Hiya folks,

This is me currently feeling stressed. I haven’t yet reached the stage of counting down the hours until this exam diet is over. (*Why* do they call it a diet, btw?!) But I am counting down the days… 11 days to go.

And I’m over half way through I amen’t entirely happy with the quality of exam answers I have given so far, but I think I have done my best, and that’s what matters, I suppose.

What I am most concerned about at the moment is that I haven’t “done my best” since coming out of my last exam at 11:15am yesterday. I was shattered (even more so than normal) because I kindof had to make quite a big effort just to be there, never mind trying to keep down the solitary chocolate bar (I needed some energy!) that I had in my stomach.

There was also the attempting-to-stay-awake effect. I set a new record for myself I think: that exam was the closest I’ve ever come to *actually* sleeping in an exam. And I don’t mean just a 10-second lapse in concentration. I’m talking about nearly half-an-hour of obvious head-nodding and thinking-with-my-eyes-closed. (Thinking with your eyes closed is very helpful if you are trying to check over your current answers, but only if you have a photographic memory. I don’t think I have a photographic memory. At least not when I’m tired.) So, on coming out of this exam, I was not exactly very with-it, and about ready to sleep for a week. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a week to spare just then. I couldn’t even spare a day of resting… but I took one.

Anyways, for better or worse, its behind me now. I’m looking forward to this time next week when 8/9-ths of my exams will be behind me. The last one isn’t really a worry… 4 whole luxurious days to study straight just for one subject.

I’ve procrastinated long enough for now, I think. I really better get back to the depressingly unfamiliar databases course I was pretending to read over before I came here.

Adieu, and tokumia

It all began on Thursday night. There wasn’t nothing major… I was just feeling a bit under the weather. Ever since coming back from Kenya with malaria last September, I was warned I should be on the watch for any recurrance of malaria. Without delving too deep into the grim and gruesome details, I had pretty exactly the same symptoms I’d had when I had malaria. So, all things considered (and various dutiful friends prodding me in the right direction), I decided I would just go get a simple blood test and be done with it. That’s all there was to it.

Except… the weekend coming up was a long weekend. By the time I’d had a lie-in on Friday (to try and ‘look after’ myself), and phoned into my doctors, I was told I was too late to have a blood test sent off to the lab that day. Considering the potential unpleasantness if I *did* have malaria, I was told to just run on down to the Western to get the blood test. They had already been told to expect me, and the Tropical Diseases experts at Gartnavel had already sent them their advice too.

However, with the long weekend looming, A&E was exceptionally busy. And since I was ‘only waiting for a blood test’, all the people who were actually obviously ill were given priority. (This was fair enough, I suppose, but I don’t think it helped my case that the triage nurse really thought I should be in Gartnavel and seemed to expect a long explanation as to why I wasn’t.)

So, one nerve-racking 9 hours later I arrive home. I was clear, thankfully! However, I had waited at least 7 hours just to have a needle pricked in my arm. Rather a long wait, with only a PDA for company. Especially as it only had enough charge to last about 2 hours. And all the time I was stressing about the revision I could/should have been doing. So much for my lovely revision timetable an’ all. I’m back to the drawing board with that too…

About the only good point was that the revision lecture I would have missed was cancelled anyway.

Anyways, back to the long hard slog… only a month to go, and then all being well I’ll have the peace-of-mind of at least having a Designated Degree to fall back on if fourth year doesn’t work out. (I hope it will, but the peace-of-mind makes a difference, all the same.)