One of the senior directors of the United Nations, Maher Nasser, opened the first Peace, Equality and Social Justice/SDG 16 conference at DMU this week, setting out two clear challenges to staff and students – work to rebuild society and the planet.
Even before I was ill, baking was not my strong point – so when the charity Headway asked me to organise a ‘Mince Pie Morning’ to raise funds for its Christmas appeal, it was a fairly solid “no”. That said, I did want to find a way to say ‘thank you’ for the help they have given me over the past few weeks. For those who may have missed the news, I was taken ill in July and had a Colloid Cyst removed from my brain – something I described in an earlier post.
Continue readingWell I told you I was ill…or so said Spike Milligan’s famous epitaph – and I did go around telling everyone I was ill, I just had no idea exactly how unwell I was…
Read more: My brain surgery story… I told you I was ill…
COLLAPSED AT HOME
Six weeks ago I took some time off with a pain in my big toe which was making me feel nauseous. The doctors suspected it was gout due to me living through lockdown like Henry VIII. Instead of getting better, things got worse, I began to shuffle like a very old man when I walked, I could not concentrate and felt sick. Eventually, despite trying to fight these problems with treatment for an inflamed toe and regular walks, I collapsed in the kitchen making my kids’ packed lunch for school. I finally got a face-to-face meeting with my doctor, which has been easier said than done in Lockdown Leicester, despite things opening up lately.
TRAUMA
The GP identified immediately that my brain was experiencing some kind of trauma and I was taken to the Royal Infirmary. A CT scan subsequently revealed hydrocephalus on my brain and I was taken by ambulance to the neurology unit Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham. By this time I was unready feeling very unwell, so it gets a bit sketchy. I was admitted on Monday July 12 – which was the day I should’ve been going for a family holiday in Boscombe, near Bournemouth. I settled on to the ward and tried to sleep. The next day I had an MRI scan, followed by a discussion with a consultant about the result. I was told I had a colloid cyst on my brain which had grown so big it was blocking the flow of fluid away from my brain. As a result, fluid was backing up and putting pressure on my brain, affecting how I walked, my speech and giving me headaches. The neurologist told me the risks of the operation, part of a conversation that started by explaining that if I did nothing I wouldn’t be around much longer… All brain surgery carries risks, but I was so unwell I knew I had to take the treatment and hope for the best. There is so much I could say about weighing up the risks, but ultimately I knew I was in a bad way and the operation was the only way. I tried not to think about a negative outcome. I’m happily married with twin 12-year-old boys. I just felt I had to get well again and put my faith in the team at the QMC.
I had the operation on Wednesday July 14 in the early afternoon. By the evening I was on a recovery ward, full of morphine, woozy and owning an incredibly sore head – see the picture below if you can stomach it…
TURNING POINT
After the operation, I spoke briefly to Sara, my wife. I have no idea what I said. I was able to walk to the bathroom at 4am – aided by a nurse. When I had arrived by ambulance 48 hours before, I could barely walk at all. That moment was a turning point, and from there I felt I was going to be ok. I was on the ward over the weekend and took another MRI scan to check the results of my operation. I was discharged to recover at home on Monday afternoon, with some paracetamol for a sore head and some antibiotics for pneumonia I contracted in surgery. Home in just seven days from being admitted. I thought that was incredible.
Since then I have been getting stronger every day. I’ve lost two stone in weight (which I see as a positive side effect). I’m walking well every day, but get tired very quickly. It will probably take six months to be fully back on my feet and where I was before all this started. There will be no boozy nights out for a while, no gym/running for months and I’ve had my driving licence suspended until January 2022. That’s ok, we are used to lockdown in Leicester. My wife, Sara, and my boys, George and Joseph, have been incredible throughout this. Friends and work colleagues have been great and given me so much encouragement. Some have made me coffee in their gardens, taken me down to Braunstone Gate for a chat or met in the park. This has been really good for me. Thanks too to the members of Hertha Berlin UK Fan Club for the constant updates and goodwill. My memory, especially my short term memory, which was at risk, appears to be working. I know I have a long way to go, but I’m starting from a good place.
PERSPECTIVE
I finally got a holiday with my family too. I know I’ve really disrupted their summer (and the next few months) and watching me go through this has been emotionally draining, stressful, on top of being hard work for them. Paddling in the sea with my wife and boys was the greatest feeling. I have a lot of perspective on things that perhaps I did not have, or care to have, before.
This is a long story cut short of course, but I really wanted to share my experience, test my brain with a little writing and praise the Neurology team at QMU from the senior consultants with their surgical wizardry to the many staff on the wards doing all kinds of jobs who show so much care.
Hopefully I’ll give you the longer version when I see you next…
Well I told you I was ill…or so said Spike Milligan’s famous epitaph – and I did go around telling everyone I was ill, I just had no idea exactly how unwell I was…
Continue readingA few years ago, in another life a was a writer, journalist and stand-up comedian. During that time I wrote the Old Romantics Column for the Lincolnshire Echo with my friend Stu Wilde. On the stand-up scene we were joined by another friend, Gary. Lockdown does strange things to people and we thought a podcast about the good and bad old days might be a way to celebrate the Old Romantics era and do something positive while disconnected by the pandemic. So I invite you to take a nostalgic journey through the past with The Rotten Retro Time Machine and take in the best and worst things that happened in the past 40-odd years. If you enjoy the show please consider making a donation to YMCA Lincolnshire, which provides emergency access accommodation, known as the Nomad Centre, the only direct access night shelter in Lincolnshire.
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One of the key responsibilities for being a United Nations Academic Impact Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) Hub for SDG 16 is to promote Goal 16 and all the Global Goals. The lockdown period has seen lots of opportunities for us to deliver projects on the ground to support our communities and also to join lots of conferences and online discussions. Although it doesn’t quite match being there in 4D, it means most are recorded and can be shared. I thought I’d post some that I have taken part in. Some times things don’t go perfectly, but then again, neither do the ones in real life.
Continue readingWith universities under great scrutiny to demonstrate how they serving their communities during the Covid-19, I thought this would be a good time to talk about the work currently being undertaken at De Montfort University, Leicester.
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Yesterday I was asked to present an example of my public engagement work to a small group of academics and third sector workers to demonstrate how university and community partnership working can create impact. From my list of recent activities I chose the work #DMUlocal did with Professor Jo Richardson, a housing researcher, from the Faculty of Business and Law, to try to measure the true scale of homelessness in Leicester and thought I should share it here.
The Project:
I felt it was a good example of how De Montfort University (DMU) had worked with a leading charity and other agencies to capture the true scale of homelessness in Leicester and how best to tackle it – and its impact led to almost 40 people off the streets and into accommodation.
I haven’t been to India for a couple of years, I think it’s fairly well known I don’t like flying and despite my love of De Montfort University’s Square Mile India programme, the food and the politics of the country, I cannot face an 11-hour journey including an internal flight to Ahmedabad, Gujarat. That said, my trips to India have impacted my life, I have seen extreme poverty, people living under questionable religious order (the caste system), beautiful colours, interesting faces and millions of people enjoying another level of spirituality I could not reach no matter how much drink and drugs I consumed on a journey to truly find myself. I can live with the fact I’m not George Harrison but it certainly feels like India does effect people in a way visits to other countries do not. Sure you can see poverty in London, New York, Berlin, and the bottom of your street, but few comeback from a holiday and say ‘that was truly life-changing’. Yet people who come back from India do, so much so it’s becoming something of a cliche. When the brilliant folks in ADH at DMU said they wanted to a research exhibition about India in The Gallery, I thought this was my chance to lance my boil and actually investigate whether students volunteering in India was truly life-changing or just a cliché. I am in the process of writing a paper on this, but as the exhibition closed last week I wanted to share the story so far and I’m happy for an academic collaboration to get the paper into shape for a future journal submission. I also created a podcast with Chris, Kainaath and Lucy from one of the focus groups that you can hear here:
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Heading home from a night spent at the Times Higher Awards with a banging headache and a huge feeling of disappointment probably isn’t the best time to update this blog, but it might help me get a few things off my chest. Naturally being shortlisted for a national accolade and not walking away the prize is a bit deflating. Even though the judges thought we weren’t number one, I thought I could share some insight into De Montfort University’s work in Leicester Prison, so at least I’ve told you how good it is. Since I am trying to theme my blog posts around UN Sustainable Development Goal 16 – let me point out that work in prisons forms an important part of the targets. The UN indicators recognise that poor prison conditions and prison overcrowding point towards systemic deficiencies in justice systems. Reforming the penal system and prisons is high priority across the world, as well as access to justice. These areas include a lack of access to legal aid, alternatives to imprisonment, youth crime prevention programmes, offenders’ rehabilitation; social reintegration measures, as well as the overuse of pre-trial detention. The programme at Leicester Prison very much focused on offenders’ rehabilitation and social reintegration. The idea was, and continues to be, that by working with staff and the men inside the prison, the university might be able to influence a different path to reoffending upon release.
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The Gonzo Chronicle 