Tag Archives: training

FND and Frustration

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

I’m a day late in writing this, mostly because I am experiencing what could probably be best described as lassitude: described in the online Oxford Dictionary as “a state of physical or mental weariness; lack of energy.”

Don’t get me wrong, I am still able to function, on the surface. Yesterday and Friday, I met friends and today, I will go to church and walk the dog, but my body feels tired. There is a feeling in my feet and lower legs, as well as in my fingers that is probably best described as if they are fizzing, like I should imagine a glass of cola would feel, if it was able to. If I try to move fast, my body reacts by jerking. That feels similar to the effect you get if you touch an electric fence: the movement comes and there is no control over it. It’s not painful, nor is it alarming these days. It’s just a bit of a bore and rather tiring.

I wondered, for a while, if the fizzing was an anxiety attack. The occupational health doctor told me it wasn’t, one day when I was speaking to her and I said I felt it now. I was speaking and breathing normally, she said; it’s not that.

Looking for patterns, I think this attack is the result of being woken at two in the morning, working a twelve hour day, then having a very hot, hour long walk on the beach, without having any real opportunity to rest afterwards.

Should I have cancelled the friends and going to church? I took Friday off (flexi time) to rest and I would probably feel better now if I had spent a long weekend resting in bed or in front of the TV, but I am reluctant to cancel the things in my life that lift me up, to preserve myself for work.

What didn’t help was that I also spent Friday morning composing a long letter to the neurologist I saw about a month ago. His promised letter reached me on Tuesday and I read through it to the end, including the final paragraph that left me metaphorically gasping.

To go back to the appointment itself, we spent a lot of time discussing history, which inevitably took a while. I was in Norway 15 years, so everything medical that happened there is missing from my files. That part of his letter was reasonable. He didn’t get it all right, but the discrepancies probably aren’t significant enough to be worth arguing about it. As an aside here I will add, that FND is seen by many doctors as akin to hysteria, so I am wary about being seen as fussing too much. If I say that being diagnosed with FND messes with your mind, I hope you can understand what I’m getting at.

He then did something of a physical exam. I’ve had a lot of neurological exams over the years, so I know that he missed a lot out. If I took a positive view, he was concentrating his examination on what our discussion had highlighted as likely areas for assessment. A more negative take would be that he was looking for what he hoped to see, having already decided it was probably FND and needing a positive sign upon which to hang a that diagnosis.

I suspect the latter is nearer to the truth, because as soon as he saw something (head shaking during various exercises where I had to close my eyes to assess balance) he announced the diagnosis and quickly drew the appointment to a close. There was only the briefest discussion on why I was there. I mentioned being sent by occupational health, the problems with having only six sick days before formal proceedings, and how I had been much better in Norway where that didn’t occur, but not really anything about what is actually happening at present, for example as I described above.

His last paragraph then, described what he had heard during that last brief discussion. To my shock, what he wrote was “the biggest problem she has found is that employers in the UK only give six weeks of leave and she had the pattern in Norway where she would work for three weeks, her jerks would start to aggravate and then she had a week off and the jerks settled.”

Having written my response on Friday, I decided to send it on Monday, partly because Friday afternoon is not the best time to send anyone a letter at work and partly to allow myself more reflection time, which has actually been useful.

The real situation is that, in Norway, those physical and mental stressors that trigger the exhaustion (which can eventually require complete rest and absence from work, if I push on too hard) just didn’t happen that often. The job was much more reasonable and we were not chronically understaffed. I took a week off work to rest perhaps four times in three years.

Here in the UK, those events are perhaps coming four times a year and because I haven’t dared to take proper time off to recover, I am probably more susceptible as well. In the last six months, I have probably felt relatively normal for fifty percent of the time. The rest, I experience this weariness. I can still function, but it’s not pleasant and I tend to forget things and make stupid errors, that sometimes I find later and feel glad that nothing serious happened because I couldn’t concentrate properly.

So although I am shocked by what the doctor said, working through what is happening and why has been a useful exercise. I suspect, with all the frustrations in my current job, it is not going to be compatible with my health to continue in the same role, long term. I would add that I know it isn’t me. Many others are circling the drain or (as the health and safety officer corrected me) approaching burnout.

What I am going to do about it remains undecided. I quite like my job and I’m good at it, but my body and mind are not fit enough to tackle it and the risk of staying is that my health could worsen. I am considering reducing my work hours to four days a week, perhaps as a trial. Other alternatives obviously include trying to find something else, either within the civil service or elsewhere. I briefly toyed with the idea of returning to Norway, but I returned to the UK for various reasons and those remain unchanged.

Anyway, enough of that heavy stuff and self analysis. We had another fun training session on Wednesday with Josephine. She sadly only has two months left in her temporary role and they’ve only just started to advertise for a permanent replacement, so it looks like I may be left again without a veterinary mentor/guide while the civil service procrastinates. However, for now, she is a breath of fresh air and great at building up the team.

The exercise involved toy animals again. She set up various scenes, where there were disease outbreaks and we had to look for information and describe how we would go about diagnosis and putting the information onto the inevitable forms.

At the top of the page is a scene where there is an outbreak of avian influenza. That was slightly complicated because of these guys:

I assume that group had to discuss what to do about local wildlife, but my group had to investigate and record a possible bluetongue sampling at this lovely farm:

I got extra brownie points for querying the assorted carrots and other vegetables in the yellow box. This farmer may be feeding kitchen scraps, which is illegal in the UK!

There has also been some amusement at work this week, because of some seagulls which have been nesting somewhere on or near the building where I work. Perhaps others have not been so amused as a couple of people have been dive bombed or poohed on, but a theory of mine was confirmed when we had a number of extra staff visiting on Wednesday for a meeting. These are sexist seagulls and while I have passed out of the door, watched over by a relatively benign beady eye, all the actual attacks have been on men. Clearly there are some advantages to being female!

I’m not going to finish without giving high praise to The Boathouse restaurant at Glencaple. Regular readers may recall a lovely Christmas meal Donna and I had there back in December. I suggested a revisit, having seen an advertisement on Facebook for afternoon tea. It would be an understatement to say that it did not disappoint! As with the Christmas dinner, I took home enough food to last me until the next day and it really did taste as good as it looks!

Anyway, I shall go now. Thanks for reading and have a good week!

Do Not Attend

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I am finally inspired to work on my story based on the Norwegian song/poem Tir n’a Noir again. I have decided it shall be a short story – different from what I usually write. I have also signed up for a scriptwriting course and am waiting for that to begin. I think it will benefit me trying out different formats. A novel takes so much time and concentration and I am in short supply of both those things. My day job takes too much energy.

That said, I’ve had a good week at work. On Monday I was out with Lauren, one of our animal health officers, training her to blood sample sheep. With only minor instruction from me, she quickly got the hang of it and took blood from twenty sheep in no time. I enjoy teaching people how to do things I’ve spent half a lifetime learning.

On Tuesday, I was learning myself. I was up at Prestwick Airport again, checking two beautiful horses that had flown in from the US. It was a broodmare and her foal and they were blue blood in the racing world. Absolutely stunning. Another colleague recommended I took the Castle Douglas road on the way back and I did. The normal Ayr road is rather boring, so I was delighted to find myself driving through some gorgeous Galloway scenery. There are mostly rolling hills here, rather than mountains, but I passed through spiky fir forests and by lochans and burns.

As you can see, the sky became quite spectacular and shortly afterwards, it began to pour. I was reminded of a summer long ago, when we holidayed in New Galloway and went walking every morning, but made sure we were back in the cottage in the afternoon as the rain started each day at about 3pm.

On Wednesday, I recorded the training on the Disease Report Form that I had given in front of an audience the week before. To do this, I was told to set up a Teams meeting with my mentor, Josephine. “Mark it, ‘Do not attend’” she told me, so I gave it that title and then began. I muffed it a couple of times and I wasn’t sure how to delete, so I decided to quit that meeting and set up another. This time, I thought I would give her a giggle and gave it a rather tongue in cheek name.

That time, the recording went well and I laid down a perfectly respectable piece of training. What I hadn’t realized was that when anyone accesses the presentation, what they would come to was a video with the title of the meeting it was recorded on in broad letters at the bottom of the page. And so, you guessed it, I have created a piece of training on a serious topic, with the title that will be there in perpetuity – Do Not Attend Again – The Director’s Cut.

I don’t have any real plans for this weekend so far. Last weekend I went for a walk with Belle, who is one of the women who will be teaching me about scriptwriting. Her dog George is very laid back, and he and Triar seeem to get on fine. Triar did shame me slightly by disappearing into a massive field, filled with long grass and rabbits, and failing entirely to return when I called him. Belle and George were fortunately very laid back about the whole thing and Belle even suggested that, as Triar enjoyed it so much, we could come back another day, but bring a picnic instead of aiming to go to a pub for a drink. Sounds good to me!

Have a good week all and thanks for reading.

Golden Hemorrhoids and Sticky Toffee Pudding

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

At the start of this week, I was quite tense. I’ve explained before that I am trying to work towards a bonus payment, which requires a lot of hoop-jumping and I am attempting some of the hoops right at the last minute, given that the deadline for submitting my activities is Monday coming. On Tuesday last week, I was meant to be presenting training on Foot and Mouth Disease and an update on Bluetongue. On the morning of the presentation, I received a message to say it the meeting was cancelled. I confess, I was rather relieved, though hopefully it won’t undermine my case.

On Wednesday, I gave my Disease Risk Form training to some of the vets. It was given at our regional meeting and I fondly looked round the room at the three or four vets in attendance and thought there was nobody there that would worry me to present to.

When the time of the meeting arrived, Josephine, my veterinary mentor told me we were linking in by Teams, and slightly to my horror, I realized that there were vets at all levels, linking in from the whole of Scotland. Still, I didn’t have any time to worry, and apart from wishing I’d thought to bring a glass of water for my dry mouth, the whole thing went off pretty well.

I must say though, that Josephine herself had given some training on Bluetongue (the situation is unfolding fast – we’re trying to keep it out of Scotland) which she made much more fun than anything I have produced. As you can see below, the cow on the Lipton’s tea van is leaving England and crossing the yellow border into Scotland and we were learning about the special measures the farmer would have to undertake. Suffice to say, there won’t be a lot of English animals at Scottish shows this year and vice versa.

Not sure whose the Coke bottle is, but clearly it should really have been Irn Bru for the sake of consistency.

Wednesday night was the summer meal at my writing group in Lockerbie. The hotel we use does food and they are responsible for the sticky toffee pudding at the top of the page. As regular readers will know, I’m a bit of a foodie and the beef stroganoff, for my taste, had too much Dijon mustard, to the point where that was the principal flavour, but it was pleasant enough.

On Thursday morning I woke up feeling a bit more relaxed, with all my training done for now. I’ve mentioned before that I am reading the Bible and I have an app that gives me three readings each day, two from the Old Testament and one from the New. My first Old Testament reading was Samuel and I was bemused to read that, having stolen The Ark of the Covenant, the Philistines were blighted with “‘emerods in their secret parts”.

Of course, I had to look this up. There are sometimes words I don’t fully understand and sometimes I don’t check, but these emerods were coming up, over and over, and moreover, when the Philistines sensibly decided that the safest thing was to swiftly hand the Ark back to Israel, the priests and diviners told them they had to give it back with an offering that consisted of five golden mice and that they had to make images of their “emerods” from gold and hand over five of those as well.

So when I checked, it turns out that the word “emerods” is actually an old word for hemorrhoids. I must say, the Bible does throw up some truly bizarre things now and then! As it was my friend Valerie who encouraged me into the Bible reading, I tried to send her a message, “Golden hemorrhoids? I’ve heard it all now!” But having sent it, I realized a minute or two later that I had sent it instead to another friend. Fortunately, I managed to delete it before she saw it, but I had a laugh and shared that with Valerie too. Let’s face it, that would be quite a message to wake up to, without context or explanation!

I shall leave you with a few, wonderfully overgrown pictures from Blackbird Lane. Thank you, as ever, for reading. Hope you have a good week.

.

From Crewe to Kirkconnell Flow

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

I seem to be in a perpetual state of travel at the moment. After Perth, I had a night in Airth, then down to Yorkshire, and from Yorkshire, I headed directly to Crewe, not having spent a single night in my own bed. Luckily in Crewe, I was staying in a Premier Inn. I guess some would find their ubiquity boring, but I rather like knowing exactly what the room will be like, and what’s on the breakfast menu, even if I’ve never been to that particular hotel before.

This week’s training was on dealing with outbreaks of notifiable disease, with particular attention to bird flu, or avian influenza, as it’s called officially. It was quite sobering to hear the accounts of a couple of vets who arrived two years before me, and found themselves dealing with outbreak cases within a few weeks of arriving. That must have been a baptism of fire, given all the kit you have to wear, including hoods that cover your entire head and blow air over your face and require you to keep an eye on the battery levels if you’re in the sheds too long.

There was a day of practical training, out on a chicken farm. I’ve seen lots of broilers before – chickens bred for meat – so I was interested to see this one, which had laying hens. Though the hens were all inside, so not free range, they were not in cages, which I was glad about. Unlike the broilers, who were mostly on the floor, with a few perches and “toys” to interact with if they wanted, these hens were much more energetic and had different levels to walk on and metal bars to navigate across. It seemed a relatively good environment to me.

We saw some chickens being euthanized. It wasn’t particularly pleasant to watch, though the aim is to have high welfare throughout the process – hopefully actually higher than they would have in a slaughterhouse. There are various roles I might have to take if I go out to a notifiable disease case and one is the Welfare Vet. It’s important that I know the correct way everything should be done.

It wouldn’t necessarily be a big, commercial farm either. If I had to deal with someone’s pet chickens, I would want to be able to explain to them about what might happen, to prepare them for what they might see, just as I used to do when I euthanized people’s dogs when I was in practice. Dying doesn’t always look peaceful, even when there is no suffering involved.

We also carried out some post mortems. If I’m first on the scene, I have to be capable of carrying out some basic diagnostic procedures. Ultimately, all notifiable diseases will be diagnosed via tests sent to an official laboratory, but if I can rule out notifiable disease without it getting that far, it can save a lot of disruption. It can take twenty four hours for the tests to come back and until then, depending on which disease is suspected, movement restrictions will be in place, not just for the farm we’re on, but potentially for a large area surrounding that. With suspicion of foot and mouth, the whole country might potentially be brought to a standstill, so it’s incredibly important that the key vet is competent and backed up with a competent team.

At some point, I will be sent out to a report case where there is suspicion of a notifiable disease. While I know it will be daunting when it does happen, I feel better prepared now than I was before.

I finally got home on Thursday and have spent the last two nights in my own bed. As my friend Lara can confirm, I only own super-comfortable beds, so being home is always pretty nice! On my way up the road from Yorkshire, I stopped at Gretna Outlet to buy myself a new weekend happiness kit.

Though it wasn’t the weekend yet, Triar and I went out to Kirkconnell Flow Nature Reserve last night to start breaking my new boots in, ready for some more Perthshire hills next week. Kirkconnell flow is an ancient, raised, peat bog. Very rare apparently and stunningly beautiful yesterday evening in the golden light. We walked along the edge and through the forest, which reminded me of the forests in the north of Norway, with their tall pines and smaller silver birches sheltering underneath.

I was enjoying it so much that we did the outer circuit first and then the shorter inner circuit. I have a walk planned for today as well. Nothing too strenuous and good, well marked paths so getting lost is not possible. It’s about time I started exploring Dumfries and Galloway on foot and not just in my car.

Thank you for reading. I hope you have a good week.

Iconic

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I haven’t got so much to write about this week as I’ve spent the second half of it in bed. I haven’t taken many photos either, though I did find a gorgeous little church in Weybridge, and couldn’t resist taking a few pictures.

I started the week by travelling to Addlestone on the train. I was booked in to an APHA “Corporate Induction” which sounded very grand and, to me, rather odd as I tend to think of “Corporate” as referring to companies, but it seems it has a secondary meaning invoking the whole of a group.

Travelling by train is something I generally enjoy. I realise that’s probably because I don’t have to do it often. I’m sure if I commuted every day and especially in London, I’d probably hate it, but as it is, it’s a novelty for me. I’d also booked a hotel that had dinner included as well as breakfast and was within easy walking distance of the railway station and which would also let me walk to the induction the next day, which I found pleasing. Having to collect receipts for taxis and meals is a bit of a faff and I have a bad tendency to lose them if I’m moving around a lot.

As part of my journey, I had to take the underground from Kings Cross to Vauxhall. I felt unexpectedly wam with nostalgia as I descended on the escalator and walked through the passageways with their odd draughts and colourful posters. We had a lovely holiday a few years back, where we stayed near Primrose Hill. That in turn, had brought back memories of reading One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Starlight Barking as a child, as Pongo and Perdita walked there in the evenings and barked messages to their distant network of dogs from the top of the hill. Kings Cross, of course is also the place where Harry Potter took the train to Hogwarts. Children’s literature has always been something of an escape for me.

The induction day was enjoyable enough, not necessarily because of the talks, but because it was good to meet new people. Security at the Weybridge centre was tight, and I found myself in the queue with a couple of lovely young women, one of whom is starting out as an animal health officer, the other (M) being an import inspector for plants. I spent some time in discussion with M about where she’d been working before.

She was in the police force for two years and had left because the environment was so misogynistic. I found that very sad, though not unsurprising, given the information that’s periodically revealed by whistleblowers and things I hear from those with relatives in the force. Still, I hope she finds a better way forward where she is now. Though it looks like there are still more men than women at the top of APHA, it’s obvious that it isn’t impossible to rise up through the ranks. I have regularly found myself wishing I had discovered its equivalent when I was much younger.

As I was walking to the induction, I found this gorgeous little church (All Saint’s in New Haw) so I took some pictures.

Having discovered that Addlestone was only an hour’s drive from Winchester, I invited Anna and Lauren over for dinner. My original intention was to eat at the hotel where I had booked dinner, but Monday night’s offering had been so poor, we opted for somewhere a bit better and ate across the road in a Chinese. I had realised during the day that I was coming down with something, but we mostly kept our distance and so far, they seem to be okay.

But on Wednesday morning I woke up feeling pretty rough. It was bad enough that I waited in bed until eight so that I could go buy paracetamol to eat with breakfast. Later, I added in ibuprofen. I was meant to stay with Mum and Dad on the way back, but decided instead to collect Triar and come straight home. I’ve mostly been in bed since, though I think I may be well enough to get up and go shopping today. Otherwise I will be living off bread, marmalade and sausages for the rest of the weekend. Poor Triar has been very patient. I’ve booked us into the Freedom Field again tomorrow afternoon so he can get a really good run while I stand around. I hope it’s sunny.

Anyway I’ll leave you there and hope to be feeling better soon. I was meant to be on duty vet this weekend, but fortunately K found cover for me without me even asking, which was lovely as I was expecting to have to work from bed. Apparently I’m not the only one who went to Stranraer well and came back infected. I hope you all have a good week.