Tag Archives: walkfit

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!

Deer in the Distance

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

It’s been another week of contrasts. At work, I am chasing my tail a lot of the time. I’m behind on paperwork, some of it complicated paperwork, that requires a lot of concentration and reading around the questions that I have to answer. APHA has what is called a Framework Agreement with the Local Authority, because we work together. We are regulatory, they are an enforcement agency, so complementary.

If you feel slightly lost at that last sentence, you may have an inkling of how I am feeling. There are about twenty pages to fill in, and sixty three pages altogether in the document. I have to read and digest the forty three in order to understand what they want me to write in the twenty and there are snippets on different pages about how to address each reply. Then I have to assess whether the reply (which is about what the LA intend to do – gleaned in a meeting, so based on notes I took about what they said) meets or exceeds the minimum standard. There was nothing about this in my veterinary degree! I guess the one good thing I should consider is that at least I am doing it in my mother tongue!

On top of that, I’m dealing with a TB breakdown. When we’ve found TB on a farm, we have to do a series of tests at sixty day intervals. Part of it is a skin test – injecting tuberculin (purified proteins from bacterial cultures) – to see if there is an immune reaction. In addition, we take blood samples in the early stages. The blood test is more likely to find animals in the early stages of the disease.

Because the skin test can only be done every sixty days (before that, the tuberculin causes desensitisation, so no reaction) what usually happens is that there are periods of inaction, followed by a massive flurry of activity as any positive reactors have to be culled and checked for lesions at the slaughterhouse. They are under restrictions on the farm, so moving them requires – you guessed it – a whole load of paperwork. I am currently in that flurry, so alongside the Framework, there’s a lot going on.

As if that wasn’t enough to be going on with, there’s a bonus I can achieve if I can demonstrate I have jumped through various hoops to show I have progressed at work and am therefore worth more. The deadline for that is the end of June.

I probably should have been working on this for the last year, to make sure I ticked all thirty eight of the boxes, some of which involve training people inside and outside the agency. As well as writing thirty eight mini-essays, demonstrating my super-competence, I am currently creating a training program for those going out to do a DRF – the epidemiological investigation we carry out in TB breakdown cases – and may also go to a Local Authority meeting to train them on how to spot foot and mouth. All that in the next two weeks.

Really, the Norwegian method of progressive pay, based on assessment meetings with your manager, with the possibility of promotion from first vet to senior vet if you demonstrate a willingness to take on responsibility is much more efficient. The irony is, that used to be the same in the UK civil service. In trying to make everything cheaper, they’ve ended up with enormous inefficiency. Even more ironically, if I was in a quieter region, with less urgent work, I’d have way more time for the box-ticking games. The idea that I’m no more useful than I was on the day I arrived, unless I can tick these boxes is just silly.

Still, there are lovely benefits thrown in. On Wednesday this week, I took a day away from all the paperwork to go to a meeting run by the British Deer Veterinary Association. It was down at Fountains Abbey in North Yorkshire, so I was able to stay with mum and dad on Tuesday and Wednesday nights and drive over there for the day. The lectures were really interesting and focused on things that were relevant to what I do. There was a talk on welfare at the time of killing – a hot topic for APHA – as well as information on the levels of TB in wild deer and the risk that represents to farmed animals. I must admit that my conclusion was that the UK is never going to be TB free, but really it was a very interesting day and a lovely break from my day to day activities.

The day ended with a walk around the deer park, which was very beautiful. The deer were mostly just dots in the distance, but it was a lovely end to the day.

The drive back took me over the moors and I couldn’t resist stopping to take a few photos along the way. The light wasn’t quite as gorgeous as it had been in the morning as I drove over, but now I had no deadline for getting to where I was going.

And so I will leave you with my June award for WalkFit, which I have already completed. As I was searching for the icon, I saw there’s another challenge coming up in three days, so I shall tackle that when it arises. Thanks for reading and a good week to all of you.

A Quiet Week

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

I managed the May Walkfit Challenge: 15,000 steps, three times in May.

Screenshot

I opened the app on 1st of June, wondering what I would find. April had been 10,000 four times. If it jumped to 20k in a day, I didn’t think I would manage it. Instead, for some reason it’s set the bizarre target of 6,000 steps ten times over. Given my daily steps target is 7,500, which I have been meeting regularly, that doesn’t really seem like anything to aim at. I’m enjoying the app and it is undoubtedly encouraging me to move more than I did, but there are a few things that undoubtedly could do with some improvement.

I didn’t have any callouts last weekend. It’s less stressful than it used to be in practice, though it’s so many years since I’ve done on-call that it’s very different in many ways. Back then, mobile phones weren’t reliable enough for the RCVS to allow them to be used for on-call vets, so you had to stay within hearing distance of your landline. No popping out to the shops if you’d forgotten to get something. Well you could, but you had to phone your boss’s mother (or whoever was covering when you were out working) and ask if it was okay.

Still, I went to church on Sunday and it wasn’t very relaxed. There’s a time limit of 30 minutes after a report case (notifiable disease) comes in. After that, you’re meant to be on the road. As church is a 15 minute drive from home, that 15 minutes would be long enough to add stress to that time constraint.

I had a fascinating day on Tuesday. One of the tasks senior veterinary inspectors cover is import checks of live animals coming into the UK. Obviously how many of those come your way depends on the region where you work. Prestwick Airport is within the area covered by Ayr Field Services and there is a terminal there for horses to come into the country. Until last year, it was very quiet, but because of some problems at Stansted, there are now quite a few horses coming in, so they are increasing the number of vets trained to do it.

So I headed up to Prestwick on Tuesday morning. I probably should have arranged a hotel for the night before or the night after the training, but because of Triar and the APHA restriction on having dogs in cars, I couldn’t do that. I have done a small amount of import and export work in Norway, so the general protocols don’t seem all that complicated and anyway, I was really interested, which always helps when learning something new.

Watching the horse boxes being unloaded from the plane was a new experience. The boxes are actually moved on rollers and pushed by hand, off the plane, onto a platform that lowers them to the ground, then onto a trailer that brings them into the horse terminal. The boxes are then pushed again onto more rollers on a platform, where they are secured. The horses are then given a few minutes to settle, before the doors are opened and they are walked down a ramp and into a stable where they can be checked.

There were two lots of horses, four horses on total and they were coming in from the US. Two of them were owned by a woman who was moving to the UK. One of her horses was 26 years old and she had used him as her FEI horse (eventing, I think). The other was younger – her new competition horse. The other two were from a stud in the US and were coming into the UK as race horses. They were all stunning, even the old boy, and I have made a note of the names of the racehorses, just in case they ever do anything remarkable. I know the odds are that they won’t, but man they were beautiful!

The only other interesting thing I’ve done this week is the homework before I begin a screenwriting course with a small, local, media company, run by a friend. I’ve been sent the first chapter of Great Expectations, along with a shooting script by David Nicholas and a link to the film on YouTube. It’s a 1946 film, so presumably the script is out of copyright. It was interesting to see the changes from the chapter Dickens wrote, to the pared down script, and then to see what the director made of it. Also, films have changed a lot since then, but the opening scene was very dramatic in black and white. I’m now really looking forward to learning more.

I’ve only a few photos of Blackbird Lane to share with you this week, so I will drop those here. Thanks for reading.

Scottish Lanes and Yorkshire Skies

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

It’s been a pleasant enough week back at work. I’m piling up cases slightly faster than I’m able to do the paperwork, but unless something urgent comes in, I should hopefully catch up with the ones I have next week.

Tuesday was spent training a new locum vet how to conduct a welfare visit. Wednesday saw me conducting a meeting with members of the local council. I work with two of them – Scott and David – on a regular basis and we get on well, but as with everything these days, it all has to be fully justified and written down. Thursday I tested a sheep for bluetongue.

And as all that was going on, all the cattle in my current TB breakdown were undergoing their first wave of testing. Until there are two clear tests, the cattle can’t be moved off the farm to another farm, so the farmer is essentially in lockdown. In the meantime, I have to dig into where the disease might have originated and where it might have spread to. All those animals will need to be tested too.

For now, I am actually on call. There are two “ready to go” vets in Scotland at nights and weekends: one North one South. I’m covering the South, so if any suspicion of notifiable disease crops up, or a welfare case that’s so urgent it can’t wait, then I’m the vet that will deal with it. I don’t know whether to hope something comes up or not. I still have to get my first report case (notifiable disease) under my belt, but obviously I don’t want any animal to have anything bad to crop up. We’re still on high alert for foot and mouth because of the European outbreaks.

After a long spell of warm weather, the pattern has now become more mixed, but Triar and I have been regularly walking down Blackbird Lane together. Well be walking there a lot today because I can’t go far from home in case any call comes in, but I want to get in 15,000 steps today.

I’m still keeping up with my WalkFit challenges and one of those is to do 15,000 steps three times in May. I’ve done two days already and this is the last day in May, so I’m going to go for it. My daily step requirement has stopped rising and is stable at 7,500 steps a day, which suits me for now. I often do more, but on bad days, I can still usually achieve that without too much effort.

There are sometimes cows in the fields lining the lane. I’m working on getting Triar to walk past them quietly. He’s always been something of a barker, but does respond well to bribery.

We did have something of an incident yesterday, not with the cows, but with water. He does love a paddle and there is a fairly disgusting, stagnant looking pool at the far end of the lane. Until yesterday , he had always ignored it, but yesterday he decided to jump in. Despite bathing him for about an hour when we got home, he still retains a definite odour of muddy puddle.

I’m going to finish with a few more photos of Yorkshire from last weekend. The picture at the top of the page was taken from my parents’ conservatory. The rest were taken while out with Triar. I do love a dramatic sky over stone walls and sunny fields. Have a lovely week all and thanks for reading.