I have just finished my fourth shift this week. I only usually do two so have been a bit knackered. Last night was fine cos I was in bed all day yesterday, recovering from the night shift before.
On my way to work, I usually pop in the shop and get some supplies…some sucky sweets, pop, maybe a magazine. On Weds night I bought a can of Rock Star Juice…yes it is actually named so. It says on the tin that it is for people who lead exhausting lifestyles. I surmised that I fit this particular criterion.
At 3am, I started to wilt a bit and therefore drank aforementioned juice. It did perk me up considerably. When I read the can afterwards, I realised why. It contains all sorts of vitamins and fruity stuff and also the caffeine equivalent to 5 cups of coffee.
When this caffeine induced high started to wear off, I felt like DEATH! it was dreadful. I was having tremors, hot and cold flushes and not knowing whether I wanted to puke, faint or cry. Awful. I shan’t be buying this witches brew again. In future I shall search for a can of “Student Nurse working to earn money to see her through uni, yet doesn’t want to experience Parkinsonian symptoms..thankyou very much”. i think they sell it in Netto….
The out laws are away this week. They have gone to France. Rumple therefore is now caring for Grandpa Simpson. This involves him sleeping over every night this week. I miss him lots. Even though when he is here I sometimes find myself thinking “would you just go out SOMEWHERE…ANYWHERE!!”.
Because I will be going to work shortly, and therefore away all night, Rumple has taken the piggies (well the smallest two) to stay at Grandpa’s also. Big Piggies is stopping with his Dad and Stepmum. Big Piggies dad lives under a bridge and eats goats. Most unsavoury.
Often, I find myself fantasising about what it would be like to have some peace and quiet. Just for a short time, maybe and hour. This usually occurs about teatime when I am up to my eyes in chores and the piggies are trying to strangle each other etc etc.
However, I have to say…I HATE IT! I have peace and quiet, it’s naff. I miss the rogues, all four of them. It’s TOO quiet….note to self…re-read this post next week as risk protecter for tearing out own hair.
Tis Peter’s birthday today. He be 22 years of age. Makes me feel right old seeing as I have 10 years on him. Funny to think of him as my little brother when he is 6ft 2. He is a nice brother. I am rather lucky on the sibling front.
Have worked like a DOG this weekend, Saturday and Sunday night. Saturday was awful come 4.30 cos I really struggled to stay awake. I had to wage full on war against my brain, which wanted desperately to shut me down! Everytime I sat down, I could feel myself nodding. Dreadful.
I watched a really good programme recently about the brain and sleep and stuff. Your brain is really active while you are asleep. It’s amazing. Also, with the whole sleep thing, if you don’t relent and get some zzzzz’s, after a while your brain will just take over and make you sleep. It starts to go into emergency setting which is why when you are proper knackered, you have perceptual disturbances and your whole cognitive processes go arse about face. On the programme, there was this fella who was doing some sort of hot air balloon tomfoolery. He wanted to get very far in a short space of time so he decided not to sleep. After 60 odd hours, he was hallucinating, and could not read or write very well atall. On the third day, his brain pulled the plug and made him sleep. His balloon dipped beneath the required height, thus initiating the alarm system. Because your hearing is NEVER OFF, this registered in his brain and woke him up. He was still really dopey though and in an attempt to get away from what he perceived at the time as a loud and annoying sound, he started to climb over the edge of the balloon. Luckily, he came round properly in time, when one leg was hanging out of the basket at ridiculous hundred feet. Fascinating.
My very lovely tutor said that the quickest way to experience a psychotic episode is to deprive yourself of sleep for a couple of days. I have to say, when I am at work and I am way tired, I do experience slight perceptual disturbances. Like the hanging basket outside the front door that looks like a womans head and shadows that look dogs and stuff. Freaks me every time!
Me an Pippy have had this discussion before…about the brain that is. It illustrates how the mind and the brain are indeed seperate dimensions. Your brain will override you if it really needs to . Bit weird really.
Twas where I was sitting yesterday for my exam. It went okay I think. We were all pretty nervous. Exam conditions aren’t very nice atall. Lots of pressure. We had the maths paper first. I wasn’t too worried about the maths test. Our module tutor had been kind enough to do a mock test during the term and I got 92%. The pass rate was 70%. Quite high but then it’s very important that nurses can do mathy stuff cos it’s all to do with drug calculations and what-not. I messed it up a bit yesterday though. The bits that I got wrong on the mock, I think I got right. The ability to add up a fluid chart evaded me though. I did it 4 times and kept getting different results. I think the anxiety of being in an exam wiped my brain. I know I got it wrong. Hopefully though I got enough right to pass.
The next exam was an answer paper about stuff that we have learnt this term, symptamology, classification, policies etc. I think that went okay. By the end though, I had writers cramp and my hand was all gnarled and clawlike.
Well it’s done now anyway and therefore I shan’t worry about it till I get my results.
After the exam, me and Miss Plum went for a couple of coffees and slobbed out for an hour putting the world to rights. I think we have spent too long in the acadamic arena cos we analyse, summarise, reflect upon and evaluate stuff a lot!! We have decided that this term has been very good in terms of learning, hard in terms of workload and we have got to know our group better. All good.
So thats it now for 4 weeks. Good, I need a rest. I can spend some quality time with the piggies three, and loaf around, watching tv withouht feeling that i should be doing other stuff. Brainy stuff.
Rumple has arisen with the lurgy today. He is all full of a cold and snivelly. He doesn’t get ill very often. I think he should have the day off work and go back to bed, but he thinks that is a poor idea. He is very hardworking and performance driven. Sometimes a good thing..sometimes not.
I am going to do some spring cleaning today. My house looks like Steptoes back yard. Housework has had to come rather low on the list of priorites over the last couple of weeks. Now I have no excuse…I miss Uni already!
I love this advert. I think the reason I love it so much is because Brains really reminds me of my middle piggy. Middle piggy is actually a really good dancer. He has an excellent sense of rhythm and interpretation. I have asked if he wants to go to dance classes. He doesn’t. I think it’s important to nuture your childrens natural talent…like Big Piggys drumming ..but equally as important not to push them into stuff they don’t fancy doing.
Tomorrow is exam day. I have discussed with Pippy the fact that I feel like I have actually revised sufficiently, but feel I OUGHT to be revising still. I don’t want to rest on my laurels and think I have done enough only to discover that when I open the paper, I should have done more. Pippy reckons I have probably done enough. I will trust her on that one. Firstly because she tested me earlier and secondly cos she has a brain the size of a planet and knows about this kind of stuff.
I will miss Uni. We’re not going back till September now. I have 4 weeks off and then I go out on placement again. Student nurses have to work very hard. The course is very demanding. I have to say though …I LOVE IT!
I am very very tired. Not just physically, I am mentally drained…what with all this learning carry-on. I have squished so much stuff into my brainio over the past few weeks that it might be possible to look in my earhole and SEE the ten essential shared capabilites as outlined by NIMHE and the Chief Nursing Officers review into mental health nursing.
Only 2 sleeps till exam day. I am purposely not doing any revision tonigth…firstly cos Gok is on in 20 minutes, secondly cos Rumple is at footie tomorrow night and therefore I shall cram my head for a couple of hours uninterrupted and thirdly cos I deserve a rest.
2 things that have made me laugh and brought some much needed tension relief are the three little pigs doing the “animal roadshow” whereby they do impressions of animals. Very well I have to say. Big pig does a gazelle, a kangaroo and a T-Rex. Not so sure the T-Rex fits in the category that neatly , but its dead funny all the same.
The second thing was Pippy informing me that Peter has a lady friend round this evening. Pippy has been banished to her room and therefore can’t be as nosey as she would like to be. She did however inspect this lady friend from her bedroom window and assured me that she would try and take a picture of said lady when she left. The thought of her stalking my poor brother in order to take pictures to show me his new interest did make me laugh.
Me and Pippy had a wonderful idea the other day. We think that Gok Wan should marry Stephen Fry. We love them both. We decided that it would be the best dressed wedding ever, with the most fantastic, intellectually stimulating wedding speeches.
This here is Glenda. She is a good witch. She also works as a therapist. Glenda helped fix my head when it was like a washing machine and I was all poorly and stuff. She read me really well and knew what I would be likely to respond to. We did all sorts of interesting stuff. Art therapy, Transactional Analysis, writing letters with my left hand (sounds weird but was very effective..apparently it acesses the subconcious part of the brain or something).
I think of Glenda often. If she hadn’t of been around when she was then it is unlikely that I would be as happy as I am now. The time that I spent with her (about 18 months) was most definitely the most difficult thing I have ever done. Often I thought that by seeing her things were actually getting worse. With the benefit of hindsight however, I can see that to get to the other side of a swamp you have to trudge through shite. Either that or you can stand still and let it suck you in and eventually drown you.
We did a lot of work around mending my “inner child”. Might sound like a lot of psychobabble but it really worked for me. Little Marge still pops her head in from time to time. Like at work the other morning, I was tidying up the playroom and I came across the dressing up box. There was an angels outfit, all white lace and chiffon and sparkles. The strangest thing happened. I actually had an overwhelming urge to cry. I wasn’t particularly sad, i just felt like crying. Seeing as I tend to analyse things a lot (like all good mental health nursing students), that is what I proceeded to do. I came to a variety of conclusions. The one that I stuck with cos it sounded the most likely was that the angels costume appealed to the little person part of me. We’ve all got it (not mine, you’ve got your own…that would just be confusing otherwise). That part of me was very damaged and I suppose that even though my therapy has finished, little me is still in the process of recovery, and will always be to a certain degree.
Tis the same kind of reasoning as to why I am gutted that my favourite Cinderella book, the one that I spent hours with as a child has gone missing. I know it’s not logical, after all it’s only a book, but books were such an important part of my life as they provided me with a portal to somewhere else where stuff wasn’t crap.
Anyway, if you have got this far then WELL DONE! I have finished being serious for today.
Today (when I should have been revising) I went and aquired a nice new hair do. Tis an inverted bob so they tell me. Whatever it is, I like it muchly. Cos it’s really short at the back my hairdresser had to SHAVE the back of my neck. That’s a bit mingy I reckon. Hairdresser lady reassured me that it is just that I have a low hairline. I think that she was being kind and in actual fact I am a bit of a hairy bird. Seeing as I was paying 45 pounds sterling, she HAD to be kind.
I then went to visit Peter and Pippy. Our parents have gone on holiday today and therefore they are home alone having to fend for themselves. Poor dears. They are 19 and nearly 22, so it is not a case of child neglect, but even so. Peter struggles with even the simplest of household tasks and he and Pippy argue lots about matters such as the bathroom, chocolate goods, the washing up, the washing etc etc etc.
Upon returning, I decided that I could stall no longer and I finally finished off my revision cards. Whether I can remember what is on them is a different matter. I hope I do well. I would be very sad if I failed these exams. However, at least if I do I can console myself with the fact that I have good hair.
Twas a quiet night at work last night/this morning. Because most of the Flower Fairies are blooming and thriving it means that I don’t have to supervise their mums and dads so closely anymore. Tis a bit sad cos it means that I see less of everybody, but it’s really good cos it means that they are doing well as families. That makes me happy. The flower fairies are adorable little creatures, what with their tiny feet and gummy grins!
At work there is a fish. He is a goldfish but he is MASSIVE. About 8″ long I’d say. I didn’t think that they got that big. I assumed that goldfish were just small fish. Then again, this fella is about 10 or something. My goldfish didn’t EVER last that long. I had a succession of them up until I was about 7. When they died, to avoid trauma, my parents would remove the bowl and replace it with a box of sweets, saying that my fish had left them when he/she departed to the toilet heaven. Granted, I was well sad the first few times but after a while, I wasn’t so bothered about them dying but would make out I was just to continue with the dead fish/sweets scenario and get my little mitts on the smarties/jelly babies/confectionary of choice.
The fish at work is blind we think. Where one eye should be ther is nothing…just nothing..just fish skinand not a hint that there ever should have even been an eye there. The other side has the whole bulging, rotating eye socket thing going on, but it appears to be EMPTY. Devoid of eyeball. It’s very strange. I like to watch him though. He sucks up stones and then just spits them out. It’s cool.
If I was an art student then I wouldn’t have spent the afternoon up to my eyeballs in bits of paper, notes and books. What i would be doing is expressing myself by creating modern pieces such as emptying my wheelie bin out all over myself and calling it “bogged down in shit”. Or alternatively, I could be doing a contemporary dance degree and communicating through the medium of dance, expressing emotions as “overworked”, “stressed” and “need a holiday somewhere hot”.
I am being optimistic about it all however. I don’t really want to be an artist. I don’t really want to be a dancer (i did when i was younger, but thats a story for a different day). I want to be a nurse. To get there I have to cope with a heavy workload and be adept at juggling. It will all be so worth it. I am quite sure of that. Also, the good things that are coming out of being this busy is that I feel that I am more than capable of coping. I am doing quite well on the coping front I feel. I am quite proud of myself for that cause it’s not so long ago that I could barely cope with getting out of bed in the mornings and facing another day.
I am going to work tonight. When the flower fairies have been fed, I am going to do a bit more revising and then carry on reading 1984. I am about a third of the way through. It’s really good. Scarily like a prophesy however. If you haven’t read it, I would recommend it.
I have some lovely new yellow pumps. They are like shoes made out of sunshine. They have near skinned my heels though. Damn canvas foot attire.
