Things About Pregnancy

Things I expected (and got) from pregnancy

heartburn
swollen fingers
constant need to pee
inability to lie on my front
tiny baby kicks
uninvited bump touching

Things I (foolishly) did not expect (and got) from pregnancy

bloating
gas +++
bleeding gums
one very sensitive front tooth
an aversion to chicken and courgettes
boobs
weird metallic taste in my mouth all the time
being talked to via the bump ("and how is mummy feeling today my little one?" OH GOD IT IS STILL INSIDE ME, YOU'RE LITERALLY NOT ALLOWED TO ASK ITS OPINION.)

Things I have not yet got from pregnancy but am expecting to any moment now

swelling everywhere
mood swings

Pregnancy: it's magical!

Juicing FTW!

There is a special kind of brain fatigue that comes with working on Microsoft Excel. So seldom has a piece of software of surpassing complexity been engineered in subtle ways to be as un-ergonomic, un-intuitive, and generally soul-destroying as this little piece of genius. You think you hate Excel? You haven't even begun, my friend. The levels to which Excel plummets you during A level, or indeed in the generic undergraduate generic-science-based-subject, barely scrapes the icy surface of its hellish frozen underbelly. The brain-bending gymnastics one has to go to to draw a simple graph has sucked out my will to live. It has juiced my creativity flat. It has made me into a brainless automaton, such that completing my new Trust's mandatory training modules for the nth time since I started working in medicine is a relief (what makes fire? do you know what bullying is? Is bullying constructive criticism, or is it malicious denigration of a person? What does the fire safety local area support representative lay manager of security and equality do exactly?) 

Also, really? Box and whisker graphs? Really? Weren't they made up by some bored maths teacher to occupy year 8s on a rainy Thursday? Do they really have a place in SCIENCE?

I have my doubts. But I am just a lowly minion. I heed my supervisor's call, I type =quartile(range, 1), I copy and paste, and I slowly turn into a minced paste of lost hope inside. 

***

In other news, we've bought a juicer, which is amazing. Amazingly expensive. Our consumption of fruit and vegetables - in particular kale and spinach - already high, has now rocketed. We're getting through 3 bags of carrots a week, and 4 bags of spinach. I'm addicted to pineapple. There is no more room for fruit and veg in our kitchen cupboards - it is spilling out onto the floor, and Tim has given up trying to keep track of it (today he was wandering around the house disconsolately, saying to himself, "now where can I source a lime?") According to the tabloids, and my new green smoothie book, this can only lead to two things: bankruptcy, or curing cancer (the book halfheartedly uses the term "controversial" to describe its cancer-curing claims, which I thought was ILLEGAL in the UK. Though I did get it free with the juicer so I guess it's all grist to the free entertainment mill at this point.) 

It's delicious. 

***

Our garden is also delicious. I never thought I'd be one to get into gardening, but here we go, I'm 28 and I've been gardening and I've pulled a muscle in my back putting a rhododendron bush in. This is what it feels to be middle aged, and I LOVE IT.  We have so far made 4 separate trips to the garden centre and every time, no matter how many lists we make or how prepared we attempt to be, we just end up wandering around in a daze of sensory overload, buy an improbable amount of things, come back and the garden just swallows it all and demands more. I love it. Tim loves it. 

And we've bought a BBQ the size of our house. Of course as soon as we've bought it, it's been tipping it down, and now it's bloody freezing, and as soon as it gets warm again Tim's going to be working his most antisocial hours yet (4pm to 1am.) I can't wait till he's off A&E and onto O&G (oh these comic double acts of departments. Mel & Sue. Ant & Dec) and has a semblance of a life again. Can't wait. I'm going to griddle all the vegetables that I physically can't juice (clue: not many, but aubergine juice somehow appals the imagination) and then juice all the ones I can't griddle, and I'm going to have a griddle and juice party with Tim, next to the rhododendron bush. Who even knew that a rhododendron bush looked like that, anyway? Not me, but now I own one. I am a sucker for product placement. 

Mawwige

Happy anniversary my beloved Timothy

Some days late (but better late than never.) Since I spent our actual wedding anniversary sitting the worst exam of my entire life (which I believe may be karmic retribution for my unbearable passing of every previous exam sat.)  Tim came to collect me from Luton airport with a gift of a Belgian bun and a piece of baklava and I told him I was far too grumpy to eat carbs and bewailed my fate generally. Lovely Timothy, whom I am so lucky to have to be grumpy at, it's been an immense pleasure to be married to you for a year, and an immense pleasure to contemplate the many years to come in your company, inshallah. May the years bless you with garish golfing blazers, and telescopic gardening equipment, and a writing bureau with more drawers than you have stationery to put in them. I love you and cherish you. Marrying you was the best thing I've ever done, apart from maybe that poem I wrote when I was 15 that used dinosaur eggs as an extended metaphor about grief. That was a work of fucking genius.

Housing and Surgerying

Guys, this update is late. I'm sorry. You know. House. Life. Lifehouse. House.

What I'm trying to say is:

So we have finally moved into our new house, which, man. Effort-tastic.

I am so pleased to no longer be sharing a house (read: leave dirty dishes all over the place/eat cereal in my underwear on the sofa). It’s all more or less in place now, and we have a study, and the waffle-maker is out, and there’s a piano and it all feels like home.  Though it was a massive struggle to get it that way. Naively we thought that taking a week off to move in was more than enough time. We’ll just sort everything out in a couple of days, we thought. Then we’ll go and chill out and maybe even go on a minibreak. Stonehenge would be nice at this time of year.

Well.

Turns out moving house is a MASSIVE ARSE. Even when things go perfectly, they take about 30% longer than your generous estimate allowed for, and when things go badly, they really flipping mess things up. Our wardrobe, for example, I ordered the wrong size of. Then they delivered the right size – but two of the panels were broken. So then they had to do an exchange – but they exchanged it for the wrong size one again. And then when I finally got the right ones, I kicked in two of the supporting struts by accident. DAMN YOU IKEA. You and your flimsy MDF. We had aimed to do the wardrobe before we even moved in properly – we ended up finishing it around 9pm on the last Sunday evening of our week off.

Also, curtains. Hanging curtains will make you want to hang yourself. True story.

I also made some poor life choices, such as deciding that reupholstering chairs was an essential thing to do during the house move. They are now wonderful. But in retrospect, perhaps not as essential as I thought. Similarly, we built the china cabinet before we built the dining room table, almost entirely for the purpose of unpacking the Höglund art glass we got from Nelson for our wedding. If you got me a contract, I’m sure I could churn out a book entitled Poor Middle Class Life Choices based solely on that week’s experience.

Still, it’s all up now and all the wedding presents are unpacked, and our stuff has expanded to fill an entire 3 bedroomed house and part of the garage. WTF stuff? It’s how I imagine the Big Bang to have been – nothingness, and then MATTER, expanding ceaselessly. MATTER that includes an art easel my parents wanted to get rid of, and a billiards table. MATTER.

We now also have an impressive selection of hammers and power-tools, like the orthopods. I’ve always kind of wanted to be an orthopod, and the electric screwdriver really does bring home its appeal. I genuinely did want to be an orthopod, by the way. It was so logical. So clean. Kind of like ophthalmology, but big and full of bones. I had to let go of that dream in the end because when I was a medical student a male orthopaedic consultant offended me by offering some kind of massive screw device to my male medical student colleague to have a go at screwing some kind of joint (look, I would have been a great orthopaedic surgeon: this is highly technical language I'm using here) into place and I was like,"um, how come I don't get to have a go? Is it because I'm a girl so you think I can't do it?'

Consultant: (looks me up and down) "Be my guest."

I should probably have realised I'd over-egged my Yeah-Feminism pudding when I saw that my reasonably well-built male friend was completely unable to turn the screw but suffice to say that I did not, and I thoroughly humiliated myself by basically hanging from the device trying to turn it with my entire body weight and not being able to. Oh, how everyone laughed. And that was the end of Connie and orthopaedic surgery. 

Eyes, on the other hand, much less strengthey, much more fiddly. No screws. I have now finally completed my first whole cataract operation. Hurrah! And it only took me 50 minutes. Haha. As I (laboriously) finished, I had a vivid flashback to Graham telling me and anyone else compelled to listen (i.e. his patients) that he could “do a whole phaco in 7 minutes.” Oh, Graham. 

For me, the capsulorrhexis is the most terror inducing part of the operation. Basically you have to make a 3mm diameter perfectly round circle in the anterior capsule of the lens using a needle to make a straight line, and then lift up a flap in the capsule, and then a pair of forceps to tear it into a perfect circle. If it tears out or if the circle isn’t round or has a weak point then during the rest of the operation, it can tear into the posterior capsule and you can drop the lens into the back of the eye, and that is a massive disaster because you need to call your vitreoretinal colleagues (who will come and sneer at you in a very special way*) in to make 3 more holes in the back of the eye and fish the lens out and it’s not very good for anyone, least of all the patient.  What I particularly enjoy about this terror is that it’s illustrated so cheerily on youtube, usually with jaunty music and special drum beats to highlight the special bits where it really specially goes wrong. Wonderful stuff.

*One of the more navel-gazey fascinating aspects of specialization is realizing that there are in-specialty stereotypes. Hours of sub-classification fun await you!

On the subject of surgery, I’m also enjoying being with two different surgeons who have different operating methods, often contradicting each other, so I have to remember what they each prefer to avoid being told off in their different theatres.  Surgeon A is a cheery, bubbly, short and plump, faff-hating, hands-on surgeon who says things like, “GIVE IT SOME WELLY” and “I WANT TO HEAR SOME NOISE” and frequently takes my hand during the operation when she considers things are going too slowly and pushes it around, a frequent source of terror to myself (you may notice that many things in surgery cause me terror: I leave theatre basically mentally and physically exhausted after each session*.)

Surgeon B on the other hand is a very tall and thin, extremely silent, even-tempered and patient surgeon who is like the Farmer Hoggins of cataract surgeons. He basically says nothing at any point, and would probably rather die than touch my hand, let alone seize it and start waggling it about during surgery. However, his silences are laden with meaning, and while he was out of theatre** (letting his Fellow supervise me), she and I had a heart to heart.

Fellow: “I feel like all his silences have such different qualities.”

Me: “Sometimes I look up from the microscope and he’s just looking at me with his eyebrows raised. I don’t know how long that’s been going on.”

Fellow: “But he hasn’t said anything. So I can’t say anything.”

Me: “Once I opened my mouth and he just said, “not yet”.”

Fellow: “Did you ever manage to…?”

Me: “No.”

Fellow: “Despite this I feel I know what he wants me to do all the time. His silences are very expressive.”

Surgeons. Fascinating species.

* I used to think Graham was massively overstating it when he talked about how interested he was in the way surgeons psychologically prepare for surgery and that it would make a good book. Sounded like a boring book to me, and I didn’t prepare for surgery except for rocking up in theatre with my scrubs on, looking lost.

I now totally agree with him, except I’m not sure it would make a good book exactly. It would make a very navel-gazey book that surgeons would all love to read, perhaps in the same category as my Poor Middle Class Life Choices production.)

**Obviously not while he was in theatre (see above for silences.) Theatre time is Quiet time.

February catch-up

Dear friends, 

Sorry for my utter failure at updating this blog and, no doubt, at actually seeing you all in real life too. The truth is that buying a house, going to work, and acrobatic rock and roll have swallowed, digested, and thoroughly extracted the nutrition from my life such that I am left with only the fibrous remains, not enough to make a tasty blog post. 

So in no particular order, here are the events that I have encountered since I last saw you.

1) House buying

Yes, we have a house.

,!!!

Yes, everyone warned us the process would be unbearably slow and frustrating, and yes it was both of those things in abundance. Having seen and offered and been accepted on a house in September within a matter of 48 hours, it was not until 2 weeks ago that we finally managed to seal the deal. But now it's ours. And we have filled it with a million items of ikea furniture. We are getting ready for DIY hell, or possibly heaven. Tim has bought a book that weighs a ton filled with useful-looking pictures that actually convey remarkably little information. I have already tried and failed to remove some offending wallpaper, and also half screwed a load of things into walls where they clearly didn't want to be. Also, there is a random square of carpet that has been cut out of one of the upstairs bedrooms. Why? Why not? I am a bit doolally with excitement, and can't wait to put it all together and then - then - we can finally unpack our wedding presents and have a housewarming! Waffles, anyone?

2) the wedding

So we attended Luke and Julia's wedding on the weekend, down in Cornwall. God, Cornwall is far away. But it was a beautiful weekend, and the day of the wedding itself was bright and sunny and absolutely freezing. Notable highlights included: skimming stones into the sea.

; Helen and Jamie arriving in a convertible that didn't convert and had no windows to glamour and acclaim on Friday but leaving to downpour and towels on Sunday ("right. We need to fully waterproof ourselves."); seeing the NZ crew again ("don't you know that Palmerston North is the centre of the universe?") and of course the lovely couple, looking splendid and very happy. Who doesn't love a good wedding?

Stylish fur tippeting from Julia

The cravat was tied by Tim, more or less because he happened to be there, following instructions on youtube. "I feel as if I just walked into a very important job by accident" said Tim afterwards, but I think he did it very well, even if he did get unnecessarily close to Luke as part of it. 

3) Acro

So Tim and I have got into acro rock in a big way. It is possibly one of the silliest dances ever invented and looks ridiculous and perhaps that's why we love it so. Naturally we're shit at it just as good as the people in that video. Everyone else in the team appears to be doing a phd in chemistry and outrageously young, though it turns out we are not the oldest ones there! Hurrah! So we are going to team practices on Sunday and Tuesday and the Thursday is authentic rock and roll and I really didn't imagine there would come a point in my life where I'm doing quite so much dancing. Well, life is full of surprises. And upside down spinny flippy twirly things too.

4) the job

Goes on apace. I've finally managed to get the hang of the PASCAL laser and directed it at aomeone's retina with good result. No one went blind. Hurrah! Surgery progresses. Things get better. And I've commandeered Tim's electric bike. It's all uphill (easy-pedal-assisted uphill) from here.

5) Skiing.

I almost forgot we went skiing in the end of January. God it feels like forever ago. We were on this fantastic week long deal which included copious breakfast, a 3-course meal in the evenings with wine, and endless free cake. I ate so much cake. And so much potato, cheese and bacon, which seemed to be what more or less every meal consisted of. In fact, on going home I've been inspired to make my very own version of tartiflette, but on a pizza. Consider that, boys and girls. Potato, cream, cheese and bacon on a pizza. It doesn't really bear thinking about. But it really is delicious. And it's just what you need after acro rock (but definitely not before.) And it definitely aids in going down fast fast fast down a mountain, even if the laws of physics deny it helps by adding weight and acceleration, it helps in motivation in getting down there in double fast time so you can have double helpings. 

 

Xxxx

Happy Christmas!

Dear friends, I hope you all had a good Christmas, whatever Christmas means to you, and a chance to rest and to catch up with your nearest and dearest, hopefully without some kind of board game induced family breakdown (though those are also some essential part of the holiday season.)

I had to work Christmas Day so spent the first hours driving through a blissfully, eerily empty England, listening to Classic FM's dulcet tones and going very, very fast around roundabouts. But before that, when I woke up at 5am, Tim insisted on giving me my present, which was...

!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yeah I know! Exciting, right?
I was excited.
A zoom lens!
Excited and slightly concerned about how much money this present may have cost.

So excited I...

 ...
...
....
....
...

 ....
I see.

An ingenious cup!!!

At this point I was possibly even more delighted, due to relief partly that he hadn't got me a ridiculously expensive gift,  and partly because I'd noticed it didn't say Canon on the 'lens' and was wondering how to break it to him that it just wasn't going to fit my camera. But that was fine, because it was going to fit my MOUTH.

....

Except

 oh wait


then he brought out this one too.
An actual zoom lens.
And this one says Canon on it.

Thanks Tim!

So if you have a camera-loving partner and want to set them up for a fall on a special day....this is definitely the way to do it. I for one was unbelievably impressed. Even now when I suddenly catch sight of it lying around on the worksurface, it makes my heart tighten just a little bit in momentary anxiety because a camera lens really shouldn't be lying around in the kitchen like that...

And take it from me - you wouldn't even have to buy them a real lens afterwards. Though that was also tremendous.

***

So I had a lovely Christmas break at the in-laws, and looking forward to spending New  Year's at my family's too. Christmas Day, however, was spent with the Bennetts - very tolerant and generous souls to whose house I'd summarily invited myself at Christmas as they were the only people I knew in Reading - and by people, I mean, their son, whom i met in New Zealand. Moral of the story: don't live in Reading. They fed me and entertained me and also gave me a tremendously generous stocking filled with goods, which made what could have been a somewhat depressing Christmas Day a very lovely one instead. So thank you, Bennetts. Thenetts.

***

While I was in NZ, I really, really, really missed the whole build up to Christmas, especially the cold weather, and the mulled wine, and the Christmas markets, and the bratwurst, and the mistletoe, and mince pies, and stollen, and panettone, and all the SEASONAL TAT that comes with Christmas. And it was so so so so so nice to have that again this year. Although i haven't managed to eat quite as much turkey, panettone, mince pies, and mulled wine as I'd hoped. And in fact not a morsel of stollen (if such an item can be counted in morsels) has passed my lips. What kind of Christmas is this?

***

Great book I read this Christmas: Being Mortal - excellent and insightful meditation on ageing and death and the way we tackle these natural processes in medicine (clue: unbelievably poorly). Very interesting read - and lots of good ideas. It gave me a lot to think about - particularly the communication model of the ''informative doctor'' and how this, though it seems to be promising patient autonomy, can actually trap everyone in a futile diminishing cycle of suffering and overtreatment. Eye opening stuff, I recommend it to all.

Much less high brow: Crossy Road. http://www.crossyroad.com/ Perhaps the best (and free) ipad game I've yet experienced. Even though it is basically Frogger, it is so much better than Frogger. Like woah. And you can play as a kiwi. Sold.

***

Enough Christmas musings for now, time to think up some New Year's resolutions and see you in 2015.

Love to one and all.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Timothy of Morocco

Does not have the same ring as Lawrence of Arabia, but is a more accurate subtitle to this month's shenangs.

So, we went to Morocco.

This is my favourite photo of the whole time there, when we went to southern Morocco and the sand dunes at Merzouga, a little outpost of the Sahara, and right on the Algerian border. It was an impulsive decision, and one I'm so glad we made, though getting there was somewhat stressful. The country had suffered a huge slew of flash flooding and terrible destruction of houses, roads and most tragically lives - so far I think 32 people died in the floods. Along the way we heard from other tourists who had been trapped (one couple for 20 days in the desert) by the floods, others who narrowly escaped disasters - a bridge fell down after one couple drove over it, killing the occupants of the next car behind them. 

It was all very grim, and in fact when we heard about the floods we suggested that we might just cancel the whole trip and stay in Marrakech, since clearly that would be the sensible, intelligent thing to do rather than go galliva. But unfortunately (fortunately?) our driver appeared not to speak any English, French, or Spanish apart from, 'IT'S FINE. NO PROBLEM.' And obviously we didn't speak any Arabic apart from 'thank you.' So basically we sped along on this journey whihc we were quite concerned might, if not kill us, then maybe trap us in some part of the country for the next three weeks, just saying, 'thank you, thank you' every time our driver drove through a massively flooded road that was essentially a fast-flowing river, while he said, 'is normal. No problem. No problem.' 

BUT IT'S FINE. Because there was not a problem. And we got there. And it was unbelievably good. 

Please forgive me for taking as many clichéd photos as I possibly could cram into my greedy little aperture of the desert, because how often do you get to trek in the Sahara with camels? 

Camels, by the way. Unbelievably uncomfortable. Also, stirrups. Best thing ever. Why ride an animal without stirrups? Massive error. The Mongolians had it down.

I love this photo because it looks like an oil painting. Tim took this with his phone (just on normal settings) after sunset in the desert, and it came out like this. I like to think that my harem pants only add to the romantic atmosphere, even though Tim made retching noises when I bought them. I even bought only the most conservative ones, with a crotch that was basically at the normal place rather than dangling two inches off the floor, and of a normal colour rather than crazy tie die. Frankly, they look a bit like scrubs. Maybe I can start wearing them to theatre. They are outrageously comfortable...

Tim tried them on. He did at least agree they were tremendously comfortable. 

So in the desert we stayed overnight at a Berber camp. It was all very touristy and as fake as you can possiby imagine, but also absolutely fantastic and amazing and wonderful. There were two guides at the camp who could speak English, French, Portguese, Spanish, and Italian (and possibly more languages than nthat, though that was the sum of our little band), and they exercised them all. Except English. One of them decided to address me solely in French, the other one in Spanish. This was terribly, terribly confusing.

I took over 1000 photos but I thought I'd share this one with you. Before I got a camera that could take multiple shots, I never knew how funny people looked just as they were about to jump. Don't they look funny?

No need to thank me.

We stayed up for sunset and got up for sunrise and in between slid down the sand dunes on an extremely rickety snowboard and ate a lot of tagine. This will become a running theme.

Tagine!

This was my favourite one, with seven vegetables, cooked over a charcoaly fire, all smokey and delicious. 

We ate a lot of tagine. 

This is one of the towns in Southern Morocco, in an oasis. Turns out, oases are fricking massive. And they feed whole towns. How foolish was I, imagining a little oasis in the desert with a couple of palm trees. Nope. They host hundreds and thousands of palms, and the health of an oasis and its wealth is measured by how many palms there are. And the palms provide shelter for growing all sorts of other things - pomegrantes and olives, apricots, potatoes and carrots in the earth beneath, and so on. 

I like the way the buildings, all made from the same ochre earth, just blend into the background along the luxuriant palms. Apparently one way to take a besieged kasbah (i.e. another name for a walled house or fortified palace) was just to divert the waters of the oasis so it washed away the kasbah foundations after a while, being made out of mud. Cunning. 

We did a whistle-stop tour of the south, which was pretty splendid. Our driver, Ibrahim, explained to us that he liked the south and the mountains in a series of extremely informative mimes. Marrakech, he explained with his hands and a particularly sad face, was too full of people 'blah blah blah blah'ing all the time. 

I would like to say this is a very accurate assessment of Marrakech, and if you do find yourself in Morocco, head straight for the mountains and the desert right away. You won't miss anything in Marrakech, which is really a very disappointing and boring place, full of people who I'm sure are very pleasant and lovely but compelled to be a bit awful because they live in Marrakech, where everything is a bit awful. 

Go to Tagazhout instead.

We stayed with a surf company, called Surf Maroc, there, and surfed as much as we could for two days, which isn't very much it turns out. We were both destroyed after a scant 2 hours in the water in the first day, and about 4 hours the second - with a sizeable lunch to pep us up, of course. Paddling is hard work. But the water was warm, the waves were good, and our driver in Tagazhout wasn't really sure how to drive a car - he coudn't switch gear, it seemed, which made life quite difficult for himself since he appeared to got lumped with the manual - and so the time passed quite pleasantly.

If you are ever thinking of going surfing in morocco, then Surf Maroc is definitely highly recommended. Great food, lovely location, and one of these demons to keep you occupied:

This is one of the most fiendish balance games I've yet encountered. That little penguin game you play on the Wii has nothing on it. It looks so easy, yet it's so fiendish. Lots of fun. I'm not really sure if it helps your surfing (or indeed anything), but who cares? 

In short, Morocco was lots of things we hadn't looked for, and not others we had, and a strange mixture of the unsatisfactory and the divinely inspiring, which is really all you can ask of a mid-November holiday.

But don't bother with Marrakech. 

*** 

I realise I never told you about acrobatic rock and roll, by the way. It was splendid. Tim loved it. And I think we're going to join the team (!)

xxx Connie