"Attention! This vehicle is under attack. Call 999!"

Yesterday afternoon I was milling about my hospital room when I heard a siren and then an automated voice announce "Attention! This vehicle is under attack. Call 999!" The siren and announcement repeated about five more times over the course of two minutes. Curious, I went to the window to see what was happening. I mean, it must be pretty serious for a vehicle to claim its being "attacked." So I stuck my head out the window and looked for vehicle and attacker. I wasn't sure what I was looking for, but I expected a man with a rocket launcher and half blown away car, at the very least. What did I see when I looked out the window? Nothing. I wasn't able to see the shrieking vehicle, and by the way people were going on about their business, I assume there wasn't a man with a rocket launcher trying to do battle with someone's Merc or Porsche. In fact, from what I could see, no one stopped or even thought about pulling out their phones to call 999 as the car kept instructing them to do. Thus, my suspicions grew and I began to suspect that somewhere, just out of my line of sight, a fancy, overpriced performance car had been shat on by a giant bird and was now squawking about it.

Initially I found this incident entertaining as it made me think about just how useless car alarms are. It seems to me that the louder and more annoying and demanding a car alarm is, the more people ignore it, especially when the vehicle's alarm is claiming to be under attack in broad daylight on a busy street in the Beverly Hills like area of London.

And then I found the whole thing to be annoying. The car was parked near two major hospitals and the last thing patients (including me) inside those hospitals  needed was to be bothered by a car making a hoo ha over some bird poo... But little did I know that my opinion was soon about to change again, and shortly I would be wishing that I had an alarm of my own to scream bloody murder.

My line stopped working and leaked everywhere towards the end of my afternoon dose, so the nurse removed it. Then around 7 pm a doctor arrived to put in a new one. Try after try the poor doctor was not having any luck and commented that I had veins rivaling a cancer patient and referred to me as Crap Veins. I had to laugh and informed him that I had already named myself Patient Crap Veins on on this blog a week earlier.  He then said how I must have a high pain threshold for putting up with all of the sticks and this got me thinking.

Somewhere around stick number six I started to wonder if I was doing myself a disservice by remaining calm stick after stick. Perhaps I was making the doctors feel too comfortable and they weren't feeling pressured enough to get it right the first time.... or second, or third, or fourth time. Then it hit me that I needed an alarm! The alarm could announce, "Attention! This girl is under attack. You with the needle, step away from the patient and call an extra talented,  super professional IV puter-iner!" Anyone know where I can get one of these?

Well, needles to say, last night I was not saved by an alarm demanding an extra professional IV puter-iner, but I was saved by an alarm of another sort - the doc's beeper. It went off after stick number seven so the doctor  left to deal with the problem. Eventually another doctor arrived and got me on his second try, or stick number nine for me.