Of Beaches, Daylight Robbery and Feral Kittens.

....So I just got back from that place. Naturally, could not have been happier to see Merry England again, with her rolling fields, her vibrant greenery.
...Except that literally nothing could be seen out of the aeroplane, and so I thought we were descending through miles of cloud, when suddenly we hit the runway, and I realised that it was actually just fog that reduced visibility to zero. FUN.
As I said. Great to be back, lol.

So Tunisia! Spent a week there as a post exams gift from the parents (partially to make up for the fact that whilst I've been on this degree they've all been on holiday without me ¬_¬) and it was TOTALLY AWESOME. Granted, all the Tunisians were bewildered at how this was the coldest they had known it in 10 years (naturally, the climate followed me), but this was not too big an issue, as when the sun came out it was totally beautiful.
So I have photos! :D

This next one is a typical street in Kerouan, which is a small traditional village- a man (see: vulture) recognised that my dad and I were tourists, and so offered to be our 'guide' by saying 'YOU COME WITH ME'. Naturally, like lost sheep we followed him around streets like this one, whilst he showed us various interesting things. He also made sure that he took us to all his friends shops, and that we bought something ridiculously overpriced at each one. Since this was our first day, we were failures at haggling, and were effecively robbed of our money. Ahem. We decided to avoid markets after this.

One thing that is interesting is that the doors are really important! Arab houses have brown doors, Berber houses have blue ones, and mosques have green ones. All had very intricate designs on them. Tunisians are also very superstitious, and so their door knockers are shaped like a small hand, called 'the hand of Fatima', and it's supposed to ward off evil eye...! And the number of knockers on a door signifies how many families live there. Some doors also have a smaller door built in, so that kids can use it. Of course, the 'guide' could've just made all this up... but we trust him. My dad paid him at the end of the tour because if anything, he was creative.

 On the way to Kerouan our driver pointed this out- Butchers will hang the head of the first animal slaughtered that day outside the shop. WHAT THE HELL. At one shop we saw a camels head hung outside! Highly disconcerting.

This is Saeed the camel (I kid you not), who walked round this well in Kerouan, which drove a wheel to pull up water. He was quite adorable.  Kerouan is, I believe, the origin of the word caravan, because it's where bedouins etc used to camp and rest with their camels and caravans.

This was the beach when the sun came out in the evening and it lit up the sand like gold glitter. I was just taken aback by how beautiful it was, seriously. Oh my god. 

...This was me trying to be arty and take a perspective shot. Ahem. This failure that you see below is part of my dress, towering over my dad in the distance. Nice one, Humaira. 

Just WOW. 

We had a horse and carriage ride! There were two horses and the left one kept attacking th eright one, which was funny/disconcerting. The driver, pictured below, looked like Asian Bradley Cooper (Good thing I am not a fan), and smoked like a chimney, taking time to turn around and inform us about Tunisia, whilst breathing smoke in our faces. Nice. He informed us that his priorities in life, in order, were house, car, money, then wife. What a guy. 

Tunisia is overrun with cats. One adorable example is the one below, who, when I took out the camera, assumed it was food and came right up to me to try and eat it, hence the close up. Another one found me whilst I was eating at an outdoor cafe with my dad, and sensing I was a soft touch, sat and watched me eat food forlornly, with great big cow eyes,  mewing and waiting for me to throw it some chicken. When I refrained, it spent half an hour trying to jump into my lap/onto the table/mewing loudly/watching me with guilt-inducing judgement. Adorable! But I couldnt get a photo because it thought the camera was food also, and tried to jump on me.

Other things that happened

• The Hotel that we stayed at was very nice, but had a tendency to play the same songs again and again and again @_@ I lost count of the number of times I heard Enrique Iglesias's Hero, and Mariah Carey's Hero one, and some other 80s hits that only my dad could identify, which made him very happy. It was all I could do to stop him going to the karaoke ¬_¬ At one point, when we were having dinner, the cheesy keyboard player started singing the Police's 'Every step you take' song in a heavy Tunisian accent. He must've been puzzled to see the unassuming small man with glasses at one of the tables suddenly brandish his knife and fork fiercely, whilst shouting 'YOU'RE MURDERING IT!'.  
•  It rained.
• People assumed my dad and I were Arabs, and so Tunisians full on addressed us in Arabic, only relaising that we had no idea what they were saying after about five minutes of us looking gormless. 
• French was the other main spoken language. I spent a lot of time conjugating verbs in my head as revision.
• I READ FIVE WHOLE BOOKS :D Seriously, it felt amazing. The Hunger Games trilogy is totally awesome and addictive and should be read. And Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is THE BEST BOOK EVER. Since Kavalier and Clay and Mister Pip and a few others. But seriously, SO GOOD. I would avoid the film like the plague because I can't understand how it's going to do the book justice.
• We visited the ruins of a massive Roman public bath at Carthage, which was awesome. My dad and I were the only people under 55 on that coach...just not good. Also, the tour guide was the grumpiest person ever, and held no prisoners.

Tour guide (speaking to us via mic on coach): Es ist ein sehr klein-
Woman (interrupting): Are you going to be talking in English? because most of us are English on here and we can't understand you.
Tour guide: YOU DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO, LADY. I AM TOUR GUIDE FOR MANY YEARS IT NO MY FAULT PEOPLE SPEAKING DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. NO. NO, YOU DONT WORRY, I WILL SPEAK ENGLISH AS WELL. DONT YOU TELLING ME HOW TO BE TOUR GUIDE.

Best tour guide ever. When she started on him again later, he turned away like a sulky child and shouted 'IF YOU WANT SAY SOMETHING TO ME YOU SAY TO MY FACE'
He then had a complet mood swing and offered her part of a doughnut he was eating. Just hilarious!

• I was also full on proposed to by a random Tunisian man, on the one occasion I was alone in the lobby. This would, I suppose, have been flattering if he did not have th eeyes of a killer, and if, once I told him I was recently married, he had not promptly asked if I knew any other single Pakistani girls ¬_¬ Thanks a whole bunch, Romeo. 

...And not much else happened! Or rather, a lot did but I can't remember it now, so we'll leave it there :)

Hope you are all good and well and awesome etc!

*waaaves*

Trust me, I'm half a doctor.

OH MY GOD HELLO EVERYONE

So I know I've been absent for...*checks* 3 months, and before that was absent for about 3 months, but Medicine has a way of making you feel guilty for doing anything that is not Medicine. On numerous occasions these past months, various enjoyable activities have been clouded by revision guilt. Food became just another opportunity to revise the digestive system. Pre-sleep relaxation was suddenly an opportunity to listen to my heart/bowel sounds. Any kind of bright light was grabbed and shone in someone's (willing or non willing) eye in order to observe their pupil response. My family just became Simulated Patients to Practice Examinations on, or Lay People to Practice Explaining Stuff To. My dad, a pharmacist, became a Person Who Can Test Me On Drugs and Side Effects. Even the Emadness fell victim to this, enduring a full teaching session on the basal ganglia, which basically allows us to initiate or inhibit our actions. I will test you on this ¬_¬

You'll forgive me then, if I say that everytime I opened up the Blogger Dashboard, my eyes were literally and painfully dragged away to the bookmark at the top of my screen that said 'Spinal Cord levels', and an evilly smug voice in my head didn't say anything, but I could hear it smirking. Pfft.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, all this thinking does have negative mental effects. Just a few weeks ago, I sacrificed a revision break in order to conduct a full cardiovascular examination on an imaginary patient in my room, right down to addressing the pillow as if it was the patient. Out loud. I was really friendly, too. To a pillow. Sometimes I'm glad I don't study at home, so my family are spared from The Madness.

I'm not saying it's always awful to revise- I'm geeky enough to be interested. You're talking to the kid who read first-aid books in her spare time, I joke you not. On numerous occasions, I have been caught attempting to explain complex medical ideas to the younger (see ages 8+) cousins. My excuse, as I am dragged away, is that they will be able to impress their classmates, dammit. The younger brothers have learnt to tune me out at the dinner table when I launch into explanations of korotkoff sounds (blood pressure), or to just full on drown me out (see the time that I started talking about oesophageal varices, which cause you to vomit massive amounts of blood everywhere. In hindsight, probably not the best timing). Just last week, whilst out shopping solo, I decided that I would go all House and observe people for gait abnormalities. Third person I saw had foot drop, which is where they can't lift their foot to point up whilst walking, so it 'drops', which shows damage to the superficial fibular nerve, which can be caused by a car bumper hitting your lower leg side-on :D WOO. I'm probably wrong now. You can't crush the enthusiasm but sometimes I am woefully misguided.

There are physical effects too- I have put on a shameful amount of Revision Weight- due mainly to the fact that my schedule since October (and also the summer before, when I was revising for that bloody resit) has consisted of:

• Wake up.
  
• Breakfast + watch something which does not require thinking
• Revise
  
• Eat + watch something which does not require thinking
• Revise with housemates
  
• Eat + watch something which does not require thinking/brief, traumatised conversation with housemates.
• Sleep
• Repeat
  

It's not the best formula for physical fitness. Hence, I have turned into a pile of flab and acquired a tire. No amount of sitting up straight whilst examining my profile in the mirror can eliminate it, and I feel it's just disturbing. Further physical effects include turning ghostly pale due to a lack of sunlight (plus, no doubt the long term effects of a complete lack of vitamin D); sunken eyes that just exude 'help me'; and a constant fight, fright or flight response- dilated pupils, racing heart rate, and sweating. Yep. I did not look good.

I realise now that I have not been entirely clear thus far. This is because exams have driven me out of my mind. Basically, I spent the time since the last post revising for my Phase 1 exam, which is the exam that marks the halfway point of this course, and after which there are no more lectures- the next two and a half years are all spent doing 7-week hospital placements. How awesome, right? WRONG. Because the whole idea was just dangled in front of us, so close and yet so far away, because between us and Phase 2 stood this massive exam that people trembled at the mention of, and that when you spoke of it to 4th and 5th years, they got this distant, post-traumatic-stress-disorder look in their eyes, and just clammed up. Of course I'm not exagerrating, shush.

Phase 1 exam is basically a four hour exam paper split over two days, which examines you on anything and everything from the last two and a half years. In order to pass Phase 1, you also have to pass the OSCE- a practical exam consisting of 10 stations, each requiring you to, for example, perform a physical examination, or take a history from/explain a medical condition to a fake patient. It is, to say the least, daunting stuff.

My exam was two weeks ago. I still shudder at the thought of it. I had revised non stop since the summer, and was a Total And Absolute Zombie by the end of it, but somehow, by some massive twist of fate, the papers were completely awful. I came out and had a full on meltdown, convinced I had failed, and have spent the last two weeks being a quiet and destructive shadow of myself, waiting for the inevitable result which would tell me that I had to come back to the Hellhole for further revision.

Except that I found out yesterday I passed!!! SO WOOOOOO! Officially half a doctor! No more lectures! Next stop hospital placements!! :D This is more awesome than you can understand, because I cannot understand how I passed that paper, and have since yesterday checked my Uni email four times, just in case they sent an 'AMENDED PHASE 1 RESULTS' message.

So yeah. God knows how I'll find the hospitals, my next blog entry might be an outpouring of self pity and reminiscence of how easy I had it before, but to be honest, I'm just glad I've got this far. And I'm glad of the change- 2 and a half years of daily lectures has given me enough deep vein thrombosis risk for a lifetime, so thanks very much, Medschool.

In other news!

...Except nothing else has happened, because as you may have deduced, revision has consumed my life.

*tries in vain to think of something significant to talk about*

...Look! I took this cool picture of the small cousin today, when it started snowing!


*Continues to think...*

Erm...Okay. Fail. Lets resort to a list of things I need to do, now that I have holidays for the next few weeks:

• LOSE WEIGHT WOMAN, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD
  
• Read MANY, MANY BOOKS. Including awesome graphic novels. Did I not mention my new graphic novel obsession?! Oh my god, read Maus. It's a man's account to his son of being a Jew during the Holocaust. It won the Pullitzer prize, and having read it, I fully agree that it is amazing.
• Continue efforts to be a girl, including expanding the amount of colour in my wardrobe
• Get clothes for the hospital placements, which I did not dare buy before in case of failure. Yay!
• WATCH MANY FILMS. (Oh my god, people, watch Drive, the Emad was right)
• WRITE SOMETHING WORTH READING
• DRAW/PAINT THINGS- yes, there may be a theme of regaining creativity here, since the right side of my brain appears to have shrunk and died.
  
• Regain a semi-normal face, that does not give the impression that I have Just Escaped from some kind of high security prison camp, or that I am currently addicted to illicit substances.
  

I will keep you posted on how I get on with all this!

And now I shall go and start catching up with all your blogs!

Over and out, crocodiles :)

...So yeah, it's me again...!

I'M BACK EVERYONE. REMAIN CALM. It's okay, really. There was no need to panic. Put down your weapons etc.

Well, God knows when I last posted, but the last few months were a horrendously stressful/occasionally nice combination of...well.. many things. No doubt I have forgotten most of it, but here it is:

• Resit exams

July was the most stressful month of my life so far. You go through the horror of UCAS, interviews, moving away from home, first year, second year, Infection and Immunity module etc..., only to find that you fail by one question, and your future on the course will be determined by a four hour exam over two days in August (which just happen to be the first days of Ramadhan too, so no hearty brainfood breakfast for you, matey). Having people to revise with helped, and there was always the silver lining of we-will-have-a-better-knowledge-of-stuff-for-Phase-One-Exam, but nevertheless it's as though someone physically beat my confidence to a pulp for a month. Happy ending and all that, since I did pass, but the lack of summer holiday (due to getting thrown straight into Ramadhan) before term started again, and the fact that it was the first big exam I failed, mean I still feel like an imposter on this course. But you know, we shall see when it comes to Phase 1 exam... ¬_¬

• Ramadhan

I spent all of Ramadhan/August working on my dissertation. Which was 10,000 words, all about constipation and irritable bowel syndrome. Seriously. I know so much about bowel movements now it's untrue. The things I've seen @_@ etc. Still amused by one of the things I read about a certain laxative- 'Excessive doses can cause explosive and uncontrollable diarrhoea'. LOL. It's the small things :)
Did manage the finish the dissertation on time :D Not looking forward to the Viva exam on it though.. you basically get grilled on your dissertation, so they can verify that you wrote it @_@ I can't even remember what I wore/ate/did yesterday, how am I supposed to remember 10000 words on bowel movements?!

• Further becoming female

So yes, my efforts to be a girl continue, with the purchase of this AWESOME maxi dress (I know!!). Not for every day use, naturally, just for Eid. Also! The fact that I now have nails, having been clean (...of nailbiting) since June, means that I have been able to experiment with various nail polishes! :D Current favourite: sparkly deep purple :O And I saw an awesome tip about blowing Barry M dazzle dust over your nails straight after putting on polish. So pretty @_@ Ahem. I'm sorry, world. I sold my soul to girl-ness. But dammit, I can't resist sparkly things! It's the magpie instinct!

• The giving up of all fizzy drinks. NO, SERIOUSLY.

I KNOW. Having spent the second decade of my life drinking Pepsi as a staple drink, I decided on the day before I came back to uni, that I wasn't going to have Pepsi anymore. Or anything fizzy. Because I still wanted teeth by the time I turned 30. My family, who were witness to my grand announcement, responded with a hearty, all-round laugh. So supportive ¬_¬ But the reverse psychology worked, because I've successfully given up just to spite them! I'm not going to lie, there have been challenging times. Old habits die hard after a decade of turning to drink to solve all my problems. Further exagerration etc. I was classically conditioned to calm down as soon as I had pepsi. I have now had to replace this with having a staple snack of Kit Kat Chunky with tea. Not sure if it's actually worse for my health...but it's the principle of giving up that counts. Ahem.

• Term starting

Yes, we came back to uni near the start of September. Sickening. The past seven weeks have consisted of neurology and pharmacology modules, along with a neverending bombardment of reminders about how we will fail the Phase 1 exam, and how hard the OSCE (practical exam) will be, and how we should already know the full medical course inside out or we are basically doomed, and how we should have started revising two years ago, and if we didn't, then we might as well leave now. Etc. So no pressure on us at all. Whatsoever. And just for the record, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN NEUROLOGY. WHAT. THE HELL. I'm still too weirded out by the fact that my brain is learning about itself. I fear it will become self-aware and try to break out of my head :|

• Cannulation/Venepuncture

Two of the coolest things we've done in a semester of nothing cool whatsoever. Cannulation = where you put a needle with a tube into a vein, and it stays there so you can give medication and fluids through it. And Venepuncture is just taking blood from a suitable vein. These were so much fun, though I would have preferred to practice on real people. But the cool fake arm things with the fake veins with the fake blood running through them were still very much fun. The blood went everywhere! :D And I now can't resist finding suitable veins on my hands/arms. Excellent stuff.

• Illness

I'm pretty sure that my recurrent illnesses have been due to the beating my immune system has taken from the stress since June. In ay case, the most recent illness has given me the infamous man-voice again (WHY does nobody else's voice go this weird when they have a cold?!), and also sinusitis, and sniffliness. Yes. Because sniffliness is a medical word. OH, speaking of cool medical words, apparently 'blob' is a medical term for something to do with the eye that I can't remember but was very impressed by in the lecture! :D

• Bathroom saga
  

Yes. Our bathroom was under construction for a week. This was the worst week in history. It was supposed to take two days, but inevitably two turned into seven, when several tiling disasters happened. The horrendousness included being unable to shower for several days, and having to use public toilets during the day due to ours being unusable, but these things paled in comparison to the fact that our bathroom door was REMOVED ...yes, REMOVED, and so if we wanted to use it we had to close the nearest door, throw a blanket over it so it was no longer see through, and have a sign saying 'DO NOT ENTER'. This loss of dignity means that nothing can ever be embarrassing again.

• London

Yes! This weekend, as a pre-birthday surprise, my parents took me and the brothers down to the Science Museum in London for a day! :D AWESOME stuff. The day included a lot of food (naturally), an IMAX showing of Born to be Wild (which was adorable- baby elephants and orangutans!!!), a 4D show where you experienced rocket take off and landing and driving in a moon buggy and got jolted around and sprayed with water when you returned to Earth and landed in the sea. (not amusing). Various space exhibits meant that we geeked out massively, and I spent far too long in the Art/Science/History of Medicine exhibitions! Despite them having creepy dummies that look like real people and freak me out. So many scary medical instruments too...think amputation handsaws @_@ All in all, a totally awesome surprise :D

So yeah, I'm supposed to be getting ready, and should probably go. I'm sure I've not mentioned something properly major, but it's all good for the moment, because otherwise I will be late for this GP thing I'm doing for my student selected module. Long story. SO in a while crocodiles, it was nice seeing you all again :D

*waaaaaaaaaaaaaaves*

"I need some air"

Once again, totally irrelevant title, but it made me laugh when my five-year-old cousin Hasan, (who has a tendency to be slightly effeminate), said this in reaction to eating a particularly spicy pakora. Bless him.
So hello! I dropped off the face of the Earth firslty because I had nothig to blog about during exam season, then because I was too busy sleeping/being a slob to blog after that. but I am here now. With my non-chronological List of Events That Have Happened.

• When I was younger, the family and I would go for walks along the canal that runs fairly near where I live. It's a hell of a long walk, but very pretty for greenery and the occasional barge that goes by, with the people on board waving as they pass, like it's still a century ago. We made a spur-of-the-moment decision to revisit it in June, and so, woefully underprepared with a lack of sunscreen/hayfever-tablets for the brother/water/cool clothes, we set out to be all nostalgic. Fifteen minutes into the walk, the brother descended into explosive sneezes, the sun came out and melted us all to death, and my dad got thirsty. It was too late to turn back though, so we soldiered on. My dad's quick-fix solution to the brother's hayfever went as follows:

Dad: Humaira, do you have any lip balm?
Me: ....Yes..? Gawd, I know they're bad, but there's no need to-
Dad: Give it to him.
Me: But his lips aren't chap-
Dad: It's for his nose.
Me: *laughs uneasily in a misheard-way*

Dad: Haroon, rub the lip balm around your nostrils. It'll trap the pollen and you won't sneeze.
Me: *Begins to run*
Dad: SEIZE HER!

Maybe the last part didn't happen.
After much disgust, struggling and refusal on my part, I was coerced into finding a lip balm I was sure I never wanted to use again (I may possess several due to a slight obsession). There was a horrible moment of lip-balm smearing and emasculation for Haroon, and then it was over. And despite the Bear-Grylls-ness of this, he did stop sneezing and my dad did the whole smug see-I'm-a-pharmacist-I-know-these-things look.
We did actually manage the walk, despite the humidity and the sun and the younger brother moaning that this was too much and my clothes sticking to me, and an awful ten minutes when we had to pass the sewers and there were literally swarms of flies @_@ But yes. About 4 hours later we were back home and decided to offset all the calories burned by ordering two Dominos Pizzas. Because why not :D
The first picture is just the pretty-ness of the canal. Yay! And the second was when we passed along a field of rapeseed..I think that's what it is, the bright yellow one anyway. Huge field of all these yellow flowers, and I spied two red poppies in the middle of it all. I felt for them, so took a photo.

• I MADE COOKIES TOO! Same recipe, refer to the Emad's blog for the link, I can't be bothered to find it and may as well plug his blog while I'm here, it's adequate in a sort of readable way :P (I JOKE! It's great.) But yes, the cookies were awesome and that recipe is seriously the best ever: they come out all chewy! And don't listen to what anyone tells you, using chunks of galaxy chocolate instead of chocolate chips tastes ten times better. :D I know. I tried both ways, to make an informed decision. Or just to get fat. Note the pretentious arty-ness of how I took my photo. Because I'm oh-so-experimental and creative.
  

• I have been making a conscious effort to be a girl, recently. I have decided that 20 years of life is long enough to be going through a self-conscious awkwardness crisis. Despite being hopelessly outshadowed by girly cousins and the like, I shall make my own small steps towards attempting to do things that girls do. Step One was to acquire a girly bag, as I have never carried anything other than boyish satchels. So I got a huge, pretty white and pink shoulder bag with a lot of shiny sequins/beads on it because I am a magpie. And I can't find a picture but will edit with one if I do. This decision worked well, despite me walking lopsided for a month due to not being used to the weight of a shoulder bag as opposed to a cross-body one. Step Two was not biting my nails, as I felt this was not ladylike. Nah, it's because it was starting to hurt to touch things. But I did put nail polish on for the first time in my life! It was an awesome peacock blue-green metallic colour, and admittedly I got it everywhere due to never having worn the stuff before, but it was a start. I have now ordered a sparkly purple one because it looked awesome :D And Step 3 will be to sort my dress sense out, but that ones going to take a while. Note that high heels will never be a part of this effeminisation. Yes. New word.
  

• My family is all over the world at the moment. Had to stay behind to do a resit/curl up in a ball of self pity as everyone else went off to do things. It shall be a lesson to me: use brain more effectively next time, stupid person.
  

• Spiders appear very frequently in my room due to there being a massive hole in the wall where the fireplace was, that can't be covered by my clothes drawer. I keep having heart attacks. Just...*shudder*

• I have a LOT of palpitations. I mean, I know I drink pepsi a lot and caffeine accounts for this, but I keep having them when I haven't had pepsi- sometimes I haven't had caffeine all day and still end up with them. It's like my heart misses every 3rd beat and it scares the hypochondriac in me. Already thought out all the worst case scenarios. I fear that another spider would just cause my heart to throw in the towel and storm out.

• The Sandman graphic novels are pretty damn ace so far, but what with exams I haven't been able to get the next one so all I can say is the first 3 are very good. I've never read a graphic novel before, but they were clearly a good place to start. Awesome stuff.

• My obvious bewitching-ness made me the target of attention for not one, but two creepy Asians, when I was getting the train home from Uni. It happened twice, and I would have been flattered by their perversely invasive questions ('Where are you from in pakistan', 'Where are you going?' 'Will you come to Manchester with me?' and further Urdu things) had they not been forty something and dentally challenged. I mean, really?! A sad state of affairs.

• Went to see the Wolves crew yesterday, just for the day. This was, as ever, much fun: comfort white Magnum with my aunty Em was indeed comforting, and the comedy relief of hearing Baby Bear (who is now 18 months-ish) saying nothing but 'Ball?' the whole time was great. And Hasan's over-excitedness manifested itself in him abandoning his food to come and tap dance in front of me. Brilliance.
  

• I think I may have run out of things to say. No, really. I know..!
  

So yes, I won't make any blog-soon promises because clearly it's counter productive.
In a while, crocodile!
(Or, as my housemate likes to say as I'm leaving, 'Stay safe, and say no to drugs!' ...You'd think she had no faith in me.)
:)

What is this...'sunshine' you speak of?!

I AM BACK!
Gawd knows when I last posted, but I swear I've been revising since Easter. Gah. The effects of at least 8 weeks of revision include:

• A 'walking-dead' complexion
• Panda eyes (which coincidentally is also the slang for periorbital ecchymosis, and- *slaps self out of revision coma*)
• A lack of fingernails, and an inability to touch anything.
• The tendency to twitch involuntarily
• Revising during sleep. Seriously. I had a full dream the night before the exam where I went through a flow chart to do with the body's response to high blood pressure. I woke up in a cold sweat.
  
• Forgetting what it feels like to wear anything other than pyjamas.
• The development of a revision belly.
  
• A permanent indentation in my bed, or 'study space' as I like to call it. Observe:

My poor bed :(

So yeah. Life has consisted of waking up, revising, eating during study breaks, revising, and then sleeping. It's got to the point where I've classically conditioned myself (think Pavlov's dogs, which is part of Health Psychology modu- *slaps self out of revision coma*) into associating eating with relaxation. We'll make me obese yet!

The exams were Monday and Tuesday. They crashed and burned, to understate. But..yeah, I can live with resitting if I at least take a few weeks off from revision now. Because if I see another cranial nerve mnemonic, I will snap and do some serious damage, using only my Clinical Anatomy textbook as a weapon/anvil.

So relaxation it is! I ordered myself one of the Neil Gaiman Sandman graphic novels as a post-exam reward, and am going to read that, with a can of pepsi and a Galaxy Roasted and caramelised hazelnut bar, on the train home :D Yay!

Oh, and family wedding this weekend. Yay for jazzing up...? I'm scared of turning up and causing the guests to flee, having confirmed for them that Dawn of the Dead has finally come true. But what the hell. At least I can be a happy temporarily-exam-free zombie :)

And good luck for your exam, Emadness! Even though you won't see this til after yours, probably. But join the post exam zombie celebrations, yay!

*Waaaaaaves to all!*

Silly Bean

Hello!
Oh my God, so it's been aaaaages! @_@ I'd make some excuse about exams or something but I've totally slacked off work in the past few weeks so I can't even blame that. Never mind. I am here now. Here being home :D :D *YAY*
I should begin with the highlight of the past few weeks. Yes, it is food/drink related. Don't look at me like that.


Utter awesomeness :D Go to Cafe Nero and have Frappes.

In other news! Hello again. Since it's a picturey kind of post, this photo has no significance but I thought I'd post it anyway since it looks so pretty. I was walking back from uni through the decidedly creepy and deserted industrial estate near my house, and the sky just suddenly looked rather lovely, with all the dramatic rays of light(which you can't see too well here). So I took a photo. And several passing taxi drivers gave me weird looks.

It is also noteworthy to..note..that I am home now!!! The last week of term was a bit hectic, involving much food and late night work, but it finally got to Friday. And it took me a good 3 hours to pack (mainly due to my extended food break mid-packing...I get hungry! @_@). And I had to isolate a pile of revision books/folders to take home, which I'm going to work through over the next few weeks. And the size of the pile, which eventually became a highly unstable Leaning Tower of Pisa, made me laugh. So I took a photo of it. I present to you, some of the knowledge that I must cram into my head. (There's still more subjects to cover after Easter, so this isn't quite everything):



Oh! So I packed Friday night, and on Saturday my family were due to come. The plan was that we'd visit the Space Centre in leicester, which we'd been planning to go see for a while now. So I slept on Friday night in the knowledge that my internal body clock would get me up at about half 10, as usual.

...Skip to 11:46 on Saturday morning, and I woke up to the sound of my phone ringing. In my sleepy confusion, I accidentally cut it of instead of answering, but saw it was my dad calling. I thought, they must've set off and have rung to tell me.

...And then there was a loud knock on my window. Note, my room is downstairs, so if someone knocks at my window, it means they've been ringing the doorbell for ages and have now resorted to the next best thing.

So I stumbled like a zombie to the front door and opened it and came face to face with my dad and my two brothers, who came face to face with what looked like a yeti in pyjamas. Their reaction was a slightly startled one.

So yeah! The lesson is, don't rely on your body clock ¬_¬ I had to speed dress/finish packing and we were out the door in 20 minutes.

On the plus, Leicester Space Centre is awesome! :D Planetarium and everything. And if anyone needs a free annual pass, just ask.

Oh, and I drove home, which was fun. Note: it was not fun. How is it fun to be going at 70mph in a very crushable metal box?! @_@


...And in other news, I made awesome Millies-style cookies on Sunday! I say Millies Style. I didn't follow the recipe- it said to use brown sugar and caster sugar, whereas all I had were Demerara and Granulated. So I used those instead. And instead of chocolate chips I cut up chunks of Galaxy chocolate :D An improvement, I feel. On the whole, they turned out pretty damn nice! :D Yay for a successful baking attempt!


I can't really think of anything else, so random bullet points it is:

• One side of my face hurts

• Let Go by Frou Frou is just awesome, as is the film Garden State

• Aunty Em is a full on literal follower of my blog! Hello!! And she is helpful in pointing out potential blog material. :D

• B&Q is second only to Matalan/Ikea as a great Eater of Souls.

• I now possess a Matalan card, having made my first ever purchase from there @_@ I feel like I've lost a part of me.

• ...That is all! OH WAIT, since the Emadness added one of the two great Reliant K songs to his post, I shall add the other great one to mine :D

So I promise (emptily) that I shall blog within two weeks, and bid you all farewell!
:)

Life, the Universe and Everything.

HELLO!
I know, I know, in my absence the blogging world became a desolate, post-apocalyptic desert, where hope and happiness ceased to exist. But I am back now, fear not.
So my last post was over a month ago- it's going to take some serious work to figure out what's happened since then...

• Exams: I passed! Yaaaay :) Though a collective decision was made with the housemates to stuff ourselves on pizza the night before results, just in case we failed and couldn't have pizza after getting them. This worked out well. Pizza and general relief over two days

• Wolves crew: Went home the weekend after results, for an extended 4 day weekend, which was utterly awesome. Highlights included Hasan (Now 5) calling me a princess (*Oh, stop it*); Baby Bear still going cross eyed when he eats; Baby Bear starting to walk a few steps at a time before wobbling and collapsing; my mum being awesome and buying avocado just for me (I LOVE AVOCADOES); Talking at Aunty Em whilst she drifted off to sleep; Spending an evening with Aunty Em, my youngest aunty, and baby cousins (this involved a lot of food being smeared over computers etc); and a trip to Bradford with my mum and ALL the aunties, which again involved baby cousins smearing food everywhere, and was rather funny. Oh, and eating was basically continuous over the four days. All in all, best weekend in a while :D
  

• Hospital visits: Yes, so we've started going to the hospital one day a week, and this is eventful but very interesting! And I enjoy it more than I thought I would. Highlights from this have included doing a cardiovascular exam on a very cute old guy who kept trying to make me look at his stomach, and then decided he wanted me to see the scar in his groin @_@ Ouch. I mean, you scream, 'NO!' but sometimes it's just not quick enough. Another cringe moment was the doctor making all seven of us feel a woman's femoral pulse (Found by poking people deep in the groin) one by one. I felt more sorry for the woman, to be honest. She told me I had lovely cool hands @_@ Yes. That would be the excessive hand sweating due to mass nerves. At least I'll be a hit with the patients ¬_¬

• Hospital clothes: I have had to dress smart for all the hospital visits. Which may make me look even shorter than I am. Ahem. And wearing a stethoscope round my neck just makes me feel like a fraud. Though I did work out a way of being able to wear my stethoscope under my scarf without trying out any of the complicated Youtube Tutorial ways! :D *Pride*
  

• Student Selected Module: Arts in Medicine has been suspiciously easy so far... We've had 'fun' sessions where we've done creative writing, others where we've just watched videos of Medical dramas, and the next one is about humour in Medicine, and we've got to take in a funny clip from a medical programme. I mean, I'm enjoying it, but just waiting for the truckload of work to be dumped on me when it's time to do the 3000 word essay that will be the assessment for this module.

• Parks and Recreation: Is officially brilliant :D I started watching it last year, then couldn't finish it because my computer died. But now I've caught up and it's just awesome. Watch Parks and Recreation! Almost as good/funny as the Office...

• Newsnight: And other politics related issues,and ANYTHING to do with sports invariably makes me drowsy. Just no. Although I do now have a small understanding of terms like 'Innings' in cricket. And that is more than Enough. :)
  

• Gone Baby Gone: is great. Though decidedly one of the most ultimately depressing films of all time.

• Slobness: Clearly I have become a slob, judging by the last few points and how I do nothing other than sit on my bed and work, or sit on my bed and eat. But it's all good! :)

• Stupid recurring headaches: I have had one every day of this week ¬_¬ Aside from becoming paranoid due to having studied the various sinister causes of a recurring headache, it is also just pissing me off. I am experimentally cutting out Robinsons Orange and Pineapple squash, despite it being amazing, just to see if that's causing it ¬_¬ More on this story later.

• Childbirth video: ....Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that birth is a beautiful experience and the most magical thing in the world, etc. But when you get sat down in a lecture theatre, and they play you a video from the Seventies of a woman giving birth, and it pulls out all the stops because apparently as medical students we need ALL the gory details... I...Just... *Shudders*. @_@ I was not able to eat for several days.
  

And that's about it. Or the trauma of the video has erased anything else I was going to say. So yeah! I shall not leave it so ridiculously late to update next time! :)
*WAAAAVES*