Another Pair Of Eyes

Morningwin

Well, it’s 7:37 as I start this and I’ve got nothing left to do before I leave for the hospital, because this morning has been such a whirl of efficiency it’s amazing. I’ve prepared or eaten all three meals for today (delete as appropriate), done a load of washing, and washing up, finished section C on my essay and I only got up at half 6.

AND today I’m not going to my usual ward round with Dr. See-no-students but instead I’m going on the neuro rehabilitation unit ward round, which is fascinating and has a brilliant consulant at its head. and then I shall come home and use my enormous pile of textbooks to finish my essay, submit it, and never think about it again. I will be free to focus on learning and revision for the intermediates, and it will be a strange kind of freedom.

Can you tell it’s a sunny morning?

No, that is not my gold car in our driveway.

Monday

Tomorrow, every single person on every single course (or evening class!) in the university has a day off. As does anyone working in any university office, café, sports facility, bar etc. People will be having fun.

Unless you’re a 3rd year medical student. We do not get the day off.

Hmph.

Resolute

Actually, not very resolute, but so be it. Point being, it is the new year and for the first time I’ve got to make resolutions and keep them instead of having to make resolutions to satisfy people that I am, in fact, resolute. This year, I am forced to try and use resolutions to facilitate my learning, my fitness, and my finances.

Fun times. As such, I have proposed to myself the following:

1. I will spend the equivalent of at least 1 hour for every day in the week in a library, with the exception of days upon which I am working the night shift. This will double after Easter.
2. Monday nights after spanish, it is time to go to the gym. I will go swimming/to the gym before or after every badminton session, or three a week, whichever is the greater.
3. I will start running and cycling places, starting very low-intensity and building up.
4. I will stop going to one stop and buying shit I don’t need because I am bored.
5. I shall not spend more than £20 on going out in any one week, with the exception of the first and last weeks of any term.

Right. I’m not feeling particularly resolute, but if I want to pass this year with a half-decent %,  I will resolve. Anyone got any resolutions of their own?

Also, just because I am proud of it, here is a picture of the creation of our new years costume for an Alice-in-Wonderland-themed party. It took hours longer than we thought it would and tested the not-particularly-expansive limits of my sewing skills, but it did let me hug people with six arms at the stroke of midnight. I give you, in shockingly poor mobile phone quality, the birth of the Caterpillar.

And yes, the arms all moved in concert with mine.

Obligatory Christmas Post

Slightly late, but….

Merry Christmas everyone.

That is all.

What do you do for Christmas?

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.

Trust

Trust is an interesting thing. It’s all very well trusting someone to do something for a project or to arrange trains to someplace, to trust a doctor to act confidentially or a mechanic to fix your car without ripping you off. It’s another thing when trusting someone or something could get you hurt – the person helping you do a flip for the first time, the brakes on your car, the safety harness on Rush at Thrope Park, the person skydiving with you. It has a different dimension because you have entrusted not just work, organisation or travel to someone but something which if it goes wrong could cause you a lot of pain.* There’s the thing though – if you want to go skydiving, you’ve got to take that leap of faith.

The Raising of the Mary Rose.

*and possibly death in the case of the parachute one, but hey.

Surgery

Yesterday I had some surgery and today I have inadequate painkillers, but that’s not the point of this post. The post is about feeling inadequate, which coincidentally comes right back to the surgery.

Alright alright, something about the surgery:

I was a day case so it was a pretty minor op but due to the nature of it I was under general anaesthetic. Turns out, GA is quite cool – I remember that I was going to focus on staying awake, and I remember a sensation of cold (but not in a creepy, scary way; more in a reassuring, refreshing way if that makes sense) spreading out from the cannula where the anaesthetic was going in. And then, voila, I was awake again, and an hour of life had passed me by without trace. In fact, despite surgery, I felt pretty terrific, and a little bit drunk. Not quite room-spinning drunk, but definitely this-bed-is-the-most-comfy-thing-ever drunk. I was also talking to the nurse, which was challenging because I could never quite seem to be bothered to open my mouth despite my best efforts. This did, however, pass. Still, GA = fascinating experience, and a perfect illustration of just how much willpower you’d need to make a little headway against a drug. And, of course, a good illustration of how long it takes blood to move from the arm to the brain. Not long, is the answer.

Sadly, however, the painlessness of GA is gone and the local anaesthetic they also administered at the time has now worn off. The cocodamol that I now have available is about as much use as a cardboard boat against the *doctorspeak* ‘discomfort’ */doctorspeak* and I’m basically trying to be as sedentary and as still as I can. Those of you who know me will realise how much effort staying completely still for a day is costing me – I am not impressed. We roll around to the inadequacy – despite it all clearly not being my fault, I feel like I am letting an endless flood of people down. I’m not going to hockey tomorrow, I can’t go to the gym with my housemates, I can’t walk to the shop with my neighbour. I had to ask my friend to drive me to the hospital tomorrow. I might not be able to do the 3-legged pub crawl on friday night, or go to a good friends 21st.

I hate that feeling. Unreasonable as it might be to blame myself for things that are beyond my control, I still do. I feel the tiniest bit helpless and I just can’t stand it.

Heal.