Theory of Mind or Luck and Magic?

You'd think that doing medicine would be about learning HARD FACTS and FIGURES and the likes, so you could regurgitate them and pass exams and save people and whatnot. It kind of has been like that up until semester three- heres a heart, this is what it does, heres how it does it, answer questions about it and come across it next in a hospital, thank you very much.
Surprisingly, this semester we are encountering 'this mechanism is not fully understood', which is almost disgruntling if youre trying to bash out your case for the week. WE.WANT.THE.TRUTH.
But then, have you ever thought about the brain? Like, properly? I have only just really started to, and seriously, its MIND BLOWING. excuse the pun.
Your skull is like a helmet protecting you, but not just 'you', actually 'you'. Everything you are as a person, apart from what you look like, is in your brain. We started off with the basics and i got that, spinal cord and impulses from your periphery and how they get to the brain, and which direction they take out of the brain back to the periphery (out of the Foramen Magnum, first turning on the left...), we did a bit of embryology, so how you go from looking like a tiny, ugly dinosaur to being born and having a giant head in comparison to your body, and a squidgy bit in your skull where you can poke your brain (DONT do this please)..and then we did some of the bits they know about, that you can see on a dissected brain, like the cerebellum which is the bit at the back that looks like a leaf when cut in half. thats alright, its easy to remember what it does cos if it goes wrong you act kinda drunk and everyone knows what thats like.
Last week we started on the Limbic System, and seriously i cant even start to explain that its just mental....It almost makes me want to cry its so complicated (even thats bloody controlled by the limbic system, so in two senses it makes me want to cry...AARGHHH!!!)
It controls reward and punishment, and anger and pleasure through some feedback mechanism that im not going to attempt to understand at this moment in time, it makes you comfort eat when youre sad, or cold.. HOW DOES THAT WORK???
One of my homegirls is having a pretty rough time at the moment and ive been chatting to her loads, its nice to have someone validate your sadness, i remember that, but it seems crazy to go from seeing chronic emotional pain, to a textbook that will put it down to X or Y neural pathway, via the activation of Z ganglion, through the ABC nucleus. I mean, really?
Are all my neurotic tics explainable by this sort of jargon? i dont really want them to be, i want my personality to be separate i guess. I eat pudding only from a teaspoon...what pathways that then Titus? hey? ( Titus is the author of what is the equivalent of 'Neuro for Dummies') I can watch scary films as long as i cant hear them, i was literally sat in the cinema watching Harry Potter (ashamedly) with my fingers in my ears as he duelled with a giant snake...that surely cant be explainable by the level of activation of some gyrus somewhere.

I was bitching with my friend El about the brain and this was the conclusion i made:

Basically everything is impossible and the human body is run mainly on magic and luck.

I quite like it. They should put that instead of 'this is an Unknown Mechanism'....basically means the same anyway, how can a mushy grey and pink thing decide what i fancy for tea? OBVIOUSLY MY STOMACH DOES THAT.

Cynical, but NOT a cynic.

Today has been a b.a.d. day. just one of those 'wrong side of the bed' ones, yknow, gets worse as it progresses until every non-withered living thing has curled up and died at your icy stare.
Manchester is colddd at the moment, and i have to say that i am starting to not mind the cold sooo much. i mean i live in the NORTH now...but today i was not pleased it was cold so i could wear my nice Tailored in Vietnam jacket, or pleased it was brisk so i could look forward to a warm pub and a nice lunch post-invigorating walk. Its not like i can wrap up and whack on my skiis or anything, it was just 8am trying-not-to-take-a-dive-before-getting-on-the-bus cold.
So that wasnt a great start and i have managed to have such a nice weekend that i didnt do any work- which is fine. honestly. maybe. no, it is. but its just an anticlimax to have to go back to academia, which is, i promise you mostly impossible. And to add to this we have the head of medicine taking our casegroup this week as our normal tutor has jetted off to San Diego for a conference. Seriously he best be bringing us back some exceptional presents to make up for this.
Its no biggie, like, he cant throw us off the course or anything, but he called us lazy and to be honest i think thats one thing we actually aren't. In context he said we werent working out our 'intended learning outcomes' out properly, we were merely guessing them, but really i thought thats what we were meant to be doing...i thought that quite a lot of the stuff were going to be doing for the next 2 years at least was executive guesswork?!
Take anatomy, par example, Anil, our demonstrator will say something like 'Lucy, tell me which lymph nodes drain the scalp' and i will go 'errrrrrr, the scalp nodes?' ( i wouldnt, cos they dont exist, but along those lines..you get me) and theres actually normally a good chance youre right, and if youre not, youve answered in a way which means youve asked him, so then he has to answer. Clever hey? they dont let just anyone into med school.......maybe.
ANyway, this week were doing about Parkinson's and i think its reasonable to say that there isnt a generalised public knowledge about this disease, except that Mohammed Ali had it....so for us to be able to theorise rather than guess about what were meant to learn about is almost not realistic....
Anyway so i havent done much work so i have to do it all now which hasnt helped my day.
And my weekend was spent pissing around with my homegirl and we went to a ball and drank cava like we used to and went to a really good gig and then i get woken up at some early a.m o'clock by my drunk housemate and his girlfriend crashing around coming in from a night out. its FINE FOR HIM. he finished lectures at the end of oct and doesnt have to be in uni until post-january exams. WORK THAT ONE OUT. Hence wrong side of bed several hours later.... but i think the thing that PISSED me off the most was the fact it dawned on me that i have gone from being know as 'cynical' to being a 'cynic' which is apparently either
a)

a person who believes that only selfishness motivates human actions and who disbelieves in or minimizes selfless acts or disinterested points of view.
or
b)

a person who shows or expresses a bitterly or sneeringly cynical attitude.
(dictionary.com)

EXCELLENT. just what i want to be seen as. SOmeone told me today that i was a cynic and i would agree that i am DUBIOUS about a lot of things, but to be written off as being bitter or a non-believer in selfless acts is just not true.
Firstly, i actually have a lot of faith in (select) people and generally i would rather be disappointed again and again than ever write off anyone that i ever considered a friend.
I would happily put myself on the line for something i believed in, however i do also think that its a protection mechanism, if you think the worst about something it only leaves you pleasantly surprised, or right, and its sometimes better to be right and a bit cynical than it is to be sat fat, dumb and happy and surprised that your were ever wrong.
Also, sometimes we cant help but being cynical, if we have even just 2 brain cells to rub together. Things dont just happen for the greater good- generally. In society if something brilliant happens the chances are theres some massive financial gain there for someone, its just obvious. If youre clever enough to get into medical school you should realise that we dont live in a world where the economy runs on hugs and kisses, most people have motives for doing things- they dont have to be ulterior motives, for self gain, but equally i dont just share my milk with my house mates because im nice. I do it because when i run out, ill use theirs.
Im not bitter about the world, i have NOTHING to be bitter about, there is no chip on my shoulder, and ask me most of the time i am incredibly happy (i can see how this looks, considering how this piece started...)
I just think its important to think about why things are happening, and not wander blindly through life without questioning anything, making the assumption that everything is fine.

Right. I'm done here. Whatever.

My (medical) Family

These are my babies. At Manchester medical school there is a mentoring programme where second year medics mentor first years as they make their transition into the big wide university world. Mixed in with them are my housemates and my medical wife, Jess.
This was taken on my birthday in fresher's week, in the foyer of the medical school at about half 8 at night...yes we are wearing lingerie pyjamas, yes tom on the end does look quite comfortable with this fact! This was for the annual PJ pub crawl, none of us really knew each other then but we had a really good night. Except it ended at a foam party where i got a viral chest infection and Jess got a strep tonsillar abscess from the gross things that are put in the foam!

As you all know i have been somewhat of a cynic with regards to (most things really) but medicine in general. But this year has undoubtedly been my favourite of the 3 and yes we are only 2 months in as my mother pointed out. Work-wise it is an absolute joke. no joke. almost impossible on every level. but i don't really care about this because all of a sudden i feel like lots of people i actually like are in the same boat.


Jess was saying the other day that everything we do together ends in absolute carnage..this is true, we have just been on the Halloween night out where we inevitably managed to lose all our children in the club, one of which has a broken ankle and physically cant move, Jess went for a curry on the curry mile at 3am dressed like a car crash victim and i ended up doing the macarena with a smurf, a member of kiss and PAC man. Bearing in mind these are the responsible second years, not the babies. I'm pretty sure they were all sat in a corner somewhere behaving themselves!
I used to scorn the 'work hard, play harder' philosophy to which most medics subscribe, seeing it as an excuse to behave badly and blame the 'stress of the job'..
There was recently an article in the 'MancUnion', our student paper, about the medical rugby team: -
(okay i cant work out how to rotate it...) but it absolutely slated medical students, mainly the sports teams who do have a horrific reputation, for being cliquey, arrogant and a general disgrace. I was talking to one of the rugby team who said they had written back in retaliation, but in my opinion it would have been best just leaving it. Medics are cliquey- we are either inclusive- of each other, or exclusive, i cant work out which. Were all in it for the long haul,( i could have 2 normal undergraduate degrees, or one and at least a masters in the time its taking me to get a medical degree) and we understand that. We get registered for EVERYTHING. less than 80% attendance = automatic failure of the year as the GMC (general medical council) says you physically wont have attended enough academic sessions to be a competent doctor. We have weekly deadlines. And yet by the very nature of PBL we are teaching ourselves most things. Stressssful. so the clique thing is internally, probably seen as a mode for supporting each other and being in the same boat. but from the outside, in our lingerie or our smurf outfits, seen as a load of idiots getting hammered and doing daft things. i can definitely see it from the outside p.o.v, but maybe with this semester, i can see it a bit from the inside too....I'm not defending the arrogance or the general disgrace, or in fact the cliquishness, but sometimes it feels nice to be united in the carnage of medical stress-relief!

Problems with the NHS

I'm not going to harp on about the coalition government and the management structures, funding problems, patient waiting times and the likes, this is a personal, insider's view of what the bloody hell goes on on wards in our hospitals.

As a medical student i am acutely aware of the idea that doctors treat everyone who is not a doctor atrociously. This summer i trained as a health care assistant at my local hospital in Bristol. I worked on the bank, which is a big pool of trained staff who get shipped to random wards that are understaffed. This is probably the most valuable thing i could ever have done- i learnt more in the 4 weeks that i could actually get shifts than i have in the year of communications training and the 2 years of academic training i have under my belt.
Not in terms of disease pathways, physiology and anatomy, but i can navigate my way around any ward now, chaperone intimate exams, clear up any type of body fluid, make 10 beds in half an hour, wipe innumerable amounts of bottoms, bed bath, assist with shower, spoon feed, remove venflons and help change dressings.
I was wary of telling people that i was studying medicine but my inquisitiveness gave me away most of the time when i would ask if i could accompany a patient to surgery or if i could watch cannula insertion or whatever. Every nurse i encountered, every HCA was more than willing to feed my hunger for knowledge. They all said that they thought every medical student should have to do the basics so they learned to respect all members of the Multi-Disciplinary team. I wholeheartedly agree.
Something i noticed on the ward was the distinct lack of communication between the doctors in charge of the care of the patients, and the people, the nurses and HCAs who were doing the 'care'. We are the people who notice the minute by minute, hour by hour changes in the patients, who do the 'care-plans', who note the shape and amounts of the stools produced etcetc. Never did a doctor ask me how the patient seemed, in fact never did a doctor meet my eye as i staggered past with 10 beds-worth of blankets or a bucket of vomit or whatever.


However, later on in the summer my grandma had a fall and broke her hip. My dad and i went to visit her in hospital and i honestly have never been so frustrated in my whole life at the lack of knowledge about what is going on. NO ONE KNEW ANYTHING!!! And what was worse i could peruse her obs sheets as i had spend my working summer doing, and i could see her b.p was high or whatever but no one ever came to speak to us about the surgery, the physio, how she was getting on daily. Visitors are just there to perk up the patients, they are ignorant to the daily goings on, and when they want to know about anything they are brushed off. We arrived on the Thursday and they told us they suspected a UTI. On the Sunday dad and i came in to see grandma after a trip to the zoo and she was honestly raving mad. She was convinced that there was a terror plot involving snakes that had occurred on the ward the night before- but don't worry, she had informed security and it had all been dealt with and hushed up by the morn.

WHAT!?!?!? the staff hadn't even noticed this. i know i know i know there are 3 shifts a day and you don't necessarily return to the same patients, but for someone who had gone from being totally lucid to a complete loon overnight i would have hoped this was noticed. even just little star on the handover sheet that says 'suddenly gone mental' would have been better than the surprise as my father explained to the ward staff that his mother did not usually talk about covert terror operations.

'we'll order a uti test, they often cause acute confusion'

'well there was actually one ordered on Thursday'

'ah yes well the results aren't back yet, so we'll try and get another one'

'what about a urine dip? that ought show white blood cells or blood or something shouldn't it?'

'well we have tried but she isn't passing much water'

'her fluid chart says she is......'

'.........................................ill just go and check her results, see if they've miraculously come through in the last 3 minutes of this awkward conversation demonstrating my incompetence'

..................

'oh yes so she doesn't have a UTI don't worry.'

'well shes still being quite mental and has in fact just referred to me as her 70 year old neighbour'

'probs the codeine innit.'

and that was it. So to some extent i understand what i thought was the arrogance of doctors, which i now see as thoroughness. The idea that at the end of the day the patients well-being is the responsibility of the doctor and so they must check everything themselves and not rely on other people's opinions. This is not an excuse for the obvious elitism that still occurs on the wards, and this is one case and it is very personal to me which is why i care so much about it.

At the end of the day it is not the doctors role to comfort and explain every minute detail of treatment to the family. But from the other side it is difficult to see that your relative is getting the best possible care when no one seems to know what care they are even receiving.

When i worked as a HCA i resented been overlooked by other staff, i felt that my role was one of the most valuable on the team, that it was me that was making the difference in the patients daily lives, but as a medical student i understand that when the shit hits the fan it will be my fault and i cant take any word for gospel, i must be able to justify all my own actions based on my own investigations and not because someone told me that it was like this or that.

confused.com

Old Friends

What is one of the best things this year is that a key member of the A-Team has moved up to Macclesfield to work for a drugs company. That means that instead of the 4 hour train journey to visit her in Kent, i can see her in 20 mins flat! It would take that to walk from mine to hers in Bristol.

There are a few photos like this one of us walking in various areas of England spanning our 14 year friendship.Welcome to the Peaks Ford!! WOOO!!

What am I doing?!?!?!?!?

SO, the summer has been and gone and it is well and truly SEMESTER 3. Notoriously the most difficult term of the course. This is because it is mainly orientated around Neurology and Neuroanatomy. Sigh. Who even cares about the brain??
As a bit of light relief I hung out with my housemate last night, because we have become a house mainly of hermits who have no ambition to embark on 'wild' nights out anymore. Paul and I turned out all the lights and snuggled up to watch 'Marley and Me'. Before I tell you the result of the film i will tell you that after we watched 'In pursuit of happyness' which left me with a dull and depressed ache in my stomach about the hardship of life and how some people work so so so so hard to provide for themselves and their family. Bear in mind this sadness, when the bloody Labrador died Paul and i were absolutely bawling, sobbing and steaming up our glasses. Paul was trying to laugh it off because the last time he cried at a film he was about 8 and it was when some dragon rider had to kill his dragon to save something or other and his mother had to remove him from the cinema because he was making such a fuss! I was genuinely annoyed at myself that what is, yes, a sad event had got me worse than basic human suffering.

Yesterday wasn't really the best day anyway-the head of our year gave us a preparatory lecture for our next 2 cases. I quote, 'Year 2, i know the last week has been hellish for you and that a lot of people are struggling with the workload. Well good news- you're all going to have to rearrange your priorities because these next cases are worse. good luck'. THANKS FOR THAT.

NOTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT.


So like most of my contemporaries i have been thinking about why i am putting myself through this. After our case, after that lecture i met up with 'the good medics' (see previous notes on my general opinion of medical students: these are the exception) and we went to the pub. it was HALF 3 and no one cared. We came to no conclusion but it was nice to be in the same boat as a friendly few. This year is hard.

This morning, post 'Marley and me' I opened my door to find an envelope addressed to me and it was with joy that i opened it to realise that it was from Mr Witherow. Mr Witherow was the orthopedic consultant who in no uncertain terms, rebuilt my foot. I wrote to him this summer thanking him for doing a brilliant job and he wrote back.
It was quite a long letter, I'm not going to go into it, but i did find it somewhat a boost to my motivation. Not that i ever consider sacking it all in but sometimes wise words from someone who knows what its like is nice. He told me to always remember to eat lunch...and on that note, I'm hungry.....

braaaainnnn draaaiiinnn....

''The brain makes up 2% of a person's weight. Despite this, even at rest, the brain consumes 20% of the body's energy. The brain consumes energy at 10 times the rate of the rest of the body per gram of tissue. The average power consumption of a typical adult is 100 Watts and the brain consumes 20% of this making the power of the brain 20 W''

My brain has become an ABSOLUTE MACHINE. Its actually kind of annoying. When i was revising it would decide when it would work...
9am-
Me-come on brain, we've had coffee, now lets start thinking..
Brain-no
Me- right, well we will have a shower and maybe the caffeine will have kicked in by then.
Brain- Try me.

and it goes on. It tells me its stopped listening by making my eyes ache at the back and going a bit fuzzy around the temporal region, then i try and remember what I've just read and it cackles at me.
This is when i know i need a break.
But still, I've trained it to know it needs to intake information at every moment of the day. During revision i would work solidly post shower, stop for half an hour lunch, an hour for dinner and then work until when Brain then did the Windows Shutdown procedure at which point i had approximately ten minutes on 'power save' mode to get into bed before i collapsed into a deep sleep.
Undoubtedly in the morning i would wake up having dreamt about whatever i had been cramming into every nook and cranny in my mind and have ONE WORD just there. going round and round.
'vasopressin', 'vasopressin', 'vasopressin' etc etc etc etc until i found a medical dictionary and looked up the word and placed in on the right brain shelf. and then the cycle of the day continued.

The thing is, i have honestly never been so stressed about an exam in my life. towards the end of the revision period I'm talking absolute exhaustion but a complete inability to sleep. the shakes. headaches. weight loss. the works.

The night before the exam I did the mock paper online, one question was:
The psychosocial model of stress indicates that stress
A. can be interpreted as the objective response to excessive stimuli
B. is a specific response of the body to a specific demand
C. is caused by over-exposure to life events
D. is unaffected by daily life
E. occurs when perceived demands outweigh personal resources

The answer is E.
My brain had given up listening to me and gone into hibernation.
And then i sat the exam and my brain went 'nah nah nah nah nah nahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...i was listening even when you thought i wasn't'. i dumped all my knowledge onto the paper and it seemed to fit the questions.

My problem is now post-exam my super efficient brain is............SOOOOOOOO BORED!!!!!

I cant win.

'You might want to turn that lancet round.....'

This, is a 'SAFETY' lancet. Millions of diabetics use them every day to check their blood glucose daily. The reason Ive whacked this in here is because today i had 6/10th of my OSCE. (Oh look, another medical school acronym)... OSCE stands for Observed Structured Clinical Examination and it means you get to don your white coat (not actually allowed in hospitals anymore...) and show the skills you have learned throughout the year/crammed the night before.
We got a brilliant set, no bloody spirometry (technically no blood should be involved...), Lung and heart auscultation(listening)...showing someone how to use a metered dose inhaler, ECG and pulses, CPR, blood pressure and blood sample taking and the handling of blood products...

Mine went OK, its one of the pluses of being a 'Williams', i was at then end of the day which means i get almost an extra day to prepare than your average Anderson or Andrews...(this makes up for the years of going last for EVERYTHING at school...).
The thing with these is that your potential for being able to competently complete the task is 100%, they are simple and we've done them a million times, but you lose marks for small things- e.g. not washing your hands at all, not introducing yourself, moaning that you cant count the ribs of the patient because he/she is too fat, not washing your hands after taking one persons dorsalis pedis pulse (foot) before you take the examiners temporal pulse. you get MINUS points for not putting gloves on before handling blood. I know someone who crashed the ECG machine. don't know how that one works.
Here's MY big mistake.....i almost lanceted myself! what a foooooooooooooooooooool!
The thing with the blood taking station is that you have to talk to a plastic hand. What i mean is that you approach and go 'Here Mr. Hand, let me shake you (joking...), My name is Lucy Williams, I am a first year medical student and Ive been asked to take a small blood sample today. This will be from your thumb, it will hardly hurt, is this Ok?' The hand says yes and then you pick up the lancet, twist that pink bit off and as you can QUITE CLEARLY see in the photo there is an ARROW which indicated where the stabby bit comes out..... I was steaming along until the examiner (who seemed to be quite jolly and up for a bit of banter...) said 'You might want to turn that around, or you might get blood everywhere...then i might pass out and that would be embarrassing wouldn't it'.
So I turned it around and stabbed the plastic hand with it, apologised to it and continued....

Lets be honest, It could have been worse.


At least I put it in the sharps bin once I'd finished....

5 stitches down and call me a doctor....

It is soooo hot in Manchester. As in its only bearable to wear running shorts and a tiny vest top and all the windows in the house that cant be accessed by some scally are wide open. Its summer in the North and I have 2 WEEKS of exams to go. I know, I just know that as soon as I'm free of academia for the summer it'll undoubtedly rain.
I ran the Great Manchester Run last Sunday... 10km for this charity called Depaul UK. Ive never heard of them before but they help out homeless teenagers. since then all I've wanted to do is run. For the first few days my Rectus Femoris' were pretty sore and i couldn't walk downstairs without considerable amounts of shuffling and groaning. Sucks to be me considering I'm in the attic room. It felt really amazing to run with 36000 people though, definitely something Id do again.
However, I haven't been running all week because I've been working. the fear has not appeared but i have got my proverbial finger out now. We have physiology practicals on Tuesday and anatomy and communications on Thursday and then a portfolio review on Friday, then the following Thursday is our SEMESTER EXAM OH GOLLY.
Now physiology involves CPR and taking blood pressure and handling blood products and heart and lung auscultation and that sort of thing. We have 6 stations of that, then on the Thursday we have 2 simulated patients and 2 prosections to work. all of this is the sort of stuff that you can justify as being useful for budding young doctors.
Portfolio is literally the bane of my life. apart from brussel sprouts. Its so EMBARRASSING, one big 'Dear Diary' session for the next 4 years... we have to write reflective pieces on 'probity' and on 'patient interactions'. one massive pile of barf. My piece on probity makes me nauseous.

What makes me feel more competent than working for any of these exams is that t-Ed actually let me take out all 5 of his stitches. He didn't even squeak. He then offered anyone in the room a fiver to eat them. boys are so gross.

The dangers of parked cars...

last night, at about 4 o'clock in the morning my friend 'fell asleep whilst running whilst drunk' and ended up in a&e having collided with a car(parked). i was due to have coffee with said person and got a text saying 'can we make it an hour later. I've got a good excuse i promise'. So an hour later i went round and this person, lets call him 't-ed' was in his tracksuit showing me his chin scar with 5 stitches. A WHOLE 5. so we eventually went for lunch, via the road with the aggressive car on to see if the lens of his glasses was there...he had wondered if he had in some way brain damaged himself when he put them on and one whole half of his world was blurred. no such luck, the lens wasn't there..it turns out it could have come out whilst CYCLING TO THE HOSPITAL. that's right folks. it could have come out when he fell off his bike having decided that cycling to the hospital was an a-ok plan.
We also went via my house which is subsequently and usefully about 3 minutes away from his, to administer- paracetamol, ibuprofen and antiseptic wipes for the war wounds on elbow and hip. Is it wrong to take a tiny bit of pleasure in the wails of a grown man as the alcohol stings? anyway, having dressed the man-scrape we went on our way. I was also very proud to be able to explain the mechanism of the lidocaine, of which 6 injections he had so bravely 'taken on the chin'...
I've shotgunned stitch removal on Friday!!! woooooooo!



In other news, watching medical drama does actually aid learning at medical school-
I had my progress test yesterday, the second of the year, and one of the questions was usefully answered for me the night before by Carter and Ross who were discussing a crazy lady wandering around who hadn't taken her LITHIUM. SCORE!!!!


Totally justifies my dedication to the series....that's right people....for the LEARNING.......




























....and the other learning.....................................

My favourite time of day....

at he moment is right now. Bedtime. I am in bed at quarter to twelve just writing this and then i get to turn the lights out and for SEVEN and a HALF hours i have a perfectly valid excuse for not working! this would have been a blessing for my parents some years ago when i begged to be able to stay up to watch animal hospital which FINISHED at half 8...and then id sit really reallly quietly and (quite stupidly) think they might forget i was there...ah what it is to be young!!

When my alarm goes off an HOUR before im due to get up i trick myself into thinking that im having a lie in, when in fact its half past six and even birds are still asleep. (well at least i cant hear the pigeons coooing away on the other side of the roof)...and then i get up and sit...hoping....wishing...praying that the Fear will come.
I dont know if this is a new thing, or whether my motivation got used up getting in to university (yes i do obviously still want to be here, i just dont want to do any work...) but i CANT be productive until ive got it. THE FEAAAAAAAAAAAAAR. it suddenly grabs your heart and stomach and twists, as your brain races through your ineptitude at your subject and lists all the things you dont know....how an ecg works, what the bony attachments for the diaphragm are, the course of the obturator nerve, the brachial plexus, the origins and insertions of all 20 muscles of the forearm, how to set up a spirometer, where the points are to auscultate the individual lobes of the lungs...hell, i cant even remember if the new guidelines for CPR say that 'nelly the elephant' or 'staying alive' are the best songs to sing to get the correct BPM.
I still havent got it. This doesnt mean that im not working, but i kind of feel like im drifting through my work, whats the rush?
Its the time of year where our library is open 24/7 and people take sleeping bags along with their laptops in order to not lose their spot. The time of year where people go a bit crazy from staying in and working. I havent been to the library once. mainly because biking there with the amount of books ive got to use would probably give me a hernia...and also because all my housemates already go which means the house is empty- basically the library comes to me!
and theres a kettle here.
So tomorrow i'll get up and do my anatomy flash cards and look at some drugs and hope that sometime during the day i have some kind of mental seizure that means i start to feel like my first exam is on monday, and not in 2 months time...

COME ON FEAR I NEED YOU.

'These are my confessions.......'

In the words of the oh so wise RnB artist Usher, these are mine...


here we go....




I. Hate. Medical Students.
i think i obviously have to quantify this, because they surely cant all be bad can they? They aren't. I have some very good friends in the medical school but to be honest, i tend to gravitate towards the non-typical variety of people.
It is so bad that i cringe when i tell people i am a medic..not because I'm not proud to be training to be a doctor, don't get me wrong, i am, immensely, its just that peoples reactions would, i can guarantee you, be better if i said i was a binlady.
Its not an overt reaction; but it generally can be recognised as one of three:
1) 'ohhh, you must be reallllly clever. So much more than me' HOW DO YOU REACT to that??? do you say, 'well, yes actually, and more dedicated to the greater good, and I'm probably more responsible too'? No, you don't. because you have probably just met this person and don't know that. plus also you shouldn't be so bloody arrogant.
2) 'HAHAHAH BAD TIMES 5 YEARS AT UNI!!! do you cut up dead people? whats it like? tell me tell me tell me!!!' thanks for the reminder about all the time and money I'm spending on my course. and actually its 6 YEARS get it right. and yes i do cut up dead people and its actually become quite normal. yes i am a bit weird for saying that.
or
3) they just raise an eyebrow because they have a preformed idea about what you will be like and they want to make a quick exit.
This isn't my problem. I know that. But the thing is with this is, its what I DO when i meet medics.
The reputation medics hold is self perpetuating.
I know medics who have announced that they think medics should be served in bars before other people??!?!? what sort of mentality is that? where even is the LOGIC in that? you re a medical student, you shouldn't be in a bar, get back to your books.
And i know that for a fact, at stage 1) some people would answer that 'yes' they were clever. probably more so than whoever was asking. It is this kind of arrogance that makes the action of 3) almost justified.
Also, medical students think they are more fun than other people. they think they can drink more, they like exclusive socials with only other medics, they form cliques within the medical school that are impenetrable.
I know i need friends who are medics because at the end of next year everyone who i know and love who isnt in my school will leave. i know i need support from people who are doing what im doing and who understand what it is like but i look at my year as a whole and there are decidedly few people who i would let near me with anything more than a pair of tweezers.
I think I'm probably quite snobbish about this- it is unfair to make such sweeping judgements but i cant help myself. I really struggle to think of my class as doctors without muttering a few words to Hippocrates to ensure he spares the patients they encounter from too much insult.
Many of the students in my year were privately schooled, many live at home in or around Manchester, or go home at weekends for washing and nutrition. this is me stating a fact and it is this that helps me understand the mentality of some of them.
I have known it that people come in to our PBL sessions on a morning drunk from the night before, i have overheard it said that people who do life sciences shouldn't use the library in the medical school, despite the fact that there are lectures for many other subjects in the same building.
This is why i am embarrassed. it is the unfounded elitism of a group of people who raise themselves above others based on THEIR interpretation of their own self-importance.
Apart from this being selfish and self-righteous, it is the exact opposite of the characteristics needed within the medical profession...
we are trying to introduce a new breed of medical professionals who have been trained in communication skills, who have had patient contact from the start and understand the dynamic of a ward. Gone (hopefully) are the days of the misogynist consultants, the old boys and their set ways...but all i see is a group of 18-19 year olds who lack the basic humility to realise that their job may be well paid (eventually....) but entails years of dedication, hard work and compassion.

At the start of this year we had the 'you are different from everyone else' lecture. It was one bigging us up. Bigging up our intellect and our potential. It also mentioned professionalism and how we have different responsibilities to everyone else. I think that bit got ignored.


The good medics I know are amazing. They are kind, funny, intelligent and hard-working and i would have (almost) no qualms about any one of them operating on me in a time of need (hippocrates forbid!) I guess these are the people i need to concentrate on.....I also need to concentrate on finding a way of avoiding the 'what course do you do..?' question......


Maybe I'll start hanging out at medic only bars. Its the only solution.

Stuffed.

I am.so.full. Im back in Mtown and i went to dinner with those housemates that are in the country. (screw you boys in canada/ prague..'boohoo im missing my exam'- shutit) Im back in student-mode. eat EVERYTHING you can because you never know when your next meal may be. (entirely an exaggeration. mine will be at 7.30am tomorrow). The cupboards are full too though (thanks mum) and the car was full on the way home as ive tried to half move out to save giving myself a hernia in a few weeks when i actually have to decamp from Number 35....
I have been at home for 3 WHOLE BLISSFUL weeks. I have done practically no work except for a few afternoons in the park with my 'integrated pharmacology' textbook for company. This is a guilty pleasure of mine and it is my internal snob that admits this....i kinda love people looking at me with my textbook sunning myself while all the crusties are dossing around with their circus skills...
Anyway...i think my mother at least would contest that i have not learnt anything- i challenge you with this-
NEVER INJECT VASOCONSTRICTOR DRUGS (epinephrine) into YOUR PENIS FOR FEAR OF GANGRENE. boo yah. i know that fact offf.by.heart. mainly because i sent it as a text to all my friends that would understand it because i thought it was funny.
The easter holidays are actually a horrible invention- They create a false hope of summer even though theres this nagging in the back of your mind reminding you that you have 4 weeks left of lectures and 3 weeks of EXAMS before you can truly bask in the glory of the english summertime.
SO, what have i done in these 3 weeks then? well, been out 3 whole times. Ive (re)discovered that a cider hangover is probably the worst sort of hangover that there is. and (re)drinking on it the next day in order to (re)go out is an awful idea.(except for if going out involves 8 banterous boys. then its a great idea and a lot of fun) Ive been to the dentist- (LUDICRISLY OVERPAID). I re-read a book called 'Trust Me I'm a Junior Doctor' that has re-scared me about my FY1 year.
I got to catch up with my homegirllllssssssssss.
I watched UP. Its my favourite film ever. After The Crimson Pirate. And The Holiday.

So basically, im sat at my desk attempting to digest, checking to see if my timetable has reduced in the 20 minutes since I last checked. It hasnt. 9-5 tomorrow. booooooooo. (yesyes, i know, in the REALLLLLL WORLD everyone does that every day blah blah. well by signing up for uni you expect to bypass the real world for up to 5 years so shhhh!)
At my left hand is my physiology manual. Tomorrow were learning CPR so DONT WORRY if your heart unexpectedly stops in my prescence (after tomo) i will be able to break all your ribs, slobber on your face and hopefully keep it pumping until someone comes along to tell me that you merely fainted.
At my right hand side a bag of ground coffee with extra caffeine (how is that even possible??) that i was given as a gift...i think i may have let slip to the people who gave it to me that my trips to the park werent THAT effective....apart from the gangrene thing.


Im just going to make myself some kind of digestion promoting drink as i feel like a beached whale.

And check my timetable one last time.

So until next time kids, watch where you stick those needles.

Hanging with Benton, Ross and Carter

For old times sake I've been hanging out with the E.R boys tonight. Ive got a bug that means I'm really snotty in one nostril (green) and have a mucus-sy cough and I'm tired. Its SSC week. what is an SSC you ask- Ive realised medics lives are entirely full of code- pbl, ssc, etc, lol....
SSC is the 'Student Selected Component'..i think that name is some kind of legal clause that means when you complain about it they remind you that you chose to do it in the first place...that's right STUDENT selected. Its a 15 page essay on a title you have chosen and been allocated. I 'beat' 20 people to what i thought would be a brilliant idea to look at 'Should Euthanasia be legalised in the UK?'...what a barrel-ful of weasels that is...I'm looking at morals and law and legal precedents and human rights and self-determination and autonomy and the 6 different types of Euthanasia and physician assisted suicide and normal assisted suicide and the law in Belgium and in the Netherlands and religion and oh my god I'm so in too deep. but that's right folks, i CHOSE IT.
the main drag is the referencing. do i reference a person who has paraphrased something from an original piece of research if i have paraphrased their interpretation? or do i reference the original work?
Can i just write 'YES' in 172 font and submit that instead?
So anyway we have a couple of weeks off normal lectures and seminars to do this and is horrific.id rather be in at 9am every day listening to detailed accounts of rectal prolapse than i would being able to lie in and knowing that i have to get up and face 'Euthanasia & The Law, Dying with dignity' (i dint have to reference that because i made it up but you get the gist)
So anyway its going alright and what i was really going to write about is that I'm annoyed because my housemate Paul has gone out for dinner.
This is annoying because he has my Grey's Anatomy Season 2 Box set in his room. What is even more annoying is that I gave it to him so i couldn't watch it because i have become absolutely addicted to it and it has taken away all my productivity and my perception of what working in a hospital is really going to be like!!! so anyway this evening i went old school because Paul didn't expect me to turn back to clooney and wyle now did he?!?! mwahahaaaa. and I'm ill so I'm allowed.
The thing i love more than anything in these drama series (more than the faces of noah wyle and the cloonster and dr mcdreamy)is the fact that I'm actually beginning to understand what they re on about.
I know what a bilateral haemothorax is. And what a pulse ox measures. what cyanosed is. i know that tachycardia is an accelerated heart rate, i know what a normal BP should be (hell if you gave me a sphygmomanometer and a stethoscope i could measure it myself. i know about angioplasty and i know about beta-blockers.
It is so satisfying to have these words no longer drift by your subconscious but actually have your brain grab them out of the air and process them and start to think about their significance within what is being presented to you.
This is a medical code even med students don't comprehend fully and its nice to be slowly cracking it.

Now I'm going back to ER in the hope that I'll be feeling better in the morning ready to be Euthanised once more...

Satisfactory.

This is the grade I got in the exams i thought I'd failed. it isn't even like 'good not great, could try harder', or 'better luck next time'. 'Satisfactory' is all you need to get through medical school. 'Satisfactory' is a PASS.
And thank god i satisfactorily gauged the amount of work required over Christmas, turned up with satisfactory Biro's and managed to satisfactorily work out which little box corresponded to a satisfactory answer.
Fair Enough. they don't want to start telling us were 'good' or anything. Heaven forbid you compliment anyone in my year for fear their heads may grow to a size that wont fit through the double doors that lead into the medical school...
BUT. Surely 'pass' is OK? i mean i know I'm getting picky about terminology but who wants a doctor that did what basically is 'o.k' at medical school? Were talking 'alright', 'adequate', 'not outstanding'..'unexceptional'....??
After satis comes Honours, then Distinction. You get honours points every time you get one of those and then at the end of your degree you get even more letters to put at the end of your name...Dr Doug Ross (par example) MbChB(Hons)...
I was in a lecture this morning and an HONOURS STUDENT was TALKING in the row behind me about how 'in the handbook it says honours points count even from the progress test even in first year even though the progress test doesn't count for anything'.
Firstly, SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Secondly, jeez Louise, you've only just STARTED. Its like collecting gold stars when the teacher hasn't even put up the chart.
Ive encountered many doctors in my 21 years. There were many present at my birth i believe. One was dragged from sleep and required to give my mother an epidural because i was taking my time entering the world (theres a theme here....birth, getting up at the weekend, getting a degree....all so long in coming..)
Mr P.J Witherow. A man who has morphed into someone who kind of resembles my uncle Pierre and father Christmas performed surgery on my club foot. twice. My GP Dr Spence is someone i have visited my entire life, he wrote the sick note when i had tonsillitis during my final A levels, he always asks about my family in England and abroad before he asks why I've come to visit, and he always sends his regards to everyone as i leave the door. This isn't to mention the many doctors I've encountered in the Accident and Emergency department when I've thrown myself off my bike and knocked my teeth out, slipped on some leaves and broken my wrist, caught a hard ball at netball and broken the other one, and this isn't even to mention the many Ju-Jitsu related injuries...
I encountered a very young lady doctor in A&E who saw my GP and announced that she had just moved there, but on some days she works a rotation in the hospital. Dr Janssen is so nice that i make a point of seeing her if spence isn't around because she seems like she cares.
The other doctor i remember from A&E is a guy, i don't remember his name or what he looked like, but i do remember that he was HOT. so lets imagine its doctor carter from E.R. I went in with the most disgusting, gammy, infected ankle from scuba diving in Thailand. Id caught some bug and it wouldn't go away, and whats more it was eating its way up the scar Mr Witherow had so beautifully made so indistinguishable on my left ankle. Dr McDreamy asked where I'd been and how the diving was and la la la if id enjoyed myself etc etc. This was 2 years ago. And yes, i don't remember all of the names, but i do remember their kind manners.
Equally, there are people that i remember who were horrible and dismissive and made me feel like i was time wasting, so thanks doctor so and so who said that my loose joints were something i had to live with. I KNOW theres nothing you can do about it but you could have been nicer. And thanks to the doctor who missed my vein 4 TIMES before admitting it had been a 'while' since he'd taken a blood sample. i GET that you don't do it all the time, but i was only 14 and that needle bloody hurt.


The thing I'm getting at here is even if i can remember the names of the doctors (sorry Mcdreamy, i wish i could cos id probably look you up on facebook if i could....!) i haven't a clue whether they were (Hons) or not. In fact if Mr Witherow was 'Satisfactory' (or even 'Low Pass') at med school id give him (Hons) just for his needlework, and Dr Janssen can have (Hons) for just being really easy to talk to, and McDreamy can have (Hons) in the looks dept......
If i come out of med school being nothing more than satisfactory, and i manage to go most days acting in a way that me personally would like a doctor to act, that's all i care about.....

Maybe I'd ask about the patient before the extended family. that would be satisfactory.

Marinade.

I got a text at 3am the other day. I was getting up at 6 to go on placement and NOT.IMPRESSED. it was my housemate Tom announcing they had found a rabbit in the road on the way home from wherever they had been intoxicating themselves, and had decided to 'rescue it'.
It’s in a box in our living room awaiting its collection by the RSPCA. They named it Gulliver because of its travels. I’ve named it Marinade.
I’ve done the hunter-gatherer thing before, set rabbit traps, watched my uncle ‘dispose’ of them (I say ‘dispose’; it was quite a lot more brutal than that. I’m pretty sure there was quite a lot of eye bulging going on…and that was just on his part.) And eaten said fluffy things in a stew...
On Monday I crunched through quite a few ribs (not mine obv...) and chopped out a human lung with my own hands…










Marinade’s days are numbered.

Blue 2, Bay J, JR

I never thought i would be disappointed at a fire drill that evacuates the library. It was 7pm and i had been fidgeting for all of 2 hours trying to engage brain with partial pressure gradients and the Laws of Doyle, Henry and Fick...I was actually getting on with it when the alarm went off and my friend Neelesh said it usually takes 40 minutes before they can let everyone back in. BOOOO.
It was snowing outside so i fought my way onto the rush hour bus heading home and did absolutely nothing for the rest of the night...
I don't know whats suddenly happened, maybe its going from having a case for the weekend, to having one Monday to Thursday but i seem to not have any time any more. It feels quite nice, i feel proper. if that makes sense.
I sit on blue 2 in bay J by the floorlength window so i can see everyone coming in and out...John Rylands, whoever he was, has had the library named after him, is referred to as though he were still alive e.g.
'Where are you going?'
'To see JR'..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rylands
I spend monday afternoons, all day tuesday and wednesday in John's company. Ive started noticing regulars and everything. Lammmmeeee!

Apart from that, Ive started French which is good but i have to admit its hard getting back into it after 4 years and realising that you really arent very good anymore. Especially when 1 of the girls in the class speaks 5 languages, including French, pretty much fluently. WHY IS SHE THERE???????????

Today in Labs we got to be 'lab rats'- totally got to take loads of Salbutamol (aka asthma inhaler)...had to have full blood pressure/pulse etc checked by a doctor before i took it- my bp was 94/72, very low..and then we all got the shakes and thought it was really funny...Realised i take my inhaler totally wrong. whoopsss!!

Other things going on in my life include:

Glee- Sue Sylvester is AMAZING!! Theres something about that saccarine all american program that makes me happy.. Mondays at 8:55 involve me running down from the top of the house shouting 'GLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!' and then all 7 of us cramming onto our 3 2 person sofas to watch Mr Schu and the rest sing and dance and ruin their ever so comlicated lives. Its pretty much the only thing that brings the house together...our love of Fin and the other guy who plays football and who looks like he has had his hair waxed into a brazillian. on. his. head!
(ive got both soundtracks. im not even ashamed to admit that)

14 Tatton View, our house for next year. Seriously i trawled around 7 houses and i was pretty fed up and at my wits end when we stumbled across this little slice of perfection! its got a garden. with grass! not just a giant gravelly litter tray. in the garden is a bbq pit and a pagoda and trees with fairy lights and a sofa?!
Its got a rave basement with UV paint everywhere and one of those clothes racks that you hoist to the ceiling of the kitchen that reminds me of (very) happy times at my grannys. Its even got working fireplaces. not sure what genius decided that was a wise idea for a student house but anyway, i cant wait to move in!!

The Summer! Its ages away, but im going to central america for a month with my housemate Paul who is going to be in belize on a Zooooooology field trip ( they say field trip, i say holiday...we get 'trips' to hospitals. def not the same thing!) SO im going to meet him. i just bought a guidebook. eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Also the Bestival line-up has been announced! VERY EXCITING ALSOOOOOO.
so apart from being so busy and tired i dont know what day it is (i constantly hope its friday) all is dandy in MTOWN.
wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Definition of Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker syndrome

A rare familial form of progressive dementia inherited in an autosomal dominant manner due to a mutant prion gene on chromosome 20pter-p12. Abbreviated GSS.



medicine.net
not me.
not yet.

Making Progress....

I have previously mentioned the progress test. dun dun duuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnnnnnn.
I don't know whose idea this was, but i think they need their head looking at. Basically the idea is that the ENTIRE medical school, all 5 years, sit 1 exam at the same time. The same exam.
So for a first year you are basically going to fail. and the 5th years should be passing. and if the next time you sit it you havent made progress, they consider throwing you off the course! WOOOOO!!
It turned out to be the most fun exam Ive ever done...this is what the questions are like:

A 43 year old woman dies after a long and debilitating illness. A post mortem examination is carried out, and a neuropathologist notes that the brain shows well-defined areas of demyelination on naked-eye examination
What is the most likely diagnosis?
A Alzheimer’s disease
B Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
C Gerstmann-Straüssler-Scheinker syndrome
D Multiple infarcts
E Multiple sclerosis

The thing is with these questions is that the first years are meant to get SOME right, so despite the fabulous yet confusing red herring that is 'Gerstmann-Straüssler-Scheinker syndrome', we do all know that demyelination is generally a sign of E, Multiple sclerosis.

However, it is tricky to spot the ones you know from the ones that are in fact ridiculous, because we have no clinical training and the presentation of each question as a clinical case is slliiiightly offputting.

Others include-

You are a senior house officer on call when a 40 year old patient who is suicidal and known to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia threatens to leave the hospital.
Under which section of the Mental Health Act can you detain this patient?
A 2
B 3
C 4
D 5
E 6

Trick to answering this one, Pick your favourite number.........
(answer: D)

I did take the exam seriously, and i did quite enjoy it because the lack of clinical now makes the end result of you being a doctor seem very far away. There was a point where my University Learned Knowledge failed me, and all i have to fall back on was 7 Seasons of E.R, Meridith Grey and Her Anatomy, House, my secret addiction that is BODYSHOCK (half tonne son/mom etc...) and when totally clutching at straws....Scrubs.
CSI wasnt at all useful, not even when dealing with BLUNT FORCE TRAMA....oh Horatio!

And when desparate and having to choose a drug to prescribe I picked the one that would sound best when screaming it across a trauma room with blood spurting in every direction.

I can see why they choose to examine us like this, but at the same time, it is incredibly demoralising to know you are going to sit an exam you cannot revise or prepare for and are expected to do badly in...

My favourite questions begin 'You are a senior house officer and your consultant calls you to prescribe...' because this is a little indication that IF you get through the exam, and all the subsequent ones, you WILL get there, and the medical school believes it, even if sometimes you dont.........

X-Ams. almost X-Mas. But rubbish.

Sooo, as previously mentioned, January is Exam season...woooo! Way to bring in the new year...Generally, until 3rd year you get the Semester Test and the Progress test. From 3rd year they see you as being competent if you don’t kill or terminally damage someone whilst on placement...Then you just sit the progress test and do the clinical skills (OSCES)
The semester exam is going to be the easiest we ever are going to take- technically they shouldn’t have given us anything impossible. The head of year 1 and 2 posted this on his blog (yes, he thinks he’s down with the kids...)
'For everyone who has worked hard this semester, the exam should be manageable. For everyone else, Good Luck'. Jammy bugger.
So I spent my new year filtering my notes, realising I had merely skimmed the depth required, and as for the breadth...don’t even go there.
That’s the thing with PBL; you just learn what you think you need to. SO if the case is about cystic fibrosis, a lay person would think that learning about cystic fibrosis would be the right thing to do...in fact its very much the WRONG THING.
You should learn about the genetics of passing it on, plus other examples of recessive disorders. The mechanism of passing it on. The physical mutation and others like it (deletion of a phenylalanine molecule...FYI)
Then you would learn about how molecules transport themselves/ are transported across membranes, the muco-ciliary escalator, the anatomy and physiology of the lungs. About opportunistic infections, which are most common?
About the pancreas, what meconium ileus is. What failure to thrive is...what would you give to supplement the diet? How would you manipulate the mucus out of the body....the psychological effect of having such a disease...what are the restrictions? Can a child go to school?
And on. And on. And on...
So, there were 8 of these cases to learn. Plus anatomy. And microbiology (yes if you don’t was your hands you will contaminate other things you touch. well done. have a merit) and the vile thing that is e4MED. This unspeakable infliction is in fact online statistical analysis of medical studies. Fascinating.
I have to say my worst experience last semester was sitting through 2 hours of e4MEd with the hangover from hell. Never. Ever. Again.

The semester exam was sat all together. I hate exams, I hate those people that swan in, biro behind their ear, and leave 20 minutes in, with that know all smirk, face saying 'you fools, only 5 questions in..'
This exam wasn’t at all like that. Body language said it all... people were really struggling, heads in hands, despair as we all wished we'd read the foot notes, that we had looked at the femoral triangle once more..(I’m sorry, what even IS the femoral triangle?)
Usually people stand around discussing what they put for question 57. This time, no. Within 3 minutes the place was like a ghost town, everyone ran away to mourn the loss of their summer holidays to resits...
Fair enough, the exam was a sneaky beast- we were specifically told that we wouldn’t be dealing with clinical content, and as far as i’m concerned having to decide which example women with breast cancer can have Tamoxifin or Herceptin is about as clinical as it gets....
But whatever. It’s done now...we just wait.........................

Wooooaaah, Wooaaahh, If you can't find the way........look to US

Christmas was brilliant. It wasn’t quite white on the day but afterwards it was like a million cloud sheep were sheared over Btown...
New Year is ALWAYS a flopppp, getting tickets for a B.I.G night relies on someone who is inevitably waiting on someone else....then it sells out and we're all disappointed. This year instead of night I booked tickets for I booked tickets for a train to London. Its homegirl time.
We went for drinks, and 'had a few' but got super jolly and giggly and spilled beans which are usually kept firmly tinned. We had a fry up at Joe's, the best greasy spoon in the world, which does exceptional filter coffee and even better mushroom/beans/black pudding/eggs(any kind)/toast/hash browns...you get the picture.
We went ice-skating on New Years Eve in front of the tower of London. I fell over and bashed my bumbone so so badly I walked like a cowboy for days after. But it was great. We shook our fists at a small boy wearing orange that cut everyone up constantly. I have never been more torn between doing the right thing i.e. ignoring him, and TAKING HIM OUT WITH THE BLADE OF MY SKATE. GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
When we got back to the crib in Stoke Newington where we were staying we decided a gourmet dinner really was the only option for NYE...we spent £40 on deli produce from Sainsbury’s. Plus a bottle of sparkling plus some ingredients for the cocktail of the night- MOJITOOOOOSSS!!
It was so nice watching the countdown of the TOP TUNES OF 2009, getting ready, makeup after many drinks= interesting.
Whilst we were getting ready Bman was on music video duty, and whilst I was rooting for JLS, Skelskel insisted on Chipmunk.... (I’m sure its Jay from S Club 8)
But there’s a great photo of us all shouting the opening 'WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH' and chipmunking with our hands. This was before we were really drunk!
We went for Mexican bar drinks and made our resolutions...now forgotten...queued for a club that almost certainly wasn’t going to let us in and ended up in a Pub. iT was BrilLIant.
The next morning we officially brought the start of a New Year in by laughing so much that I thought I might wee myself as my friend Hanskel said- 'How did we get home'.....it was exactly what I was thinking, we laughed and laughed.





In hindsight I think we were still drunk.
I <3 Us

Caring At Christmas....

SO I know this was a long time ago but I wanted to write about....Caring at Christmas is an organisation in Bristol that takes over the 'Julian Trust' night shelter for homeless people and turns it into something amazing from Christmas eve until new years eve...It turns 18 beds into 50, it provides a television, clothes, blankets and 24hours of food availability in 24 hours...
After 'Autopsy Fail' something came over me. I couldn’t shake the feeling of complete despair at the homeless man who no one knew lying on that steely cold table. It got steadily colder in Manchester, and every day the thermostat war ensued in House 35. We were quibbling those extra pennies being spent on keeping us warm. At least we had the option to quibble. I was even tucking my top into my jeans. Every day it got colder I realised more and more people would be struggling with street life.
So I decided that on going back to Bristol I would do some work for Caring at Christmas. I worked 4 4 hour shifts from Xmas eve where we made 50 beds (a triumph considering I rarely make my own), poured tea and coffee for 3.5 hours and washed up breakfast gear for 100 people. When my alarm went off I cursed. I trudged down Ashley hill in the icy snowy mush occasionally flailing around trying to regain my balance. Every morning on the way I asked myself why I was doing this and every time I left I knew why...
I’m trying really hard not to sound righteous. To sound like a do-gooder, cliché saying I felt like I’d made a difference. The experience wasn’t about me and I can see how it may look like i'm trying to earn brownie points, it’s difficult to explain without sounding ridiculous that coming home for me was about everything that these people don’t have. Family and friends and shelter and warmth.
It helped me wise up to a lot of things that I had no idea about, and it forced me to see a lot of things I think people turn a blind eye to.
I can’t really summarise this with a statement about how I 'made a difference'...if I hadn’t been there someone else would have wrinkled their fingers in that washing up water.
All I can really say is I will be volunteering at Christmas for as long as I can.