Getting Ready For Christmas

I'm off work next week. I can't wait. I've barely started my Christmas shopping - I have so much to do. I have a few presents for my immediate family and my best friend's son and I've made my Christmas cake. And that's it. Today, we went to the supermarket and bought a bunch of the dried ingredients for all my Christmas baking.

I made a start today. I have made some meringues (they're OK but I don't much like eggs, and I think they have absorbed the colour from the baking paper as they have a slight brown tinge), which, if I keep them in an airtight container, may keep until Christmas. I also made a batch of fudge. I have failed at this so many times before, and I just cannot do failure at cooking. And I actually think it is starting to set. I'm so proud of myself. This is only a practise batch, though.

So, for Christmas, for the children in the family and my friends' children, I have decided that I will, in addition to buying them a present, give them a bag full of home made sweets and treats. My best friend thinks it's a lovely idea. She even wants one. I have so many ideas of what to put in them. I have recipes for sugar mice and stripy biscuits and Turkish Delight and loads of other yummy sounding things. I just don't know if the bags I plan on getting will be big enough! I am excited that I'm going to be able to decorate the bags with pretty ribbons. I'm actually really excited about it!

I also need to crack on with my mince pies. I made lovely mince pies last year and I was going to make a start on them today. But I left my recipe book with the best ever mince pie recipe in at my
 house and I'm busy baking and cooking at my mums.

I Think I'm In Love - HELP!

I have met a wonderful man and think I am in love with him. I am both deliriously happy and very, very miserable.

It feels different to anything I have ever felt for a guy before. He is absolutely gorgeous. But I think he has a great personality, too (unlike the last absolutely gorgeous guy, who was a lying, cheating thing). He is friendly and funny and warm. He smiles at me when I get to work and he often comes and says hello (followed by a 'Oh god, I'm not working with you today am I?' and a smile to show he's joking).

Every time I think of him or see him, I can feel my pulse quicken and my breathing change. I have giggled over him with my friends. Despite being 25, I have never been a giggle-over-guys kind of girl - I have tended to keep my crushes to myself. Or tried to be all grown up about it.

We flirt all the time together at work (to an extent - as you may be aware I am a nurse, so in front of patients, we are of course sensible and mature) and it must be so obvious cos everybody has noticed. I felt so good after a couple of shifts with him as the flirting just didn't stop! He even started the flirting the other day.

However, I don't know if he is single. One of the girls at work says he is single, but I don't know. But I am too shy (about the only thing I am shy about!) to ask him, or to take the flirting any further, just in case he says no. And seeing him at work after that would be so embarrassing.

He's also a little bit younger than me. To me, that sounds like a problem. But then, I realised that the last guy I was with was 2 years younger than me, and the one before him was a year younger than me. So, actually, I guess that's not a problem, really.

I don't know what to do now, though.

Help!

Book Review - Midwife on Call by Agnes Light

Plot Summary

The book starts off with a young Agnes Light (pseudonym) fainting at her first birth. What is particularly mortifying for her is that she has two children of her own.

Agnes started training as a nurse some years previously, only to discover she had become pregnant. She gave up her post as a student nurse, quickly married her boyfriend and had two baby boys in quick sucession. She and her husband split up. She later remarried and had two more children.

She worked as an Auxillary Nurse (HCA) for some time when her boys were young, and then commenced her midwifery training as a direct enterant. And fainted during her first birth.

Throughout the course of her book, Agnes describes some of her more memorable episodes, working in the hospital, in clinic, in the community and as an indepenent midwife, and the difficulty she faced in the profession due to poor hearing.

Book Review

Unlike many books of this type, Agnes is still a practising midwife, approaching retirement and dreading it. Also, uinlike many midwives of her generation, Agnes did not train as a nurse first. These make this book unique in this popular and expanding genre of health care professionals memoirs.

This book is funny and sad and is definitely well worth a read.

Book Review - The Truth About Melody Browne by Lisa Jewell

Plot Summary

The novel starts off when Melody Browne is 9 years old. She wakes up with her mum and dad outside her house shortly after her ninth birthday. Her house is on fire.

Melody has only a couple of memories of her childhood before the fire, and grows up, estranged, from her parents, with her son, whom she had aged fifteen. This is part of the reason they are estranged.

The book moves from nine year old Melody to 33 year old Melody, weeks before her son's 18th birthday. She is unhappy with her life. She is a single mother, living in a council flat and working as a dinner lady. And then, on the bus one night, she meets a man. He admires her shoulders. She thinks he is a freak. And yet, she agrees to a date with this man.

He takes her to a hypnotism show, and Melody is chosen to go up on stage and act out the part of a five year old. Afterwards, Melody faints and slowly, over the next few weeks, Melody's memory starts to come back. It happens slowly. Sometimes, she just recognises a house or a hairy mole on a lady's face, and knows she knows it. Other times, she actually has to be told about it.

By the end of the book, Melody actually knows what has happened to her and has met some of the people who, during the first nine years of her life, were important to her.

Book Review

The book starts off a bit slow, and to be honest, after reading the first few pages, I was almost tempted to give up. However, I persevered and it was worth it. As you learn more, along with Melody, through her fleeting flashbacks, or her feeling that she knows something, you are eager to learn how she got from there to here.

The book flips back and to, between now and 1979-1981, not always in order, so if you like a book that is chronological, it may not be for you.

I'm being deliberately vague, not wanting to give away the plot, but it is so surreal. It is a very exaggerated book, and if things like that happen in real life, then I must have lead even more of a sheltered life than I thought I had.

By the end of the book, I was in tears about Melody's life.

Except the disappointing start, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Book Review - Matron Knows Best (By Joan Woodcock)

Plot Outline

Joan started training as a nurse cadet in 1966. She tells of her early years as first a Cadet Nurse and then as a Student Nurse, and how she was expected just to do as she was told.

She then became a Staff Nurse and worked in a variety of different places, including A&E, a respite hospital where they had to refer to the patients as clients and weren't even meant to do basic things such as send off a urine sample (!) and in an isolation hospital.


Her first post as a Sister was in a GP practice when the post was new, later becoming a Marie Curie nurse, a prison nurse and working in a centre for women who had been subjected to sexual assults.

All this was interspersed with raising her son, caring for her mother in her last week or so of life and caring for a friend at the end of her life.

Review

Being a nurse myself, I absolutely love these books of previous nurse's experience. I find the change from how we practise today so very different and absolutely fascinating.

At times, I was laughing out loud at the stories in these books. I know what can go wrong in a hospital. Joan has difficulty using the sluice the first time she is expected to use it. I, too, had difficulties when using the sluice once as a student, and whilst I didn't end up soaking a Sister, I did have an HCA having to help me scoop faeces up!

I do however have one major criticsm, and it is of Mrs. Woodcock herself, and not of her book. At the end of the book, she criticises the care that nurses with a degree provide, giving two examples, one that her elderly neighbour was left in a disgusting condition (incontinent with her head in her dinner plate whilst the nurses sat at the nurses station) and the second that a degree level student nurse told some one in a hospice that she didn't do mess. All I have to say is the fact that the neighbour was left in such a terrible condition is not the fault of degree nurses. It may simply be those nurses. Secondly, the fact that just becasue the student nurse was being trained at degree level does not mean that all degree nurses are like that. I am a nurse with a degree and will help clean up all types of bodily fluid. Likewise, I have worked with nurses trained the old fashioned way who do not see it as their job to get their hands dirty.

Whilst I enjoyed the book, the last few pages, criticsing degree nurses, left me fuming.