Looking Stuff Up

I waste so much of my life looking stuff up. It's becoming a bit of an obsession. I can be happily going through my day when a thought pings in my head and I think, "I must look that up." It could be something trivial like, "Do spiders have ears?" (They don't but they can still hear you through their vibrating leg hair, so don't say rude things about them). It might be more important like, "When is my car tax due for renewal?" or a health question like, "What causes a twitchy eye?" (Stress, apparently).
I have a lot of questions about the human body. It's a very complicated thing that absolutely no one understands. Even the experts. I've been reading complicated papers from liver journals recently and I am stunned at the lack of understanding of such a big and important organ. You might think that I'm turning into a hypochondriac, which would be ironic as the liver is in the hypochondria region on the abdomen and pain from it is called hypochondriacal pain (I'm not making this up). In light of all this reading I might suddenly have a question pop into my mind like, "What is bile for?" (Breaking down fats in the small intestine), "Where is it stored and concentrated after cholecystectomy?" (It's not stored but released directly into the small intestine), or "What happens if the bile duct is blocked and it can't get into the small intestine? " (You become a hypochondriac, with pain in that region, jaundice ('doesn't she look well?'), dark urine, pale poos, feel a bit sick and no one takes you seriously, especially if you are a woman.).

Maybe it's a sign of age or twitchy-eye stress but I find that there isn't enough room for every day things with all these questions. When you work with children they notice. They have always rolled their eyes at me when I confuse brothers and sisters names, although in my defence I teach over 300 children every week but this week I got confused about my own name. We were singing The Quatermaster's Stores, which everyone loves because the words include a swear word. "Ummm, Miss, you swore."

There were rats, rats, big as blooming cats, in the stores, in the stores.There were rats, rats, big as blooming cats, in the stores, in the stores. In the Quatermaster's stores.

I set them the challenge to make a verse with their name and a rhyming word. I was able to model it with my surname, which only rhymes with one word in the English language.
"Or you could use your first name," I said, "So I could use....what is it?.....yes...There was Julia Julia being quite peculiar in the stores, in the stores."
"Miss, did you forget your name?"
"Erm... yes.... I've got a bit of a Swiss Cheese brain at the moment."
"Why does Swiss cheese have holes in it?" one smart child asked.
"I don't know, maybe you could look it up and tell me."
More stuff to look up. (It's a bacteria that makes carbon dioxide bubbles by eating lactic acid when the cheese is maturing.)

My Swiss cheese brain seems to be really struggling to place people.
After orchestra rehearsal us adults were chatting, waiting for the kids who had left glasses or phones or their raincoat to come back and get them. My friend, who is a human rights expert with a particular interest in space law, was talking about a conference call she had just been on with Mars and how she had told the Martians that suicide was illegal. (I might be making that up, or not). I was surprised because I thought it had been decriminalised but apparently you can still be prosecuted if you succeed. This started us talking about laws that had not been taken off the statute books or could be misinterpreted because of poorly placed commas.
"Oh yes," I said, enthusiastically, "There's the law that all men have to practise their archery for two hours every Sunday. I have a neighbour with an online archery store and he was telling me." I looked at the youngest of us and my brain leapt over a hole. "You probably know him," I thought as I visualised where he lived and where the neighbour lived.
"My dad?" he asked quietly, clearly thinking it was time to call in th men in white coats.

Did you know that it's also illeagal to eat mince pies on Christmas Day and to die in the House of Commons?

A Cautionary Tale

Five years ago, my daughter went to University and I got Fresher's Flu.  I'm not sure how it was possible for me to catch it from that distance but I definitely came out in sympathy.  I felt low and tearful and as though I had drunk too much the night before and it left me with a cough that didn't go away until just before Christmas when I ended up losing my voice for the first time. Losing your voice can be frustrating and it is something that has recurred every 6 or 7 weeks since.

The most frustrating thing, though, has always been other people.  "Have you tried..." "You shouldn't..", "If you just....", "You can't be using it properly...", "What do they say about it?", "There must be something they can do."  "It's because you're stressed.", "If you were more positive it would go away." 

This was all made even more frustrating by the fact that I couldn't shout, "F off," at them.

What would start out as someone trying to be helpful would end up as a bizarre exercise in victim blaming and I would end up feeling a lot worse than when they started.  I learnt to just nod and smile at all the suggestions, thinking, "Luckily for you, you have no blooming idea what it's like."

I'm sure I've given unsolicited advice to people who are sick before but now I am always more careful.

You see, I cursed the last person to give me advice.  "You need to use the straws technique," she said, "We swear by it."

I asked her if she had ever had a voice problem.

"Och, No," she said smugly, "I do my vocal exercises every day."

It was wrong, I know but I cursed her. I wished her to lose her voice and know what it was really like.

And she did.

The next time I saw her she told me how awful it had been and how she had always thought that if you do everything right then you wouldn't get it but both her children had a bug where their voices were croaky and she caught it.  Being a singer, her voice went for 3 weeks.  I nodded wisely, feeling secretly pleased but guilty that I had wished this on her.  Not everyone has my powers but I think it would be wise to be careful.

Almost every other advert on the TV at the moment has something to do with cancer.  The NHS have campaigns to remind people to check out coughs, strange poos and for men to feel their balls. Macmillan have a coffee morning and a campaign to go sober in October, Cancer Research are encouraging people to shave their hair off or run through mud, Marie Curie have just had a huge tea party and all of these adverts have got me thinking about what might be an awful and under reported aspect of cancer.  

Everyone knows about cancer.  They've known of someone, or read a book, or seen a soap.  They know it's awful.  They know it's caused by smoking or eating salami, or not getting enough of the right kind of exercise.  They know that people with cancer have to 'keep their strength up'.  They know that cancer treatments happen quickly.  They know that doctors work miracles.  They believe that cancer is something you have to 'fight'.  They know cancer patients have to be strong.

I've often been concerned about this idea that cancer has to be a fight.  The problem is that cancer is you.  It's your body, growing a bit more than it should.  If you fight it you must be fighting yourself. In a war against yourself you will always lose, even when you win. In the past, if I have said this to people they suck their teeth and say, "you have to be careful.  If you give up it will win."  This is bollocks.  Psychologists are beginning to study this and have concluded that mental attitude has no effect on cancer development and disease progression.  https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/04/20/new-meta-analysis-undermines-the-myth-that-negative-emotions-can-cause-cancer/

These things that people know can end up sounding like blame to someone who is ill.  "If only you didn't smoke."  "I knew eating Salami would be your downfall."  "If only you'd done yoga instead of swimming." "You are eating all the wrong things."  "You should eat something." "Even if you are feeling sick, if you don't eat you'll only get worse."  "It can't be that bad, or you'd have been seen already.  They don't leave people with a cancer diagnosis without an appointment for a month." "It will be fine.  I know someone who had cancer and they had chemotherapy for years. Oh, yes, it was awful treatment. Survive?  Oh, no but they had years of treatment. You've got to fight.  It's going to be hard but you can do it." 

When I first lost my voice I would find people's suggestions funny.  As if I hadn't done vocal exercises all my life.  As if I didn't drink only water.  But eventually it wore me down and I started to feel as though I was to blame for being unwell.  When people got frustrated because I had tried all their suggestions they would say, "So, why do you think you've got it?" as if I knew and as if knowing would help, except they would have something else to blame me for.

So, while I'm happy to eat cake (I'm always happy to eat cake) and donate a fiver to charity so they can research cures and treatments that might make people feel better I will be extra careful to not turn any research I hear about into blame for someone who has been diagnosed with cancer.  They might have witchy powers like mine and curse me to really understand what it's like.  

Eye Level

I'm feeling a bit fragile about my weight at the moment. I've reached that age where I'm flabby and tired.

I've even got too fat for my wedding ring.
"That's got to be water retention," said my colleagues in the staff room. There was some discussion about squeezing my fingers to release some of the water but I was concerned that water leakage wasn't something else I need to deal with.

My most wobbly bit is my tummy. When working with 4 and 5 year olds this is the bit of me they are looking at and children of this age take no prisoners.
"When is the baby coming?"
"It's not."
The child rubbed my belly and said, "Why not?"
I was already feeling fragile and wasn't sure I could answer the question but I like to be honest if possible.
"Because I'm too old to grow a baby in my tummy," I said.
The child took a couple of steps back so that my face was in view and with head tilted to one side said, "Oh, no you're not," rubbed my belly again and wandered off muttering about not understanding.

You would think this would be a wake up call but here I am sitting on the sofa, watching a depressing programme about body age and eating a second slice of cake.

The Elephant in the Blog

I've always wanted an elephant. I thought they'd make great pets.  If my garden were bigger and had a watering hole I thought I'd definitely have a pet elephant.  I'd call him Bill and feed him peanuts.  I would never give him baked products because they are bad for elephants despite their constant bleating of, "Gissa bun."

I thought that having an elephant would be fun.

I was wrong.

Bill is here now.  He is sitting on this blog being all grey and elephanty and stopping me writing anything. Whenever I try to do something, or write something, or think something Bill throws peanut shells at me and shouts, "What about me?" It's very hard to ignore an elephant jumping up and down in the corner of your blog wearing a fancy hat and tooting a party blower.  The feather on the end keeps tickling my nose and I have to stop typing to scratch it.

"You could just write about me," he suggests helpfully.
I've told him that I'm not going to and so he should just be quiet and go away. He has refused to go away.
"You'll have to notice me sooner or later, " he trumpets loudly in my ear.
I've told him that I know he's there but I'm not going to tell everyone else about him. Elephants produce an awful lot of poop and I don't think it's fair to share that around.
He concedes that his stools are rather large and smelly but he doesn't care.  He just wants to be noticed.

So here is a picture of an elephant.

I'm off to make some apple/caramel buns. (It's caramel week on Bake Off). I wonder how many Bill would like?

Soap

There are currently only two Soaps in my life. The Archers (obviously) and Holby City.

I love the Archers because, well, what's not to love? It has cows, picnics on Lakey Hill, birdwatching by the river Am and characters I've grown up with. Currently, Jonny (son of John) who died by driving an old tractor too fast two days after my son was born, has got a job for the snobby Aldridges to drive a big shiny tractor too fast. This could end badly but as I won't have given birth three days before I probably won't cry.

Holby City is a soap I don't really understand my affection for. I've never liked Casualty, which always seems a bit overly dramatic. Holby is calmer. It's also a fantasy hospital. I'm going there if I'm ever sick because everyone gets diagnosed and cured within an hour. My dad always said that he would have liked Doc Martin as a GP because he always knows what's going on. "But he's so rude," I would argue. Both Mum and Dad thought rude honesty would be preferable. I watched the first series of Ambulance (set in London) and really enjoyed it. There is something unintentionally funny about near-death situations, which the programme brought out. This series is set in Stoke and the flat Midlands accents and schmultzy music are sucking the funny out. A man who'd got stuck in bed and joked with the paramedics that he had the "full English breakfast of cancers," was questioned on his sense of humour, while the paramedics looked at him doe-eyed with  sad string music in the background. It could have been funny. I agreed with the man when he said, "what else is there to do but laugh?"

Realistic hospital programmes would be funny and boring. Someone should make a programme about the corridors. Doctors and nurses wander up and down corridors looking lost. They can't find rooms, patients, other doctors. Patients sit being patient. Appointment at 3, still waiting at 4.30. No problem. Some demand to see a certain doctor, others get cross and irritable: their patience training isn't going so well. They all wonder if they have time to get a coffee or go to the toilet. A nurse comes to get the next in line. They are a newbie. Their relative asks if they can come too. The nurse says, "Of course," before thinking, taking a sudden step back and saying, "are you together?" The people next to them laugh, stand up and say, "Can we come too?" A doctor sticks his head out of the door and one of the patient's relatives recognises him from a previous operation. Automatically she winks at him and he winks back before scuttling back into his room both wondering why they had done that. Maybe it was the stress. Maybe it was the boredom. The people sit listening to children crying, they watch people who look ill and those who don't but are shocked and dazed, pale and shaking at the bad news they've just been given.

Maybe it's the unrealistic nature of Holby that I like.

Struggle

I'm struggling to blog at the moment. My head is full of huffs and sighs and stories that aren't mine to tell. The language is appalling too. Bum. Darn. Piddle. Gosh. Fiddlesticks. Blow.