Module Results

Of the 1500 students that took the K101 exam, around 6% got a first (85-100%).

I was one of them.

I cannot believe it. I got 90%!

Added to my TMA average of 69%, I got a PASS! No distinction, coz my TMA scores weren't high enough, but I don't care. 90%. It's unbelievable. On all three questions, I got a first (they don't give you exact percentages, just the marking band your answer was in).

So, that's K101 done and dusted. My first year complete, my first module attained. Only seven more to do...

Moving from Level 1 to Level 2

SO, K101 is DONE. I get my result is around a month, and to be honest, I've barely thought about it since I stepped out of the exam hall. The exam, for what it's worth, was much better than I was expecting. I wish I hadn't got in such a massive, life-damaging stress about it. By that morning, I was catatonic.We got to take in a notes sheet, so even if our minds went blank, we had somewhere to start. My mind didn't go blank, the questions were all on bits I'd thoroughly revised. I regurgitated 2500 words onto the answer booklet, and I finished with about half an hour to spare. My wrist was complete agony after an hour, then I stopped feeling it. I'm considering getting plastics to have another look at it. The tendon is two inches short and I can see the scarring moving up and down inside when I clench my fist. This is not good!
I then had to wait for the bus for an hour, but that was mere BAD TIMING. I don't even want to guess how I did. I think I passed. That's all I can say.

K203 started ten days before the exam and I did NOTHING until after the exam. Then I just couldn't get my brain in gear. I was still in revision mode. This is why I'm never doing two modules back to back again. It took me three whole weeks to do one unit (you're supposed to do a unit a week), though I had sick children to contend with as well. I did the first TMA without reading half the relevant unit.
But SOMEHOW, I got 71% ! 
My highest TMA essay score in K101 was 73%. I was expecting a significant drop in marks on this module, with it being higher level. Let's see if I can do as well next time (probably not).


Without naming names (and I put all this on my feedback form after the module), my K101 tutor was a disappointment. Her feedback was minimal, her group interaction worse. When I asked for help with my exam prep, she had nothing useful to say. The only good thing was her tutorial notes (I never went to a tutorial).
My NEW tutor is a REVELATION! She's very active on the forum, does regular tutorials with excellent notation and her feedback is exactly what I need. It tells me what I've done wrong, without being insulting, and tells me what I've done right. She praised my structure and paragraphing, which tutor#1 marked me down on every time.

It's buoyed me up to get on with it. I've managed to mostly catch up in the last ten days and I've got a reading week next week, so I can get up to date and write my next TMA, which is due on the 28th. The course content is one subject, but in great depth (the polar opposite to K101, which is broad and shallow) and the first block is theory. Theory, and difficult reading, and nonsensical statistics. It's challenging every preconception I had about health and biomedicine. It is MESSING with my HEAD.
But I think I love it.

Exam nerves

I just laid on my bed and ate a massive cream cake from Greggs, like a decadent Northerner. And why (aside from the fact that cake is great) I hear you ask? Because, dear reader, I am procrastinating. Like a boss.

My exam is in fifteen days. I haven't sat a formal exam since June 2002, when I did my AS levels. I always did far better in exams than coursework at school, so technically this should cheer me (I got a coursework mark of 69% overall). I am not cheered. I am petrified.

The exam is three questions, in three hours. There is a choice of question in each section, one on each block of the course. In short, I 'only' have to revise seven units instead of all twenty three (although, some people are revising all of it in case they don't like the questions that come up). My eldest is now at preschool, so I get two and a half days without him. However, my youngest has decided that if I look busy, he wants to sit on my knee. Even as I type, he has clambered up to sit with me.

So, I'm panicking. I'm anxious and stressed and tired. I wander about the house bellowing Bowlby's theory of attachment. I have made cue cards about important topics, for one of the two big blocks I need to revise. I keep telling myself I'll be fine, I need 40% to pass, there's no pressure to push for a distinction, I just need to pass. But still, my mind flails around shrieking.

My next module starts on Saturday, and the first TMA (a thousand words on perceptions of health) is due on Halloween. Gawd help me.

Motivation!

Motivation! You're back! Thank God!

I cannot lie, my motivation has been flagging like a bitch of late.
I've just been pottytraining my eldest, my baby's turned into a mobile, happy MONSTER and I can't seem to leave the two of them for five minutes to get on. They're either engaged in A WAR (aged 3y and 14m, there's no hope of a peaceful life) or the elder is crapping on the floor, or the younger is halfway up the stairs. What I really need is four LONG arms, six hands and eight pairs of eyes. Mutant mothers are the future.

So, I finished block 3 and wrote a TMA following the guidelines exactly. I did this because I didn't particularly enjoy the content (institutionalised racism, something that disgusts me to my core) and my personal reaction to the question was BURN ALL RACISTS. This was unlikely to get me decent marks. I also had to stay away from the facebook group for my course, where people suggested diversity was a Bad Thing, in case I actually ragegasmed all over the group page. It was, to say the least, an emotive topic.
When I worked at a GP surgery, I came across indirect racism on a daily basis: "Is the doctor...ENGLISH?", patients would hiss across the reception desk. "I don't want to see that black one again". And also, direct racism, usually bellowed at the door of the offending clinician. Racist patients generally assumed that we reception staff (entirely white british) would wholeheartedly agree with them, and were always surprised when we pulled them up on it or reported it for further investigation. I never experienced any racism from staff to patients, but the patient population was 99% white, against a doctor population that was 10% white. The majority ethnicity ruled the day. It sickened me then, it sickens me now.

ANYWAY, back to the point, I wrote the TMA with as little personal inflection as I could, toning down the journalistic urge to use emotive language. I also wrote it firmly against the guidelines and I got...

MY FIRST PASS TWO!

(or a B, or a 2:1)

70%, basically

Previously, I've had 60% and 61%, neither of which I was remotely pleased with.

This has cheered me up beyond measure, and I have powered on with some of TMA04 today. The rest has to wait for the project (o'doom) which starts tomorrow, on evaluating information on the internet. I also have to finish a bit of block 4. Next month, I've got two TMAs due within a couple of weeks, because of the way the project has fallen, so I shall be a busy bee. Doubtless outside will be all sunshine and roses and I will be in my dining room, sweating and swearing at my laptop and brain. Or it'll piss down with rain.



My Black Dog

I'm going away next week, just for a few days. On my return, I have a project to do. The project I feared when I first recieved my study planner is upon us! I cannot believe I'm halfway through this module already. The project is on analysing the usefulness of self help websites. We pick our own topic, find our own websites and then rate them (and each others) before writing a report on the general quality of information, and a TMA on the report. This is all done over 3 weeks. We work in small groups, and currently, I'm co-ordinating my group, which sounded terrifying to start with, but actually, I LIKE THE POWAH!
Ahem.

Anyway, it makes sense to pick a subject close to one's heart and (if the rest of the group don't pick it) I'm going to do postnatal depression.

Twenty five months elapsed between the births of my two children. I was cripplingly depressed for thirteen of those months.

It started about three days after my eldest was born. I got the baby blues. EVERYONE gets the baby blues. It's caused by an oestrogen crash, and a sudden massive rise in progesterone with the DAWN OF THE LACTATION. Some women get it on day 2, some not til day 14, but everyone has a bit of a wibble at some point in the first 10-ish days where they want to put the baby back where it came from and carry on as before. If you can remember what before was. Which you probably can't, because pregnancy erases the memory of all that has gone before. Either way, you have this baby blues crash where you mourn all that has gone before, and then you feel fine and start to pick up physically and mentally.
Except, I just didn't.

I remained steadfastly in denial, but various events transpired to make me worse. Like the impetigo he got on his mouth at 5 weeks old, and the herniae that even the GP missed at the 6 week check, and the continuous reflexive vomiting from the umbilical hernia that made him continually wet or feeding. My husband was rarely there, because he had a lot of work and was very much of the "BUT THIS IS YOUR JOB NOW" mindset. Due to the vomiting, my boy ate continuously. He fed 3 hourly until he was almost two from habit, but as a newborn, ate every 90 minutes, vomited and then started again. He wouldn't sleep, so at 10 weeks, I started co-sleeping, but then felt even worse because everyone said CO-SLEEPING BABIES DIE (this is a fallacy, as I later found out).
I would sit in bed, alone with him, in the evening, and I would want to jump out of the window and run. And that feeling didn't go away. I didn't wish him harm, but I didn't love him or want him. I felt like I was looking after someone else's child and that they would come back and take him and I could go back to normal (whatever the hell that was). I went back to work on odd days when he was a few months old just to have an excuse to get away from him.
My health visitor spotted all was not well, when I finally divulged that my support was nonexistant most of the time and I was very depressed. I then had one to one sessions with my HV for a few weeks and everything started to get better. My relationship with my husband improved immeasurably, and I fell in love with my little boy.

When he was six months, I was ill and it was thought I might have multiple myeloma because I had strange red cell formation. While we waited for my protein banding test to come back, we were on holiday. It was our second wedding anniversary. For the first time, I had to face the prospect that I might not be able to watch my son grow up. I got the all clear after five ENDLESSLY LONG days. I never looked back.

I had a year of feeling well mentally, and then my husband buggered off with another woman when I was pregnant with our second child. That was a kick in the tits. I went suicidal, then I went rageous, then back to suicidal. I sat at suicidal-without-ideation for months. Then it developed into suicidal WITH ideation, so I got some help and even though I felt much the same about the baby (i.e. nothing), I managed to get on with my life as best I could. I thought I would have him and hate him and want him gone. I thought he would be born looking exactly like his father. I thought he would remind me of everything and tear me in two. Then he stopped growing and I started feeling guilty, because I knew I wasn't looking after myself. I was barely eating, sleeping fairly badly and just not bothering much with my health. I was plagued by UTIs and dental infections, which I couldn't much be arsed to sort out. I went for a scan at 38 weeks and I saw my baby's face and he looked like his brother and then EGAD did I feel guilty. I was still terrified of having him, scared of the reality of having two kids on my own, but I started to want him. He wasn't born until 42 weeks, giving me a whole month from that scan to get used to the idea of having him. When he was born, it became apparent that he was a miracle, his cord should have killed him weeks before. He was meant to be.

So there's a wholly too candid glimpse of the reality of ante and postnatal depression. I didn't suffer postnatal depression after Jack was born, possibly because I had far more support (chiefly from my mum who stayed with me, or I with her until he was 2 weeks old), possibly because I had such a massive jolt when he was born and healthy, possibly because I immediately moved house. I had a few bad days, but I've not suffered depression in the (almost) 14 months since he was born. Huzzah!

But this is a disease which is difficult for family to understand - "WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON'T LOVE THIS BABY? HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE THIS BABY? YOU WANTED THIS BABY? LOOK AT HIS FACE!" - and even worse to live with. You know, as a mother, that you are not supposed to feel this way, you are supposed to love this child unconditionally, yet with all the physical, emotional and mental changes of having a child (postnatal depression being most common with the first healthy baby), how are you supposed to adjust without support? Women should be taught antenatally that there is no shame in having postnatal depression. I know so many mothers who struggled through (myself included, obviously) because the SHAME of admitting it to a professional was too great to bear. You have a fear that your child will be taken away from you, partly because you feel they should be anyway, partly because of the great crossover in people's minds between postnatal depression and puerperal psychosis (when the hormonal shift is so great that the mother becomes a danger to herself and the child). It is isolating. It is scary. It is treatable, it is common and it shouldn't be the taboo that it remains.

Thoughts on hospital design

The worst stay in hospital I've ever had (and I've had eight, two of which were taking care of my poorly eldest) was immediately after the birth of my first child. I was an inpatient for just 16 hours, on the ward for 12 of those hours, and I loathed it.
The hospital was an old one, built in the 70s and never massively updated. The obstetric area was split into antenatal assessment, central delivery suite and antenatal longstay/postnatal. I had care on all three of these areas across my two pregnancies.
The antenatal assessment unit was shared with the abortion clinic and women's gynae/urodynamic department. I went there once for a scan with my eldest and twice for assessment with my youngest. He wasn't growing properly. They failed to identify a cause, and he was born with two true knots in his cord. This should have been seen on scan. He nearly died when he was being born. Thankfully he didn't, and I'm glad I was able to have him at home instead of by caesarean at 38 weeks.

Central Delivery Suite was amazing. I had multiple observations done there, and I delivered my eldest there, 90ish minutes after arriving. They kept me waiting 20 minutes when I got there, and I needed to push. Not the snappiest service, but once I was pushing, all was fine. They also stitched me up after the birth of my youngest. Ambulance transfer after you've managed to have a (miraculous) safe homebirth is a bit gutting, but they got me a comfortable bed to lie on and left me to it, discharging me after 6 hours.

However, the antenatal longstay/postnatal ward was dreadful. In modern hospitals, the two are kept broadly separate. If you're pregnant and in hospital for more than a day, there's probably something amiss and you don't want to be hearing newborns cry all day.
I was put in a four bed bay with two other women and newborns. One had been there a week while her baby was in SCBU and went home fairly early. The other was a spanish lady who was on her third baby and quite indignant about not being immediately discharged. I had asked for 6 hour discharge, but had torn quite badly after having a large baby. They wanted me to stay in overnight (he was born just after 4am) and I was vehemently against this. I went on the ward at 9am, and saw a midwife at 11am and 2pm. Then a paediatrician came and did newborn obs and declared that since my baby had been fast asleep for 5 hours and thus not fed (despite feeding 3 times in the first 5 hours), there was something wrong with him and we'd have to stay in.
We tried to wake him up to feed him, but he was having none of it. He'd had a fast, wet delivery and was snotty, sicky and tired.
No midwives came to see us. A snotty auxillary told us that we wouldn't be allowed home til feeding established. The window was wide open and it was freezing (he was born in March). I kept closing the curtains to try and sleep - they kept opening them. I had a fluorescent light over my head that I couldn't switch off. I couldn't sleep, and hadn't slept for over 36 hours by then (and had delivered a baby!). The food was dreadful - dried out pizza and chips, with no ketchup, and a tiny pot of jelly. Had I known I was allowed to bring my own food in, I would have sent my husband out for a McDonalds, but nobody told me that.
Eventually, they rang the 8pm gong to tell all the fathers to bugger off and I burst into tears. My husband went and found a midwife and bellowed at her. She was head of delivery, and tried to persuade me to stay in overnight, so I said I would self discharge. Finally, a midwife came round and checked me over (for the first time in over 6 hours) and said that it was totally normal for newborns to sleep after birth, and the paediatrician was wrong. We got home at 10pm and lo! The baby woke up and fed every half hour for the whole night.
Newborns are not easy, but if I'd been allowed home, or to stay on CDS, I would've slept and I would have coped and maybe I wouldn't have had postnatal depression.

The postnatal stay was the reason I had a planned homebirth second time round, and when I had to go into hospital afterwards, I asked to remain on CDS.

My best hospital stay wasn't for me, I was in with my eldest, who was having a tonsillectomy. He had them out in a brand new hospital, with a very well designed children's ward. He was in a four bed bay, designed in a cross shape, rather than 2 facing 2. There was loads of room and toys for him to play with and the whole bay was closed off with a nursing bay and locked door. When he went to theatre, he walked down, rather than go on a huge scary bed. He sat on my knee while they cannulated him and sat and watched when they anaesthetised him. It was nothing like the various general anaesthetics I had as a child, where I was gassed twice because I was hysterical and terrified. I was older than him, and more aware, but being stuck on a huge bed while men fiddle about round your hands and arms and everyone's dressed in scrubs is SCARY. However, he took it like a pro.

My current OU unit is on hospital design, and deisgn really makes a difference. Being treated (or ignored) in an overbright, cold, friendless room when you're feeling weak, battered and emotional is horrible. It's not really treatment at all - any medicinal benefit I was supposed to get from the 'rest' was lost.  I don't class uncomplicated childbirth as something to be overmedicalised: the key to a fast recovery is good food, supportive company, and good quality rest (even if it's in small doses). I got none of these the first time.

MOAR essays

I haven't written in an age. Mainly because nothing has riled me of late and I haven't felt the need to pontificate at length about religion or the perils of Amanda Holden. Since I last wrote, Blogger has changed 'backs off hissing'. I think it's a sign of getting old when websites change, and instead of embracing the new technology, you bitch and moan. It won't run on my phone anymore! Boo!

It is TMA time again. Already. They get closer together as the course progresses, though there's six weeks between the last one and the exam. My exam date is the two year anniversary of my ex buggering off, so I shall have a welcome distraction. I took a different approach to this essay, since my last one didn't work.
First, I actually wrote an essay plan. It was a very brief essay plan, but a plan nonetheless, and in doing so, I ANALYSED THE QUESTION. Second, I started writing somewhere in the middle of the essay because I literally had no idea how to start. It would seem to be a downside of planning an essay. You know what you want to say but then brain and hands do not connect. You end up spouting something that reads very much like a 6 year old's What I Did In The Holidays story. "Bowlby wrote about children who attach to their mummys because they love their mummy the most. But then they wake up and it was all a dream"
Ahem.

So, the bones of my essay are in place. I've used references to back up points, rather than just dumping them in the middle of a paragraph and hoping that's enough. I have Harvard referencing DOWN. I need to carve about 200 words off the word count, and rephrase some of it to answer the question a bit better, but otherwise, I *think* it might be better than the last one.

Submission deadline is in two weeks, so I have some time to DWELL and revise endlessly. I also need to do the other two mini-essays, one of which is 'how do you think you did?'. For which, I may just write this blog address.

Once this TMA is submitted, I'm a third of the way through the course. Huzzah!

For my next trick...

It's been a week since the TMA submission deadline passed and I wait.
And wait.
And wait.
Everytime I see I have an email on my phone, my pulse quickens. Then I remember that I only checked StudentHome twenty minutes before and my results weren't up then.

This week, registration for 2012/13 courses opened, so I've registered for my next course. K203 - Working For Health is 60 credits and level 2.

I'm also considering doing another level 2 course, of 30 credits concurrently. That one starts in February. I qualify for transitional funding and I want to get this degree. It's the most motivated I've been to do anything EVER.

See, times are a-changing. My eldest son has just turned three and will start preschool in September (if I can find him a place) and my baby is close to being one and steadily turning into a Real Boy. In a few months, he'll be old enough to stay overnight at his dad's.
I have more time on my hands than I did even two months ago when this course started.
I am coping fine with the current workload; even with the kids being ill and me having weekly dentist trips, I'm still two weeks ahead. I LOVE it, I'd recommend it to anyone in a similar(ly bored) boat.

But I really want my TMA results so I can see how dreadful I am.

Attachment theory and attachment parenting

I've been doing some work on attachment theory as part of my course. It's particularly interesting as I have deliberately used the attachment parenting model for my children.
In brief, attachment parenting is being a giant hippy-mother. You breastfeed, co-sleep, baby-wear, focusing everything on nurturing the child. The idea is that a secure child is a happy child. It is the absolute polar opposite of that babynazi Gina Ford.

Every pregnant woman, and many women who haven't got that far, have ideas about how they will raise their child. With my eldest, I knew I would breastfeed, but that was it. I'd read up on the AP ethos and it didn't suit my way of thinking back then. I was going to have a natural labour, I was going to adore him from first sight, I was going to cope fine when I got back from hospital. He wouldn't need a dummy. I would never sleep in the same bed as my baby. I'd wean him at six months. Blah blah blah.

In the event, I had a natural labour, and a giant (9lb 1oz) baby a few days past my due date. He split me like I was a banana. I didn't feel anything much for him. The giant baby fed well twice and then went to sleep and refused to wake up. The paediatrician panicked because he hadn't established feeding and I didn't escape from hospital for 16 hours. I got home, and giant baby woke up and devoured me every half hour, all night.
My giant baby then developed awful reflux from his umbilical hernia. So, he would feed for 20 minutes, vomit up the whole feed and feed again for another 20 minutes. The health visitor assured me this was 'normal' and he was 'overeating'. HA! The paediatrician we later saw about his hernia told us that it was definitely the hernia causing the sick. In the mean time, I'd resorted to a dummy because I'd been convinced he wasn't actually hungry. At 10 weeks old, I cracked and started co-sleeping and a miracle occured: I started getting some real sleep.
However, the damage was done and I had moderate/severe postnatal depression. A traumatically fast delivery, sicky, hungry, clingy baby and periodically absent (through work) husband took it's toll and daily, I wished to jump out of the window and run far away. I didn't feel like he was my son, but that I was looking after him for someone else and they would come back and get him soon. Eventually I got help, but my eldest remained an insecure, screamy little boy until he was about two years old. I breastfed him until he was 22 months old (I stopped coz I was 7 months pregnant and my boobs were killing me) and co-slept until he was 2 and a half. He still gets in my bed at night, but I don't mind. He'll grow out of it.

With baby two, I vowed things would be different. Until my husband buggered, and then I didn't think about the baby much at all until he was about ready to come out. It didn't seem important. I had him at home, for minimum interference, and he was born in under two hours. When he was born, I felt nothing but love. That first rush actually happened and took my breath away. The first picture I have of him is him feeding, holding my boob with his little claw-hands staring at me like I am the GODDESS. I've co-slept since day 1, despite my mother trying to persuade me otherwise. I also babywear, which I didn't do with my eldest. It makes life much easier for a non-driving single mother; I just lob him in the sling and we're off. And he is a hilarious, social, happy child.

No two children are the same, but for me, attachment parenting has saved my sanity and produced at least one secure baby. I wish I'd done it from the start with my eldest. But, you live and learn.

How to write a TMA (or not)

So, I submitted my first TMA. The writing process went thusly:

I looked at the question a few times in the week of the last unit of the block.
I thought about it a lot, and pulled a lot of vexed faces about it.
I jotted a few ideas down when they came to me.
I woke up one morning with the essay introduction formed in my head, and the part of the text I was going to analyse.

I sorted the kids out, sat down and got writing.
I wrote the introduction. It was far too long.
I sat and looked at the introduction for some time.
I procrastinated trying to work out Harvard referencing. For what it's worth, Harvard referencing is annoying. It alters depending on which institution you're writing for. There must be a simpler way, but the Open Uni rules compel me to Harvard.
I started writing the body of my essay.
I wrote a conclusion. This was all over a couple of hours.
I checked the word count - 50% over the wordlimit. Oops.
I did some cutting, but as is the norm with an essay you JUST wrote, couldn't see anywhere I could possibly trim my precious words.
I sent it to my word-count-slave sister (she's a journalist) for some help and grammar checking. She returned it with some ideas.
I sat and edited it.
I edited it again.
And again.
And finally I was left with an essay that hit the word count.

I ignored it for two days.

I then re-read the essay question and um...realised I hadn't answered it in my essay.

So I rewrote huge swathes of it, to actually answer the question, and trimmed the conclusion a bit.

Then I took it out of Works and into Open Office. Open Office is free and I shouldn't expect so much of it, but my god! Everything is so damnably complicated. It took me ages to work out how to put a page number in the footer! I miss Word. I must locate a copy.

I fretted about it.

I fretted some more.

I submitted it.

And thusly did my first TMA essay come to be pass. Strange how unconcerned I used to be about submitting essays in school, doing them the night before, half asleep/drunk. And now, they fill my every waking MOMENT! I don't expect my marks til around my birthday on the 3rd. That'll be a lovely birthday present...sigh...

This week, I've also done my first iCMA. It was easy, even for a dyscalculic dunce like me. I don't get my score for that yet either.

On with Block 2!

My first TMA

Ah, TMA, how you haunt my every waking moment, with your words and your need for objectivity and your ridiculous word count.

Basically, I hadn't thought about it much at all until I went to the dentist on Friday. I have a dental phobia. Instead of kicking the dentist in the face and leaping out of the window, I take valium and zone out for the duration. However, this was a root canal, and in an attempt to fight the panic that rose at my brain being drain-rodded via my gum, I thought about my first TMA essay.
Well, I didn't think about it much, truth be told, because I was so very off my face, but clearly some idea took root (mayhaps through the hole inserted by the dentist) because I woke up yesterday morning with my essay fully formed in my brain.

So, seizing the day, I leapt from my bed and, once the kids were fed and dressed, I sat and wrote the beast.

It took me two and a half hours, with breaks to try and fathom Harvard referencing, and sat, proud, at my eventual effort.

Until I checked the bloody word count. Permitted word count: 1200. My word count: 1800.
Oops.

So, the mad pruning began. I'm really not sure how I went so mentally over. And every time I reviewed what I'd written, I hated it more and more. It sounded juvenile, subjective and badly argued. I haven't written an essay for years and I don't tend to edit my blogs, because I end up HATING every word I've written.

This morning, with some advice from my journalist, word-count-obeying sister, I have trimmed and pruned and cut and re-worded 550 words off the beast. It still makes sense, it's still well argued, but I wish I had space to reference every point I make.

The cutoff date for submission is the 22nd, so I've got a bit of time yet. I'll probably go through it one or two more times before submission (not too many times, there comes a time when tweaking can make everything fall apart).
I'd just quite like to do WELL. Not AMAZINGLY well, but I'd really like a B.

What have I learnt from this mad dash of essay writing? Not a lot; my essay technique has become lazy and too personal. I need to learn to be more precise and less waffley. I'm interested to see what my tutor says about it though.

Must Know All The Things

Oh my brain!

So, unit 1 was interesting and I got through it at a good pace. It was on the family caring role.
Unit 2, however, has made my brain hurt. It is on the role of care within the NHS.

I worked in the NHS for 8 years. I left a month ago. I started out as a receptionist, barking at patient's who wanted an appointment (actually, I was nice, generally). However, I was quickly promoted to clinical coding, with special emphasis on chronic disease and QoF. This means I know far more than is usual on diabetes, COPD, epilepsy, asthma, hypertension, CHD, CVAs and atrial fibrillation. For the first year of my improved role, I concentrated wholly on diabetes and COPD, getting the registers correct and a recall system in place. I got to know all about compliance, specialist clinics and how to interpret blood results. None of that was in my actual remit, but I absorbed the information from working on the data all day, every day.

So, Unit 2 is all about diabetes. If I had known very little about the disease before starting, I'd have probably sailed through without concern. Instead, my brain has been turned up to 11, almost re-analysing everything I know about diabetes within primary care. All the prejudices of hierachial care (which I came across rather a lot), all the non-compliance, all the expert patient knowledge snuck back into my brain with KNOBS on.

It makes me want to go back to work and develop a strategy for diabetic teaching with the nurses.

I think that's the problem. I want to act on this new knowledge. I want to go and do something useful with it instead of letting it wash over me. And I can't, because I don't have that job anymore and may never have that level of influence in another job.

It's something I need to work through because it's going to keep cropping up!

The one where I'm a massive snob

I have already given up on the course forum. I'm only checking my tutor forums from now on.

Alas, it seems that a small percentage of fellow students think they're on the Jeremy Kyle show and think they need to air their troubled life stories in relation to Every Single Topic that comes up. Whereas sharing experiences in context is quite informative, projecting a past situation on to every possible scenario is annoying, attention seeking and bellend-y.

This same small percentage of students are semi-literate. I'm not wholly a grammar fascist, but I would've thought being able to write in sentences and spell simple words correctly would be a prerequisite of doing a degree level course. Some are already complaining that it's too much reading (it's bugger all reading), they don't like the way the course is structured (i.e they don't like thinking for themselves) and they might drop out. After week one.

One is complaining that they aren't getting a course grant because they got one last year and didn't finish the course. The OU is not a bloody charity here to offer money in exchange for a half-assed attempt at a course. Another is complaining that the grant isn't enough to buy a PC. For the record, the grant (which is for stationery, books and travel) is £275. The course books are no more than £50 brand new and only the exam is compulsory for travel. If you don't have a PC, distance learning is probably not going to work.

It is like looking at a facebook war every day. I cannot be arsed.

I know, I know, I'm a massive snob. But these people are all adults and acting like schoolchildren, with a total disregard for netiquette.

Anyway, my first week has actually gone well. I've been staying at my parents and haven't been able to make my DVD work on their computer, but I've been downloading the mp3s off the site. I'm halfway through unit 1 (which is on care within families and consists of a lot of Scottish people bellowing at each other) I need to write my notes up properly. The reading has taken me about 5 hours over the week, thus far. I'm quite happy with it all.

Drug addicts are people too

So, once again Protecting Our Children was on last night, and once again, I haven't watched it yet. And once again, it has sparked considerable debate amongst my fellow students.

It appears that one of the families in last night's show were chronic drug abusers who had their children removed at birth. One of my fellow students linked us to a program in the USA that sterilises drug addicts for free, and gives them money for it. She linked to this as a possible solution to the problem.

Now, I have two major issues with this. The first, as pointed out by other students, was that by offering money, people are going to sell their fertility for their next fix. Drug addiction doesn't necessarily end in premature death. Many of these sterilised addicts may recover and return to a normal life, but a life where they are unable to have children. Sterilisation, especially in women, is difficult to reverse and expensive.

My second, more significant issue is that it sees people as nothing more than their addiction. Sterilise the addicts, get rid of the problem. Or rather, ignore the problem because it's a lot easier to claim ignorance of drug addiction if there are no unhappy children needing long term care as a result of it. It also ignores that many addict parents do everything in their power to retain custody of their children. Drug addiction in itself does not automatically mean parenting failure.

So, I posed the following to the group:

The most common 'type' of people to have multiple children removed from their care are those with learning difficulties, often due to childhood abuse. Would anyone want to sterilise that particular group of people to limit the number of children in care?

If I'm playing devil's advocate, these are precisely the type of service user that should be sterilised as they are far less likely to recover or gain the correct parenting skills.

Back in the forums, the answer? Silence. Because all a sudden, we've slipped over the line into eugenics and nobody's comfortable with that.

Fresher's week

I went to see Cirque du Soleil: Totem yesterday and it was amazing. Highly recommended!

With my first mailing of course materials was a 'Welcome Week' handout of activities to do over week one of the course (4th - 11th Feb). It is, essentially, an induction into the world of the OU.

Unlike half the people on my course, I didn't do the welcome week IMMEDIATELY ON RECIEPT OF THE MATERIALS. I decided to wait until vaguely approaching the actual start date, so I could gauge my working speed more accurately. I feared that sprinting through the work in a fit of excitement would lead to faltering discontent as the weeks became more demanding.

Time allotted for running through the welcome was six hours. However, since this included up to three hours to work through the IT guide, I didn't think it'd take me quite that long. I was right - the IT guide took me fifteen minutes, but then I've worked in IT for eight years.

Another activity - 'buy your set books' - I did MONTHS ago (thanks again, Vickie).

The course welcome DVD actually settled me down quite a bit. I've been feeling a bit generally dreadful about life for the WHOLE of January, and was starting to think I'd made a terrible mistake deciding to do ANYTHING other than sitting on my arse, in a catatonic state, for seven years, and then working at Lidl. So, I watched the DVD and it was reassuring. I suppose that is the point of it. It wouldn't be much of a welcome if it just showed people screaming down the lens, glassy- eyed and rending their garments. Heh.

The module guide was similarly reassuring, though I did laugh at the italicised exhortation to BUY the set books. Saying that, I have noticed people moaning that the set books are available through StudentHome. They aren't, this is fantasy and nonsense.

I then had a brief look through the study planner and assessment guide. This is getting everyone's knickers in a twist. Some people seem to think they should be able to write their first essay RIGHT NOW.

OU study, at least at entry level, is incredibly structured. I'm doing a nine month course, split into six blocks. Block one is an overview, blocks two to five are the main body of the course and block six is a 'moving on' type of affair. Each block is split into units and I'm allotted a unit per week to study. The units are linked up with two set texts and a DVD-Rom. There are various activities to do. Alongside this are the tutor and module forums online.

At the end of the first five blocks, I'll have to submit a Tutor Marked Assessment (TMA), plus an extra one around the mid-module group project. Each TMA is split into three sections: an essay, a shorter activity on care skills and a retrospective. My first marked work will be an introduction that I have to email to my tutor by the 16th. I sent this off this morning. I doubled the word count, but apparently it doesn't matter this time.

At the end of block six is an exam. Yeah, the exam I kinda didn't notice. Woo!

On top of all that, I have to do five interactive Computer Marked Assessments (iCMAs). These are based on numbers and statistics. Remember I said I was dyscalculic? These are going to be FUNZ.

So, I am officially a student, after ten years of being a worker bee/mother/disgruntled (ex)wife. It's a curious sensation, made stranger by the fact that I am still a mother and disgruntled ex wife. So many things to juggle!

On your marks...

Today is the first day of the course.

Egad, I'm a student again for the first time in not quite ten years!

Child protection

Everyone on my course was told to watch Protecting Our Children, which is a three part series on the BBC at present. I haven't watched it yet, I'm not very well and I didn't feel like being hideously depressed right before bed last night!

However, a lot of people have watched it and were shocked at the contents.
These are people about to start a university level course in health and social care. For the next nine months, they're going to be reading case studies, asked difficult ethical questions and it's not always going to be jolly outcomes and happy endings.

Now, while it's fairly obviously going to be a shocking documentary or there wouldn't be a lot of point airing it, the cases broadcast were nothing particularly abnormal for child protection social work.

I used to work in NHS admin, doing notes summarising, which meant I frequently came into contact with child protection case conference notes. I have read some dreadful things, that I cannot give examples of to protect confidentiality.
There are four main types of child abuse recognised by child protection - neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse and sexual abuse. As you can imagine, there is often some crossover between categories. Neglect is by far the most common, and probably the hardest to read about in a clinical setting because there is no terminology to hide behind. If you're fairly ignorant of medical terminology, a 'torn fourchette' in a six year old girl won't read as anything terribly shocking (it is). However, reading or hearing about the same girl being left alone for whole days and nights without food, ignored and having to sleep without blankets on the floor, you can't fuzz that out mentally.

Working in a quiet, small, rural practice for eight years, I came across case conference reports across all four of categories of abuse, to varying degrees of severity, and it never ceased to chill me to the bone. I had to fight to not take my work home with me mentally every time.

I am under no illusions. Parents and other caregivers can do terrible things to their children. Maybe the real problem that social workers face in this country, aside from funding issues and archaic communication systems with other agencies, is that the general public prefer to ignore that child abuse still goes on.

The same people baying for the blood of the social workers involved with Baby P would probably rather poke out their eyes than admit similar abuse might be going on in THEIR village.

Getting To Know You

The boy has been de-tonsilled! His recovery wasn't entirely uneventful, as he had some bleeding last week which culminated in a midnight dash to A+E. However, he is now almost back to normal, and life can continue. Huzzah!

So, as my start date looms closer (10 days. Erk.), I've been flicking around course forums online.
The first port of call was the OUSA course forums. K101 runs twice a year as it's one of the most popular modules, but the forum mainly consists of people about to start who are looking for others in their area, or who are paralysed by terror. For most, this is the first time they've done university-level education.

I asked for people in my city, and found quite a few. Everyone seemed polite, even though the forums aren't strenuously moderated, and obeyed the rules.

I found a link to the facebook group for my course start date and joined that. I'd been there two minutes and noticed a flame war had broken out on a post bitching about course fee grants, to the extent that someone had actually decided to withdraw from the course! Some people have run through their 'first week induction' already. And some people have already read unit 1 and started writing their first TMA! The course website doesn't open until tomorrow!

I've added a few people on facebook already. I don't normally add randoms on facebook, but I may well bump into these folk in Real Life, so may as well.

I've had an introduction letter from my tutor, who seems very well suited to the job and friendly. Nobody wants a dragon for a tutor.

I'm starting to look forward to it. The fear has been greatly assuaged by reading the forums and knowing others are just as terrified as I am.

Trepidation

I think the worst thing about waiting for an OU course to start is the not-knowing.
I don't know how much time it's going to take me, whether my essay writing skillorz are up to scratch, whether it'll be all be horribly beyond my comprehension.
I don't know how much I'll be able to work round the kids, and my commitments to them and general housekeeping. I have officially left work today - I am now scrounging off the state wholly, instead of partially. This is somewhat terrifying in itself as I have no idea how the reduction in money will work out for us.
I don't know whether I'll enjoy the course, whether I'll 'get' it, whether everyone else will loathe me entirely...

I can be anxious to the point of neurotic at times and I am about this course starting. Excited too, but primarily anxious.
The OU don't really help with the anxiety by basically saying 'Don't worry...all will become clear' in the preliminary literature. My poorly, freshly de-tonsilled toddler is sucking all my time into a vortex at present, so I haven't read through much of my course stuff yet (hence examination-spotting fail). I need to go shopping and fill my study with stationery. MOAR PENS!
My course website doesn't open until next Wednesday, so I can't go and bitch about being a paranoid idiot at everyone else for a whole WEEK and I don't really have time to anyway, until Jimmy's feeling better.

Instead, I dwell and panic and fret and stare at my study calendar, and fret more, and briefly consider weeping.

Ah, only two and a half more weeks until I can stop flailing and start working.

Wah!

I was saying to my sister only this afternoon that I need to read things more thoroughly, especially in academic context.

This was brought into sharper relief when I flicked back through my course materials and spotted a section at the back of my assignment guide titled "Examination".

Um.

How did I fail to notice this course ends with an exam?

So I panicked, as you do. I get incredibly anxious when travelling to new places. I may only live an hour from my exam centre, by train (plus a ten minute walk), but it's a city I've only ever shopped in and I don't know it very well. I envision being lost hopelessly, missing my exam and wailing until someone saves me. Possibly mountain rescue.

I've not taken a formal exam since my AS levels in June 2002. I was drunk through most of the afternoon ones. It's a slightly daunting prospect. Not that I plan on drinking; that would seriously impede my ability to get home afterwards.

This to shall pass.