Tag Archives: mental-health

Turn Right onto Albert Road

Blog, Vet, Travel, The Vet Who Came In from the Cold, , , , , , , , , ,

So here I am in Wolverhampton, or rather, in a leafy suburb of the city. I’ve completed my first week at Cavan Vets in Bushbury and, on the whole, am feeling very content. I’m also sorely in need of a rest, having driven down last Sunday, then worked from nine in the morning until seven at night for the last five days.

I rejected another locum offer last week because of similarly long hours, though that one was also complicated by the fact that I was going to have to find (and fund) my own accommodation and the dates they offered were all over the place. I could only work part weeks in Glasgow because Lara very kindly let me stay in her flat. The practice where I’m currently locumming offered to pay for an apartment and, in the event, kindly found somewhere for me, which made the whole thing very straightforward.

It’s not like the PDSA. This is a private practice, where clients are paying for my time. I confess I felt a bit nervous at that the first couple of days. Imposter syndrome, if you like. But it’s amazing how things have slid back into place, some of them from more than twenty five years ago, which was the last time I worked in private general practice in the UK. And I love the animals, even the ones that are grumpy with me. Who can blame them? Vet clinics can be scary places, with needles and being poked and prodded, of falling asleep and waking up with a wound and a cone, of areas where your owner can’t come with you.

But the nurses and receptionists are lovely. Their love of animals shines through. The practice is full of waifs and strays, from Paddy the Labrador, who was taken on by the boss, to the black cat without a tail, who has a whole room to stretch out in while he waits to find a new owner. And for the two weeks we are here, Triar gets to be a practice dog as well. Monday morning, I left him in the apartment, but when I got to work, I was told he could come too. If he got on with Paddy, all well and good. If not, they’d find him a kennel. By Wednesday, he was dragging me in the door when he arrived. He and Paddy get on fine and he is spoiled rotten by almost everyone. For me, it’s just lovely to see him so well loved and looked after.

As for me, I’ve also been well looked after. The apartment is lovely and everyone has been very patient with all my questions and a few, odd areas of ignorance. When I qualified as a vet, the only flea treatment on offer that worked was Nuvan Top. You could spray a flea ridden animal and watch the fleas drop off. A few years later, the spot-ons arrived: the ones you put on the back of the neck, which killed fleas in the environment too. Now the treatments are all-singing-all-dancing, kill worms and fleas, ticks and mites. Some are still spot on, some are tablets, but there are a lot of choices and usually they are combined with worming treatments that you can’t use at the same time, due to crossover of the active ingredients. I’m still trying to get my head around all that. Still, I seems to have been keeping up so far with the appointments and am handling more complicated cases than I was at the PDSA.

It’s rather strange that I’m already half way through. The nurses will just get me trained up and then I’ll be off again. The practice is so lovely though, that I wonder what would have happened if I’d landed here years ago. Despite the long hours, I’m enjoying it immensely. For the first time, it crossed my mind that perhaps being a locum might be better than going back to APHA. That said, I’ve worked in quite a few practices over the years and the two I’ve been working in in recent weeks have been warm and welcoming places. I know not all are so harmonious.

I feel a bit sad that I’m not likely to have time to explore Wolverhampton as I did Paisley, but my body is telling me I need to rest. I’ll see how I feel tomorrow, but I suspect a quiet day in will be in order, though I shall probably go to church and maybe try to find somewhere nice to walk Triar. I don’t have many photos. The one at the top of the page is Halfway House, at the intersection between Albert Street and Tettenhall Road, near where I am staying. It’s now a dental practice and pharmacy, though it used to be a pub and, before that, a staging post, which is what, to me, it looks like. It’s after the time of Jane Austen, but still easy to imagine travellers stopping there, back when the horse was the main means of transport and it took days, rather than hours, to get anywhere.

I’ll leave you with the few pictures I’ve taken while wandering round, as well as one of Triar in his new Practice Dog role. And now, I’m going to grab a coffee, then kick back and watch Ludwig on the TV. Triar is asleep on the sofa beside me. What better way to spend a day? Thank you for reading and I hope you have a good week.

Catching Up

Blog, Hillwalking, Scotland, The Vet Who Came In from the Cold, Vet, , , , , , , , ,

Working as a government vet, there are times when my job brings an intensity to life that I find fascinating, almost addictive at times. I am still dealing with the aftermath of the bird flu investigation. The initial visit – walking round the shed seeing the sick birds was just the start. There followed a tense period of information gathering. Behind the front line workers like me, there are teams working on epidemiology, tracings and licensing. They need to understand the minutiae of the on-farm operations.

So during that period, it’s as if nothing else matters. It’s all-consuming. The rest of life takes such a back seat that any daily struggles and all other work fall into the background. I fall into a seat in front of the TV at the end of my working day and it’s enough.

As the tidal wave of that work begins to slow, the rest of life and the other work tasks trickle back into focus, but at the moment, those (work) tasks are still quite urgent. Principally, I fell back from avian influenza into the slower wave of bovine tuberculosis. As well as dealing with outbreak work, I should also be doing routine work relating to trade and imports and exports. But our work is prioritised and often we are so busy that we are only skimming the top of what needs to be done. That said, I slipped in a Poultry Health Scheme inspection into my calendar on Tuesday, completed the paperwork and sent it off the next day. The deadline was March, but it was painless (actually I enjoy those visits) and now it’s done.

So picking up the reins of my TB cases, one is quite far along. At the start, there’s a lot to be done, contacting the farmer, explaining what will happen. Broadly, no cattle can move on or off the premises, other than to a slaughterhouse (where they will be scrutinized for disease) and even that is done under licence. There follows a period of testing and culling. Most of the tests are skin tests, but we do blood testing too, at the start. Any animals with positive results are culled and those too are inspected for signs of TB infection. Once we have two clear tests in a row and we have paperwork to say the farmer has cleaned and disinfected the area or areas where the sick animals were housed, then we lift the restrictions.

So with the first of my cases, we are past the blood test and the first of the two skin tests just came back clear. It’s not impossible something might show up, but generally from here it’s plain sailing. In my other case, we are just concluding the blood test. It tends to throw up more positive results, so those animals have to be processed, slaughtered and inspected. I guess it may sound barbaric, but compared with the suffering TB can cause if it goes unchecked… well these things have to be weighed against each other.
To me, those results look quite good. There weren’t so many positives. It will be interesting to see whether any of the animals have what are called “visible lesions” – the TB bacteria tend to wall areas off in the body, a bit like abscesses. If they find those, they will do further testing. Finding the bacteria is almost the holy grail because that allows us to get a much better idea of where the disease came from because they can test to see what strain it is and which other cases are closely related. It takes ages though to grow the bacteria and sometimes they can’t.

Anyway, I digress! As well as working through this process, I have to write everything up in a monthly report. My information and that of all the other cases goes to Scottish Government for oversight. The whole thing takes up a lot of time. I’ve also been allocated the job of overseeing the cleansing and disinfection work at my bird flu farm. The cull is finished and the shed is almost empty. But as the end of the week came into view, I was just thinking that next week, I have plenty to do, but that I will also be able to fit in a welfare visit that’s part of another ongoing investigation that has currently been sidelined. And then my line manager asked me to take on another TB case. This one’s just starting. What testing will be required remains to be seen because all we have at the moment is a positive result, found on a routine skin test. If they don’t find visible lesions then the regime will be different again, but my initial tasks include a Disease Risk Form – a visit to the farm to look at possible source and spread. Is this beginning to sound familiar? This is what I do!

Anyway, in among the work, I am trying to sort out when I might take holidays and who I might visit. My attention is so distracted that I realized yesterday that I’ve booked a week’s holiday that overlaps with a weekend on duty, so I’m going to have to work out what to do about that. For now though, I intend to rest and enjoy the weekend. Last week, Triar and I climbed a whole load of rough steps to visit the Waterloo Monument above New Abbey. It was quite a grey day, but I took a few photos.

We didn’t make it all the way to the top. The stairs were very dark and Triar said no halfway up. Unsurprising really and a sensible decision! Anyway, thanks as ever for reading. I hope you have a lovely week.

Arctic Lights

Blog, Holiday, The Vet Who Came In from the Cold, Writing, , , , , , ,

I said at the end of last week’s blog that I was going to talk about the apps I currently use to manage my FND and I will, but first I should mention that I’m at Valerie’s for the weekend. Val’s daughter Stacey and son-in-law, Llewelyn, stayed here over the summer, while Stacey was having a baby. They went home a week and a half ago and, to my great joy last Sunday, Val invited me and Triar up for the weekend. It couldn’t have been more perfect for me. I’ve a few things booked in early October, so weekends are limited and I wasn’t expecting to come here so soon. But yesterday evening was spent on a sunset walk around Airth, listening to the amazing sound of the geese that are gathering in the fields, followed by gluhwein in the hot tub. As Valerie said, “Let Autumn begin.”

As regulars will know, I was recently diagnosed with Functional Neurological Disorder, or FND. While the diagnosis was recent, I’ve been having neurological oddities going on in my body for years. My life and job in Arctic Norway was sometimes physically tough, but for three years I was able to manage my symptoms. They occasionally came back, but then I would rest until they went away again.

The physical and mental stresses I’ve had since returning to the UK had destabilised the situation and I went through a period in the spring and summer of this year, when the symptoms had returned on what seemed like a semi-permanent basis. They weren’t awful. Some tics and body jerks, days of waking up exhausted and odd sensations, mostly like insects crawling on my feet, though the feeling of a knitting needle jabbing into the top of my right foot was sometimes quite unpleasant.

While getting enough rest is crucial, there are other things I’ve been doing which seem to help and they mostly revolve around apps on my phone. Sometimes I think constant access to the internet and to smart phones has brought some very negative things into the world, but there are some real positives as well. I try to ensure I get enough sleep, for example, and though partly that’s about putting down all my devices as bedtime approaches, I do monitor how much sleep I get, and the quality of that sleep in the Autosleep app, which is linked to my Apple watch. While it doesn’t directly help me sleep, it does remind me that I feel much better when I do sleep well and helps me monitor what works to get there.

As well as Autosleep, I have been using WalkFit. I’m not sure I would recommend it. It’s quite expensive for something that’s not quite as good as it should be, or at least that’s my opinion. It got me on board with false advertising, telling me I’d lose weight quickly, but then not giving me explicit guidance on how to do that. To be fair, I knew before I started that rapid weight loss from a walking app was unlikely, but it did tempt me in. Then the first three months cost £25 and I assumed that would be the ongoing price.

After the first three months was up, they charged me £66 for the next quarter, but by then, I was well into the program. I may not have lost much weight, but I am regularly doing a whole lot more exercise because of it, so while that is working, I shall continue. It suits me quite well as, on the mid-level activity program, the daily target is 7,500 steps. You can have two days off in any week without losing your streak. I’m now on 139 days and I don’t want to lose it. There’s also a set of exercises you can do inside, if you are struggling to get steps on wet days. I would do more of those if they were 20 minutes long. They used to be, but now they’re nearer half an hour and the music is a bit tedious. As I said before, I wouldn’t entirely recommend it. It would be better if there was more flexibility to choose the length of your exercise session, but for now, I’m sticking with it.

The final App I’ve been using is Headspace, which I get through work. I used to have Calm, which had some lovely Sleep Stories, which tended to send me off in minutes, but as work were offering to pay, I changed over to Headspace instead. What I hadn’t expected (and which now, has unfortunately changed, it set me up a day’s itinerary, with tasks that it ticked off as I did them. The day started of with five deep breaths, moved onto a two to five minute chat on how to handle the things life brings, then a ten minute meditation session. There was a very variable afternoon task, that was sometimes physical exercise, sometimes music and sometimes a short wildlife film, the to end the day, it recommended a sleep story, which it calls a sleepcast. I’d added in a mindful eating course, which it added on and marked off when done with the rest.

I’m glad I joined up while that itinerary was in place as it’s now changed. Those things are still there, but in a much busier screen with “Recents” at the top, then some of those previous “Daily Essentials” as a line underneath you have to scroll along. Some are missing though, so I’m now using it less, ironically. Pretty sure that wasn’t their aim. My mindful eating course is now in another line called, “Picked with you in mind.” Well you didn’t pick it, did you? I picked it! Anyway, I digress. I’m still using the app, but it’s now much more difficult for me to track whether I’ve done each element over the course of a day.

It’s taken me some time to find sleepcasts that I like. There are certainly plenty to choose from. The Calm ones that I liked best told a story, where you walked alone up a mountain, or along a beach, then lay down somewhere and did some meditative activities. The Headspace sleepcasts paint pictures, sometimes of quite busy places. Maybe some people find those helpful but I don’t. I have found some though, that describe scenes where you find a comfortable place and I am using those more often. Now and then, I try a new one and last week, I tried one called Arctic Lights.

I was looking forward to a scene, with the aurora overhead, and that was in there, but I must confess, most of the rest, I found unrelaxing for all the wrong reasons! There was something about a breeze and snow on the ground and the sounds of a waterfall in the distance and that had me bristling. I mean, I guess it’s possible, but in the Arctic where I was, all the streams and waterfalls froze quite early in the winter and often before the snow came. There were sometimes wind, but most of my memories of aurora were on utterly still nights, where the sky was clear and there was an ethereal silence as everything was solid ice. So instead of the lovely relaxing experience I’d hoped for, I was lying there in bed going, “Well! That’s not right!”

The last straw was when some deer passed by and went to drink by a lovely lake. Why deer, I thought, my mind in glorious outrage. I never once saw deer up there, other than reindeer and far more often, there were moose! I mean there were deer there! I inspected a carcase once that a hunter had shot, but only one in three years. Of course, if I hadn’t had all those ore-expectations, I probably would have found it lovely. Instead, I grumpily sat up and selected a different one. Ah well, I’ll just have to write my own Arctic stories instead!

Anyway, Valerie is now up and it’s time for me to go down and join her, so I’ll leave you there. Hope you have a good week and thanks for reading!

Talking

Blog, Scotland, The Vet Who Came In from the Cold, Vet, , ,

I’m hopelessly short of photos at the moment. Sometimes it’s been because of the weather, but for now it’s because my life has shrunk, I think. For a while, I was forever away on courses, or sent out west. I will expend what extra energy I have to spare this weekend on painting rather than exploring. I feel, in some ways, that everything in life it at a standstill. There are some hurdles I need to get over, and once I do things will start to move again.

One of the hurdles is the building work upstairs. I asked to paint before there were skirting boards and wooden windowsills and lights and plug holes, because it would be easier, and it is. But what that means is, that until I have painted, all those things can’t be done. Once they are, and I’ve got real rooms back again, and all the workmen have left, I can start to clear my bedroom. I’ve been living in a room that’s clogged with inaccessible boxes for almost a year now. I don’t want it to become a way of life.

And then there’s work. I have started to call my nightmare farm, the Farm of Doom. My fellow blogger Penny, who writes the Walking Woman blog (https://icelandpenny.com) has commented now and then on the presence (or usually its return after an absence) of my sense of humour. When I’m rested and well, it comes to the fore. It never really leaves, but it seeps more into my writing. Black humour is how I deal with the negative stuff that comes with a career as a vet.

Anyway, I’m hoping to put the Farm of Doom behind me shortly. My line manager offered to take me off the case on Thursday afternoon, but frankly, I want to take it to some kind of conclusion so I can get closure. That will be another river crossed. The offer came in the wake of me telling him I had been suffering from nightmares, to the point where I had phoned a counsellor on Tuesday.

My workplace has twenty four hour counselling available and I felt a bit apprehensive as I picked up the phone, but it was actually a huge relief. I haven’t really talked to anyone, beyond the absolutely necessary people working on the case, what I saw that day. That’s partly down to confidentiality, but even where I could talk to colleagues, I mostly haven’t. They don’t need to share my horrors. Having checked the counsellor had her own counseling available, I poured most of it out, though something still held me back from mentioning the worst detail. I don’t know why, but perhaps nobody else needs that image stuck in their head.

Yesterday, I talked to someone from Safety as I have reported my experience with the Farm of Doom as a “near miss” or whatever the terminology is. She discussed my most recent absence from work with me and told me I should record it as work related, even though I have a pre-existing condition, the fatigue was caused by my experience at work. She will advise that the three days I had off should not count towards my absence record. She doesn’t control HR, unfortunately. She has been arguing for years with them, about the awful wording in the formal absence warning letter, but she can certainly give advice, and as my line manager generally follows such advice, hopefully they can make things better for now.

I guess the other big hurdle is the NHS waiting list. I spoke again to the GP who tried to bring things forward for me, but he had no success, so the expected date for an appointment is still July. In the meantime, I will continue monitoring myself, looking for patterns and trying to work out triggers. I was sent a course about BSE in cows recently and was reminded of how similar my symptoms are to theirs, but I know I don’t have Creutzfeldt–Jakob because, if I had, I’d be long dead.

On that cheery note, I shall take my leave! Even if I’m barely going out, there’s a lovely view from my garden and Blackbird Lane will be waiting for me. The daffodil at the top of the page was taken there. The birds were singing when I stepped put into the garden this morning, and a beautiful day was dawning. I’ll leave you with a couple of photographs of that! Have a lovely week all.