Leaving clasroom teaching - the aftermath.

When I first started out writing this blog it was meant to a regularly updated account of life after Lemtrada - now it's more like an infrequent anecdotal rant instead, oops.

So I'm posting today because I'm having a bit of a "what the hell am I doing?" moment. Admittedly, the last two years have been full of those but this one has been festering for some time and is mostly career related. 

Back in January, I had a meeting with my boss and somewhat gleefully handed in my notice to say I was leaving the school and in fact the teaching profession, for good. It was gleeful because I was just about to go off for 4 weeks to have round 2 of treatment and so I knew I'd only have to actually teach my classes for 2 weeks after that before I finished, wahey! In reality, I actually chose to stay on until May to help Year 11 get through their exam prep and coursework deadlines, which was really lovely and a nice way to wind down my career. 

I'd already been working for the music service part-time alongside my Wood Green teaching hours in the last academic year, and by January I was actually teaching full-time again between the two posts after taking on some maternity cover work for the County Music Service. It felt great to have enough energy to do so much for the first time in ages, but doing the two types of teaching alongside eachother made me start to realise that I'd well and truly lost my love for classroom teaching. 

I think it's safe to say that as a classroom teacher, once you realise that you don't have the enthusiasm or motivation to make whizzy, exciting lesson plans that motivate and inspire young people - it's time to move on. The teachers that are respected by the students are the ones that demonstrate their love for their subject as much as they can. I'd gone from spending my entire weekends coming up with new ways to teach various topics, staying after school so long that my friend Mark would send me a text telling me to go home and wanting to be part of every extra-curricular ensemble going, to doing frankly the bare minimum. Some of which wasn't through choice, certainly losing all my extra-curricular ensembles at once hit me really hard and was a bitter pill to swallow. But seeing someone else with more energy and enthusiasm than me, come in and instantly fall in love with the students and to continue to push them to do their best and sound just fab, well that helped a lot. 

I also remember feeling incredibly guilty because so many of my amazing colleagues were working full-time and working their absolute socks off, and there I was barely working 3 days a week as a classroom teacher and still incapable of finding the joy in it. Admittedly teaching a subject that isn't your own didn't help - I still can't quite believe I managed to convince 3 classes of year 7s that I was an IT teacher AND teach them some basic computer programming! Priceless. 

So many pros/cons lists later, I chose to leave WG and classroom teaching itself after 7 short years and to take my very part-time Woodwind repair business forward as my main job, and to continue working freelance for the music service as an orchestra manager for their touring orchestra OSSO and as a peripatetic woodwind teacher again. 

I worked my absolute socks off this summer to stop myself from feeling a bit odd about not having the usual lengthy summer holiday - which felt amazing. It was such a joy to have WHOLE DAYS worth of woodwind repair rather than a few snatched hours in the evenings and the weekends, I felt so productive! 

But fast forward to now, when colleagues have gone back to work and it's the second week of September and I'm feeling totally lost. I'm not missing the job, (sorry lovely Wood Green colleagues!) I'm not particularly missing the kids, although every time I see my tutor group out and about my heart leaps, I miss my little family and I'm mainly missing the feeling of actually contributing to the community. 

I am still actually teaching a fair bit, working for 4hrs in a local Primary school teaching whole class clarinet (yup that's a class of thirty 7 year old students, all "playing" the clarinet at once!), working with the second youth Orchestra "OSSO" for the county music service and doing about 7 hours of private clarinet/sax/flute/GCSE tuition.

But it's not being responsible for hundreds of kids on a weekly basis, helping them to make the right choices, being there for them if they don't, supporting staff and being part of a big community.

Don't get me wrong, I am happy, MUCH less stressed, healthier and I have far more time to work on the garden etc. Being self-employed really suits my lifestyle, but it's such a big change and I'm just feeling a bit lost. I live to serve other people, and I honestly don't feel that I'm doing that right now. 

I know the repair work does help others, it's great to be able to reassure the parent who thinks he's damaged his daughter's clarinet beyond repair that it's okay and not the worst I've seen! And yes I can fix it! But it's not serving the community on the same scale as teaching once was, it feels like a big piece of me is missing, and I guess I need to work on filling that gap. 

The other thing I didn't expect to be hit by is the change in respect from others. It's really surprised me by how differently you are regarded when you become self-employed. This week alone I've been asked if it's just a hobby, what I do all day and if it pays the bills! Those who know me well will fall about laughing at the idea of me sitting at home doing very little. Being a workaholic who enjoys being stressed is probably what gave me MS in the first place! 

Why is it so hard to believe that I'm able to make ends meet by working for myself and that I'm not sat watching Netflix all day?

The answer to my little identity crisis is perhaps to push myself and the business to get to the point where I can rent some business premises. I would dearly love to have a big enough space to run a workshop, a shop front selling secondhand instruments and a bunch of practice rooms I could hire out to private teachers/students/local ensembles. Maybe, just maybe, being more visual would earn me a bit more respect AND help to serve the community. Who knows, time to go and make a cuppa, fix another saxophone and ponder how I can feel like I'm being 'useful'. 

C x

Sometimes, I'm disabled.

And there’s a controversial title before I even begin. 

Firstly I should say that disability is not a competition as to who is the most or the least. Whether you’re wearing an eye patch, using a stick or a chair or maybe have something completely invisible – it all comes under the same umbrella term of disability and all are difficult to cope with. My biggest challenge with my disability is that it is so variable and I often feel that makes it less believable, even less valid at times. Especially as what I feel that happens to me is self-inflicted disability, i.e. I do things to cause myself to become more aware of being disabled.

For example, this weekend Jonny and I chose to clear the rocks, bricks and wood from bottom of our garden which were left over from us breaking up the very old and leaky pond 2 years ago. At the time we couldn’t afford a skip so we just left it all and it’s been a real eye-sore ever since. So we spent the afternoon lifting heavy chunks of brickwork, breaking stuff up with a sledgehammer and putting it all into the skip at work. I say putting it in, to be honest I had good fun ‘shot-putting’ the bricks into the skip, as you do. We did 3 runs of filling up our van and driving down to the skip before Jonny felt that he was too tired. Yes my fit, healthy, muscular, carpenter husband felt tired quicker than I did, wahoo! And it really was a wahoo moment, but I know that in reality if I wait for my body to tell me that I’m tired then it’s too late. So what I did was fairly stupid, especially as before we even started, I had already taught at music school from 9-12:45pm, attended a 1hr meeting afterwards and driven myself to Oxford and back already that morning.

So we rested for an hour or two in the afternoon before we walked for 30 minutes to have dinner with our landlord, where we then drank too much wine and before finally walking another 30 minutes home. The next day I felt awful unsurprisingly, and even in life pre-MS I probably would’ve spent the day snoozing and doing very little to recover. But I was on the rota to lead worship at church, and I felt I’d probably manage it/didn’t want anyone else to do it, and so got myself up and rehearsed from 10-11am then sang in church immediately after. I love singing and leading the congregation and it’s a fairly new skill I’ve acquired but I do find it exhausting. At this point the fatigue was so bad I couldn’t walk unaided and I had to be helped on and off the stage and on and off my kitchen stool that I’d had the foresight to pack in the car that morning. It gives my worship leading a bit of a ‘Westlife’ vibe but there’s no fear of me standing up at a key change don’t worry! So yes, tiredness had hit me big time, and when I sat down after belting my heart out for the first 3 songs, my body did something completely new and pretty freaky and I had whole body tremors for 15 minutes. Finding yourself rocking forward and backwards and your head bobbing up and down like the Churchill Dog is a deeply unpleasant feeling and unfortunately, one I’ll need to make a note of and report to my nurse I think. Needless to say, Sunday afternoon was spent sleeping out of necessity, and then we ordered Dominos for dinner.

As a result of those antics, I’m still recovering now. (I can literally hear so many MS people saying ‘What did you expect?’) Today I’m not well enough to have a shower unaided, I probably couldn’t cook lunch for myself without supervision (thankfully I’ve got last night’s pizza in the fridge though) and I’ve cancelled my private instrumental tuition sessions for this afternoon because although I’m desperate to teach them, I have to prioritise getting through the rest of the week. Yes it does serve me right I suppose, I am a person with MS and we have to pace ourselves. But then again, should I feel guilty? I didn’t feel tired when I was playfully shot-putting the bricks into the skip, I still didn’t feel tired when it was time to walk to our Landlord’s house. In previous weeks I’ve managed to do the Witney Parkrun on the Saturday (without training), felt exhausted at the time and been absolutely fine by the Sunday, no fatigue, nothing. So does that mean I CAN use the title of occasionally disabled? Because it doesn’t seem like one weekend to the next is the same. I haven’t completed a Parkrun since my first one because I’ve been working on Saturdays which has been frustrating. My brick moving and throwing activity this week felt like good exercise to me, and I’m being told to exercise more, but how can I have the confidence to go for a run etc when it then takes me two days to recover? MS is and always will be unpredictable, which is a nightmare in itself, but I can’t exactly quit all work just to try and let an exercise regime make an impact.

The unpredictability of being occasionally limited in my mobility etc has stopped me from accessing things to make my life easier. Mainly because I think I’d feel like a bit of a fraud. Today I need to go to Boots to pick up some painkillers, but the thought of parking any distance away stops me, which is where ideally, I would apply for a Blue Badge to enable me to use disabled spaces and I think it would make a massive difference to me. But then again, why bother when the next week I’ll probably be able to walk the 500m from the nearest carpark to get to Boots? Today based on my inability to do certain tasks, I would comfortably score 9 on a PIP assessment for everyday living. But 80% of the time I think I’d score closer to a 5, so is it justified? I know how much the system has been abused and how hard others have had to fight to receive PIP. Bearing in my mind that my history of disability assessments has involved me asking occ. health to encourage my boss to stop wrapping me up in cotton wool and to give me MORE work not less, I can’t see a PIP assessment proving particularly fruitful…

Assessor: “So Mrs Bownds, how are you on your worst day?”

Claire: “Cross because I haven’t got enough energy to water all my plants, do a 5km run, make a soup from scratch, make a curry, fix a couple of flutes, teach a few students, do the shopping… I mean is that really too much to ask?!”

P.S

I'm really bad at blogging, I didn't ever actually do an update on how Round 2 was and what it involved! I'll work on that asap.

Two days to go - Lemtrada Round 2

Well it’s deja-vu time again! It’s the end of half term and I’ve got two days to go before my second round of Lemtrada. I had round 1 on the 25th of February 2018 for 5 days, this time it’s only 3 days thankfully and then hopefully that’ll be it for quite a few years! 

Lemtrada/Alemtuzumab is a repurposed chemotherapy drug, it’s a much much lower dose than would have been used with chemo but still carries some fairly dangerous side effects. As a result,  you are watched very closely whilst you have the dose in hospital (monitored every 15 minutes for the first hour of the actual drug and then down to every 30 mins for the next etc) and you have to have monthly blood tests for 6 years to keep an eye on your levels. 

With two days to go before I get “plugged back in”, I’m busy food shopping and batch cooking like I’m preparing for the apocalypse. Not that I don’t trust Jonny’s cooking (although we’ll gloss over the risotto disaster whew he threw everything in together all at once and THEN read the method!) but looking after me during treatment week is hard enough work anyway, so I’ve working hard in the kitchen and also enlisted the help of our wonderful parents to get a weekly menu of homemade microwave meals sorted. Both freezers are absolutely rammed with food to last us for the next 3 weeks. In case anyone needs some batch cooking inspiration we have:

Moroccan Chicken, Beef Chili, Sausage casserole, Thai Chicken curry, Cottage pie, Cape Malay Curry, Courgette and Tomato soup, Pulled pork, Lasagne, Leek and potato soup. 

Everything just needs veg, rice or couscous adding to it, and the ones that need mash are pre-frozen with the mash (last of my potato hoard from the summer.) I know frozen mash sounds gross but actually if you season it well before freezing it’s still passable. FYI, Cheese and chive mash freezes well, as does mustard mash.

So I’m ready, mostly for next week. I probably don’t have enough snacks to combat the steroid munchies but perhaps that’s a good thing as I managed to gain nearly a stone in treatment week last year!! 

This year I’ve invested in a pair of Bose noise cancelling headphones as the neurology ward can be very noisy and with the steroids keeping you up all night, it’s good to sleep during the day! I didn’t buy new as they had a good secondhand pair available online at CEX for about half the price, so I’m rocking the QuietComfort35 model which does very nicely! 

I’ve also stocked up on extra strong mints again (to take away the steroid taste) and a travel sized squeezy squash to add to my water so I drink enough to flush all the dead blood cells out. 

Entertainment-wise I’ve just discovered 5 on demand (My5) which is a whole new world of absolute trash TV, (I love a fly on the wall documentary or terrible reality tv programme!) Plus I’ve got some good books and colouring books to get through. Sorted! 

I have the cannula fear again after having had 14 vials of blood collected in 7 days due to a blood test muck up. My veins are not the greatest when they’re healthy, and right now they’re particularly unhealthy. My favourite phlebotomist Jane describes my arms as a garden full of weeds, I.e you have to navigate through the scar tissue/weeds to get to the good stuff. Lovely. Hope you’re not all wincing at the thought! 

I will post a bit more throughout next week, I’ve decided I must be a seasonal blogger. It’s a bit tricky to type when you’re working full time but with several weeks ahead of me off for recovery, hopefully I can be a bit more of an active blogger. 

Claire x