Another Pair Of Eyes » Happenings

Castaway

Callan — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 06:45:15 +0000

So, today – a mere 9 days or so after being put in plaster – my cast has come off. Early mobilisation, they say. No signs of rotational block, they say. Minimal chance of further displacement with (low load), they say.

I say, goddammit yes, I can do stuff again! Cannulation is low-load, venesection and ABGs* the same. Clinical win! Things like showers and getting a coat on and cutting up food need no longer be an awkward mess of angles, and although I can’t drive now I’ll be able to in the next few weeks.

It’s not an immediate return to form, obviously. Elbows stiffen very quickly without use, and I cannot straighten my arm because the muscle is so tight over the joint. Flexing it is easier, but again the full range of movement has been lost. It (should be) temporary but it’s a bizarre feeling of limitation. In addition I am firmly told to spend the majority of my time using one of those slings made of black foamy stuff with straps on to minimise loading movements and to stop me falling into things and leaning on it etc. I’m not supposed to do anything vastly more strenuous than carrying a glass.

But hey. All the above will improve. For now…FREEDOM!!!

*arterial blood gases

Morningwin

Callan — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 07:52:08 +0000

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

Callan — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 14:50:06 +0000

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

Callan — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 16:08:17 +0000

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:

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.
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.
I will start running and cycling places, starting very low-intensity and building up.
I will stop going to one stop and buying shit I don’t need because I am bored.
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

Callan — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:24:47 +0000

Slightly late, but….

Merry Christmas everyone.

That is all.

What do you do for Christmas?

Projects

Callan — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:19:11 +0000

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

Callan — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:53:58 +0000

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

Callan — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:54:50 +0000

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.

SSM1

Callan — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:12:36 +0000

Or Student Selected Module 1, as it is officially known. I had my first session of five today, at an adolescent psychiatric unit with a traditionally friendly name. Airlock style doors, personal alarms, seclusion rooms, a purpose-built facility worth many millions for a maximum of 20-odd patients. Guests. Service users. Not a single tap, door or window had a handle which might be broken off or smashed into, nowhere anything breakable or easily thrown, no fixtures or attachments from which one might suspend a rope. It is, of course, not possible to prevent people self-harming: there is always headbanging or jumping awkwardly to try and break an ankle, an arm; but they try their best. It’s a stalemate, really – patients are ingenious. A pen is a risk assessment. The corridors are wide, spacious. It gives a nice feeling of space; it also allows the necessary 5 people room to restrain a patient. Practical design features you don’t necessarily notice outright.

There is a school, with teachers from the local college under full-time contract. It is hard – there are days when they have to teach without pen, pencils, anything. They teach ratios with paper cups and orange juice. A class is maybe three people; in the workshop it is between one and two. Workshop? Yup, disk sanders, lathes, fret saws. Risk assessments, heavy staff presence. Worth it for the students? They love it. Same goes for the cookery classes. No knives, though. The teachers are enthused, amazing people. They are proud of their students, and despite the challenges they face they keep going strong. One, talking about lesson feedback, talks in an everyday voice about having to fill in the feedback herself to the diction of her student, because the student has a bandage on one arm from where she continues to try and break it. Matter-of-fact – this is how it is, here. The learning is split – some of the students cannot write where others can, some musical some not. They try to bring life skills into the place, avoid institutionalisation – they have a bike maintainence session, cooking, taught how to shave and do make-up, they can get GCSEs.

Despite all of this, 24 hour care, education, specialised care teams on standby, monitoring and treatment and enthusiasm and all the support it is possible to give, only one in three patients are able to be discharged back into the world. It is inescapable, no matter how good the people and the equipment and the resources, that this is not a place you can easily leave. Every door is unlocked and locked behind us. They can manage only four classes a day, because some patients can’t be in together, others must be, others refuse to go at all. Trips to A+E are mentioned. In the seclusion room, our guide’s voice betrays a gentle sadness. Mental illness is, truly, a terrible thing.

I walked away today after two hours without having seen a patient, and I felt really quite moved. I’m not really sure why. I am told that we may be joining some of the classes there as teaching assistants, at some point.

I don’t really know if I have managed to get the feelings I got across with this post. I don’t really know what else to write, though, so this is fin for today.

The Time Traveler’s Wife

Callan — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 22:08:24 +0000

I read The Time Traveler’s Wife a few years ago, while on holiday in Iceland. I read it in the tent over a couple of days, and I’ve not been able to face it again in the intervening time. I don’t think any other book has managed to cause me such emotional trauma before or since. It now stays on the shelf, a heavy presence, and I’ve not been able to muster the will to once more open it up.

The other day I went to see the film – it was as good as it could have been, I think. It was brilliantly cast, well done and the omissions would not have been too obvious to those who’d not read the book (mainly the darker aspects – the father, the fighting, the other side of Gomez). On the plus side, sections including Alba were actually better in the film than in the book. Overall, it was up and down and it reflected the theme of the book, and that was good. It was still pretty melancholy, but it was manageable.

Now, though, I have a problem. Watching the film has awoken the echoes of the book, and I don’t think I can hold off reading it anymore. It’s on my mind again, daily, and I know that dusting off the battered cover is the only way to resolve the matter. And I don’t want to, because it left such an impression before. I don’t know whether I’m trying to avoid the pain it caused last time, or whether I’m afraid it won’t do the same this time around.

Here we go again.