Look on the bright side of life.

What I really want to do right now is to hide under a big blanket never to emerge again. As you know I got the results from my “Doctorate in Educational Psychology”-interview yesterday, and you’ve probably guessed from the first sentence of this post that I was unsuccessful.

A part of me is not surprised at all, at the interview I was extremely nervous and already half way through the day I felt that I wasn’t giving my best at all. I got muddled and giggly (as I do when I get nervous) and was not giving a good impression. On my way home I was upset with myself and deep down inside I knew I wasn’t going to get in. But a small part of myself still hoped. Hoped that everyone else was a lot worse than me. And it’s that part of me that is disappointed and upset.

It is understandable that I am upset and disappointed, I mean this was the chance of my life! The thing I am most disappointed about is that it feels as if my life is not going anywhere at the moment. I feel stuck. I have for a long time had this feeling of “stuckness” and yesterday I could finally put in words why I feel so stuck. The situation I am in is so insecure; me and Rob are renting our flat, knowing that if our landlord decides he wants the flat back for some reason we would have to move. We both are in jobs that we know we’re not going to have forever (both planning on changing jobs and moving up the career ladder/study some more, etc.), and at the moment we don’t have a huge amount of savings. This all makes us financially vulnerable, we can’t plan for the future, something that makes me feel as if life has no point to it. Not getting in on the doctorate confirmed this feeling of being stuck.

However, yesterday I decided that I was going to allow myself to be disappointed and upset, after all it is understandable and it is OK to have these feelings. Denying myself to feel is something I’ve been doing too long, which more than once has made me take my feelings out on food and the way I can control it, allowing myself to feel will curb this. But I also decided that I was going to look at the positives of this whole thing. So here’s my list of positives:

• I now have the experience of doing one of these interviews and I know what to change for next time. Also my nerves won’t play such a big part either next time.
• I will have time and hopefully money to start doing my driving lessons! I’ve got the theory done and have about 18 months to sort my practical out.
• I actually enjoy my job and the people I work with are great. My job will also give me great experience.
• I will get another 3 pay rises at work.

May goals

Time to update those monthly goals!

My April Goals were:

• Continue with my physiotherapy exercises and do them at least 2 times a day. This has not really worked. I get home from work exhausted most days and late so I mainly have time for dinner and to go to bed… But I have been doing some of them throughout my day at work when I can and properly on weekends.
• Start with the yoga sessions at work. Well, yoga got cancelled one week and the next time I forgot my kit at home. But today I actually went! It was great and very challenging for my muscles!
  
• Send off a first draft of my article to my old supervisor. This is something that is still in progress, I’m almost there!
• Not think of the results I’ll get on the 3rd of May too much, whatever it says! This has not worked at all… I have been thinking about non-stop… But it hasn’t intruded on my life too much.
• Make sure I have cheap and healthy packed lunches to work every day. This has worked very well! Haven’t had one shop-bought lunch all of April!

May goals:

• Do my physiotherapy exercises as often and as much as I can.
• Continue with the yoga sessions at work.
• Keep working on my article.
• Be constructive, not destructive, about the decision I will get from Southampton Uni, whatever the decision is.
• Continue with the cheap and healthy packed lunches for work.
• Become better at saving money.

Time to get serious!

Two weeks until I go to Southampton for that interview! I’ve made a plan for how to prepare for it (I’m a ‘plan-making’ kind of person) and as I was sent the programme for the interview day it wasn’t very hard.  There will be a group task, which I can’t prepare for really as I will not know the task before hand. However, I had to go through a group task for my last interview and I think I did pretty well (I mean I got the job after all) and I am fairly confident that I’m good in groups. The next part will be an individual interview which will consist of two parts; ‘academic’ and ‘the practice of educational psychology’. So I need to show that I am academic (know what’s going on in educational psychology, etc.) and that I know what educational psychology is about. For this I will prepare through;

Academic;

• Reading recent educational psychology journals
• Reading up on children services issues
• Write down how I have applied psychology in my work settings

Educational Psychology Practice;

• Read EdPsych job descriptions
• Sum up what I know about EdPsych’s and their work
• Write down what I have done to get learn more about Educational Psychology and Educational Psychologists
• Write down my skills and how they will help me in my job as a future EdPsych!

Then the interview will finish with a individual task. For this we’ll be given a short paper that we’ll have to read and summarise, highlighting the key points of the paper. This will be timed so will have to be done in a certain time frame. For this I can simply summarise one or two of the academic papers I will read as preparation for the academic-part of the individual interview.

As you probably understand, I am so nervous about this! It’s like an opportunity of a lifetime! Feel like all this preparation is going to lead me nowhere, but as Benjamin Franklin once said “Failing to prepare is preparing for failure”. So if I don’t prepare I will almost definitely fail! Better make the most of this!

 

I didn’t eat too much sugar!

Most of my regular readers probably already know that I have type 1 diabetes, but most of you probably do not know entirely what it involves what the difference between the two types are, etc. (and for those who truly do I take my hat off for you!). I don’t blame you guys, media does not do much to distinguish between the types of diabetes and likes to scare people into all sorts of interesting diets. Saying “eating like this will CURE your diabetes” or “this diet will protect you from getting diabetes” earns news papers and magazines millions, but doesn’t make life easy for people like me.

Before I go into explaining what type 1 diabetes is, I’d like to tell you my story. Because behind every diagnosis there is a story, a person. A person is never their diagnosis and I think I speak for everyone with a condition or disability here; please see the person behind the medical terms.

I remember suddenly getting very thirsty, I had never been one of those people who carry a water bottle around, I didn’t even drink after gym class, or my karate or figure skating sessions. Maybe a few sips here and there but never a whole bottle like some of my peers could. So, this sudden thirst really threw me a bit. Why was I asking my teacher to be excused so that I could go and have an extra cup of water? At first I thought I had just become normal, like my friends I would now drink more water, after all drinking enough water was healthy. However, when my thirst went beyond just having some extra cups of water in the day, when it started waking me up in the night and coupled with an ever increasing need to go to the toilet, getting dehydrated and being extremely tired I started getting worried. I told my mum (who is a health professional) and she said that maybe I had eaten something salty, it probably wasn’t anything. But still she advised me to go to the school nurse and ask her if she could measure my blood sugar. To 14 year old me this all sounded very alien, blood sugars, what were they? What did it have to do with my thirst, tiredness and constant urinating? Nevertheless I went to the school nurse the next day and she said she didn’t have a blood glucose meter, but that the school doctor would come around in a months time and that he could do it then. She did measure my iron levels and they were fine so she said I probably was fine and should come back in a months time if I was still experiencing my symptoms. That afternoon I fell asleep in class, something that had never ever happened to me, my teachers woke me up and my English teacher drove me home as she was worried about me. I got home and my mum called from work (she worked a late shift), I told her what had happened and she told me to try and stay up until she got home, she wasn’t impressed with the school nurse’s answer. My mum borrowed a blood glucose meter from her work and when she got home she measured my blood glucose. I remember it reading 13.2mmol/L. It was high, I probably had diabetes. I was told to go to bed and if it was still high in the morning we would go to hospital. That night I went to bed wondering what on earth I had done wrong? I was 14, I exercised, I didn’t eat sweets and fatty foods more than for celebrations and at weekends…

The next morning my mum measured my blood sugar and it was 12.2mmol/L, a little bit lower but still high. I had breakfast and we then went to A&E. At hospital I was admitted straight away, I had lost over 10kg’s in weight and my skin was very, very dry. The doctor measured my blood glucose again and this time it was 18mmol/L. I remember that as I was later admitted to room 18. My diagnosis was type 1 diabetes and I spent 2 weeks at hospital learning how to deal with the condition, learning how to give myself injections, how to measure my blood sugars and how to deal with my diet.

I’ve lived like that for over 10 years now, regular blood sugar checks, insulin injections/pump therapy is a part of my every day life. If I accidentally take too much insulin or I unexpectedly do some extra exercises (for example walk somewhere because I just missed a bus, or I get something extra to do at work) I get hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). People never take me seriously when I say that I have a low blood sugar or hypoglycemia. Some people think it’s like just being a little bit extra hungry. It’s not. When I get hypoglycemia (blood sugar under 4.0 mmol/L; I’ve been as low as  1.0 mmol/L) I start shaking, become pale, feel faint, get very confused, sometimes I even get aggressive, and I get very hungry. In this case I need to eat something sweet, otherwise I can faint and in the worst case scenario I can go into a coma or die.

The last sentence in the last paragraph reminds of what I really wanted to say with this post. A few months after I had got the diagnosis I was at school and I got a low blood sugar. My friend got me a regular Coca Cola so that my blood sugar would go up. One of my teachers walks by and starts telling me off for putting sugar into my body. My friend tries to explain about my low blood sugar, but my teacher rejects this and starts lecturing my friend about me not being able to have sugar because of my diabetes. Luckily by that time I had drunk enough of the Coca Cola to be OK, but this is a common misunderstanding about type 1 diabetes, and it could have been dangerous. People in general think that if you have diabetes (any type) you ate too much sugar and can’t have any sugar ever again. This has happened to me several times, when I was 17 my public health teacher told our class that type 1 diabetes is something you get due to your lifestyle. When I told him this was not the case, he started some sort of war with me and every class started with “today we are going to talk about X, unless miss Maria over there wants to prove us wrong”. Last time something like this happened was when I was in hospital after my operation. Funnily enough one of the night nurses asked me how long I had had the condition. I told her it was just over 10 years. She looked at me and said: “But you’re not fat!”. So I politely said I had type 1 diabetes and not type 2 and she just looked perplexed at me as if I had just told her that I’ve got wings and was going to fly to Australia, then she said: “But you get diabetes from being fat, right?”

I understand people’s confusion, which is why I wrote this post. What I don’t understand is that educated people, especially those that work as nurses and teachers. I don’t want people to be confused, and I don’t want people to judge me every time I have to explain that I have type 1 diabetes. I want people to understand me, to know that I am a person behind my diagnosis, just like every one else. If you want to know more about this, I’ve got some links at the bottom of this post so please, read up and be educated

- http://www.bupa.co.uk/individuals/health-information/directory/t/type-1-diabetes

- http://www.diabetes.org.uk/Type-1-diabetes/

- http://www.lifescan.co.uk/type-one?gclid=CKaYrI-1xbUCFcbKtAodtnYAPQ

 

Life is pretty sweet sometimes.

What a day I’ve had so far!

This is my first day home alone, the knee is coming along well, so I wasn’t too worried, as you read and saw in my last post I can now bend my leg beyond 90˚ and I am managing the swelling well. Nothing to be worried about, right? Eh, maybe there is. I decided to go to my local chemist to pick up some of my medicines. I got there alright, but while in the queue waiting for the pharmacist to sort it all out I suddenly felt very faint and had to let her know and go and sit down. She later came with my medicines and a cup of water. I got so scared, imagine if I would have fainted? Fallen over with a newly operated knee… Not a good idea…

Anyway, I managed to perk up, left the chemist and decided it would be best to do a pit stop at my local Nero for some coffee and lunch. While there I checked my e-mail and saw that I had got one from the Department of Education, letting me know that my status on one of my applications had been changed. I automatically thought it had gone to “unsuccessful at shortlisting” like the other ones had. But as I couldn’t check the application website form my iPhone I had to wait until I got home. When I got home I checked the application website and to my disbelief it said I had been invited for an interview!! I have been invited for an interview to get on the Educational Psychology doctorate at the University of Southampton! I still can’t quite believe this!

I am invited for an interview!!

After this I got another e-mail from work, letting me know that I passed a test of knowledge at work (have to do tests at work as I am on a trainee-programme). I got 86% right on it! All in all I’ve had a very odd day, going from very low to very high! Hopefully I’m lucky at the interview too!

I want to be successful.

Since I left university, finishing my masters degree I have been in the process of re-writing my thesis into a journal article. Having my own original research published has been one of my longest academic dreams. And now when I have the backing of my supervisor, who herself is a very successful academic, pediatrician and lecturer, I seem to be hesitant.

Having six weeks off work due to my knee operation I saw as an opportunity to get this done, to get the thesis fit for a peer-reviewed journal. You know how they say that when one door closes another door opens. My time off was to be one of those situations, it wasn’t just going to be a sad time with lots of pain and ‘waiting’ to get better, it was also going to be an opportunity. I know it’s only been two days after my operation and one of them was spent in hospital, but I can’t seem to get myself to do it. It is as if I am so close to this dream that I’m not sure if I really want to take the big step and actually make it happen. I open the Word-document and I just stare at it, I don’t want to change it, I don’t know what to change. It feels as if I do change it, I will change something nice that I created. I know I have the original saved in several places, but to actually change it I have to get over this mental barrier I have… But it feels like I’m vandalising my own work somehow.

Another part of me is hesitant because I don’t know what to do with it. This is a new thing, something I haven’t done before. I don’t know where to start and as much as I google it, it doesn’t give me any straight forward answers. I guess I have to learn the hard way…

What would be your advice for me? How do I get over the mental barrier? Do I just need to kick myself in the back-side and get going?

How on earth..?

So, I just wanted to put a quick post here about my result from my dissertation. I got an A! How on earth I did this, I don’t know, but somehow I managed to pull through and get an A! I must say that I am very proud of myself though!

 

My thesis (Initials are wiped off for security reasons).

It’s all over.

So, as you all know I have been working on my thesis and yesterday I managed to finish it, have it bound and hand it in. Handed it in a week early, not because I am one of those organised, super smart people that think they’re better than everyone else, but because I had to. Let me explain; the deadline is on the 31st of August at 5pm, I start working on the 28th of August. The 27th is a bank holiday (i.e. no one to bind it or hand it in to as everything will be closed) and I will work between 8.45am and 5pm every day from the 28th. That means I will have to leave my flat at 7am and won’t come home until gone 6pm. There will, in other words, be no chance in hell of me keeping working on the thesis or have to time to get to any binders to bind my thesis, and then to uni to hand it in. So I had to finish it and hand it in a week early. But at least I have a bank holiday weekend to relax in before I start full time work again! It just feels so weird… I can just relax guilt free. I still forget every now and then and feel guilty for not writing on my thesis! Like this morning when I woke up at 8am and my first thought was “Oh no, I should have gone up an hour ago and already worked some on my thesis! Then I remembered that I don’t need to anymore! It feels very strange indeed!

My thesis (Initials are wiped off for security reasons).

@ Benugo

Righty, here I am at ‘benugo’ at King’s Cross Station. What I’m doing here? Well, waiting for Rob to finish work and come and join me so that we can take the train to Ashford. Meanwhile I’m writing, writing on my thesis, and you know what? I think I am getting somehwhere! I even think that what I’ve written so far is good, extremely good. I just need to get it all back into the actual word limit. At least 1000 words that need to go. How do you do that when every single word is so important? Ah, well I guess I’ll do it, somehow!

I am getting there!

I am almost there, a few more days of some hard work and I will be done!