Mark Wilkes
BIS 97 Stage one — awake
You will not
remember
meeting me.
Consultant anaesthetist, Birmingham. We will speak for about eleven minutes, and then you will lose the thread of the conversation entirely, which is the point. This is the only place I get to finish a sentence.
Scroll to go under.
BIS 82 Stage two — sedation
The edges soften.
This is roughly where people stop being polite and start telling me things. It seems only fair to go first.
Guitar, badly, weekly
Lessons with Paul Foad. Currently helping turn his CAGED method into an actual book, which is a more patient project than anaesthesia and considerably harder.
Yew Cider
A cider venture in the west country. Orchards, festivals, and an ongoing family argument about the tagline.
Machines that do the admin
A quantity of home-built tooling that runs the billing, watches the diary and files the paperwork. It is a hobby that pretends to be a productivity gain.
BIS 45 Stage three — surgical anaesthesia
The hour you
were not there for.
People imagine anaesthesia is the injection at the start. It is the hour afterwards — the part with no witnesses, where somebody sits with your physiology and keeps it boring. Boring is the entire craft. Nothing happening is the product.
BIS 21 Stage four — deep
Down here it stops being a job.
There is a book in progress. It is not machine-written and it never will be — so this section is deliberately empty until you fill it.
The book
Dictated on walks. Begins, apparently, with the strangest night anyone ever had in intensive care.
Casebook
Cases as puzzles, played fair. No real patients — the discipline of the form is that everything is invented and everything is solvable.
Blackwood Hall
A game for ten people, a house, and a matter that needs resolving. Invitations have not gone out. That is arguably the whole problem.
BIS 0 · isoelectric
no cortical activity · nothing to report