Catching up while not attending Tramlines*

This is a catch up and I well aware it is at least six weeks since I wrote. I have had a bad attack of real life and my online activity has therefore been curtailed. Thus I have a couple of big stories.

At the time of last supervision about a month ago, I sat down and realised that I had just not made the progress I needed to on my PhD during the last month. There had been a lot of events at Church that had pulled me in and when I was involved had turned out to be bigger than I expected. Events such as a wedding at the Church and the anniversary service. Often what I had hoped would be a short involvement turned into a full day one. There were several things going on, I was getting over tired with trying to keep my thesis going, work and with church involvement. There also seemed to be a rule that the more I did the more people found for me to do. I was obviously not keeping boundaries well. So last supervision I decided I had to take a sabbactical from church. This was partly aided by the fact that I had a submission date of the end of October so it was time limited.

Still I did not manage to stand back as quick as I think people thought I should. A fortnight after this there was a communion. There are nine serving elders at St Andrews, of them for that communion there were only three available. All the rest had legitimate reasons for being absent including operations, big academic conferences and family weddings. Normally within a URC this would not be a problem but at St Andrews the ritual requires at least six elders at present. That meant that I was recruiting non-serving elders. There are difficulties with this, non-serving by virtue of being non-serving are not as familiar with the ritual as serving and also tend to be older. The result was that I made a decision that on this occasion we would drop the processing of the elements in. I did debate quite late on if the two table elders might process just the chalice and the bread roll but by that point it was really too late to change. It worked but it required input from me.

Having got that over with on the 7th July I was looking forward to the next weekend being a quiet one when I could get on with my thesis.

On the 9th July I went home with a migraine from work. Unusually for me coming on during a consultation. Maybe something to do with the heat as it was a very hot day. Anyway slept until my sister rang to say that Dad had collapsed and been taken into hospital in Macclesfield. Cathy was at my parents waiting for Mum to come. I said I could not make it that evening but that I would try and get over by the day as soon as possible. The rest of the evening was a mix between trying to organise things and going around to visit my friend Margo. I rang my sister to let her know to get me on my mobile but she did not answer. She rang back later to say she had had to pick Mum up from hospital in Macclesfield.

Around 11:00 a.m. the next morning I managed to get over as I needed to do some phoning to cancel things. It turned out that Cathy had had barely three hours sleep as Mum had become disorientated and could not work out why Dad was not there.

We got some lunch and then went to Macclesfield hospital. At the time the doctors there thought that dad had an artery that was colluding and that if he went for an angiogram at Stoke (they did send people to Manchester hospitals but it would mean waiting for a space while at Stoke they would do it immediately). So with that in mind I took over the care of Mum and Cathy went up to her family. For those who do not know Mum has early onset dementia and can get quite confused, however having seen Dad again and with the idea that he might be out by the weekend she seemed to calm down somewhat.

The next day was busy just with ordinary things for Mum. Her minister came around, we went out for a walk had lunch and then Mum’s hairdresser came around to cut her hair. I then ran her a bath. Then a phone call came from Dad. It was unclear and all I really gathered was that something had happened when he had gone into Stoke. So I rang Cathy and asked her to find out what was going on. About two hours later Cathy rang back. It had taken her that much time to track down where Dad was in the Health Service and what was going on. The story was when they did the angiogram they found that far from it being a single artery that it was multiple arteries and his heart valve was in poor shape as well.  The doctors advice was that he should have open heart surgery as soon as possible and that they were not happy with him going home. Therefore he was now in Stoke waiting surgery.

Dad refused to give permission to have further surgery until he had talked with the family. Stoke is not the easiest place to get to from Stockport. In the end we managed to organise for Mum, Cathy and I to go down on Saturday. Adrian, Cathy’s husband came up with the brilliant idea of going by train. The big problem with a car is that Mum tends to dose in them and really can be quite cross when she wakes because she does not remember why she is travelling. With the train Cathy and I were able to interact with her the whole time which meant that she did not go through the crisis of sleeping and forgetting. However during the afternoon it became quite clear that I was stressed out having got about six hours sleep the last two nights as mum woke several times during the night and always needed reassurance. 

With Dad needing an operation and needing time to recuperate we needed to rethink. The eventual decision was to put Mum in a home for respite care. The minimum time this would be for was four weeks. It would have to be a home near my sister so she could keep an eye on Mum. Until we could set that up I would take care of Mum. Mum broke down and wept when we left the ward but by the time in the train could not remember than she had been to see Dad.

On the Monday Cathy went to look around several homes. On the tuesday I had a doctors appointment myself which I did not want to postpone. So my sister came over, collected Mum and took her to see the home she felt was best while I went over. It gave me a break. I did not drive particularly fast but just having time in the four walls of my flat was good. I saw the doctor and did some sorting out. By Tuesday we had seen the home but Mum desperately wanted to see Dad and could not remember the visit on Saturday so I took her on Wednesday.

Thursday we moved Mum to the home near Cathy. It was hard and made more difficult that I could not focus. We had not yet heard the date of Dad’s operation although they had said end of that week, start of next. We left mum in tears but we both knew that unless we went the tears would not stop. It was hard.

I stayed with Cathy a while not wanting to drive far after the emotion of that event. Sitting in the garden talking with Sam and Hannah was a complete antidote to the intensity of sitting my mother. Mum is perfectly capable if only she remembers what she is doing. Just as I was leaving Cathy got a phone call from Dad to say his heart surgery would be the next day. Cathy rang the home to tell them

Cathy got rung at six to ask whether Dad had died by the home. They had found Mum at 5:00 a.m. sat in her chair cuddling a teddy and weeping her eyes out because she was convinced that Dad had died. Otherwise Friday was a waiting day. Dad only went down for his operation about 4:00 pm and we only knew he had survived after 7:00 pm.

The rest of the weekend has been spent quietly in my flat trying to get the introduction to my thesis almost finalised. Dad seems to be progressing much as the doctors expect, he was slightly confused tonight. Mum is packing and unpacking at the home. As long as that keeps her busy and she is not getting too distressed I am not too worried. We left the suitcase visible so she would know that stay was not permanent. There is some difficulty over contacting her as the mobile phone that she uses keeps loosing the signal.

*Tramlines is a music festival that happens most years in Sheffield; until this year it has been free and largely still is but some events are now charged for. As far as I am concerned it is mainly an inconvenience with music audible when I want to go to sleep and town difficult to get around.

On Trinity Sunday 2013

Work wise I have been busy, there has been teaching statistics to Linguistics and slowly dealing with them. It has been time consuming on the whole and taken up more than I expected particularly as I had to learn R. Now R is not easy to learn, rather in its raw form it is a bit like finding your way around an unknown city where you have to ask strangers directions and there is no map. The problem is that you often do not know what is the next piece of information you need. Most software on the other hand has both your very detailed instructions and also menus that work some thing like a satnav and yes you can end up arriving in totally the wrong place if you just use them. Yes I can make it dance when I want to, but how much do I want to? Well maybe my need for a decent graphics package will encourage me to see if I can at least learn enough of it to draw good graphs! It has some quite sophisticated graphics tools. There is also a new system for booking courses that some groups are using. They want me to look at it but make the date for a Friday which is my day off. Then I have been busy with Human Nutrition, one paper has just been published but had a very efficient main researcher, one paper about to be submitted, in the end we called off trying to analyse the data in different ways and finally there is one paper where I and the other data analyst do not agree on figures. I am also trying to negotiate the setting up of extra NVivo courses.

I am also slowly being inducted into the chaplaincy. I have so far got through synod, had the talk with this years coordinating chaplain (Peter Cullen), got an SRB check form filled in and also had a request for my username so they could give me access to the shared drive. The chaplaincy is a lot bigger than it was when I was last in this role, oh and it is weird because I am both the newcomer and also experienced hand. Setting up for communion a couple of weeks ago I recognised the cloth they were using and I made a comment about being able to change how it was gathered as they were struggling to get it onto the communion table. Then promptly started untying the knot. The comment came back “Do you know this piece of cloth?” It is just like the question of how the pebbles came from St Columba’s Bay Iona, well I picked them up put them in a rucksack, then gave them to my parents to bring back. The thing that really gave me deja vu was the first communion back in the Octagon Centre. I struggled to get in due to building works but when I did, there in front of Meetings Room 1 was Cat the Methodist Chaplain and a whole lot of students, standing around just as the chaplains used to before Thursday’s communion. No communion is not back in Meetings Room 1 but for a while I really just accepted it was. Unfortunately I am not getting to the away day as it clashes with my next supervision.

Church wise I think things are settling down at church, I am trying to find out where I fit as I am finding it is not to the place I left. This is not due to a shortage of suggestions. I think at times they would like me to do far more that I am capable of. Some of the things are simple, the choir tried to recruit me, but I knew a prior commitment to the sound desk ruled that out and I get slightly worried about a choir that wants to recruit me. The other thing is in some ways Sarah prepared St Andrew’s too well for being without a minister. I am having to run a mild campaign to persuade them that being without your own minister does not mean being without any ministerial coverage and that there are ways that we may have a share of a minister. The problem is that as they do not believe they will get anything out of any discussions they are at present quite wary of discussions. They also are finding that Bob Heathcote’s approach which is to listen first and then propose difficult to understand. They want something that they can deal with and conceptually I think the idea of a collaboration has not been thought through. They want a detail so they can see how it might work. I struggle with this having been in various styles of groups of churches until I came to St Andrew’s. I suppose if you have only experienced one minister to a church model then anything else feels like a foreign country. There are plans for the anniversary service on 23rd June and there is a Mission and Care group in July. This month with the third Sunday being Pentecost and therefore a joint CTBB service I decided I would work that Sunday and go this Sunday. However next month is going to be tricky indeed with me really needing to be there for all Sundays plus some time on one Saturday.

Writers group has been going again which is good, it has become a place where I feel I am among friends and I concentrate on other things than thesis. At present we are partially preparing for the Broomhill Festival Reading where some of us including myself are performing. I am beginning to realise that I am getting to be write more competently, especially when people comment on how good the material is that I plan to read. Choosing it was difficult as I was holding back some of the material I have written for the reading in the autumn. At first people were hesitant to join in so we asked another group called the Tuesday Poets if they would join us. Now there are plenty of volunteers but the Tuesday Poets have given us male voices and as all the writers in the group at present are women this was something we lacked.

Finally thesis for those who do not read my thesis blog. Well I have now submitted possible second drafts for all my substantive thesis chapters to my supervisor. One of them needs quite a bit of work but I am actually quite pleased with the other five. I am hoping that I can get the work done tomorrow. There is then just my introduction, methodology and conclusion to get to the same state. The introduction I think is fairly close to there, the methodology needs cutting by 50% and I have not written a word of my conclusion. The game plan is to do this over the next month or so. Then it is proofing in earnest. less Jean