Which way

My lungs are having a strop and I'm having to wait to see which way they're going to go. I've just been to my out patients appointment at the hospital, and the doc wasn't too impressed, but then neither have I been over the past couple of days. I have instructions to put my steroids up this evening if there's no improvement through the day, and if there's still no improvement tomorrow then I ought to phone the ward and probably be admitted. I really don't want to go in :o( The doctor I saw wasn't my consultant, but the registrar. He's a new registrar, but we have met before when he was an SHO, so he does know me a little. However, I'm not quite as sure as he seems to be that I'll need to be admitted tomorrow, but as he points out, it's then the weekend and beds become more difficult to find and the admissions system isn't quite so straight forward (there's a stupid system that I've talked about before with the A&E department at one hospital in the city, but all the wards being pretty much spread over the two other hospitals in the city, which means that the patient has to be well enough for a transfer). I dunno ... it's tricky. I want to do what is right and what is safest, but I also don't want to go into hospital unnecessarily, or too early so that I'd just be sitting around feeling rubbish, but not quite ill enough for the docs to do anything other than what I can do for myself at home. It's the perpetual dilemma of how long do I wait to find out which way things are going to go ... even though I have instructions from the reg. I'll just have to hope that my lungs decide to play nicely and pick up.

The other decision I've had to make in the past week has been whether or not to tell the OU about the difficulty I had in my exam with the invigilator talking to me throughout. It's been tough, because she was a lovely woman, but after talking about it with several people I came to the conclusion that I did need to tell the university. While I'm fairly certain that I've done enough in the exam to pass, the distraction of having an invigilator speak to you could, for some, make the difference between pass and fail, so I thought I had a responsibility to them to say something. As it turns out the OU were pleased that I did tell them, and they have been incredibly good. They apologised profusely, took details of what happened and who the invigilator was; they've said that they'll send a special circumstances form on my behalf to the script markers explaining what happened during my exam, and they're also going to address the matter with the invigilator involved. I said that I didn't want to complain as such, but suggested that perhaps this person should attend some retraining. However, it turns out that she was at retraining earlier in the year, which obviously didn't sink in, and unfortunately it seems that as a result of this lady's inability to invigilate my exam properly she's probably lost her job. Well, that's not quite how the person at the OU put it, rather that 'we don't think we'll be using her again.' Oops. I do feel a little bad about this, but then she was rubbish at the job she was supposed to be doing, and if it saves anyone else from going through the same thing, and possibly failing their course as a result, then maybe it's for the best.

:o/