Digigran

Pediculosis Capitas


The Head Louse
or
Nit
as we call them in our profession.



Worried Well
This is an expression I have adopted from my husband who says that people who worry about being unwell occupy a good deal of many doctors' time. Not that he thinks the sufferers do not need help - only that there are increasingly more and more things about health we worry about (as well as the work-related stuff and guilt complexes of things left undone like our BLOGs for example).

He is currently writing about patients who believe they have been infested by some kind of unseen creepy crawly. The posh term is Delusions of Parasitosis (For those who have such fears see THIS).
I went to NATE Conference this weekend and bought him a simplified version of real infestation called I' ve Got Nits ( See picture and scroll down for details of content).


I told a retired GP in the village about my husband's writing and he then told me he had once knelt in the living room of a patient in Belper watching her bang the back of a settee to show him the myriads of parasites living there. These, she said, were jumping all over her at night, as she watched TV and causing a horrible itchiness. As she banged, hosts of dust motes floated high into the air and she cried gleefully, "Look, look, they are everywhere!". He then, he said, found himself kneeling beside her, banging the top of said settee, trying to prove that it was only dust! He should, of course, have referred her to see my husband, who knows how to listen gently and sensibly to patients, getting themto explore their anxieties and let loose their fears, etc. However, that takes up a good deal of NHS time and money so I guess sitting and banging a settee together might give some sort of comfort. She was not, as you may imagine, disabused of her illusion though.

More stories of nits
I also once worked with a class on poems about headlice with a wonderful teacher called Stuart Harrison , one of the most creative people I have had the pleasure to know. He use a microscope o attached to a classroom computer to take images of nits combed from a child's hair which looked like the first picture on this BLOG. (Bear with me, dear reader, if you exist, I cannot yet place my pictures where I want them in the text.) I then wrote thin poems with them and we made them into ppts. I wish I knew how to attach the PPT. presentation, so you could see exactly what these Y6 children achieved. I must get a lesson from DR Joolz and post it later.
Meanwhile here is a sample from the boys:

and now the girls:

It is a transparent oval
Blood trickling through its body.
Long waving tentacles
Swaying side to side.
The thought of it living in my hair
Makes me shiver and my teeth start to quiver.

Its claws are like crab’s pincers
Digging into my head.
It is a space monster searching
Through your hair
It’s lost in the space of each hair

My head is like an obstacle race
It has to win.
It moves wobbling along my hair
A tight – ropewalker
A circus act
It can balance on one strand of hair and hardly fall off.

This was their Literacy hour work on metphors and similes- they thought it was learning about lice!

So why am I burbling on like this?

No I have not got

NITS

Nor do i feel unwell, but I am well and worried or perhaps just well-worried. You see, I may be invited to do what I consider to be a very important National job in the near future, where I will want to appear as perspicacious and wise as I can possibly be and because I will be represnting others, aslso have a little gravitas. Can I still then hang on to a digigran identity? Do I need to kill this BLOG?

The thought seems a 'horrible

imagining' . ( see Macbeth's thoughts when contemplating killing Duncan) I suppose I could just delete the message from my email and then no one would know about this except perhaps for the good Drs Joolz and Kate and a few intimate friends....but This is for Alexander, the digibaby,who I am visiting today and who I want to be able to read these pages at a later date and be proud of his NAN.

These worries are like a little infestation, making me want to scratch my head-- to follow through my metaphors

Dilemma, dilemma, dilemma

Please advise.

Worried but Well-Pleased with herself

Digigran.

Off to see a Cock and Bull Story here tonight. Perhaps it will impove my narrative stylea nd help me stick to the point. At least it should be more cheerful than Saraband (which is brilliant, but oh so very depressing a narrative for the silver blogger)

Rock-a-Bye-Baby




Rock-a-bye baby, on the tree top
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall
And down will come baby, cradle and all

Wow, can't believe that I have not posted for a whole month, especially as the baby's birth happened almost to date on Dec 10th and not the expected 6th and at the beginning of December too. So, no excuses there for my long silence. I have actually thought about blogging a lot in the interim. However, I have also been caught up in a whole range of experiences that have militated against me finding a quiet time to write and cut and paste as I like.
I had my sixtieth birthday, showed

this film

at the local screenroom to celebrate (all my friends thought it very apt)
spent my wedding anniversary in

Paris

and then came home to a swathe of marking and assessment.
Did all of you know out there that lots of teachers spend their Christmas holidays focusing on professional development and writing assignments? Such dedication.

I've been thinking a lot though about the nature of blogging and the personal time it consumes, so that in my own time ( is that meat space, Julia?) having an experience and blogging that experience begin to compete for attention rather than complement each other. When I was waiting for the baby, there seemed ample time to sit and write about my expectations but since the birth there have been a series of events and work obligations that have demanded my full attention. Are most Bloggers then, people with a good deal of time on their hands, who live life vicariously in a virtual reality- or am I just disorganised? Yes, please do respond, I need to know how you mums manage it.

Anyway, much a surrounding the early days of the baby- the nature of the delivery, mum and baby adjusting to feeding rhythms etc mmm too personal to log on about here. And tin that lies another paradox. This seems the personal medium 'par excellence', but it is so very public too, so it's like those diaries in the newspapers ( see Michele Hanson) rather prone to posturing and positioning rather than the true confessional diary.
As you know, my son and daughter-in-law do not want me to publish any pictures of Alexander- so I can't fill the screen with his adorable little person. He is however very, very lovely and very like his dad- but then is the baby's father's mother (his gran)allowed to say that? Am I making some sort of family claim? I don't intend it to be. He does however reminfd me quite poignantlyof his father as a baby- except he has more hair.

Both equally lovely parents however, are just as besotted and have bought me number plates which end with NAN as my Birthday present. Look out for a LOL ( accepted clinical designation of elderly female patient!) in a

mini cooper

with

Mary Poppins personalised plates, reading something like:

MP05NAN in PINK!!!!

I bought the baby a soft cushion version to match.
Have now pushed him out in his pram for a walk, so more on prams and pushing and schedules next time I get round to blogging.