Challenging Pople at Physics

Despite this, look what I made:

Ok, so, it’s been months and months since I last updated. This is mainly due to the fact that I asked blog.com to send me a new password and it didn’t, but also because I was hit by the what-if-someone-other-than-my-2-existing-but-probably-no-longer-due-to-not-updating-since-January-readers-reads-this fear again.

Still, I can probably fill you in on most of the things that have happened to me in that time in one blog post:

Lent term – trying to keep my notes up to date
Easter holiday – trying to learn aforementioned notes
Easter term – desperately trying to learn aforementioned notes, then being tested on them

This summer has gone really quickly, and whilst I’ve spent time in Cyprus, Scotland and Wales (with a fair number of anecdotes for each), the time in between has been filled up with 8 pub quizzes, 5 series of How I Met Your Mother, completing Portal 2, playing Pokemon Black, more time than I’d have liked observing acupuncture and some dubious music video making. I’ve also been doing the Great British Bake Off technical challenges, with results ranging from the Roulade of Success to the Battenburg of Disaster.

Overall, it’s been a pretty good few months. Next week, I start my first term of year 3. With new courses, clinical school open days and the dreaded application forms to look forward to, I’m sure there’ll be plenty to blog about.

Battenburg of Disaster

Roulade of Success

Before you start reading this, I should warn you that an unexpected supervision-arranging set of emails has got me into a very stressed mode. I hate organising supervisions. It’s particularly bad at the moment because I am desperate to keep the evening of the 25th January free, for reasons I’ll explain closer to the time.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

That aside, I did promise to fill you in on my goals for 2011. Firstly, vegetarianism, something that I know neither of the readers of this blog approve of. Secondly, I am going to do my D of E physical rec. Finally. Thirdly, I am going to do a Wainwright walk with my Dad.

The Christmas holidays have been filled with lots of things that I would tell you all about if I wasn’t in such an aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh mood. Octopuses and eels. Crosswords. Bad Welsh accents. 18 days of revision, at the latest count. Books about bears that go shopping.

I was feeling ok about going back to uni, but there are 4 weeks of this term that do NOT look fun. At all. 5 supervisions in a week, for example. Each with fun supervision work, no doubt.

Alright, now I’m starting to panic again. =|

Wow, I haven’t blogged in over a month. Sorry. Well, actually, I did blog, but then Google seemed to consider my post to be malware so I had to delete it. Point being, there hasn’t been much new material floating around here recently.

It’s a good time of year to be reflective. The consensus in the media appears to be that 2010 hasn’t been the best year for any of us. This seems a fair point. I’m not too thrilled with the new government. The Icelandic volcano wasn’t a blast (except for, you know, literally). Miners got trapped underground and we had to hear about it every time one of their children learnt a new word or went to the bathroom. England’s performance in the World Cup was much as expected. It keeps snowing. And snowing. And snowing.

On a personal level, however, I’m really not too sure how I’ve felt about 2010. I went on holiday with my boyfriend for the first time. I managed to pass anatomy. I came last in a medieval tournament. I learnt how to pick up a chicken. I dressed up as the March Hare, stayed up till dawn freezing my arms off at a ball and took classes in massage. I got back into knitting and I sort of got back into baking (the lack of an oven being one of the key restrictions in this area).

I suppose that, whilst many aspects of my life right now are quite similar to how they were at this time last year, what’s changed is that I feel more in control of them now. There’s less of an “aaaaaaarrrghwhatthehellisgoingonpanicworrypanic?!” aspect to my life (although it hasn’t been eliminated entirely). Which leads us on to my goals for 2011. As yet undecided. Stay tuned =].

Remember that this day might be your last
and that it is a miracle that any of us
stands up, breathes, behaves at all.

These are the last 3 lines of “How To Behave With The Ill” by Julia Darling. The poem used to be up on the noticeboard on one of the wards I worked on. Having not thought of it for a couple of years, it has come back to me several times over the past few days, in general following pathology lectures/practicals.

Sometimes, approaching the end of term, with the number of diseases we have had explained to us, and the statistics associated with them, it becomes almost overwhelming. As a child, I suppose I was always under the impression that it was normal to be healthy and abnormal to be otherwise. By the end of term, having spent 8 weeks of being told day after day about “common” infections, genetic abnormalities, congenital abnormalities, degenerative conditions and the like, it becomes somewhat impossible to maintain this view. Even with the statistics related to the parasites we have been studying this week, we have been given figures such as that “1/3 of the world’s population is infected” and “25% of you in this room are probably carrying this parasite” and “almost every cat has bitten the head off of a mouse, so will have these cysts in its brain”. These are only 3 lectures in two years of preclinical study.

Obviously we have evolved to fight pathogens, as they have evolved to utilise us. Sometimes we are infected but are not ill. It isn’t often of benefit to a pathogen to kill its host. Individuals may suffer from a number of conditions, infectious and otherwise, which may not be apparent to an observer. Still, with the sheer volume of pathology in our population, it astonishes me now to realise that I have managed to spend so much of my life considering a state of health to be a state of normality. I don’t know what proportion of people in this country would label themselves as healthy, and indeed our perceptions of health probably change as our health does. However, I suspect that far fewer people would than I would have imagined before beginning to study medicine.

I suppose what I am saying is that, with the sheer volume of things that can develop incorrectly in our bodies, that can invade our bodies, that can wear out, that can go wrong, this week I have been repeatedly struck with the feeling that it is a miracle that any of us stands up, breathes, behaves at all.

That’s all.

I thought I would share with you the tales of a few individuals that I encountered on my way as I walked back from the train station this evening. I’ll try to keep this as chronological as possible.

As I left the station, there was no bus waiting at the bus stop, so I decided to walk rather than wait for one. So did a girl with a huge clickety suitcase who, once I had overtaken her, followed me very closely and very loudly all the way to the first set of crossroads. Cue overheard snippet of conversation one:

Man: Did you SEE Danielle Lloyd in Zoo magazine this week?

Except he pronounced “magazine” in a really American kind of way. Not the rest of the sentence, just the word “magazine”.

I carried on walking into town, which seemed to have been subject to some sort of sparkly confetti explosion, which a woman was sticking her broom between the escalators attempting to clear up. I walked into Lush, to take a look at the bath bombs. There was an Australian man with his young, smallish son:

Child: Daddy, what does this do?
Man: I don’t know.
Employee: This is a bath bomb!
Man: So you put the whole thing in the bath?
Employee: YES! Would you like a demonstration? This one here is very avocado-ey! Look, I drop it in and it fizzes away and (leans over bowl) just smell how relaxing it is! (This demonstrator has clearly never been relaxed in his life)
Child: Oooooooooh! Daddy, can we get one?!
Man: No, not for us. Maybe for someone else.

It is very rarely that I see a child look so disappointed.

I then carried on into the market square, which was full of children. It was confusing. I wasn’t aware that so many children lived here. They all had glowey wands and balloons and hats advertising Heart radio. The Christmas lights were about to be turned on. It started to rain. It was less than fun trying to get through the crowd, but eventually I broke through and onto the bridge. Cue snippet three:

Man: (shouting across street) How do you say “F off” in your language? F OFF?! F OFF!

I want to buy the small child a bath bomb. I want to buy myself a bath bomb. In retrospect, not buying any bath bombs was a mistake.

I don’t know why, exactly, I am feeling cranky, but even a Saturday night trip to Sainsburys didn’t really lift my spirits. I think that actually I’m just a bit bored. Anyway, I have a number of largely unrelated thoughts going through my head which you may peruse if you wish:

1. The Pope. The condom thing. Seriously? Seriously?!
2. I am so fed up of writing about retinal processing.
3. Washing up is dull and my tea towel is soggy. I hate soggy things

Alright, I’ve run out of steam. I have more thoughts, like about how I wish my cough would go away so I could get to sleep more easily tonight, but blehhh.

Blehh.

If the end of term would hurry up, that would be super.

Well. So. Um.

Apparently my boyfriend is going to be in a naked calendar and is getting his hair cut short for the purpose and also is going away for the week between him coming home from uni and Christmas.

The fist bit seemed kind of sucky until I knew about the last bit, which is suckier in comparison because I really enjoyed pre-Christmas last year, and I’ve been looking forward to it all term and post-Christmas just isn’t the same. I probably won’t talk more about any of this here because I still haven’t decided quite how personal I want to allow this blog to go.

I can, however, share with you my two competing quotes of the day, and you can vote on which you prefer:
1 – “So the great life lesson we learn from this is never to fix your bike whilst on a gravel path”
2 – “Hello, nice to meet you, I have massaged your boyfriend.”

Whatever your opinions may be about the SATC movie, one part of it tends to come back to me time and time again. Following the whole wedding-disaster, bouquet-smashing-on-head debacle, Carrie feels so down that she wonders whether she’ll ever find anything funny enough to laugh again. I can’t find the quote, because apparently this didn’t mean as much to the internet community as it did to me. But anyway, someone (possibly Charlotte?) reassures her that when something really funny happens, she’ll laugh.

Sometimes, I feel quite down, and then someone says “Hello, nice to meet you, I have massaged your boyfriend.” And it makes me laugh.

In other news, today I walked from histology to my room to Old Court in only 22 minutes, for which I should perhaps be awarded some kind of medal, or certificate or something. I also had a lie-in this morning. Head massages rock. I have made a significant dent in the pesto, take that Jamie Oliver.

I didn’t do any work today either. But there was PRESENCE OF BOYPERSON. Today was an unintentional, spontaneous off-day, which is EVEN MORE SHOCKING. I will have to do my essay tomorrow afternoon.

Anyway, we went to see this:

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/walid-raad-miraculous-beginnings

Now, I am finding this blog post tricky. There are many aspects of the day I could talk about, but there are some people I wouldn’t want reading about my love life/bra difficulties/attempts to buy chicken mayo baguettes. However, I shall share with you the harsh truths:

• Sometimes, I find being in a long-ish distance relationship difficult.
• Sometimes, I find wearing my bra in a comfortable way difficult.
• Sometimes, people put sweetcorn in their chicken mayo. Sometimes I feel guilty for eating chicken mayo, or the chicken in Nando’s. Sometimes, you think the food on display is plastic display-food, and it subsequently turns out that this is actually the food that someone is intending to put in your sandwich, and you have to make excuses and leave.

Also, the afternoon did not start too well, because it was rainy and I did not know how to occupy myself in Aldgate by myself and what’s more I was quite hungry (see: chicken mayo discussion, above). But then the afternoon was better and I had fun. But then there was nausea. And then I had to leave and I was not happy with this state of affairs. Then I came back on the train and no infants managed to get themselves stuck between the doors in between the carriages, and no parents tried to show them platform 9 3/4, which made a change.

There are now 17 days left until I go home. I have not accumulated further pesto. In fact, I would estimate that I now only have 80% of the initial pesto remaining.

Mmm… pesto…

Not having a huge amount of work to do this weekend (it happens occasionally…), I have TAKEN THE DAY OFF, despite the ABSENCE OF BOYPERSON. I think this is maybe the second or third time I have done so in my one-and-a-third years of university so far.

Therefore I went into town to go shopping. This has left me feeling unjustifiably Christmassy for this time in November, to the extent that I bought some warm pyjamas and a Sainsbury’s magazine. I bought a Sainsbury’s magazine despite the fact that I won’t have an oven for almost another 3 weeks. I want to cook banoffee millionaire’s shortbread. Also gingerbread. And stuffing. And Nigel Slater’s appley cheesy tart things.

In other news, I have a new secret project, which is very exciting, but shall not be discussed further here due to its secretive nature. Shh. I may also finish or nearly-finish Koala today, yay!

I will do my pharmacology flashcards at some point. =|