My loss of ability to sleep or eat

I have become officially useless at writing and i’m not even really in the mood for it right now, so i expect this will be brief.

I have finally graduated for the last time 6 years after starting. I have left Oxford. i am currently staying with my parents in Northumberland for a couple of weeks before i move to (was going to write city but then thought maybe not, but a big city near London)  to my new life and new job.

It was so weird and sad leaving Oxford. Having hated the place at first and done anything to get away from it, now i love it, and did not want to leave at all. I know it so well, my best friends are there, i had a routine going on and had lived in the same room for 3 years. I was really settled and felt SAFE.

But as of the weekend i will be moving to a new room i managed to find while doing work shadowing. I only looked at one room and just went for it. It is another attic room. I liked it. It only a small skylight instead of the 2 windows i’m used to, so it will probably be quite dark, but it has a double bed. I will be sharing the house with one other couple, who i havent met, called Lucy and John. I hope to God we get on.

And from next Wednesday i will be starting work. I have always been scared, but i had calmed down a little after doing work shadowing since i saw that the day to day ward stuff, while scary, difficult, and taking forever, was doable, and there is support. Also, on the rota, i didnt have to do any of the scary stuff (aka CDU where you have to clerk the new patients coming into hospital, weekends, and nights) for a couple of weeks, so i would find my feet and settle down a bit. But then last week we got an email saying the rota had been changed, with no explanation.

So now i am working nights for the first friday, saturday and sunday. As i say we start on the wednesday, come the friday i will instantly be into nights.

On telling this to some people (namely my Mum), the response was that surely that is just like during the day only dark.

But alas, no, it means that myself and 2 other people will be the only doctors covering the entire hospital, so every new patient coming in (and friday and saturday nights = busy) will need to be clerked and treated by me and these others, and you dont just sit around on a ward, but you cover all the wards for every job the needs doing, you just get bleeped all over. And then you run to see the patient, and it is at night that patients actually get sick and die, so i will be having to try and prevent that. And i know nothing and there is no back up or support whatsoever. Plus i will carry the crash bleep, so whenever someone arrests, i will have to run to them and try to shock them back to life. May sound fun. Isn’t at all. And it is a big hospital, so it WILL be a nightmare.

So basically, i am feeling a kind of fear that through driving tests, university finals exams and every other stressful thing i have done, i have never experienced before.

And i am trying to hide that from my parents.

I can’t sleep.

And eating has become the most traumatic event in the world.

When stressed, i find it literally impossible to eat, so at every meal i’ve had to seriously choke the food down. At every meal i’ve honestly thought i was going to throw it right back up onto my plate. It has been the most impossible hard work, but i cant ask for less food since that is the way of showing love in my family, so essentially i would be saying i want mum to stop loving me. Yesterday it did come to the point though where i actually had to admit i felt very unwell, and suggested that perhaps i could leave the desert till later, but somehow having admitted i was struggling with the food i then managed to force it all down.

But i know this is only going to get worse as the week progresses and the time draws nearer.

So i have this horrible nauseous, terrified feeling at all times, making me silent and sullen to my parents.

I am very very unhappy and just want to disappear into my head and never come out again.

I was wondering if maybe i broke an arm or something accidentally i might be able to get out of it, but i wouldnt, it would just make it even harder.

Let’s end with a little pretence at happiness. It’s all been very nice weather here, and i’ve been engaging in wonderous counrtyside activities like picking the peas and various berries from the garden (we have so many raspberries, strawverries and gooseberries they are coming out of our asses, which i think is marvellous, if i had any appetite of course), generally reading, i even got a little sunburnt yesterday and somehow have developed more of a tan spending a few days in northern britain than i did in 8 weeks in the caribbean.

So yeah, if it wasnt for the horrifying, petrifying thing that is to come, i think i would have been enjoying myself.

The other big thing is that i have been seeing a guy since before St Kitts. He actually waited for me to come back and is still there. I’ve lost the will to write again right now, so just briefly, he is 39, divorced, has a 5 year old daughter who doesnt live with him but he sees at weekends. He doesnt like his job, but he does like me. We’ve had long discussions about whether it is just the sex that he likes with me. Apparently not. Who really knows? Hopefully i will get round to writing more often so i can go into more detail about him.

I still read you all, just rubbish at noting and writing myself.

Love you all