Luckier than some

Munich Botanical Garden, December 2019

It's been more than a week and I feel the pressure to report in, but also resistance to writing a whole post about what I've been doing. It hasn't included anything that I imagine would interest anyone but me. Really, look away, there's nothing here, move on. But for the sake of my dedicated readers, who remind me how much they look forward to what I write, I feel bound to put something down.

I was on leave from the diabetes job for two weeks, and so had a bit of time for Mr MXF. In my first week I did some work that would actually affect one of his customers - not a real paying customer, but an organisation that Mr MXF supports on the side with website and email management. And it was successful! It still feels as though any success is more by luck and educated guesswork than knowledge and judgement, but still, it worked. Mr MXF reported back that I had received a vote of thanks at the Trustees meeting, which makes me feel even more of an imposter. In the second week I carried on my efforts to understand email hosting and servers, without noticeable success, which makes my triumph with the real customer even more surprising. 

I did another vaccination shift, where we had to use up 90 doses before 11 a.m. to avoid having to throw them away. So I contacted my diabetes team, and they all trooped over to help out. Which means that everyone except me has had their second dose - mine is due after Easter, but I might ask nicely at the end of my next shift and I should be able to have it then.

I had a big day of Sorting Out Stuff like renewing home insurance, reviewing my broadband contract (which ends in June), having an argument with my mobile provider about itemised billing, then investigating alternatives to find I could halve the monthly cost with a different mobile supplier on a month's rolling contract. Halving the cost only means saving £3 a month, but I'm giving it a try anyway - if it doesn't suit I don't have to wait more than a month to move to a different contract. The supplier I'm leaving got in touch, as they do when you threaten to move on, and told me that I'd been with them for 21 years. I was amazed. Can you believe mobile phones have existed for 21 years?

There's lots going on with the Buddhists, as always. I now have a meditation mentor who I chat to about twice a month, and so far has given me some good advice that I'm finding very difficult to follow. (Sounds familiar? I have managed to do the physiotherapy exercises more regularly, but it's still a struggle for motivation.) My regular Monday study group has finished the first whole year of the course in just a little more than a year, and we have settled down to a regular group of nine women via Zoom. The Tuesday group is still going and has maintained its Thursday study by choosing another book to work through together.

And as well as all that, I'm still pushing for expansion to our local group. We've managed to maintain our attendance for the last year despite not meeting in person, but without continually attracting more people the group is always at risk as people drift away over time. The difficulty is that we don't have an experienced practitioner to lead us on a regular basis, and for a number of reasons it's difficult to find one. I have some ideas, but I need to take the other members of the team along with me. So that's what I'm trying to do at the moment, which is occupying much time and thinking space.

I was very hopeful of finding a better venue to meet when we are ready to do so, and one of the group did make contact with somewhere that looked perfect. Unfortunately, when we were ready to get back to them we had lost the Tuesday evening slot. So unless something unexpected happens we'll probably have to go back to where we were meeting before, where there isn't WiFi. It's not an insurmountable problem, just a bit of a challenge.

And that's it for now. There's the exciting prospect of being able to do more and go places and meet people soon, but I'm trying not to raise my hopes because all this can be snatched away at a moment's notice if infection rates rise. But going out to work in two places, and having access to Lateral Flow testing, and seeing mum and dad a couple of times a month means I'm much luckier than some.

Vaccinating is exhausting

Coronavirus Vaccination Clinic 2 (the Portakabin), March 2021

You've had to wait for it, but the answer to the puzzle of what's in the bag hanging from my clothes airer relates to the fact that due to overconsumption and lack of willpower I had to go cold turkey on chocolate and snacks. I still had quite a large supply in the house and didn't want to throw them out, which meant that they had to be more inaccessible. Hence, hanging them up out of reach and out of sight. It worked quite well.

I've done a lot of reading in the last month as evidenced by the huge blog post last week, but there's also been a lot of other activity. The physiotherapist is suggesting that the longstanding issue with my hip is probably the source of the problem with my knee, and has changed my exercises. I am finding it increasingly difficult to motivate myself to actually do the exercises. And I have attended a very interesting Zoom webinar about the Libre 'Flash Glucose Monitoring' technology in diabetes, and I wonder if my colleagues already know about the things I learned.

I have been on annual leave from that job and signed up to many vaccination shifts, some of which were cancelled. We are doing far more work compared with that first session when I was shown the ropes - enthusiastic people are coming for their second dose as well as a few unenthusiastically turning up for their first.

We are now using iPads instead of paper forms to track our vaccinations, which I'm sure saves an enormous amount of data input, but relies heavily on our systems finding the individual. This means that the NHS number is quite important, name and date of birth being surprisingly unreliable. Obviously nobody knows their NHS number, but there is a website where it can be found, and so notices were put up asking people to type the long URL on their phones. This is quite difficult, so I suggested to the people doing the clerking that they could generate a QR code, at which they looked very blank.

I've only just started to appreciate the power of the QR code, which is the two-dimensional bar code that can be scanned by a phone camera and take you to a website. It was suggested to me for a diet sheet I was writing where I wanted people to have a look at a set of YouTube videos. The diet sheet would almost always be printed and provided to patients on paper so a clickable link would be useless, and even a shortened version of the URL would still be difficult to type, so I was just going to suggest that people searched on YouTube for keywords that would take them to the videos. A Young Person (now defined by me as someone under the age of 30) who has joined our diabetes dietetic team had the great idea of using a QR code, and it worked beautifully.

Reception in the Portakabin clinic

So I went off and produced some notices with QR codes for the clerks, and even laminated them (because: infection control), and handed them over on my next shift which was more than a week later (because: cancelled shifts). I think they made life a little easier - I wasn't in the same room as the clerks for most of the time so I really don't know how they were being used. But this picture of the reception area shows one of them on display.

Proximity alarms being charged

The other innovation is a proximity alarm worn around the neck, which vibrates and/or beeps when it is within 2 meters of another proximity alarm. These are given to patients when they check in and are supposed to make sure they stay 2 meters apart from each other. Obviously staff aren't wearing them because we can't vaccinate from 2 meters away, but we have extra face shields or goggles as well as masks and we test ourselves regularly using lateral flow kits.

The hardest thing about the shifts is the need to be standing up for six hours (with half an hour allowed for a break). The shift starts early and finishes at 2pm, then this week I had my weekly shop to do afterward, and needed to make some soup while I had time and before all the veg went mouldy. By the time I'd finished all that it was 5 p.m. and I was shattered, so I thought I'd have a nap. I became conscious again two and a half hours later, had some supper and went back to bed.

What I've been reading

Second Foundation
by Isaac Asimov

"The old First Empire lies shattered. It has been swept from the Milky Way's bright spiral by the inexorable expanding forces of the First Foundation, established by the psychohistorian Hari Seldon - the only man to have foreseen the shifting patterns of the inhabited cosmos."

I stamped my foot like a toddler and said that I wouldn't enjoy this book - well, I didn't, much, but it wasn't quite as bad as I expected. I can't for the life of me understand why the series has been labelled a classic - I still don't know whether I'm supposed to be for or against the Foundation, or which army was on which side and why. Anyway, I'm done with it all now.

The Lost Duke of Wyndham
by Julia Quinn

"Grace Eversleigh has spent the last five years toiling as the companion to the dowager Duchess of Wyndham. It is a thankless job, with very little break from the routine... until Jack Audley lands in her life, all rakish smiles and debonair charm."

One of the books on my shelf that I kept because I liked it the first time, but twice is definitely  enough. Hooray! I can move one solitary book out of my shelves. I'm going to have to think up another plan for emptying the house.

On The Road
by Jack Kerouac

narrated by Matt Dillon

"Sal Paradise, a young innocent, joins his hero Dean Moriarty, a traveller and mystic, the living epitome of beat, on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States."

Another book from the list of Classics, and so marvellously narrated in a way that brought all the characters alive. Not much of a story arc, just a description of a few trips from New York to San Francisco by way of all sorts of other places, sometimes by bus, hitchhiking, and driving and meeting all kinds of people. The last trip to Mexico was probably the best.

Death in the Stocks
by Georgette Heyer

"Beneath a sky the colour of sapphires and the sinister moonlight, a gentleman in evening dress is discovered slumped in the stocks on the village green - he is dead. Superintendent Hannasyde's consummate powers of detection and solicitor Giles Carrington's amateur sleuthing are tested to their limits as they grapple with the Vereker family - a group of outrageously eccentric and corrupt suspects."

Easy to read and all the clues are there, such good fun to pin down the murderer.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
by J. K. Rowling

"Harry Potter thinks he is an ordinary boy - until he is rescued by an owl, taken to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, learns to play Quidditch and does battle in a deadly duel."

A nice short one to start the series. It's good, but it's still going to the charity shop - or to the downstairs shelves for the time being.

Behold, Here's Poison

by Georgette Heyer

narrated by Ulli Birvé

"It's no ordinary morning at the Poplars. The master is found dead in his bed, and it seems his high blood pressure was not the cause. When an autopsy reveals a sinister poison, it's up to the quietly resourceful Inspector Hannasyde to catch the murderer in time to spare the next victim."

The plot was a good one but the book was slightly spoilt by the strange, slow narration, and the fact that the 'hero' came over as pretty unlikeable, which might also have been because of the narration. It seemed unrealistic when the girl fell for him, and the dialogue of the proposal scene was dreadful. In fact I've now convinced myself that it was the writing not the narration. Pity. 

The Journey and the Guide: A Practical Course in Enlightenment
by Maitreyabandhu

"The journey starts with our mind, particularly when we begin to look into the truth of things - the truth of the friend in hospital, the coffin we carry to the graveside. What we find in our guide, the Buddha, is a man with a fit, healthy mind. To get fit, we need to work on becoming a happy healthy human being."

Within my Buddhist group we've spent eight weeks reading and discussing this book, chapter by chapter. It's very readable but not particularly coherent, and most of us agreed that there are some bits that we bump up against, the main one being the author's focus on same-sex friendships above all other relationships. We've invited him to speak to our group next week, so that will be interesting.

Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet
by Tim Jackson

"This challenge to conventional economics openly questions the most highly prized goal of politicians and economists alike: the continued pursuit of exponential economic growth."

I'm no economist so the majority of this book was way beyond my understanding. But I read all the words anyway, and luckily the last chapter summarised the argument in non-economic terms. Essentially, to support a growing population our capitalist society relies on economic growth fuelled by our inclination towards consumerism and novelty . This is not sustainable in the context of a planet with limited resources. The answer has to be found within social policy, as do most of the issues that compete with the selfish and hedonistic nature of humans (like better health, diet and exercise).

Pandemic contributions

30, 000 vaccines administered, March 2021

I've done a second vaccination shift in the Portakabin, which went OK. It was a bit hectic in the morning because between 8 and 9 a.m. we delivered as many vaccines as we had in the whole of my first six-hour shift. Word was that the other vaccination location in the hospital was closed for some reason, so everyone was redirected to us. Whatever the reason, we coped. At that point I was doing the 'reconstitute the vaccine checker' role, which involves checking everything that the person reconstituting the vaccine does, so I wasn't under as much pressure as some.

Halfway through the morning we had a visitor with a cake marking the fact that 30,000 vaccines had been administered by the Trust. Despite my contribution being in low double figures, I wasn't about to hold back on tasting the cake, which was very good. I also feature in the team photograph that was taken, although I was standing at the back with mask and visor so it's unlikely I'll be noticed.

Towards the end of my shift I was sent over to the other vaccination location in the hospital to be shown the new electronic version of the paper form that we've been using up to now. It runs on iPads and allows for more flexible updating of the questions asked, e.g. people's reported reactions to the first vaccine are now being collected when people rock up for their second dose.

Another Covid-related activity I've participated in has been a survey for which I have seemingly been picked at random by the Office for National Statistics. I completed one fairly long online questionnaire a little while ago for which I was given £15 for my trouble, and then I was asked if I'd do another. This time I was not only entitled to receive another £15 but was given an ONS-branded cloth bag as a gift. 

It was an interesting questionnaire all about how my life has been affected by the Covid restrictions - practical stuff about how often I go out and what for, how my work and social life has been affected, whether I'm likely to continue with some of the changes I've made, but also how I feel and how worried I am about various things, The first questionnaire also contained a whole lot of statements for me to agree or disagree with, many of which were the myths that have been circulating (e.g. 5G masts giving you Covid). It was an interesting glimpse into the Government's data collection strategy.

If you can guess what the bag contains and why it is suspended from my clothes airer, you will be awarded points. And we all know what points mean.