Often, it takes me a while to get on with things...

Things I have to do today:

1) Unpack from university
2) Apply for work experience
3) Write the book review I have been needing to do
4) Hoover up the dog hair before my friend and her boyfriend arrive
5) Pack for my holiday which starts on Friday

Things I am doing:

1) Writing the first blog post for a blog I planned to start in December and have never got round to starting
2) Thinking that the original suggestion that I was going to talk about science on this very page is perhaps a bit ambitious

The above pattern is repeated throughout my life. Things get done in the end but I'm having to become much more strict with myself about it all. If I'm really going to give this whole media thing a bash then I need to get setting myself some deadlines. Like saying I'll write a blog post today. It may be very short and very rubbish but at least it exists. (Edit: Actually it's ended up much longer than I expected.)

Somehow this is easier than writing a diary. I have never been very good at actually keeping diaries up to date and my entries are always somewhat melodramatic as if I feel that I have to ham everything up for myself. I find it much easier to talk to someone else, to legitimise the way I feel by having a response from someone rather than trying to justify it to myself by being dramatic. Talking to myself on paper just feels a bit silly. And even worse when I read it back. I suspect that this will turn out to be much the same but somehow it's not as scary. Perhaps the trick is to try not to be embarrassed about it and accept that that is how you felt at that point in time. If I'm ever going to write anything I need to be able to read it too!

I will admit that I did start the book review yesterday. It took me a very long time to get out of the mindset of an 8 year old i.e. "I liked this book because it was very interesting". It was hard to get out of the first person. Reading a book is a very personal experience. I am almost afraid of recommending books to people I know because I am afraid of them not liking something which I found important, interesting or moving.

I did eventually find things to talk about, far too much for a book review in fact so I'm going to talk about it a bit here. The book was Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery and I had been prepared to be a bit grossed out and rather scared off surgery. Indeed, the tagline for the book "You might think twice before going under the knife..." made me a bit cross! How on earth did they have the right to discourage people from having surgery! In the end, "think twice" about surgery I did. The horror stories were not modern ones but those of patients and surgeons in the past making last ditch attempts when it was well known that the patients would probably die of infection anyway. These people had gone before us and taught us what we need to know now in order to use surgery to save lives. And I respected the author for not filling his chapter on plastic surgery with preachy tales of people enhancing their bodies but with the fascinating pioneering work of those trying to afford injured soldiers the chance for a relatively normal life. Despite this, I was slightly embarrassed to be left with a slight feeling of longing for extreme plastic surgery stories. Perhaps I've been reading too many magazines...

But I suppose such plastic surgery extremes are pioneering in themselves and though they may not always be considered morally right, is it not human nature to see how far we can push our bodies? Pushing the boundaries as all of the surgeons written about in the book did?

I also appreciated that the author described the failings in surgical history as well as the successes. One of the most important things in modern science is that the public understand that it is not perfect, that it does not always yield definite answers and that mistakes must be made before the eureka moment. Behind every great achievement are hours and hours of experiments and observations, most of them useless. And very rarely does that eureka moment come.

I must stop before I get too settled on my soapbox. And I'll take the risk and recommend the book: Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery by Richard Hollingham. A fascinating history of a subject that most people know little about which touches on surgery's impact on society as well as the individual. Might even use that sentence in the review.