Closing Pandora's Box

We’ve had countless boiler problems this year. Every few months something seems to happen. It sprouts a leak, starts letting out gas, making weird and un-boiler-like noises or just not getting turned on when I try to press its buttons. Last week it started drooling all over the floor and the pressure inside would rapidly drop and so prolonged use of hot water (in a bath or shower) would mean you’d have to do some fancy stuff to it to make the hot water come back. This was annoying, since I take my time whenever I have a bath or shower. So much so one of my friends always say “see you next week..” every time I text her, “I’ll text you later, about to jump into the bath/shower.” A few days subsequent to this, the boiler spluttered its last few breaths and stopped working all together. 3 days without hot water and heating.

It is not very often we consider boilers to be of value in our lives. Even when we talk about the things that we take for granted, how often do you hear anyone mention their boiler? I guess it’s like that clichéd line goes “you don’t realise the value of something till it’s gone…”. Said so many times, and probably experienced many more times but still it rings true. I realised the sheer importance of it when waking up for Tahajjud and Fajr (morning) prayers in the bitter cold without any hot water to wash with or heating to warm up the house with. I realised it’s importance when running late for university and jumped into the shower for a quick one only to be drenched in ice cold water. I realised the importance of it when sitting down stairs studying with frozen feet and fingers because of the cold. The water was so cold it left a burning sensation on contact with skin.

“It’s so annoying,” said  my brother one morning. “Why does this stupid thing keep messing up! I don’t wanna go to school today.”

“Think about all the people who live in icy conditions without hot water, or central heating. They only have one pan, in which to cook and in which they heat up water for a bath. Be grateful,” replied my dad.

The whole thing gave a few members of the household a really bad cold but it got me thinking. We use so many things each and every day. Many of these things we use without any thought as to their value in our lives, because they don’t seem valuable. Forget the small things, many of us are caught up in our traps that we aren’t even grateful for the big things that glare us in the face.

Say thank you to whoever you believe in, for once some of these things are gone, they may never come back. Thank God the boiler is now fixed. But more importantly thank God it was only the boiler and nothing more that messed up.

PS
This was written in a hurry so please excuse the grammar and or other mistakes.

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Title: Autumn Days – Estelle White

It’s Friday morning afternoon, I have work to do but really can’t be bothered. I’m sitting here with The General talking about all sorts of random stuff. What? You wanna hear? Okay…here’s a collection of some of the things that have happened over the last week or so.

Friday 18^th

A week after my actual birthday we all decided to have a birthday lunch for me and another loveeeeeeely person. A joint birthday you could say. So I ordered my chicken and ate. It tasted alright at the time but by the evening however I was starting to feel a little off. Saturday morning, I woke and had to run to the toilet, an act I would be repeating all day. All of Saturday I had that weird feeling the pit of my stomach which comes just before you want to puke. After having dinner, I drank some water and that tipped the balance. Luckily I made it to the toilet in time to empty the contents of my stomach (through both ways). I was vomiting all of Saturday night, and bits of Sunday as well. . Bad times.

*****

Sunday 20^th

We were sitting down eating dinner, my siblings and I. My brother started singing:

Brother: *singing* In my head, I see you…¹
Sister: *singing* I hear you in my ears and you can’t sing…so shutup. And I know I can’t either, so I’ll shut up too.

My brother ended the whole incident by throwing a mattar (pea) at her.

*****

Monday 21^st

I was telling the General about just how bad I had been feeling over the weekend, and he replied by saying:

The General: Guys were doing you both ways and you just couldn’t handle it.

Then later, while talking of his own bad stomach near the end of the day, the following was said:

The General: I feel your pain down there..
Me: Ewww…dude I didn’t cause you any pain down there.

*****

Wednesday 23^rd

It was just after stem cell lectures, The General, Dummer (AKA Black Dick) and I were sitting in a base room doing very little.

Me: I know someone with 11 siblings.
Dummer: I know someone that had 89 kids.
Me: OMG! 89? No way?
General: No way!
Dummer: 8 or 9.
Me:  I thought you said 89 for a second, was gonna say. Now it makes more sense.
General: I know someone with 15.
Dummer: They must’ve been at it for a good 15 years, one after the other.
General: Yeah they were Bengali.
Dummer: The Bengali women just lay there and a fish comes along.
Me: Haha! What the hell? I know Bengalis and fish are quite intimate, but having babies with fish. *rolls eyes*
Dummer: Imagine if Bengalis made hentai, the fish would be the lead characters.

We don’t just talk  all rubbish, we discuss a bit of science as well. The conversation continued and ended up on AIDs:

Dummer: Man had sex with a monkey, that’s how AIDs came about.
General: It actually bit him. And it’s possible the rhesus strain of SIV is very similar to HIV.
Dummer: Sounds much cooler to say he had sex with it, and HIV can’t transfer orally.
General: It can, through the…
Dummer: Yeah but it’s really rare. That guy told us in yesterday’s lecture…Robin Shattock, I think he knows a lot more about HIV than any of us.
Me: AIDs is spread much more rapidly through mucosal surfaces such as the vagina, where dendritic cells pick up the virus and transfer them to lymph nodes.
Dummer: Say you were speaking to someone, how would you know they had HIV?
Me: At the end of this degree you can walk around with a HIV testing kit, if there is such a thing. And if someone wants to mug you, just be like ‘I have AIDs and am not afraid to use it’.
Dummer: And you squirt it in their mouth… If you get what I’m saying.
Me: Ah man that’s disgusting!

*****

Thursday 24^th

I happened to lose my house and locker keys on Wednesday and so was worried all day on Thursday. While walking past my locker at the end of the day, I saw my keys dangling there, still inside the lock. You’re allowed to say what an idiot. But only if you can do it with a Jamaican accent.

Rosaline: (text) Guests are here. Just roasted myself in the kitchen . x
Me: (text) Did you marinate first? Though to be honest, I’d prefer you raw. x

That sounds a lot worse than it’s meant to / was intended to. Am I allowed to explain what I actually meant when I said that? No? Hmph. Okay.

*****

Friday 25^th

The General talks about wives a lot and about how he would steal my wife, just before we were to get married. Maybe it’s to do with the fact I really annoy him about being gay and liking BMWs. If you don’t know what a BMW is, let me just tell you I’m not referring to cars. I was thinking about adding a picture of one for a second, but it’s not appropriate. How can I not think he’s gay when he says stuff like:

General: How do I find that happy and stress free person I used to be?
Me: I guess he’s still there, just sleeping. You just gotta wait for him to wake up.
General: Yeah sleeping with other guys!

And when he started on my future wife and marriage popped up he said:

General: I’ll bring you along when I buy my wedding saris…

Can I tell them what you do at weddings?

*****

Hope you all have a lovely, relaxing and fun weekend. What are your plans? I’m off to Paris . Jealous much? And I know I’m really behind on blog reading and comment-backing. Will get to that soon.

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Title: A song we used to sing in primary school assemblies.
¹In my head – Jason Derulo.
Picture 1 – Showing Tuileres Garden, Paris taken from here.

Date: One Thursday morning last year.

Location: Dissection room.

Setting: (isn’t this partly the location?) We had just cut through the rib cage, and were trying to remove the heart from the chest, cutting away the connective tissue and all the other attachments. I hadn’t prepared for this anatomy session, and so pretended to read from my book in which I should have taken notes and done the directed self learning exercises. The following was the only contribution I made in the whole hour or so, apart from do my share of cutting with the scalpel and tugging away at the pericardium (the protective ‘sack’ like structure in which the heart sits).

Sophie: That heart is huge! (places fist on top, and the other) Even if I had three fists I don’t think they’d cover the size that heart.

Me: He must’ve been a really nice guy. He is a guy isn’t he? (Checks the cadavers genitals). Yeah a really nice guy.

Sophie: What? Big heart? Oh I get it!

Supervisor: Can anyone tell me what this particular condition is called? What about you Nas?

Me: (mutters) Ummm… being too nice-itis?

*****

Setting: My little brother is singing a love song that is stuck in his head. We’re walking together, carrying bags of Sainsbury shopping. He stops singing, puts on his ‘thinking’ face, and turns to look at me.

Brother: Hmm, you know how people that are in love, why do they always talk about missing heart beats? If I missed a heart beat, would I die?

Me: (rolls eyes) Ummm, I don’t know…

Brother: What do they teach you at uni? You never have an answer to any of my questions. So useless.

*****

“CVS,” she said. “I have CVS module up next. Do some posts on that.” This one is for you AcetylCholine.

The cardiovascular system consists of 2 main things; the heart and the blood vessels (veins, arteries and capillaries) and if you want to be technical, all the stuff inside. The circulatory system can be divided into 3 parts – the pulmonary circulation (this takes deoxygenated, i.e. blood with no oxygen to the lungs via the pulmonary arteries and brings it back, through the pulmonary veins), the systemic circulation (blood from the the left ventricle is pumped to all parts of the body, via branches of the aorta), and the coronary circulation (provides oxygen and nutrients to the heart muscle). The circulatory system is closed, meaning that no blood ever leaves the system. If there is a break in this, and blood seeps out from the vessels, it is known as a haemorrhage. The functions of the circulatory system are many:

• Transfer of nutrients around the body (breakdown of things you eat, amino acids, salts, sugars).
• The transfer of oxygen to, and carbon dioxide from all the cells in the body and other gases as well.
• Carries blood cells (such as white cells which form an integral part of the human immune system and fight infection and disease).
• Regulation of body temperature, pH, and homeostasis.

Development of the heart

• The heart is the first organ of the body to develop and function.
• It is formed from a simple crescent of cells of the mesoderm (middle layer) of the embryo.
• The crescent contains endocardial cells, which organise to form a tube with a lumen (the hole in a tube, think of toilet roll tubes) all surrounded by myocardial (heart muscle) cells. The tube expands, elongates, bends, loops, balloons to form the various structures of the heart.
• Disorders include: atrioventricular septal defect, atrial septal defect, ventricular septal defect, tetralogy of Fallot.

Bending / looping of the heart tube (Scanning electron microscope images of mouse hearts)

Download: Development of the heart and its conduction system (lecture slides, PDF)

The cardiac cycle

• Heart muscle is described as being myogenic, that is to say, it beats of it’s own accord and without any outside stimulus. (Video: Heart cells beating in a petri dish).
• For efficient pumping of blood around the body, the heart must pump in a specific order, allowing for filling of the atria first and then the ventricles and lastly contraction of the ventricles ejecting blood out of the heart into the aorta (to the body) or the pulmonary artery (to the lungs).
• Valves play an integral role in making sure blood doesn’t go backwards. A lot of valve disorders can be diagnosed from knowledge of the cardiac cycle. (Video: Heart cycle)
• In a healthy  and fit individual, each cycle lasts approximately 1 second, meaning, there are approximately 60 beats per minute.
• Disorders include: aortic stenosis, aortic valve incompetence (regurgitation), mitral stenosis, mitral valve incompetence, tricuspid stenosis, tricuspid valve incompetence.

Download: The cardiac cycle, heart sounds & murmurs (Scanned lecture notes)
Download: The control of stroke volume in health & heart failure (Scanned notes)
Download: Cardiac contraction pharmacology (notes, PDF)

Blood vessels

• The 5 main types of blood vessels are arteries, arterioles, capillaries, venules and veins.
• Arteries contain a thick muscular layer in their walls, allowing them to withstand the high pressure of blood being pumped directly from the heart.
• Arterioles are literally small arteries, being microscopic vessels that regulate blood flow in the capillary network. They contain fenestrations (holes) in their walls.
• Capillaries are the smallest of blood vessels and connect the oxygenated arterioles to the venules in a u-turn type fashion. They are found almost every cell in the body, but their number varies with the metabolic activity of the tissue. For example, those body tissues that have a high metabolic demand, such as muscles, the brain, liver, kidneys use more oxygen and nutrients and thus have extensive capillary networks. Structurally, they are extremely thin (consisting of just a single layer of endothelial cells and basement membrane). This aids diffusion as the distance for diffusion is less (Fick’s law of diffusion).
• Venules are thinner than arterioles and are responsible for draining blood from the capillaries and begin the return flow of blood back to the heart.
• Veins have the same structure as arteries but each layer is relatively thicker, and thus they have a greater lumen (hole in the middle). Blood pressure is the veins is much less than in arteries and so in places such as the lower limbs, muscle contractions aid the movement of blood back to the heart.
• Blood vessels can contract and relax in response to both external stimuli (from the sympathetic nervous system) and local stimuli (paracrine agents such as nitric oxide, endothelin, autacoids). Physical factors such as temperature can also have an effect. This is important in regulating blood pressure and allows the brain to specifically alter blood flow to a particular organ.

Download: Blood pressure, peripheral resistance & haemodynamics (lecture notes)
Download: Nervous and hormonal control of blood pressure (lecture notes)
Download: Pharmacology of vascular smooth muscle (notes PDF)

*****

As you can imagine this is an extremely large topic, and thus I hope this is an adequate introduction. You better be grateful AcetylCholine!

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Picture 1 – Showing heart, taken from here.
Picture 2 – Showing part of the circulatory system, taken from here.
Picture 3 – Showing development of the heart tube, taken from lecture notes.
Picture 4 – Showing structure of the heart, taken from here.
Picture 5 – Showing cardiac cycle, taken from lecture notes.
Picture 6 – Showing the structure of blood vessels, taken from here.

I sat down, scattered my lecture notes all over the table looking for the ones on ‘Immune cell-cell interaction at the molecular level’, took my laptop out of my bag and turned it on ready to do some work. When it finally booted up, I smiled when I saw the post-it notes on my desktop:

(Click on the picture to enlarge and read the big green post-it)

The smiling didn’t last very long, when I realised I was now officially 21. TWENTY-ONE! But before my mind starts wandering down the ‘OMG you’re getting old’ path, I’m going to start making those notes I was going to. Plus, I have a lot of other work to do as well, just take a look at the other post-its. And their cheekiness, I have to buy 3 twirls now. 8-)

And thank you to all you lubbbbbly jubbbbly people who have sent me cards and messages and mails already! <3

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Title: City of blinding lights – U2
Screenshot showing desktop – Personal photography

Brother: You’re dizzzzzzy bruv!

Me: Errrr, do you even know what that means?

Brother: It’s like crazy or weird.

Me: *rolls eyes* I’m not crazy or weird. What you on?

Brother: YES you are! And now you’re annoyed. And you haven’t said a single nice thing to me this morning. You’re always depressed. And you never laugh except when you’re playing tik tik¹ or when you’re on your laptop talking to your girlfriend.

Me: Shut up you idiot! I don’t have a girlfriend. T_T

2^nd Jan 2011

*****

Occasions like the beginning of a new year or a birthday allow us to take out the measuring stick and see how much we have grown, see how much we changed over the last year, and determine where we are standing. It gives us an opportunity to blow the dust off the goals and resolutions we set ourselves at the beginning of the previous year and take a break from the daily grind of life and see where the world has taken us. Are we still standing at the cross-roads lost, with no direction, no purpose, or have we found a path, our path, leading us where we want to go?

Here are my resolutions for this new year (in no particular order), and you can ask me at the end of this year if I was able to fulfil any of them:

• Stop being so nice and yet overall be more nice to people (refer to conversation with little brother above). Don’t ask me to explain this one.
• Survive next semester and make time for people even when there is little time. I’ll show you my weekly timetable once uni is in full swing.
• Stop procrastinating Procrastinate less. I don’t think a 10,000 word dissertation can be written the night before. Maybe it can. I haven’t tried so don’t know. Hmm… Cutting down on the time wasting would help too.
• Smile more and actually be happy for at least 10 minutes a day. Maybe it’s time to start smiling lessons in front of the mirror.
• Improve my vocabulary, and add more long and weird jargon words to my lexicon. The longest word I know at the moment is probably ‘hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis’. SHUSH! it is a word and not 3 words with dashes in between.
• Write in my diary more. Yes I have a diary. Not a ‘Dear diary’ type diary, but a diary.
• Try not to forget any birthdays or anniversaries this year. I’ve started writing them in my year planner though I have forgotten a lot of the dates. Eeeek! Send me your dates people.
• Try and give library books back at the right time. Once I got a fine of £32.50. I could have bought 6 copies of that same book and still had money left over for some chicken and chips.
• Create a TV booking sheet, as to allow me to book my rightful place in front of the TV when Manchester United matches are on.
• Get a new job and somehow fit it around my already cramped weekly schedule.
• Rediscover the Nas I remember as a distant memory. Time to finally come out the closet I think.  NO Not THAT closet. I’ve never been in THAT closed. Will elaborate on this one later. Just remind me.
• Reference all my blog posts properly so that Furree Katt knows where my titles come from.
• Eat more badaam (almonds). UPDATED – 20 minutes after having initially posted.
• Learn to realise when food is hot and safe to eat. Just burnt my tongue AGAIN eating my fav daahl. UPDATED 2/01/11 @ 20.58.
• Remember to update this list, and actually stick to it.

We should not just celebrate the end of a year and the beginning of a new one, we should celebrate the end of every day knowing we made someone happy and start the next one hoping we can do it again...²

Last time I was at the bank waiting in the queue to pay a bill, I heard the following from an amazing little girl, who was no more than 9 or 10, talking to her friend and it brought a smile to my face:

This is my last cookie, and I’m only giving it to you because you’re my best friend. I hope you like it.

Would YOU share your last cookie?

Smile! And make those around you smile. :)

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Title: Machines – Biffy Clyro
¹ Tik Tik, noun. A game played by my brother and I in our bedroom upstairs with a shuttlecock and hardback books. Rules are similar to badminton. It was named as such by the mother. Injuries experienced are predominantly to do with the fingers.
² Quote from http://www.boardofwisdom.com/ which I read on another blog.

Me: Do animals feel pain?

Little Miss Sunshine (LMS): Yeah I guess so. You can see it when you cut off their arms or something. What about plants?

Me:  Hmm. Well they don’t really have a nervous system as such. So I don’t really see where the pain would register. And transpiration doesn’t count as tears.

LMS: Hehe. Lactation?

Me: What the hell? I just imagined a plant with boobs. Every 6 months they pop out boobs and just squirt milk everywhere.

LMS: I always get confused. What’s that word for crying? Lac..

Me: Lacrimation? It’s derived from the Latin word ‘lacrime’ meaning to cry, I think.

*****

Last weekend my mum went to Pakistan. Me, my dad and my younger brother went to drop her off at the airport. Just as we were leaving to come back home, the following conversation ensued between my brother and I:

Him: Who are all these ladies in the red skirts and hats?

Me: They’re the air hostesses, you know the ladies on the planes who bring you food and whatnot.

Him: I bet they get to fly a lot and see lots of places. Do they get free tickets?

Me: I guess so. It’s part of their job. But I’m not too sure.

Him:  When they have gone abroad with a flight, do they like get to see the place? Or are they kept under curfew and can’t leave the airport?

Me: That would really suck if they couldn’t leave the airport.

Him: You know what. If they get good pay, then I too wanna be an air woman

… (after a I started laughing) air man.

I know this is a post about happiness and smiles, but when I typed ‘air hostess’ into Google, some of the stuff that came up would’ve made some guys a bit too happy. So to save on the kleenex, I decided to use this picture. 8-). She is pretty.

*****

You may remember the post I wrote about happiness. If not you can read it by clicking here. There’s not much else I want to say but would like to share a photo with you. This was spotted by the ever so lovely Aam in labs last year while we were looking at blood slides down the microscope. The smile on her face was bigger than the one you see below, so I took a photo of it for her. It shows a smiley faced neutrophil (correct me if I’m wrong, I sucked at spotting things down microscopes).

Smiles can be found anywhere if you just look hard enough – (can I quote myself?)

“Gravity is a force,” I said. “Caused by attraction between things.”

“So how was it discovered?” my brother asked with the distinctive I’m in the mood of asking a lot of questions look etched all over his face.

“Ummm, some guy called Issac Newton was sitting under a tree one day and an apple fell and hit him on the head or something along those lines. He sat down and thought why it happened,” I replied trying to remember physics from a long time ago. I stopped liking physics after year 9, so the direction of this conversation was not good. But It was my fault really; I had promised him that I would help him with his studies.

“That’s a dumb thing to think about. He got hit because he was sitting in the wrong place! And he’s so weird too. Whenever I get hit on the head, I get a headache and can’t be bothered to work. But I still don’t know how to answer this question. What is gravity?”

“Everything that has mass has gravity. So basically that means everything attracts everything else. Those things that are big have lots of gravity and attract smaller things to them. Small things also have gravity but it’s so weak it isn’t really noticed. That’s why things fall to the earth and apples hit you on the head because the earth is just so huge.”

His brow crossed even further. “But then why does my fart smell go in all directions?”

“Why would anyone or thing want to be attracted your farts? They’re lethal man!” I replied, trying to supress my laughter at his logic.

“You know when I get married, does that mean my wife has to be really fat because I want someone that’s really attracted to me?” he asked in his 12 year old confused and innocent *cough* voice.

*****

Do you remember the days when you could run around naked or just in your pampers and everyone would smile at you and hug you (if your pampers were clean) and it was all perfectly normal. You could say and ask pretty much any thing and no-one would think of you as a complete dufus. Asking questions I think is extremely important. It helps us understand, pass exams, and sometimes lets us know we’re doing the right thing and brings us peace of mind.

When I was 16 or so, I came to a stage of my life where I began to question. Life hadn’t really been a joyride and I wanted answers. One of the things I began to doubt was God. Where was He when I called for Him? Why did it seem as if He wasn’t answering any of my prayers? It was a bit of a downwards spiral falling into an abyss of darkness.

GCSE exam time came. I hadn’t really prepared, due to the ‘baggage’ that was weighing me down but biology is a subject that I’ve always enjoyed and it was probably one of the few subjects I had put some work into. As I sat down in the big hall with bright lights above, the heat became noticeable. I needed some water but my bottle was ice and literally frozen because I had forgotten to take it out of the freezer in the morning. I licked my lips trying to stop them from drying too much. On the table in front of me I could see my shadow; hair pointing skywards with something moving in it. What the hell? After a few minutes I managed to remove a minute spider from my hair. At that time I used to be hysterically scared of spiders and a spider in the same room as me would be an excuse to get up and run like my younger brother (read here). It was small and I felt sorry for it having been lost in the gelled up jungle on top of my head. I put it on the the table and left it to do what it wanted climbing and crawling all over the place.

The biology exam begun. It was going okay; I’d done most of it and with 20 minutes left there were only a handful of questions I couldn’t answer. One of them was about mitosis, a process which results in the formation of 2 identical daughter cells from one parent cell. There were 6 diagrams on the page labelled A, B, C, D, E, and  and at the bottom of the page were 6 empty boxes into which we had to place the letters in order of what stage that picture represented of the cell division cycle. I had done the first 2 and the last 2, but the middle 2 were giving me problems. I know this. I had spent 3 hours the night before learning this exact cycle. Help me God, I know this. Please help me. I just sat there for a few minutes reciting all the prayers I had ever learnt, relevant and irrelevant, hoping that something would happen, hoping that He would plant the seed of knowledge which I was after in my mind. He did better than that.

I don’t really know how to describe this next bit because sitting there watching things unfold, I could not believe what was happening. The spider that had been walking all over my arm and enjoying the freedom of the table suddenly stopped and made its way to the centre of the exam paper. It was so small and helpless I decided to let it do what it wanted. Anyway I had much bigger problems to deal with. Subsequently, It walked onto one of the 2 pictures I was confused about, changed direction and faced the empty box on the right. I couldn’t believe what was happening. When the little insect walked into an empty box, I was too stunned to do anything. How could a spider so small answer the mitosis question I was stuck on for so long? The overwhelming warmth and awe of the moment left me momentarily stunned. It was then that I realised He was there, listening to me. It was then any doubt I had about His existence were removed and I once again became a true believer. It was also then that I stopped being scared of spiders.

*****

There’s some more things I have to add to this but I’ll save them for another post.

=].

Don’t you just hate it that just as you’re about to go to the toilet a queue forms. And it's the same when you're in the toilet. Just as you sit down, and start to doze off someone knocks really loudly or shouts at you from the outside. Whoever invented the toilet seat was a right legend, but I'll not go into that for now. Anyway, so there I was just getting out of my room heading towards the toilet when my brother ran in, turned on the light, SCREAMED so loud and high pitched-ly and ran out faster than he ran in (except this time he was half naked). Normally he likes to annoy me and goes to the toilet when he sees I’m about to answer nature’s call. But today it was different. It’s very rare for him to spend less than 5 minutes in there when he knows I want to go in.

“What happened to you?” I asked quite amused by the whole thing.

“There’s a HUGE spider in there,” he replied in between his constant screaming.

I rolled my eyes and laughed. Out of the four of us, I’m the only one who’s not afraid of spiders or any other insect for that matter. If a fly, moth, spider, or anything which doesn’t resemble a human or anything that is not big and furry enough to be a domestic pet enters the house, the other 3 tear the whole house down with their screams.

Personally I quite like spiders. A teeny weeny one helped me get an A* in my biology GCSE exam. It’s another story which I think I’ll leave for now. (If you remember, feel free to remind me and I’ll tell you that too!).

*****

Everyone has their own fears and phobias. There’s more phobias then you could possibly imagine. Just think of it this way, there’s a phobia for pretty much anything and everything. For example there’s bogyphobia (no that’s not a fear of bogey’s but it’s close) which when coupled with achluophobia may lead to fromclinophobia. There are some phobias which can seriously affect a person’s day to day life. For example some people suffer from withchronophobia or hypnophobia or logophobia or hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. The list is endless. (No I’m not going to explain what each one means. justgoogleit.com).

I remember just before we started 6th form, we were all taken out on an activity day to help us get to know our form members better and partake in various team activities. For each activity points were awarded for how well we completed it and how much time we used. There was one challenge that involved climbing up a ladder to a small platform approximately 10 metres up a tree from which we had to jump and touch a ball that was suspended some distance away in the middle. No-one was volunteering to do it. So I mustered up some courage and decided I’d give it a go. What’s the worst that could happen? Let me tell you something here, I’m shit scared of heights. But I still love to stand on high places and look down just so I can have that weird feeling in my stomach. Just as I reached the top and stood on the platform did I realise just how high off the ground I was. It was then that my fear kicked in and I questioned why the hell my balls had grown suddenly for me to volunteer. The fastening heart-beat, the sweating, you know the classical symptoms all followed.

Whenever fear tries to over take me or helplessness tries to stop me from doing anything I have a certain ‘ritual’ to focus and overcome those feelings. I close my eyes and give fear 5 seconds to do what it wants. That’s all. Then I recite durood-shareef and think of someone close like a family member or a dear friend and dedicate what I am about to do to them. It melts away the darkest of my fears. After that nothing can stop me…

How do you deal with your fears and what do you do when you are in a situation where quick action is needed but your body just freezes?