Admitting Defeat

Well, the exhaustion has finally caught up with me.

Yesterday I must have looked pretty awful because I was sent home from placement. It was weird coming home and getting into bed at 9:30 in the morning, but I have never been so glad to see my bed in my life. I'd been on the late shift the day before and then slept very badly that night, so really wasn't in the mood to throw myself into work with gusto. After having a cup of tea and a teacake (Thanks Graeme) I slept until lunch time when I had no choice but to get up to go to my latest midwife appointment. Graeme, being the New Man that he is, came with me.

I told my Midwife how awful I was feeling and she was very sympathetic. She took some blood to test for anaemia and told me to think about how I felt about carrying on with my course. Obviously I do want to carry on, but not at the expense of my own well-being. And I've got Baby T to think about now - I'm sure he doesn't want me running myself into the ground. If I had a job I'd just take some annual leave or cut down on my shifts, but students don't have that luxury.

It was then time to check my abdomen (which was "fine" apparently) and listen to Baby T's heartbeat. This is where things became difficult. The Midwife tried high and low to find the heartbeat. Nothing. She tried at the sides. Nothing. She tried high and low again. Still nothing. I wasn't worried - Baby had just been kicking the living daylights out of me while I sat in the waiting room. Obviously Baby T is just a fidgety little bugger like his Dad. After smearing yet more of that gel stuff on my belly, the Midwife had another go. Success! Baby T's heartbeat was coming through loud and clear (at 148bpm if anyone's interested). I was then given a rather inadequate amount of tissue to wipe all the gunk from my belly. A full roll of Charmin would have been more appropriate.

After giving me some information about local antenatal classes, I was sent on my merry way.

Later that day I saw my GP. I came away with a sick note for one week off and a prescription for a mega bottle of Gaviscon to rid me of my heartburn. Now I'm just waiting to chat to my personal tutor and see how the land lies. If possible I'd like to hop off the course now and start my second year again at a later date. I really don't think I'm getting much out of my studies at the moment - my heart just isn't in it. I can't imagine working anywhere near as hard as I did in my first year. I amazed myself at how organised I was - "organised" is now a swear word as far as I'm concerned. I used to do all sorts of extra work on my days off and I reaped the rewards at the end of the year by getting great results. I thrived on all the extra learning that I did. Now, I'd much rather be sleeping than in the library studying and I'm not going to get very far feeling like that, am I?

Lisa xxx

Carry On Nursing?

I must warn you. I am about to have a rant. A pregnant rant. It will not be pretty.

I've been back at university for over 2 weeks now after having 3 weeks on sick leave and 2 weeks of Christmas holidays. I have to say that I do like being busy every day. Having a reason to leave the house each morning (or each lunchtime, depending what shift I am doing) is great. I tend to get a bit stir crazy being cooped up all day with nothing better to do than the washing and ironing. However, there is one aspect of all the busying around that is just not agreeing with me - and that is the fact that I am absolutely exhausted.

I am not new to shift work. I've been a student nurse for well over a year now and most of my placements have involved getting up at some ungodly hour while it's still pitch black outside. Up to now, it has never bothered me in the slightest. In fact, I always quite liked the early starts. Of course, up to now I've not been 25 weeks pregnant.

The past two weeks I have been on placement on a rather busy surgical ward. Shifts start at 7:15am so I set the alarm for 6am. By 8am I'm helping the patients get washed and changed, making beds and running round trying to find an obs machine that actually works so I can take everyone's blood pressure to make sure that nobody is about to expire. Depending on which staff are on, my break time is anything from as early as 9:30 to as late as 1pm. This means I'm not getting regular meals so my blood sugar must be up and down like a yo-yo. At 12pm it's time to give the patient's their lunch and to finish off any jobs that weren't done throught the morning (which is usually the obs because the machines keep conking out). By about 1pm there's a bit of a lull as all the heavy work has been done and the nurses get on with writing up notes and handing over to the late shift. I manage to snatch a bit of a sit down while this is going on, as by this point I'm really feeling the strain of having been on my feet for so long. I'm hot and bothered, absolutely shattered, aching all over, my right leg usually feels like it's going to drop off at the hip and my feet are so swollen they're practically bursting out of my shoes. I am absolutely gagging for lie down in a darkened room with a sign on the door that reads "Do Not Disturb on Pain of Death". Or words to that effect. Unfortunately, my much-needed rest is often cut short as it usually falls to the students to answer the patients' buzzers (and some of those patients are extremely buzzer-happy) as the staff often suffer a bout of extreme deafness in the early afternoon. Funny that.

After running around like a headless chicken for the best part of 8 hours I think I can be forgiven for being a little tired. After getting home and just about having the energy to remove my uniform and shove it in the washing machine to massacre any hospital superbugs I've picked up, I'll be damned if I am going to do anything else for the rest of the day. And usually, I don't. I lie down with my feet up to try to rid my legs of the oedema (that's fluid for you non-nursey types) that has built up over the course of the shift. Until I started this placement I did not think it was possible for a woman of my build to have the legs of an African Elephant, but this appears to be what has happened. "Cankles" are not an urban myth.

Last year, after finishing placement, I would often come home, cook a lovely evening meal and have it ready for Graeme getting home from work. I absolutely loved making something from scratch. Not any more. Cookery in all it's forms is no longer part of my life. I simply cannot be bothered. Even when I can be bothered my body is so stiff I can't even bend down to put anything in the oven. Why waste precious energy making meals when ASDA or the Takeaway At The End Of The Street can do that for me? Why slave over a hot stove when I can be, well, sitting?

You'd think with such a level of exhaustion I would be sleeping like a log. Not so. Pregnant women do not sleep. We are nocturnal. We have to be nocturnal as all we want to do all night is pee. When not peeing we try in vain to arrange our pillows to support our body in such a way that will allow comfort. This is impossible. We cannot lie on our fronts as our bellies are too big. We cannot lie on our sides as our bumps fall to one side and need propping up with yet more pillows. In fact we use so many pillows we fear that we may be swamped by them and suffocate in the night. Finally, we cannot lie on our backs as our limbs go numb. Not to mention the fact that we're crippled with heartburn no matter what position we lie in. Great. In an attempt to overcome these problems, for the first time in my life I have taken to sleeping sitting up. Well, obviously I don't sleep because I'm nocturnal now, but if I were to sleep that would be how I'd have to do it ;o)

Don't get me wrong. I knew pregnancy would be diffcult and that being a student nurse whilst pregnant would be extremely draining. However, I didn't think it would get so exhausting so quickly. I feel like I'm close to burnout after only 2 weeks back at placement. I have no idea when I'm supposed to do my coursework when all I have the time for is going to placement and recovering from placement! Friends, and even staff at the hospital, have started commenting on how tired I look. One patient even said she felt guilty for being in bed and having me to look after her - the woman had just had major surgery and thought that I was the one that needed looking after! Luckily I see my midwife and my GP this week so I'll pick their brains for advice. I was hoping to get to the end of the semester before taking my maternity leave, but if I'm struggling now I'm only going to feel worse as the weeks go on and my belly gets even bigger. Right now, doing an 8-hour shift at 30+ weeks pregnant makes labour seem almost appealing...

Lisa xxx

I hate compression fittings

I think one of the nastiest things B&Q have done to me has been to sell me two 15mm compression fitting end caps in exactly the same kind of packet, with different sized nuts on the end.

In an effort to remove two unnecessary radiator feeds from my living room, I decided that instead of draining the central heating system and taking my time over it, I'd just go gung-ho into it, and cut the pipes with water still flowing through them, then attempt to quickly stick a compression style end cap over it. Sure there'd be a bit of water spray into the foundations of the house, but it would only be momentary, and I'd have it capped off in a few seconds.

Wrong.

The first pipe I removed went quite smoothly. Apart from underestimating the pressure of the water, and getting a face full of black slimy water at first, it went quite nicely. The pipe was capped and I felt quite happy about it all. The second pipe was a little more awkwardly placed, hiding being a joist, but I set about it none-the-less. After cutting the pipe and getting another face full of water, I slapped the fitting over the end, the started tightening it up with the same two spanners I used on the other side. After about a minute of tightening it up, I realised that the spanner was too big for the nut, and was just spinning around doing nothing.

It was just as well Lisa was upstairs really. I had to shout her down, so that while I lay on the floor with my thumb over the end of the pipe, she had to search through my tools, trying to find a spanner that fit. In the end, the pipes were capped, and I think I've just created a swimming pool underneath the house. Now I'm enjoying my usual post-plumbing paranoia that the pipes will explode in the middle of the night, and the house will sink a few feet into the ground.

Joy!

Brother Paul's Guitar School

After a long period of intense laziness, I have finally gotten round to fixing up my brother Paul's website. He's a guitar teacher and showbiz magnate, who operates out of Salford, Manchester. Check out his website, and hire him for teachery and performary. Make sure you've got your best chewin' tobacco with you though, because he's well into his chickin' pickin'.

Rock on!

http://www.paulthorntonguitar.co.uk

Back To The Grind

Christmas and new year have passed again. I've had people telling me how, as you get older, time starts to accelerate and before you know it, you are middle aged. Well, happily, I'm not middle aged yet, but I am starting to get worried about how often Christmas seems to come and go. It's also bizarre to think that this time next year, we'll have celebrated Christmas with our new baby, and life will be another kind of different by then. Hey ho, it's all good stuff, none the less!

New year for us was very quiet. Neither of us are particularly big fans of new year, so we elected to stay in the house and watch some suitably cheesy television. Luckily, there was a 3 hour top 100 most annoying celebrities on, so that kept us going until 12.30 or so when we called it a night. We did flip over to Jools at 11:59:45 to see in the new year before flipping back to the celebrity prats program. Not bad I though, we'd managed to condense the new year celebrations down to about 30 seconds. It was marvellous!

And now I'm back at work, and Lisa is back on placement. F1 is just about finished and I've been assigned to the new concepts team, so hopefully the coming year will be interesting, working on new concepts for games. I've gotten myself back to the gym, if only for the past week, but I'm fired up to get back into the red hot training regime of days gone by, so that i can shift this side of ham that seems to have gotten strapped to my torso over the past year.

This year is going to bring lots of change, and hopefully mark the start of an exciting new part of my life, so let's raise a metaphorical glass to 2007, and take a symbolic sip!

Happy new year!