Vagrant Wanderings

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:55:19 GMT

So, i have a 'trial day' at a job from an agency on monday....for £6.15ph (about 412, US peeps) plus bonuses + benefits, working in a callcentre. i could be out of Morrisons by the end of the week!

This can't go on

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 15:00:17 GMT

My little sister is being allowed to walk home alone from school...It's only a half mile, and for any other kid, even my youngest sister who's about 8, it would be a normal thing. But with Evie, it's entirely a different matter. She has 'petit mal' or 'childhood absence', a form of epilepsy. I copied and pasted the symptoms, below, as it's not that well known:

'People with absence epilepsy have repeated absence seizures that cause momentary lapses of consciousness. These seizures almost always begin in childhood or adolescence, and they tend to run in families, suggesting that they may be at least partially due to a defective gene or genes. Some people with absence seizures have purposeless movements during their seizures, such as a jerking arm or rapidly blinking eyes. Others have no noticeable symptoms except for brief times when they are "out of it." Immediately after a seizure, the person can resume whatever he or she was doing. However, these seizures may occur so frequently that the person cannot concentrate in school or other situations.'

Not only does this make my sister very vulnerable...but these episodes can occur while she's walking, and she'll just carry on going, in a straight line, essentially unconscious but fully aware to an outside observer. She has to cross roads, so I hope my concern isn't unfounded...but I don't think it's right that she's left to walk home alone, as it also makes her a particularly vulnerable target to a lot of unpleasant things that a normal 10 year old would be able to deal with....especially as these get worse and more frequent if she's put under psychological stress of any kind, if you see where I'm going. And there's nothing I can do about it, from 200 miles away, were anything to happen to her.

Feeling lost

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 11:17:45 GMT

I don't know how best to explain it...I'm feeling out of place. Muddled. Call it a crisis of identity, call it being an emo shif, fuck knows what it is but I feel like I've lost something....but i don't know what that thing is. Maybe it's the fact i haven't trained in almost 2 years...the fact that my sensai was certain that i would be able to set up a new club of my own by the time i hit 20, but after all my health problems...I just stopped. Maybe it's the fact I haven't seen most of my friends in over a year and the realisation that I don't really have any close ones here. Or the fact that following the death of his aunt, Chris has become...distant i guess. I just feel isolated. Could also be the fear that I won't be welcome at Chris' aunt's funeral next week...it was Chris that asked me to go with him, i wasn't invited. i know for a fact that most of his family severely dislikes me.

And the fact I'm having to deal with a solicitor in a legal case against my work isn't helping. I just want to walk out of that place, but i know if i do my claim'll never go through.

Time to report to the union

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 11:43:57 GMT

Seriously tempted to get my work in serious shit. Slipped on a wet patch of floor (no wet floor signs up on anything), and so someone called a first aider cause I'd sprained my wrist and my ankle. Couldn't put any weight on my right foot. A senior manager told the first aider, in no uncertain terms, that there was 'nothing they could to', sent me upstairs and told me to go get a cup of coffee, then came up 5 minutes later to send me back down to work. Damn lucky that I carry painkillers in my bag or I'd've been fucked, since they didn't even offer me that.

I was told I'd be on tills all day to 'rest' (no help to my wrist of course) but 3 hours before I was due to finish I was sent onto the shop floor, even though i couldn't walk properly. <_<

Sumry of tl;dr: I was made to work a 9 hour shift with a sprained wrist and ankle without being offered so much as an aspirin, let alone any first aid help, because my work are cunts.

On family

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:18:11 GMT

So....I haven't seen my dad since early september last year. I know I was ill and in and out of hospital for months, but I still feel really ashamed about it. I'm finally going there on thursday, and coming back on Monday...and it really brought things home when I was told that I still had christmas presents waiting for me...

I worry about how much things will have changed...or is it how much I'll have changed, since a lot has happened over this last year. It's a big homecoming for me, I suppose. Plus it's a meet the parents thing...Chris hasn't met my dad or any of that side of my family at all. I can't wait to see everybody, but I'm a little nervous about it all...especially as i'm taking Chris there on the wekeend of this event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanidloes_Fancy_Dress (they underestimate the numbers there, it's considered to be closer to 10,000 people on a good year) which means that when he meets everyone, and vice versa, they'll all be in costume! Chris is going as The Doctor. My costume is...yet to be decided xD I'll provide pictures, though.

Health matters

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:50:18 GMT

I collapsed twice during my work shift yesterday....both times i managed to get out of sight when I did it...(difficult in a supermarket) because I can't afford to lose this job. Bad enough that my uni is on the ropes, though at least they're being sympathetic to the current situation and I'm in extension city.

Had some major grief with the hospital on sunday. I collapsed three times over the weekend, once rather dramatically sideways into a wall when walking down the street, so my boyfriend missed work to take me in. On a side note, his mother has condemned me as a manipulative bitch because he stayed here an extra day as a result and stated that I'm not welcome to stay with them anymore. Their tests all came back negative so they said I should wait to see my doctor who would probably (note the optimism in their statement: they didn't want to have to deal with all of this themselves) refer me to a neurologist....am I allowed to be scared by this concept? Oh, I won't re-write it here, but I'm actually about to enter into formal complaints proceedings against the hospital after they a) gave me a pill that made it worse for hours afterwards, b)accused me of faking it when i collapsed on the floor after they'd dismissed me and c) left me to walk several miles home (read: be half carried) when I couldn't even stand up without support.

So...I found out yesterday that my blood test results were all negative...I haven't found much condolence in that fact. That's because as a result they've decided that there is nothing wrong with me. They just want to wait for another month and see if it gets better by itself, and if not just repeat the same tests again. Going by the fact I'm collapsing from dizziness on a daily basis now...and this had been going on for over a month, and worsening exponentially within that time...I fail to see their logic.

This isn't helped by what I found out last week...my uncle (and my sister's godfather) has cancer, of the liver and bowel. Although his chances of pulling through are very good, he's in intense chemo. But my family are putting on a brave face about it. The common joke on the topic is that at least he has no hair to lose!

...On a more positive (ish) note, on the weekend of the 15th and 16th February, my boyfriend is finally coming with me to meet a load of my relatives. We've been together since 10th July, so this is a big thing for us, as he's not been introduced to a single member of my family, and we're set to move in together at the end of June. The preparations for that are already underway, and it's all really exciting. It's a long distance relationship right now: he's up in south west scotland, about 250 miles away, so everything is quite difficult. Most of my wages seem to go on train tickets as we spend most weekends together! (I think that's why I'm so bankrupt, my account hovers around the 0 mark)

...the source of all of my health problems

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 07:38:45 GMT

I always thought I was just unlucky....always getting injuries and the like when I was stressed...but got some fantastic news today...(not)

My back problem is in part the result of something i'll have had my whole life. that i've got an imbalance between my autonomic nervous system and my hormone levels. it can have different signs in different people. asthma, hayfever, exzema, OCD, coldness in the extremities, depending on what it affects (OCD is overresponse to visual stimuli, ashtma and hayfever to air, exzema in the skin, coldness to temperature. It's got a strong genetic component, and the things are interlinked : my aunt is OCD, my sister and a few othersasthmatic and an awful lot of my family have exzema, Eating disorders go in with it too Apparently general things that go with it are being high achievers and general 'jumpiness'. I'm lucky though. Could also have been mood swing and migraines, Luckily I avoided those two...God it sounds like PMT.

Mine's along the similar lines (can tell i've got it by the fact that regardless of air temperature my hands and feet are always icy cold) but its also to pain: when i'm stressed the inhibition of seratonin and endorphins is much worse, so my body has no natural resistance to pain at all at those times, basically. any pain i'm in is amplified to far higher than what a normal person would experience. and it'll reoccur every time i get stressed. Things that would be almost, or very nearly totally, filtered out by a normal person by endorphins become painful to me. And with my history of unpleasant incompletely healed injuries...well I'll leave that to your imaginations. There's no way to treat it other than for my to make every effort to lower my own stress levels. It's not as bad as it sounds, of course, because I've always been like that.

People have already suggested that I leave acf xD

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:02:44 GMT

Typical timing. I'm sick and I have work tonight, plus a presentation to do. Just something to traumatise you here:

1. Diet of pre-human hominids and early humans
Investigating the diets of early hominids is at best challenging and at worst amounts to
simply cataloguing what vertebrates were available. How can we determine what foods
were (to end of European Palaeolithic).available to hominids, and how can we hope to find out what they actually ate?
Methods have included inference from human anatomy, tooth-wear, and isotopes, as well
as from anthropological parallels. Determining diets of human ancestors is fundamental
in understanding how the energy-draining human brain could grow so excessively large,
and what allowed (or drove) dispersal across the world.

I know less than nothing about this topic myself, either.Though on a lighter note I no longer have to write an essay for Friday. Because of the specifics of one of my modules I can hand in one in two weeks and one in four instead.But damn am I running one hell of a fever...still going to work tonight (can't afford not to), but at least I work in the section with the fridges

update on life

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:05:01 GMT

Lots of news for you all:

I went from having no jobs to two, of a sort Job number one is standard, I'm doing ten hours of shelf stacking in the pre-prepared food section of a big local supermarket a week. Get just enough to pay my rent, meaning I can easily live off my student loan for everything else, and actually afford to have a life for once.Job two is just ultimate win. I'm a voluntary assistant for phd research on the analysis of excavated human remains. Basically means I get given a skeleton on a table and paperwork to fill out on how well it's survived, any obvious diseases it had in life (stuff like leprosy, tuberculosis, arthritis and the like), rough age of death and a few other things besides.

Still no computer Was conned, and am waiting while they try to get me my money back. But as soon as I get that I'll
order myself another one. In that time I've gone back to trying to repair my old piece of antiquated crap, yet again. Oh, and the internet in my house is down for the millionth time. I went away for the weekend and one of my housemates killed it, it seems. I really wish the landlord had let us sort it out ourselves instead of him taking on all the administration of it, because the connection is atrocious.

My modules This term my modules are fantastic, other one is analysing animal skeletons, a step down to what my voluntary work is doing. The other is dealing with the influence of people on the environment and vice versa (human ecology, to put it in its broad sense)

Life and love Me and Chris, my current boyfriend, are still going strong after over 3 months. Because we're now both working we see each other pretty much every weekend, even though it's a 5 hour journey each way. My mum is still pestering me to let her meet him, but to be honest, I'm worried as to the fact that, going by past record, her and my stepdad will try to scare him away! Though i don't think they will succeed, my family are a bit...intimidating to most people.

Family My gran had to go into hospital last friday, to get her hip replaced, but all seems to have gone well. Bless her, it's something like the fifth hip replacement she's had to have. Her first one was when she was only in her forties. I hope that isn't genetic! I'm planning on getting a train to get that hour and a bit up the coast to go and see how she's doing, maybe next week or the week after as I have thursdays off.

I guess that's it for now. But all seems to be going pretty well aside from the computer!

hospitals...

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 09:37:43 GMT

Yeah for those of you that don't know (not many, I rant enough on msn etc) I would up in hospital yesterday. My right ankle is swollen to twice the size it should be and turning purple. But it was an utter farce.

1: The Triage nurse (the one who makes a preliminary assesment to see how urgent an issue it is, dodn't even look at it. Hardly asked me anything and didn't listen when I said anything. Only 'assessment' she did was getting me to wiggle my toes. And so what she wrote on my assessment form (I saw it later) was only a bunch of lies about my having a past history of ankle problems. Do I hell! I've sprained it, ONCE, and I never even said that cause it was years ago.

2: When the nurse came to collect me from the waiting room she practically ran down the corridor...I couldn't keep up because i can hardly put any weight on my right foot. I tried and it was agony, and got this disapproving look when she finally stopped to wait, which was after a doctor came round the corner...

3:Turned out I was enver actually going to be able to see a real doctor. That nurse was the one doing the assessment. I had to repeat everything and not be listened to, again, although she clearly didn't believe me as to how I'd done it. Again it wasn't looked at. She poked the top of my foot (the bit that WASN'T swollen) a few times, then poked my achilles tendon which was obviously not damaged as the doctor I'd seen at the village surgery that morning (who'd referred me to the hospital) had said. She remarked that one side of my ankle was turning a weird colour and more swollen but ddin't actually look at it other than that...may I just say...DUH. Esoecially as I'd told them that the doctor I'd seen that morning suspected that there was a fractured bone there. She also completely failed to notice what other people, icluding the village doctor, had: that my foot has angled inwards slightly. (severe enough that when I try to walk it is almost entirely on the outside of my foot)

3: When they took the x-ray the angle wouldn't have shown the point that was supposed to be fractured. It was from the inside of my foot: the bone (which is the one on the very outside) would have been obscured from clear view by the (fair large number) of small bones in the way. I actually had this explained to me when I went for an x-ray on my hand early this year and had to bend my fingers at weird angles so none were overlapping. The second was a view from straight above: no use when I was suspected to have taken off a piece of the end of a bone.

4: The same nurse as 2 actually admitted that they didn't know what was wrong with it. She said it was probably 'ligament damage' but admitted that they wouldn't explain the way it had swollen.

5: I wasn't given any advice of what to do about it at all. Just told to go and stay in bed for a couple of days and told to take nurofen or something. They put one of those white elastic supports on it which doesn't actually do anything. I may as well have worn a long sock. Oh, and I still can't walk. I alternate between hobbling and actualy having to hop if I walk more than, say, fifty metres.

A fresh beginning

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 23:31:45 GMT

Yeah, so I tired of my last journal....it was full of really depressing stuff that I don't want to be reminded of, and I'm trying to finally get away from my past. So here it is. New start, new look, new journal. Still the same old wolf though.