I thought I knew what hormones and mood swings were before this last week, but it transpires I was wrong. I've had lows before, but I've never crashed so fast from completely happy to completely miserable as I did on the weekend. And you know what? I'm already back to happy again now.
Yes, I know. This is pregnancy. These things happen. It still doesn't prepare you for how it feels to suddenly realise that your entire life as you knew it is gone- and _it's never coming back_. At exactly the same moment I was freaking out at that thought, another one struck me- I am completely responsible for this child. Yes, me and my husband. But in the middle of the day for at least a year after she's born, there's going to be me, and me. And if I hit my breaking point, if I can't take another minute of it, I can't just walk out and get in the car and go somewhere. It's all up to me. Oh, and then there's my body. Which is gone. Go-o-one. I've only added 3kg, but I'm all bulky and huge. Okay, so I wasn't a supermodel before, and I famously stacked on no less than 17 kilos in the 12 months before my wedding without it bothering me a bit. All of a sudden I'm convinced these 3kg are the end of the world. Did I mention the thing about how terrified I am to not be working? That's right, in the job that drives me crazy. Or how terrified I am at the thought of leaving my baby at daycare and going back to work a year later?
As you can see, I've completely lost my mind. Or I had lost it, for about 36 horrible hours filled with anxiety and panic attacks and insomnia. Then almost as quickly, I was back to feeling pretty cheerful. I keep expecting myself to behave in certain ways, and when that doesn't happen I go into meltdown.
What has helped, other than giving myself a break and challenging the negative thoughts, has been talking about it with the ladies in my pregnancy exercise classes. We're all going through the exact same things. This really is the biggest change that can happen in life, but there's nothing wrong with change. Great things come from change. If I'd resisted various changes (like I'd wanted to), I wouldn't be married to this particularly great guy; I wouldn't be living in a place I absolutely love; and I certainly wouldn't have close to doubled my salary in 18 months.
So, now I'm done with whingeing, let me tell you what cheered me up today (other than M&M cookies, which worked wonders)- I went to get my maternity bra fitted this morning. I knew the cup size had gone up a tad, because my existing bras were not fitting all that well, and I was starting to get comments. Well, I've always wanted bigger boobs (it's always the way, right? You either want 'em bigger or smaller, no matter what you have). I've been a 36B since my early twenties, and before that never managed anything more than a 36A.
So, I was gunning for a C cup today, but no- that was no good. Neither was the D cup. I hit Pamela Anderson's size (36DD) and... well... no good either. Yep, I am a confirmed and actual 36E, one size larger than Pammy. Heh heh heh. Awesome.
See, if little things can upset me, little things can equally make me giddy. Them's the breaks, I suppose.
(Oh, and does it freak you out that there are websites with lists of celebrity bra sizes? If you're totally bored, you can go compare yourself and feel either deficient as heck, or full of womanly pride- I, for one, am feeling well-inflated- there ain't an E cup on that list. Mwa ha ha.)
Excerpt from Between the Lines
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Triage
I just finished my Senior First Aid course today for the fourth time in ten years. I've also done the Remote Area First Aid training. I believe that first aid training should be mandatory for everyone, everywhere. I may be a little biased by the fact that I have a life-threatening condition- anaphylaxis- and I'd love to know that everyone I encountered would be capable of helping me out if necessary. Still, it seems like so little effort to sit in a class for two days to learn the basics of CPR, how to stop bleeding, how to deal with diabetics, head injuries- all the things that can start small but can kill.
Over the years, I've put my first aid training to use more than half a dozen times, dealing with everything from car accidents to ordinary fainting. I was thinking today about how much scarier it is if you _don't_ know any first aid and you come across a situation in which someone has been seriously wounded.
Take the first accident that happened near me- a friend, at a loud party, walked out into the back yard through a sliding glass door, and left it open behind her. Her favourite song had just come on the radio, and she turned it right up and began to dance. Behind her, the mother of the guy whose party it was closed the door to keep out the noise. The friend turned back to the house to go inside again, head-banging as she went- and crashed straight through the plate glass, face-first.
There must have been twenty of us there, and for a moment the whole place seemed silent, even though the music blared on at the same volume. The girl was standing just inside the house, holding her forehead as if she'd just bumped it slightly. The door was in big shards around her. She turned around to face us, and as she went to talk a thin spray of crimson blood arced up from behind her hand and spattered across the white roof.
So, at that point, my first aid training kicked in. I made a run for her and got her sitting down, and with the nearest handy piece of fabric (which happened to be a towel) I put pressure on the cut. Only one other person stepped in to help- everyone else was just stunned. The two of us sat there for close to forty minutes, waiting for an ambulance to arrive, putting all the pressure we could on this girl's face. When the ambulance got there, the paramedic peeled back the towels, and we saw that her forehead was cut down to the bone, and her nose was almost in half. She had 80+ stitches and plastic surgery to repair the damage.
I still start to go weak at the knees when I see blood these days. If none of us had known first aid, or if I'd come across someone with that injury on my own and I didn't know how to deal with it, there's a strong chance things could have gone from bad to much worse.
As usual, there is a point to this. The point is, it's made me think about how shocking it is to see someone else injured, and how utterly impossible it is to figure out how to help if you haven't been trained. Just like most of the guys who went away to war in 1914. Sure, plenty of them would have seen accidents around the farm- the occasional severed finger, maybe much worse (tractor accidents and the like). But I doubt anything could have prepared them for seeing their friends and countrymen injured and dying from all kinds of shocking trauma.
The process of triage, or deciding the order of priority in treating multiple injured persons, originated with French doctors in WWI. It had been used before that time, but was formalised in the trenches. Those who are dead take the lowest priority. After that, in a first aid situation (rather than a battlefield situation), those who are unconscious come next; then those who are bleeding; then the rest.
Many of the principles of first aid also hail from war- and though the development of aid practices began many centuries earlier, the Crimean, American Civil and First World Wars presented never-before-seen volumes of opportunities to understand the effect of various physical traumas on the human body. Think about the various injuries we may encounter these days if we're unlucky- broken bones, cuts and bleeds, severed body parts, head injuries, crush injuries- all of these were wounds people suffered en masse during those wars.
Fair enough, that's what medics were for. But still- imagine having gone through your life without much more than a splinter, a few cuts or burns, and all of a sudden being thrown into a situation where the man standing right next to you suddenly has his intestines hanging out. How on earth would you deal with that? Especially if it was then repeated twenty times a day, every day, for several years.
It's scary enough encountering a serious injury in this day and age, even in the presence of readily available medical assistance. Imagine if it became your every day, and there was nothing you could do to help- and there was every potential you could be the next victim yourself.
Over the years, I've put my first aid training to use more than half a dozen times, dealing with everything from car accidents to ordinary fainting. I was thinking today about how much scarier it is if you _don't_ know any first aid and you come across a situation in which someone has been seriously wounded.
Take the first accident that happened near me- a friend, at a loud party, walked out into the back yard through a sliding glass door, and left it open behind her. Her favourite song had just come on the radio, and she turned it right up and began to dance. Behind her, the mother of the guy whose party it was closed the door to keep out the noise. The friend turned back to the house to go inside again, head-banging as she went- and crashed straight through the plate glass, face-first.
There must have been twenty of us there, and for a moment the whole place seemed silent, even though the music blared on at the same volume. The girl was standing just inside the house, holding her forehead as if she'd just bumped it slightly. The door was in big shards around her. She turned around to face us, and as she went to talk a thin spray of crimson blood arced up from behind her hand and spattered across the white roof.
So, at that point, my first aid training kicked in. I made a run for her and got her sitting down, and with the nearest handy piece of fabric (which happened to be a towel) I put pressure on the cut. Only one other person stepped in to help- everyone else was just stunned. The two of us sat there for close to forty minutes, waiting for an ambulance to arrive, putting all the pressure we could on this girl's face. When the ambulance got there, the paramedic peeled back the towels, and we saw that her forehead was cut down to the bone, and her nose was almost in half. She had 80+ stitches and plastic surgery to repair the damage.
I still start to go weak at the knees when I see blood these days. If none of us had known first aid, or if I'd come across someone with that injury on my own and I didn't know how to deal with it, there's a strong chance things could have gone from bad to much worse.
As usual, there is a point to this. The point is, it's made me think about how shocking it is to see someone else injured, and how utterly impossible it is to figure out how to help if you haven't been trained. Just like most of the guys who went away to war in 1914. Sure, plenty of them would have seen accidents around the farm- the occasional severed finger, maybe much worse (tractor accidents and the like). But I doubt anything could have prepared them for seeing their friends and countrymen injured and dying from all kinds of shocking trauma.
The process of triage, or deciding the order of priority in treating multiple injured persons, originated with French doctors in WWI. It had been used before that time, but was formalised in the trenches. Those who are dead take the lowest priority. After that, in a first aid situation (rather than a battlefield situation), those who are unconscious come next; then those who are bleeding; then the rest.
Many of the principles of first aid also hail from war- and though the development of aid practices began many centuries earlier, the Crimean, American Civil and First World Wars presented never-before-seen volumes of opportunities to understand the effect of various physical traumas on the human body. Think about the various injuries we may encounter these days if we're unlucky- broken bones, cuts and bleeds, severed body parts, head injuries, crush injuries- all of these were wounds people suffered en masse during those wars.
Fair enough, that's what medics were for. But still- imagine having gone through your life without much more than a splinter, a few cuts or burns, and all of a sudden being thrown into a situation where the man standing right next to you suddenly has his intestines hanging out. How on earth would you deal with that? Especially if it was then repeated twenty times a day, every day, for several years.
It's scary enough encountering a serious injury in this day and age, even in the presence of readily available medical assistance. Imagine if it became your every day, and there was nothing you could do to help- and there was every potential you could be the next victim yourself.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Strategy
It seems like every six months I come up with a new strategy on how to tackle the beastly task of bringing this novel into some kind of reading order. Well, I have a new strategy. It's time to take control again. I've spent too long dallying around waiting for the answers to jump out and smack me between the eyes, and now I'm going to go and dig them out myself.
So, here's the plan for the Whole Damn Thing.
1. I'm going to tackle these scenes in a logical order, and right now that means chronological order. So, I've made a list of all my scenes, from 1914 to 1939. For manageability I've divided them into chunks- the pre-war events of 1914 to 1915; Bill at war from 1915 to 1918; from Bill's return up to the death of his father, or 1920 to 1922; 1922 to 1932; and finally 1933 to 1939.
2. I'll take each scene and find the most recent or most relevant version, then save that as my working file and put all the other versions in a dark, buried folder somewhere.
3. I'll write a mini-outline for what happens in each scene, concentrating on what I want to achieve; the reasons why that particular scene is necessary to the story.
4. Then I'll go through the scene and slash out everything that doesn't work, so I can see what gaps are left. I'll then go through and rewrite, using stream of consciousness and visualisation to fill any blanks in emotion or description or plot before writing more.
5. I'll then review each scene to see how it flows, and make changes as necessary, without getting too exceptionally pedantic about it.
6. I'll do this for each scene, one chunk at a time, and when I've finished each chunk I'll review that to look at continuity and flow. After that I'll work out an overall editing process.
By the time I get to this stage, I'll probably have a two-year-old kid and a drinking problem. LOL.
I know this sounds like the usual micromanagement, but I actually now see it in smaller pieces. It gives me permission to work on one chapter at a time, and it gives me some direction because I know where to start- 1914, with Bill and Len arguing before Bill proposes to Kit. If I get really ambitious, I might look to set myself some deadlines for completing these tasks...
So, 1914, here I come.
So, here's the plan for the Whole Damn Thing.
1. I'm going to tackle these scenes in a logical order, and right now that means chronological order. So, I've made a list of all my scenes, from 1914 to 1939. For manageability I've divided them into chunks- the pre-war events of 1914 to 1915; Bill at war from 1915 to 1918; from Bill's return up to the death of his father, or 1920 to 1922; 1922 to 1932; and finally 1933 to 1939.
2. I'll take each scene and find the most recent or most relevant version, then save that as my working file and put all the other versions in a dark, buried folder somewhere.
3. I'll write a mini-outline for what happens in each scene, concentrating on what I want to achieve; the reasons why that particular scene is necessary to the story.
4. Then I'll go through the scene and slash out everything that doesn't work, so I can see what gaps are left. I'll then go through and rewrite, using stream of consciousness and visualisation to fill any blanks in emotion or description or plot before writing more.
5. I'll then review each scene to see how it flows, and make changes as necessary, without getting too exceptionally pedantic about it.
6. I'll do this for each scene, one chunk at a time, and when I've finished each chunk I'll review that to look at continuity and flow. After that I'll work out an overall editing process.
By the time I get to this stage, I'll probably have a two-year-old kid and a drinking problem. LOL.
I know this sounds like the usual micromanagement, but I actually now see it in smaller pieces. It gives me permission to work on one chapter at a time, and it gives me some direction because I know where to start- 1914, with Bill and Len arguing before Bill proposes to Kit. If I get really ambitious, I might look to set myself some deadlines for completing these tasks...
So, 1914, here I come.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Fragments of Antonin
I watched a really interesting French movie a few nights ago titled Fragments of Antonin. Completed in 2006 and nominated for a Cesar Award for Best New Work, the film is set toward the end of WWI, and opens with a French soldier at a hospital for nervous cases. He suffers severe shell-shock, constant tremors, and repeats the same obsessive actions over and over again in association with the only words he speaks- the names of five people.
As the doctors attempt to unravel the mysteries of his mind and how the war produced such incredible physical effects on a man who was not outwardly injured, we learn the stories behind each of the five names through flashbacks. They all relate to his experiences in the war, and through each flashback the tension rises as we wonder which person and which incident finally pushed Antonin over the edge from war survivor to wreck.
The movie was well put together and full of fascinating detail. One of the scariest parts was the opening credits, in which real footage of French soldiers suffering shell-shock was played. I was stunned to see what the doctors did in trying to understand the phenomenon- they exposed the patients to stimuli like whistles, explosions and officers shouting commands to see what kind of reaction would result. It's just a reminder of how little was understood about the human mind and the impact of war before the world was forced to deal with the aftermath of the Great War on so many.
As the doctors attempt to unravel the mysteries of his mind and how the war produced such incredible physical effects on a man who was not outwardly injured, we learn the stories behind each of the five names through flashbacks. They all relate to his experiences in the war, and through each flashback the tension rises as we wonder which person and which incident finally pushed Antonin over the edge from war survivor to wreck.
The movie was well put together and full of fascinating detail. One of the scariest parts was the opening credits, in which real footage of French soldiers suffering shell-shock was played. I was stunned to see what the doctors did in trying to understand the phenomenon- they exposed the patients to stimuli like whistles, explosions and officers shouting commands to see what kind of reaction would result. It's just a reminder of how little was understood about the human mind and the impact of war before the world was forced to deal with the aftermath of the Great War on so many.
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