Life improves

TL:DR

• Health improving but still resting every evening
• Weight disaster
• Meals: still getting youfoodz for dinners but managing to have different lunch a bit 
• Career hitting goals
• Church and Jesus: good 

I just read through my July post and I behind the scenes I can feel that I was tired and over it and miserable and had had enough already of this stupid virus.

Well, thankfully, particularly in the second half of August, things have picked up a bit!

But it took a bit!! The first week of August I had quite a busy schedule gearing up to the start of U:PASS classes on the 6th August. I had ended July with the feeling that I really needed to stop doing as much, and really not do *anything* except work during the week.

So I tried to put that into action, and then of course collapsed for 3 days and missed the first day of classes. It was really frustrating. I got quite scared honestly. I had such a long stretch of exhaustion that I felt like I was back in the acute period of illness in the first 2 months of glandular, which was back in February and March.

But, thank you GOD, it lifted.  

Mum came over and brought flowers and chocolate (the flowers are almost gone but have lasted for most of the month!!!) and cleaned my bathroom, which meant I didn’t need to do it for my Dad the following week (the advantage of being a single person is that bathrooms don’t need weekly cleaning like in families).  

I had my Dad to stay the second weekend of August, which was hard because de-ferreting my apartment is usually, actually always, a major exercise, but I was sensible and literally only cleaned in the morning and then rested all afternoon. I told him he had to wash up and we wouldn’t go out for dinner (like we usually do) and he sort of coped with that, although in a bit of a puzzled way, like he hadn’t actually realised properly how sick I was and how tired I get, particularly in the evenings. 

It was exciting the following morning because I was on welcoming and going to church early and he said he wouldn’t come to church because he was driving to Canberra (but really, it’s because church is a freaky concept for him) but he did come and meet my minister again. I found out they had no dedicated singers, so with no preparation (i usually revise the songs the morning or night before because we have a big range of songs and it’s easy to forget them) I rehearsed a song and he watched. That was nice. He doesn’t normally hear me sing. I think probably the last time was at my grandmother’s funeral (obviously wasn’t a particularly good performance on that occasion!!).

I also hadn’t learnt the new song for the month and I didn’t know the kids song, so I also hurriedly learnt those after he left - and the fact that I pulled both off with nobody much noticing except the excellent pianist (who could hear when I wasn’t quite getting the rhythm and melody right at various bits) was a bit of a miracle.   Not the easiest thing to do, to be honest. I’m lucky my brain is usually fast at learning music (although slowed down throughout this whole illness frustratingly) although having the sheet music in front of me helps a lot. 

The major stuff up for the month was emailing the wrong schedule to not just one set of 1000 students, but to two *different* groups of 1000 students.  So many UTS students know who I am and recognise my name… not always in a *good* way :P  I also got a wonderful bite-y nasty comment from a student basically calling me unprofessional, but my boss and I both agreed to let that go through to the keeper. 

I have worked out that Saturday morning is my “go to” socialising time, given my evening lack of energy, so I had brunch with 2 sets of friends on two Saturday mornings in August, and am going to have brunch with my friend of 20 years, Annie, tomorrow.  Brunch is good because it gets me out of the house on Saturday, but I’ve just been heading to the closest cafe (Flower Power) which is only about 1km away.  

After the scare at the beginning of August, I thought it would be a really good idea to check in again with GP (although of course I’ve been doing that super regularly throughout this whole period - I have the best GP ever) and so I saw her and we got full blood tests done. The result was low vitamin D (no surprise there), iron was fine, everything else was fine, except my liver as usual not terribly happy with my obesity.  She also wants me to do a proper diabetes horrible sugar drink test, which of course I’m terrified about.  But I’m going to try and face that in September.  I have gained a lot of weight over the course of the year (about 10kg but I’m scared to go near the scales).  

But, we talked about going to the fatigue people, because I hit my 6 month anniversary on the 11th August (WOO!), but she said they’d probably say I should try some light exercise twice a week, so I could just try that instead. We agreed that swimming would be great because I am skilled in the water and able to judge my pace and effort etc, so the day after I saw her, I grabbed my towel and swimmers and which had cobwebs (ok, not actually) and clambered into the pool, accidentally leaving my goggles in the car but who cared.  I loved it. I reckon I was high on endorphins for about 2 days. The first lap felt AMAZING. The second lap, about halfway along, I suddenly felt everything get tired and I realised it takes 75m of swimming for me to get tired now!! Which was pretty depressing. But I managed to get through a slow and portly kilometre, and since then have managed 4 more swims, going twice a week on Wednesday afternoons/evening and Sundays. 

It’s so good to be in the water and exercising. Realistically I know that without good diet it will make no difference to my weight, but I just feel better. Every single time, except this last Wednesday, I have come home and slept. It really wipes me out. But my body aches in a good way instead of the usually glandular fever way.  I’ll keep going with it.

In terms of work, August is never an easy month, with 23 new leaders starting, 210 classes being run per week, and I had 35 observations of second semester leaders. But sensibly, I divided them into ones I could manage (18) and ones that the seniors helped with. That made it reasonable. I also got consulted multiple times for mentoring and peer based stuff from people across the university, from Faculties, different units and areas.  

I hit two BIG BIG career goals this month, which was SUPER EXCITING ALL IN CAPITALS. The first was actually in May, when I was asked to write an article on creating an inclusive learning environment.  Due to various factors, they didn’t publish it until August, and here it is: https://futures.uts.edu.au/blog/2018/08/07/empathy-communication-support-helping-students/  Of course, I’ve written a few blogposts before for UTS, but this was the first one where I was approached.

The second career goal was even more exciting.  I received an email from a ecumenical theological college asking if I could run a workshop on peer learning and group learning on the 27th August (and they would pay me an honorarium!! I barely know what that is!!!) That was a wonderful thrill to write and create materials and push the academics to think about both peer based support and also group based assessment and learning.  My favourite comment was from an academic who was quite reluctant at the start because of the tables and, God forbid, butcher’s paper. He said: “I still don’t like group work, but I learnt a lot”. Honestly I’m pretty sure the thing they got out of it most was the introduction to Kahoot :)   

Another amazing thing was I was on prayer on the 19th for church, and that morning I sat down to write my prayer and the song Great is Thy Faithfulness and the psalm it is based on popped into my head, so I wrote my prayer with that underpinning it. Then the service finished with Great is Thy Faithfulness!! And I didn’t even realise! God indeed is mysteriously working.

One of the other funny moments was this month I’ve done about 4 reference checks (which is usual) but also had to write letters for leaders applying for the Rhodes Scholarship (!!!) and the New Colombo Plan scholarship (!!!).  But the best reference was the one I was doing for a graduating nurse and I was explaining U:PASS and she said, “Oh, my daughter goes to UTS and studies in ____. She’s been going to U:PASS! She loves it!!”  That was the best. 

Another little work moment today was I was helping a nursing student with her assignment on assumptions and different cultures and bias and I could see that while she could write in English, she did need help with grammar. So I worked with her to login to Grammarly (which took ages, because she didn’t follow the instructions initially) and then as she was leaving she said: “I’m so glad I came into HELPS today” which made me feel all the feels. 

The final pretty cool thing that happened this month was that yesterday I got a call from the strata manager who told me that my window had been broken by the NBN man installing a box. She was like: “Are you ferrets going to be ok?”  Thankfully that was actually the same day my backdoor was being replaced by strata, and so I had taken the precaution of locking the ferrets in the cage for a day. I loved that she thought of my ferrets!!  When I got home there was a giant hole in my window above my door (and glass aplenty that they’d missed under the couch) but they ended up coming at 8pm and installing a new window. Which is thicker (hence blocking noise from road and neighbour) and is not glazed, so it lets in more light (which is great). So basically, for a bit of angst and a colder house than normal for a few hours, I got a new window for free. The poor contractor who broke the window ended up ringing the glass people and got me on the phone to apologise. I told him it was all good and no need to stress. I said, everyone makes mistakes.  I think I helped him feel better. And my excellent neighbour was great throughout the process too. 

And that was August. 

I have made another exciting appointment for September but I’ll leave you in suspense as it may not happen.