Baby Business: All Advice Is Wack, Yo

What do you mean, you can’t believe I’ve got more to say on this subject? Well, I have. I will not  be silenced, my voice must be heard, I refuse to be interrup…. (sorry, just broke off for half an hour there to run around with a teddy bear on my head, shouting “Whoosh! Weeeee! Oooooh! Splodge!” – fairly rewarding if you have the right audience, but choosing your demographic is key).

I have a seemingly niche view on this baby business, and it’s one I’d like to share (gingerly, quietly, never leaving my back exposed) with people who may do this themselves one day. My earth-shattering revelation is tantamount to this = in the main (special circumstances notwithstanding, please contact my legal team etc etc), it’s ALL FINE. It’s all fine, you will be fine, you won’t make a complete hash of it and it’s not dead complicated. My secret suspicion is that lots of the advice, webpages, forums and woeblogs out there exist solely to make women feel miserable. They help perpetuate the myth that once you’ve pushed a lovely little alien out through your vagina you will be forced to carve out an entirely new identity out for yourself, possibly involving changing the username on all social media accounts to ‘mummy’ something and suddenly and inexplicably using acronyms to refer to your family. You might think, reading some stuff out there, that you’ll no longer be able to chat to your mates who don’t want / can’t have / haven’t got kids and that NO-ONE WILL UNDERSTAND YOU COZ OMIGOD IT’S ALL SOOOOO DIFFICULT.

I’m not saying it’s not hard, like, (it can all get a bit despo when you’re cry-feeding into a box of Maltesers at three in the morning, watching a particularly disturbing episode of Criminal Minds – creating a Nurturing Environment is Soooo Important) but there are cubic hectares of the internet devoted to blogs which describe in painful, waiting-to-die level detail just exactly how much solid stool little Mungo has generated this week. It is hard, but if you’re lucky enough to be a healthy person with a healthy baby, it is also FINE. The hard bits are harder than you think, the great bits are greater than you think. That’s it really, it’s all just fine.

My advice would be (and I’ve thought about this because I wanted to come up with something really pithy and erudite) that nearly all advice can just shit off. If you are a reasonably nice person then I’m sure you’ll do a bang-up job, because most reasonably nice people will try quite hard to look after the human being they brought into existence, like people have been doing for, oooh zillions of years (must check the statistics on that, but ‘a zillion’ sounds sort of right). Whilst the internet has given us many wonderful things – cat pictures, beard tumblrs, Acorn Antiques on youtube – it has provided a previously unprobed level of complexity to some fairly commonly-occuring human activity. Thus when you’re all stressed out and all this stuff is new and a bit of a shock and your baby isn’t sleeping very well and you’re desperate, a few little keystrokes will find you in the midst of hundreds of people in the same position (that position is frequently squatting a corner, wearing a nightshirt that has, frankly, seen better days but for now is held together with blood, toast crumbs and an inordinate amount of your own stinky dairy supply).

Here’s the suckerpunch though – you’ll join this forum, maybe post something, read what others have got to say and YOU WON’T FEEL ANY BETTER. Once you’ve been advised to try co-sleeping, to avoid co-sleeping in case you roll on your baby and suffocate them, to let them cry it out, to never leave them to cry it out, to keep them in your room/put them in another room/hold them/don’t touch them by people who have established themselves as an authority on the matter, you’ll probably find yourself wondering if your bath is deep enough to pull a Virginia Woolf and just leave the whole sorry mess behind. I’ve picked sleeping, in this instance, but you’ll find this state of affairs also applies to feeding, crying, teething, weaning, pooing, smiling and existing. It can be dictatorial, applies a load of unnecessary jargon to some fairly normal stuff, excludes non-kids folk, judges you swiftly and without mercy and is frequently just incredibly, utterly dull.

What people almost certainly won’t say are these things: The first few weeks are a bit shit and it’ll almost certainly get better soon, you just need to hang in there. If someone removed me from the greatest hotel in the world and unceremoniously forced me out through an inadequately-sized catflap, I’d be pretty pissed off too. In there the stream of food was constant and one reclined in an almost permanent state of blissful slumber. Take those things away, and going forty-five minutes without some grub is really going to grate. Add to that your world is now colder, louder and full of enormous shouting monsters who have had the temerity to constrain your beautiful fat nakedness in clothes and STUPID FUCKING HATS, ugh, and it makes sense that it will take a while to settle in. After that point, they might sleep or they might not, and that is just the way it goes, my friends. Shocking, innit, but they’re all different. It’s almost like they’re HUMAN or something.

So my prescription is this is, broadly speaking, ignore all the advice (apart from mine because it’s really, really great) and just get on with it, remembering these maxims. Never, ever settle down to feed your baby without at least three drinks lined up in front of you. Avoid ‘mini-adult’ clothes, waistbands and socks, you’ll all be happier. Up to a certain point, sleep IS replaceable with crisps and Dime bars. To Charly and Clairy, I wish you all the best, you’ll be ace at this because you are wonderful people. Nothing complicated about that xxx

 

 

Medical Matters: Diagnosis

People always ask me what kind of doctor I want to be, and although I’ve got a couple of ideas (a kick-ass glamorous one who studiously avoids contact with phlegm obvs), I’m still quite open to the idea of what I might end up specialising in. I’ve got to try it all out first because some things sound amazing – “I SAVE BABIES! I RUN AROUND WITH A DEFIBRILLATOR! I PUT MY HANDS INSIDE BRAINS!” – but who knows, maybe the prospect of an in-depth association with rare skin diseases may eventually prove unavoidably alluring. One thing I probably won’t end up in though is any kind of research, because I’d rather be talking to someone than reading academic papers, and because I come out with ‘facts’ like this on a regular basis:

’80% of medical diagnoses are made from the patient history alone’.

There you go. That’s an interesting idea isn’t it? If I was more academic and better at writing papers I’d find the source of that information and tell you if it was true or not. Alas, I’m not, so all I can say is “My teacher, Mrs G, told me it and I believe her because she has that sort of face”.

A patient history is that seemingly endless list of questions your doctor asks you in the hope of getting to the root of your problem. It starts off very broad and gets more specific, and although sometimes it can seem irrelevant (“Do you have any parrots at home?”), there is, amazingly, a master plan at work. Although medicine does involve lots of bone parts and myriad invisible and theoretical gates and loops and processes, what underpins it – to my mind at least – is a series of patterns, which is to say that if you have, say, an ulcer, you will often (although inconveniently not always) present to your doctor with a similar history and experience as another person who has also had an ulcer. The purpose of a history is to look for these clues and patterns, and hopefully point towards some possible theories which you may or may not confirm with tests and investigations, depending on whether or not you think it is warranted.

So then, for the purpose of this post, let’s talk about stomach ache (SHUT UP, THIS IS FUN, OKAY?).   If you tell Twitter, you’ve got a stomach pain and are being sick, what responses do you get? As previously stated, I’ve done absolutely no research on this so I’m going to go with my Scientific Gut Feeling and hazard a guess that people will say the following things:

1. Awww, babes xxx (because Twitter is essentially a lovely kind place unless, y’know, anything’s happened in the news)

2. We’ve all had that here mate, there’s a bug doing the rounds xxx

3. I always get that, drink some camomile tea pet xxx

For the sake of clarity, I want to say at this point that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of that, we all do it, I do it all the time. After all, you go to online people mostly for sympathy and reassurance rather than medical opinion, which they would be irresponsible and wrong to give. If you want to find out what a doctor thinks, you need to go and see one. I’m saying it merely to make a comparison – when we consider it a ‘lay’ matter, we’re all quick to diagnose not just each other but ourselves, and remedy things accordingly. We base that diagnosis on our own experience, or things we’ve heard about, but what we very rarely do is delve any deeper into the matter.

If you were concerned enough to get a bit more medical and take your stomach pains to the doctor, they might approach it rather differently. There’s a fairly set pattern to taking a complete history (which isn’t always necessary), but I think I’ll wang on about that on a different occasion and just talk today about PAIN. Doctors love talking about pain, and like to get really into the nitty-gritty of exactly where, what and how you feel it. Not because they get any kind of pleasure out of this, or because they’re really nosy (although, disclaimer: I AM REALLY NOSY), but because finding out the small details will quite often reveal a pattern which can hopefully be recognised, confirmed and treated.

So, this stomach ache we’ve got, yeah (Are you still with me? Stay with me), let’s talk about that. There are lots of snazzy little frameworks about to help medical folk remember to ask all the right questions, but my personal favourite is SOCRATES. Thusly:

Site – Where is this pain exactly? Splitting the abdomen up (not literally, like, but IN YOUR MIND), into a noughts and crosses grid gives you nine areas, and pain in different ones of these points to different sources for the pain.

Onset – How long have you had it, and how quickly did it start? Again, different illnesses/diseases have different patterns of onset.

Character – What sort of pain is it? Interestingly enough (in a geeky about linguistics type way), people often use the same words – a dull ache, a sharp stabbing pain – to describe pains when they have the same underlying conditions.

Radiation – Does the pain move? For example, in a very classic textbook presentation of appendicitis, most of us know that you feel the pain in your lower right belly. BUT DID YOU KNOW, in that same classic presentation, the pain starts off in the central abdomen before radiating down? See, aren’t you glad you stuck around for this?

Associations – Does anything else happen when you experience this pain?

The others are Time course, Exacerbating/Relieving Factors (stuff what makes it worse/better) and Severity, but frankly, I’m a little bored of this list and I imagine you are too. Suffice to say, this list of questions is what takes you from ‘girl with stomach pain’ to (please use your best ER voice for this), ’35 year old woman presenting with severe right-sided stabbing abdominal pain of sudden onset, four-hour duration associated with nausea and vomiting and relieved by lying down and abstaining from food’. Sounds totes profesh, dunnit?

Of course, not everyone handily presents with a pain, but if they do and the medical staff treating them ask these types of questions then they’ve got a good starting point to maybe make some guesses as to what’s going on and start sorting the person out. Isn’t that amazing? Making a diagnosis just by ‘having a conversation’? After all, according to Mrs G, 80% of diagnoses are made just by CHATTING to people and asking the right questions (this satisfies so many of my thwarted amateur-detective ambitions).  So there you go, there’s a start to explaining some of the stuff we learn at medical school and why sometimes your doctor asks you a bazillion questions and doesn’t necessarily do any tests. You may care, you may not, but well done if you got this far, you deserve a lollipop. Do any doctors still do that? THEY SHOULD.

 

 

 

Medical Matters: Introduction

So pals, I’ve had this wonderful idea to do something for my non-medical friends about what medical school entails. I think there’s this preconception that in order to be a doctor you have to be the smartest cookie that ever existed and spend all your time walking round muttering the names of various bones under your breath (Hey guys! The leg bone’s connected to the…. BODY BONE!), but that’s pretty much untrue. So here I am, several glasses of wine to the good, and I’ve come up with this marvellous concept where I’m going to bang on about medical school to non-healthcare folk. It’ll be EXTREMELY exciting, so bear with me.

I’m not saying that to be a doctor or other healthcare professional you don’t have to be strong academically. There are a metric fuck-tonne of exams to be passed, not only at university but annoyingly for probably the next five or six years of your career after qualification. Exams that I will inevitably pay hundreds of pounds to sit FOR THE PURE PLEASURE OF DOING SO, and because I will not be able to advance to the next stage of my career without being able to prove that I’ve passed them. Being good at exams and pencil-wielding under duress is obviously important, not just for the written ones but also for the practical ones, called OSCEs, that involve lots of flashing lights and actors and are tremendously exciting if you like that sort of thing, and heart-arrestingly tense if you don’t (I adore them and all their bleeping sounds and drama, but alas I am one of those unfortunate people who only really shines when everything else is falling down around their ears). There are so, so many things to remember along the way that of course a  good memory is essential, but one of the big reasons that the grade requirements are so high to get onto a medical course is because the demand itself is also high, and this helps to pare down the applicants a bit. Once you’re there however, just being a clever sausage will not see you through, because you realise that actually, healthcare is mostly about communicating, the mystery of diagnosis and the selection of appropriate treatment and less about (to me) boring things like SCIENCE and ELECTRONS and STUFF ON THINGS (I’m not really a traditional academic, I wonder if this comes across at all).

So I propose a small series of posts, where I bang on about some of the things we learn at medical school and why it’s important; how sometimes being a doctor is like being a kick-ass Miss Marple, and how sometimes it is quietly mundane, and people say ‘STAT’ on disappointingly few occasions. I can’t promise that I won’t devise a whole post on whether scrubs are nearly always blue because this is the most universally flattering colour but I do want to talk a bit about what it’s really like to train to be a doctor in an age where we often seek medical advice from the internet before we’d think of setting foot in a surgery. This could be a great idea, equally it could be terrible, but I’m sure you’ll let me know either way.

Baby Business: Ways you will inevitably harm your child

I read a piece recently, written by someone who must have lots of money and is trying to come up with ever more creative ways to spend it, about baby-proofing your home. Well, not even doing it yourself, but paying some clever arse who is great at inventing unnecessary job titles to do it for you. If anyone wants to pay me several hundred pounds, I’ll be round there like a shot to point out the obvious, saying words like ‘scale down your knife collection’ and ‘minimise access to power tools’.

It made me think how much I hate that whole concept, as if by sticking enough plastic corners to all your lovely furniture you can completely eliminate the risk of your child getting hurt. I don’t want to cover my house in all this crap, or have locks on all the cupboards and I’m all in favour of a little bit of risk-embracing in life. In this spirit I’m going to tell you about the ways in which I have already inadvertently damaged my baby and we’ve all lived to tell the tale.

Nails

Those little scratch mitts won’t last forever and you can’t keep ignoring the fact that your baby has started to sport nails rivalling those of Gail Devers in the Atlanta Olympics. Or Flo Jo, for the older readers. Cutting those nails is a right ball-ache, being as they are miniscule and moving at the speed of light, but it’s got to be done, so man up and get it sorted, yeah? The first time I did this, I came tantalisingly close to causing no damage at all, but obviously got over-confident after Nail Nine and pinched a bit of skin off with the clippers on the final one. It didn’t bleed but OH MY GOD I FELT DREADFUL. To give you an insight, my baby cried for twenty seconds and was then fine again; I cried on and off for the next nine hours, at one point driving off wailing “You’ll be better off without me, I can only do harm here”.

Cheese

One day you’ll be sat there cuddling your baby, taking in those intoxicating aromas of off-milk and milky poo, and you’ll think to yourself, ‘Christ, this smells really bad’. There will be a new, worse-than-ever smell, and it’ll be coming from this little bundle of lusciousness because YOU’RE A BAD PERSON WHO HASN’T WASHED THEIR BABY PROPERLY. Your child will be secreting a minging cheese paste, probably within the folds of their fatty little neck. When you find it, all yellow and disgusting and wipe it off with your finger, gagging and grimacing throughout, it might even be sore underneath because of all the neglect and that. Bung on some Sudocrem and resolve to do better next time.

Head

‘Golly, I’m so efficient! Look at me carrying my baby in a harness AND doing the hoovering! I’ll put that shopping away now, that’ll be fun for her to look at’. These were my thoughts five seconds before I opened the fridge door into my baby’s head. To give her credit, she only made a brief ‘Rargh!’ sound (think goats on youtube), but I felt absolutely terrible and once again considered phoning Social Services to report myself. It’s okay though, once you tell people this, everyone has a story about how they’ve accidentally wanged their child into a wall or some such. My favourite comes from a friend who was showing someone how he put his daughter into one of those harnesses. With a breezy “…and so, you just slot her in like that!”, he pushed her in from one side, failing to notice that the other side wasn’t shut, essentially posting her through and frantically grappling to catch her before she landed on the floor. Which he did, for those who enjoy a happy ending.

So there we go. There’ll be more obviously, since one of the first things my husband said about her was “Man, I can’t wait to teach her how to spin fire!”; not to mention the untold psychological damage inflicted by parents with a questionable music collection and a fondness for practical jokes. I just thought I’d tell my mates who are doing babies that it’s both okay and inevitable if you ruin them just a tiny little bit, it’s life innit.

P.S. Please don’t give me any tips on how to cut nails etc, or advising me to bite them for her instead, I think that’s rank. Kind Regards xxx

Lunging is for winners

Hello. I’ve fallen back in love with exercise. I’ve sorely missed it over the past year and right at this moment I’m dizzily high on my own endorphins, admiring my own quads and polishing my kettlebell until it gleams. I’m feeling stronger than I have in ages, feeling a little bit spiffy in my clothes and no longer having to do ‘resigned face’ when I look in the mirror. This isn’t really because I’ve lost loads of weight (well, it’s a little bit about being slimmer than I was, I just wanted to sound like a really well-adjusted person incapable of vanity). I like not bulging out of my clothes and putting undue strain on the elastic in my knickers, but more than that I’ve got back on the bandwagon of lycra-clad pain because I want to be super strong and glossily, enviously healthy. In the words of my wonderful Twitter friend Lizzie, I’d like to be able to ‘bench press a sofa’ and live to be 130.

My fondness for exercise is a fairly recent concept in the grand old timeline of my life. We walked a lot as a family and always played outside, but the idea of organised sport always left me cold. With that terrible all-or-nothing part of my personality that I have tried to tame over the years, I thought that if you couldn’t be olympically wonderful at a thing, there wasn’t any point. My parents had both set some pretty amazing precedents in that arena, so I figured that since there was no likelihood of me representing my county or my country at anything, there wasn’t any point. Added to which, it seems a common theme among many of my friends that we detested PE at school. Like, physically loathed it and all it represented. It will paint a very accurate picture of me if I tell you that my three favourite sporting moments at school were an interpretative dance class where we did a robot routine to Axel F; a lone aerobics class in sixth form where I got to grapevine to the Prodigy; and a game my friend Selina and I made up called ‘colonial tennis’. It involved a lot of shouting and gesturing and very little hitting. My sporting life, people.

When I went away to uni, I put on the eminently predictable two stone that came hand in hand with drinking every day and subsisting entirely on carbs and fat. It sort of crept on and I didn’t notice until I sort of stopped one day and looked into my cruel mirror and realised I had become pudgy. Sort of sluggish looking and a bit grey. I did that dreadful and very British thing for a while of wearing the size of clothes you wish you were rather than the size you actually are, and looked way more horrendous than I would have done in jeans say, two or three sizes bigger. My friend Anna and I embarked on my first ever diet. Well, it was more than a diet, it was a colour-coded series of lists and checkboxes designed to revolutionise our whole life. Foolproof.

I tried a few things exercise-wise until I finally joined a gym, a place I thought was for saddos and people with body hang-ups. Despite fitting neatly into both these categories (I unsurprisingly went through a hazy, not-sure-if-it’s-finished yet period of complete body dysmorphia in my early twenties and took most of my anger and fear out on the way I looked or thought I did. Ugh. Getting older’s good isn’t it?) I found I really enjoyed myself. Something clicked and I found what I liked – it wasn’t competitive sport, it was exercising ALL BY MYSELF.

I’m a horribly competitive person. Losing at Scrabble or cards makes me a bit sad, but in terms of physical stuff I hate competing with other people (unless of course, they don’t know I am doing it, in which case it’s wonderful and YAY I WIN I WIN I WIN). Maybe I don’t have much confidence in my own abilities, or maybe I’m just scared to see how many people on a netball team would die if I really got going but it doesn’t float my boat. Running, however, or going to the gym, or swearing at workout dvds in my lounge, that’s totally my bag. Beating the crap out of a punchbag, doing some really good press-ups or sprinting until I do a little bit of metallic-tasting spitty sick; that’s when I feel all alive and super. And now it feels important, because although it was only about six or seven years ago that I didn’t want to exist at all, now I want to be here forever. To qualify that, I’d really like to be here, in as good nick and as sane as possible, for a very long time. That’s a nice ambition, isn’t it? On my count, let’s all do squats.

 

Baby Business: Sex, Exercise, Sleep, Bums, Stuff

So I’m 14 weeks in to this baby business and these are my observations at this point, given that (boobs aside) I’m feeling Pretty Normal (subject to change). Thanks to some Twitter lovelies getting in touch, I am now writing these thoughts down with some specific people in mind, but I would like at this point to issue some sort of ‘don’t sue me’ disclaimer. I love you all dearly so let’s not end this with legal wrangling (unless it ends in some sort of monster payout for me, I’d really like that sexy Tom Ford perfume, a cute little kilt and a blowout in Paperchase if that’s okay).

Sex

I’m not about to go into detail here as I’d quite like to stay married, especially now I’ve got a baby and more laundry and that; but I would like to reassure you that it all feels quite normal and no-one will cry. Obviously, you’re feeling quite cautious, and you have to be careful not to be too put off by the whole ‘oh dear god, what if we accidentally made another one, that would be dreadful’ thing. It’s easy to build up the fear but it’s best to just crack on, get back in the saddle and any other horrific euphemisms you can think of. The one weird thing is that your boobs are kind of out of your repertoire. Instead of being part of the natural progression of things, you both studiously ignore them and try to pretend that they don’t exist. I’m not sure when they come back into play, as it were, but I’m guessing when you’ve finished feeding your baby and all fear of accidental-milk-in-adult-mouth has passed. Aside from which, sensitivity is minimal. Once you’ve fed a baby for eight hours in a single day (YEAH I KNOW, THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED), someone else coming along and getting in on that action isn’t going to register very highly on the titillation scale. TITillation. Ahahahahahaha.

Exercise

If you’ve been doing your pelvic floor exercises like I shouted at you about before, this should all be okay. Now I’m not telling you to do it, there’s no right time, do what you want etc etc etc, but for me, I needed to get back out there and move again. Not only is it some welcome time on my own, but it makes me feel good about myself in a way that isn’t entirely about fitting into my jeans. Sanity not vanity, and all that (although honestly compels me to tell you it is at least 40% about vanity). If you’re breastfeeding you will still have plenty of relaxin in your system making your joints vulnerable so take it easy. As a committed all-or-nothing exerciser, this was the hardest thing for me to do, but starting slowly and building up my resistance gradually might just have been the most sensible, mum-type thing I’ve yet achieved. Hoorah for moderation, eh?

Sleep

Get used to answering a lot of questions and being stopped by people in the street. These people will want to know how old your baby is, how much it weighed, does it sleep, is it good. It’s quite nice in a way, but I imagine could be quite irritating as well, so have some stock responses to hand. People equate ‘sleeping’ in babies with ‘behaving’, and will judge you on this accordingly. Now (don’t hate me, please don’t hate me), but I am blessed with a sleep-through-the-night type baby. YES, YES, I’M VERY ANNOYING. It is however important to note that this is absolutely nothing to do with me, it’s the luck of the draw, so try not to let it get to you and tell everyone to piss off with their advice and well-meaning chiding when they think you’re doing it wrong. If you’re having a horrible time and not sleeping, eat WELL and LOTS and take any offer of help that comes your way. Should these offers not be forthcoming, invite a friend or family member over and simply pull their hair and kick their shins until they agree to clean your bathroom and cook you a roast.

Bums

It has been brought to my attention that last time I forgot to mention bums. Not of the baby variety, but yours. After birth you will develop acute Fear Of Pooing, which won’t be made any easier if you were one of the brave, wounded souls who endured tears, stitching or an episiotomy. If you are slightly anaemic after birth (and this is fairly common) many places will dish out iron tablets, which are lovely and free but in my experience cause crazy new levels of constipation. Instead, many chemists stock a liquid iron supplement which you add to juice – it’s about eight quid but worth it in order to make sure The Poo Of Destiny is as free-flowing as possible. With this in mind, you’ll also want to be chaining the veg and other fibre sources at this time. You’ll be completely exhausted and your body is a war zone, so eat well to get better and keep your digestive system in good order. I’m not saying you’ll be on a health kick – you will need everything you can cram in your tired, bloated little face. I have tried to forget but distinctly remember those first weeks only sleeping for forty minutes at a time – I managed to stay vertical when I needed to by eating lots of good hearty stuff plus at least three boxes of chocolates a day (thank you for my presents!) in addition to iron and vitamin supplements OH AND LOTS OF CRYING.

Stuff

You won’t need as much stuff for this baby as you think you will. You won’t need as much stuff as everyone else thinks you should have. To save money / stop your house looking like something we’d all gawp at on a ‘sensitive’ look-at-these-hoarding-weirdos type documentary, get the basics and leave everything else until you actually need it. If you have a car seat to bring them home in, something for them to sleep in, some clothes and some nappies YOU’LL BE FINE and YOUR BABY WILL BE FINE, because all they really want is you, to be fed, to be warm and to feel safe. And your boobs in front of their face at every given opportunity. They’re only human.

Anniversary!

A couple of weeks ago I went and met a whole load of people off the internet in a pub in Birmingham. I was initially wary because (and this is a story for another time) I’ve had some odd experiences with meeting internet folk and also because it was going to be a gang of medics and I’m very, um, un-medic-y. AND BAD WITH WORDS.

Do you know what though? I had a lovely time, confirmed that the people I thought were brilliant WERE indeed wonderful – people say you shouldn’t make snap judgments but I happen to be very good at them – and made some new friends along the way. All in all, a very good day and night during which I managed not to tell too many rude stories or let on that I can be a bit of a cow.

What was extra special for me was that I didn’t really have to explain myself. Because I had a little mental a year ago and decided to put my back-story on the internet, most of the people there understood my path into medicine and not having to come up with an unwieldy sentence for my mature student status every time I introduced myself to someone was a huge relief. What do you say? It’s something I get asked about on a daily basis on my course; in every new study group, in every clinic, on every ward (“What do you mean ‘I’m obviously a bit older’?!”, I say and then run to the mirror, crying). I am yet to come up with a handy set-piece which manages to convey that I didn’t just have some epiphany about wanting to be a doctor in my late twenties, that I didn’t go to uni at eighteen and find the studying a bit difficult, which is what most people assume when I say that I had a hard time first time around. Personally I’d find it easier to just tell the truth, but then this tends to make the person asking feel terrible and also seems ‘a bit much’ either when you’ve only just shaken hands in a bar or are looking at an x-ray together for the first time. So, answers on a postcard if you think you can crack it. (Seriously, I love postcards, DM for address etc)

This got me thinking about how glad I was to have got that little story off my chest a whole year ago now, how kind everyone had been about it, and how accepting most people are. I’ve had a really great year. When I wrote that story I was still reeling from a miscarriage and had honestly reached the point where I just didn’t think I was ever going to get pregnant again or that I’d have a successful pregnancy if I did. Looking at the date I’d posted it though, I must actually have been tinily, tentatively, itsy-bitsily pregnant, which perhaps explains the tidal wave of hormones that led me to sit down and type-cry my life to a bunch of strangers. At this very moment, my fat little rosebud of a baby sits next to me, laughing at a cushion and bashing my thighs with her spitty fist. In addition to this wondrousness, I’d had a good year at medical school where I’d actually made friends and, thanks to doing two days a week in hospital, got a bit of validation that I’d made the right choice in returning.

This validation is important to me because, in truth, I am a terrible medical student. My friends are almost entirely non-medics, I don’t spend any of the time when I’m not studying thinking about the subject, and my life outside of medicine is, and I suspect always will be, bigger than either the course or my job when I get there. It’s easy to feel quite guilty about this, like I’m not really ‘proper doctor material’. While I think the human body and the things that happen inside us are beautiful and miraculous, I’ll admit that I only learn about neuroanatomy or the bloody renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system because I have to; rather than just for the sheer love of the science behind it. I like people, I think I’m good at listening to people, being observant, playing ‘symptoms detective’ and communicating in a way that is useful and, where possible, makes them feel good. That is my pitiful skill set and I really hope it’s enough, especially as I already have moderate fear about returning to my course in September. My friends will all be a year ahead of me by then, and I’ll be with people another year younger. I’m not intrinsically ageist, and I hope I’ll meet some more great people but there’s something a little bit odd for me in being surrounded entirely by people born in the year I started getting off with boys and surreptitiously swigging Malibu at sleepovers. So, if I start to visibly wobble a bit when I return, I hope you’ll all shout at me IN CAPITALS to crack on with it and not get weighed down by what people might think of the haggard old crone in the corner. I think I’ll be quite good at it if I can just get there.

(This is a very odd PS. I’ve seen in various forums people referring a girl to my blog who has had a similarly shit time and is asking people for advice on re-applying to medical school. IF YOU WANT TO, WILL YOU CONTACT ME SO WE CAN TALK? I promise not to compare your story to mine or to offer advice, but I will listen, I will provide the facts that I know to be true in terms of re-applying as a failed student, and if you want I’ll try and help you with the process of doing so xxx)