Up The Farway Tree

Been rather busy..

I have been meaning to catch up on my blog for days now yet somehow the time keeps escaping me! Work has been fairly busy but I am coping much better with it now. In fact I would go as far as to say I am starting to enjoy it ;-) It is always hard moving to a new job and this was always going to be a challenge - more responsibility and a completely different cohort of patients. I am however really enjoying that challenge and I am learning a lot of new things. In particular I am starting to gain some confidence in dealing with more emergency type situations, something I missed out on earlier in my training due to not doing the on call work. I am trying to progress training wise and am currently applying to do the mental health act training, doing a couple of audits and somehow managed to agree to speak about 'why medications' at a patient support group held at work. As if I wasn't busy enough :-)

I had my second organ donor stall this week held at the medical school. It was quite interesting to see the differences between this and the one we held at the student union. Mostly we found that more of the students were already signed up (which I would hope for from medical students) and the ones that weren't seemed keen to do so. The people who tended not to be signed were members of staff! There was again some misinformation - about being too old to donate and about not being able to due to other medical conditions. There is no upper age to donation (the oldest person to donate their corneas being over 90!) and most medical conditions don't prevent donation - and anyway it is better to sign up and let the doctors decide if your organs are good enough! Lucie helped me out again and it was quite strange as we bumped into a few members of staff who were around when we went to uni and I think they were quite pleased to see some former students back doing something useful :-) We also had some help from a first year medical student who has followed the work of Live Life Then Give Life due to knowing someone with CF. It was great having the extra help as at some points we were all dashing off to catch different groups passing. On the topic of organ donation some of you may have noticed the new TV advert (which incidentally features someone with CF) - this is a new hard hitting multi media campaign launched by NHSBT which hopes to bridge the gap between those who support donation in principle but have not signed the register. You can see the advert here - would be interested to hear what people think of it.

Last weekend we were at a 40th birthday party and I also started my Christmas shopping - seriously. The countdown will start quite soon :-) This weekend is the auction mum is holding in aid of The Butterfly Trust so hopefully it will be a huge success. I have been making more cards this week to sell and she has already sold all the butterfly charms I made - so that's a good start to the funds. It's a small but much needed charity providing support to people with CF in Scotland - you can read more on their website about the various services on offer. Fingers crossed for a great night .... and also that I win the raffle featuring Watson the Hawick cashmere teddy bear :-)