to know that I don’t find them that interesting.   

Many people have read the Sunday Times number one bestseller ‘This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor’. The book, for those of you who haven’t read it, is a collection of diary entries written by Adam Kay, a former junior doctor who specialised in obstetrics and gynaecology. 

Marc is a newly qualified doctor and for the last two years has been on rotation, in a hospital on the South-West coast of England. He’s had to deal with all manner of patients ranging from newborn babies to one hundred year old war veterans. Every patient leaves a legacy in Marc’s mind with their individual story. These stories are meant to be kept secret.. but after a long stressful day Marc knows that there is nothing that cheers me up more than hearing some funny stories. It leaves me knowing that however shit my day has been, Marc’s has been just that little bit shitter…sometimes literally. 

So here I share with you a sneak peek into a day in the life of Marc, by telling you about his first patient of the day last Friday.

1stNovember 2019, 7:30pm – Patient, a forty ish year old white man. Unable to sit down and in considerable pain. 

Marc asked what had happened. The man explained that he had just been to Sainsburys to do his weekly shop and had arrived home to find that he’d locked himself out. So, he decided to break into his own house, targeting the first-floor bedroom window as his point of entry. He remembered leaving it open that morning so it was worth a shot to climb up and shimmy it open from the outside. He found a nearby ladder and started the climb at which point he lost his footing and fell. Marc nodded in a consoling manner. Then the man added, ‘I fell directly onto my freshly bought shopping and embarrassingly onto a bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup… which inserted itself …up my bum’. 

This wasn’t Marc’s first ‘I slipped and fell’ rodeo but the man did seem very convincing, so Marc took pity on him, after all this must have been an incredibly painful fall. Marc lightly chuckled and thanked God the glass bottle didn’t break mid entry. He explained how he would have to take a closer look and went to work. After forty-five minutes he managed to retrieve the bottle, however he somewhat lost faith in the man’s well crafted story as the bottle was covered by a perfectly intact condom.