Another Pair Of Eyes

Jenny

Jenny has asked me to explain that due to various undefined technological issues, her blog is temporarily down. I am told it should be back in a few days.

Interest

Revision, eh. It’s a bitch and everyone knows it – nobody wants to sit and relearn things they kind-of remember (or never learnt) in the days before an exam. Even now, when outside there’s a biting wind which cuts through just about everything, it still seems a bit like being chained to a desk. This revision is slightly different to that stereotype, somehow. It’s still manically hard to actually bring myself to start, but once I do I just get lost in it. It’s, horror of horrors, interesting. Even though the thought of opening textbooks still appalls me, once started I find myself enjoying it, which is a thoroughly alien feeling.

Speaking of interest, someone has been interested in the progress of other, non-examined parts of my life recently. I trust the following, relatively hot off the presses, is answer enough.

Planning

I sat down this morning to plan out how I’m going to make this under piano thing I’m building. I managed to scrounge a bunch of tools etc from home so now I am fully tooled up* and ready to roll. I’m going to start marking out the wood tonight, so when some nice weather rolls around I can hop outside saw in hand and pounce. Should be good. I’m genuinely quite excited about working with wood again – not done it since school and I enjoyed it a lot back then. Depending on how this goes (it’s a pretty simple design, nothing but straight edges and hidden dowel joints) I may or may not end up making more stuff in future.

We shall see.

Apologies about the image quality above…

Check out the rust on that tri square.

*with the exception of a centrepunch, which I will procure from somewhere.

Paediatrics

I never had myself down as someone who likes kids. Especially babies. Why should I? After all, they vomit and piss and spread their stool liberally about the place, and howl and cry and bang things together in a 24-hour cascade of sound interrupted only by bottles and sleeping.

Last night, I went out for dinner with my family, and in the general medley of conversation I ended up relating how my attachment was going. It was only after I’d been talking with enthusiasm and without pause for about 10 minutes solid that I realised that actually, I don’t hate kids at all. I love kids, I find them fascinating. Their development is just phenomenal, the way they think and learn, the changes month by month, year by year. I love the variety, the psychology, physiology, family dynamics and sheer vitality of a child, and as a direct consequence of these things, I love paediatrics. It seems so obvious now, not sure why I didn’t see it before.

It’s a strange change. I think the only reason that I ever became irritated with children, especially babies, was because I didn’t understand. I do now. I see a child banging the top of a bin to make a sound, and I understand why, and actually instead of annoying me it makes me smile.  I’m not saying that all children are saints and that they can never drive someone up the wall, just that I find it far easier to tolerate and value kids than I did before.

That’s from a personal standpoint – from a medical one, paeds is also brilliant. It has variety – a broad range of systems and problems over a broad age range. It has follow-up – children you see and treat will often come back to you at least once, and in that there is the reward of seeing how they have been doing, how they have grown, how the interventions you made (potentially) have changed that life.

I guess that leads me into the darker parts of paeds though. Despite the best efforts, children still die. Illness and defects and rare syndromes can strike down a child, sometimes literally while you watch. Not only that, but they are beaten and abused, neglected and bullied and mistreated by their families, by friends. You have to keep an open eye. I remember we had a particularly shocking moment in the middle of a diabetes seminar where we were asked what it might be when a type 1 diabetic child (can’t produce their own insulin) presented in A+E with hypoglycaemia and high levels of insulin in the blood without a corresponding increase in c-protein (meaning the insulin causing the hypoglycaemia was injected rather than produced). We came out with abuse, accidental overdose, neglect, a host of similar answers, some possible, some not.

The answer was attempted murder. Don’t be afraid to think the worst, was the message. Child protection is one of the only things that whoever first sees or suspects it is responsible – if I see a patient and I think there are child protection issues it is my responsibility, not that of my consultant or SpR. Sure, I can and should discuss it with them but if they disagree and I am still convinced, it is still my obligation to do something. Obviously this doesn’t really happen, but it is a disquieting thought nonetheless.

Anyway, I’m still going on about paeds and I should be doing work for it right now. I could talk about this for a long time, but I won’t say anymore. Point is, this is something I’d very much like to do, something I can picture myself doing for many years, and it’s nice to have that feeling.

We’ll see if anything else jumps out at me like this has, but if not…

Changed

Sometimes, when you think back and look back and remember back to how things were with someone – friend, partner, co-worker – you realise just how much has changed. In this case it’s a friend, not someone I knew brilliantly but someone who we went out with, drank with, laughed with etc.

Now he’s depressed. Due to a complex situation, the details of which I shall not go into, I cannot get him to see anyone, and neither can anyone else. His life is fracturing – he broke up with his girlfriend. Who he lives with. Who he now desperately wants back but she has closed that chapter. He’s slowly losing the patience and care of his housemates, and spends the nights playing on his computer. He’s not been to a lecture in three weeks and is currently failing his degree. It’s a difficult personality with severe depression, and there isn’t anything, despite knowing that, we can do.

Projects

Well, I’ve hit a bit of a rut now. My bike is pretty functional – needs new brakes still but other than that it runs very nicely. It’ll go up in its final form when it’s done properly, though. My assignment is done and submitted, my paediatric essay is complete, my chillis/peppers are almost ready (some of them, anyway) to be picked. I’m no longer completely lovelife-bereft.

And I’m left with a bit of a feeling of ‘now what’? I like having projects to keep me going, something to do when I’m not working or out and about, something that at the end I can say ‘yes, I did that, and it’s useful’. I’ve still got Tchaikovsky’s Barcarolle running on the piano and I’m two pages through that, but I still find myself needing something else to do. And turns out, Tchaikovsky’s Barcarolle has presented exactly the type of problem I can solve from a practical standpoint, because it is hard. In fact, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever played, and as such, the one I’m having to practise all the time, learn all the time, relearn all the time. As such, to avoid driving my housemates to distraction, I’ve got to use my headphones. And they have nowhere to go when I’m not using them – can’t go on the piano as I then can’t play the lowest octave, and if they are on the floor I tread on them. I like my headphones and want to keep them intact.

Yes, sure, it would be easier to take them out of the piano and put them on my shelves on the other side of my room every time I stop using them, but it would have been easier to buy a new bike. Instead, and this is on a budget of £10, I will make a little kind of cabinety shelfy thing to sit under my piano which will hold the headphones and which will also serve as somewhere to put a lot of the music books I’ve begged and borrowed from various people. It will be good times, and give me a chance to do some woodwork which I’ve not done since I was at school and which I kind of miss. It’ll be harder without a pillar drill and I’ll have to nab some tools from home, but it should be do-able and come the end we’ll see just how much of my D&T I remember…

Step 1 – a plank, a problem, and an idea.

Cusp

On the cusp, on the edge, whatever other relevant phrases you can think of. A transition is always a little jarring (with the possible exception of one of the transitions on the film I edited on schizophrenia, which was so brilliant it was hardly noticeable *pride*).

As you all may have guessed, there is a stirring in the millpond of my lovelife. We shall call her D, seeing as fancy single-letter abbrev. seem to be all the rage at the moment. It’s at the stage now, though, where we’re beginning to change from the light-hearted, worry-free banter and chat to actually getting to know stuff about each other. It’s a bit tricky as its all still quite new so we’re both treading carefully, but hopefully it’ll all hold together and solidify a bit. I’m very cautious, but I’d like to think I’m cautiously optimistic.

Wish me luck.

And just for you Dickie, ‘Thoughts’.