Volunteer Diary 4 and 5 - a recap

To say that I have been busy is an understatement. I had the assumption that after my exams had finished I would be graced with time to focus on this blog, to work on my university application and to get ahead in A2 work, along with socialising with my friends and also complete some more work experience. Well it turns out that in doing all of this I have lost track of time and I have only just realised how much I have neglected this blog, and for that I apologise.

So since my last post I have continued with my MOOC on the clinical psychology of children and young adults, and I have learnt so much about the formation of mental illnesses and how complex they are. I also feel as if through this MOOC I have significantly improved my own independent learning skills.

However, my voluntary work is what is continuing to inspire me. Each week I am continuing to strengthen the bonds and friendships I am making with the children, whilst learning more and more about their personal disabilities and challenges, along with getting to know their parents. On Friday we had a special skills ice skating lesson, and as well as improving my own skating ability, I learnt that I have hugely impacted on particular boys life. The boy is one who I looked after on my first week of volunteering and he suffers from dyspraxia. Despite not being paired with him that week, he still insisted on being paired with me, and even left the volunteer who was initially paired with him to skate with me, continuously hugging me and telling me that I am his favourite. Whilst this may just be a phase, I can help but feel almost a sense of accomplishment, if not at least a huge humbling feeling that I have influenced this boy's life so much, that he wants to work with me every week (last week when I was paired with him he danced around the seating area in the ice rink with excitement and shouting "YES I GET TO WORK WITH ELLIE") To see a child respond in that way is extremely inspiring, to know that you alone can improve their mood that significantly proves to me alone why I do this voluntary work. Of course it is not just this boy who inspires me, they all do. Even when we were completing the skills lesson, all of the children joined in, despite many uncomfortable glances at first, they all want to try new things, and they are all willing to do new things.

I feel that through my voluntary work I can see myself growing as a person. Not only do the children that I work with inspire me each week, but so do the incredible other volunteers who I have been able to meet along the way. Before I started this voluntary work I had a tendency to be quite shy around new people. Whether shy is the right adjective is debatable, but I was not one to go up to new people at random and create a conversation or friendship, I liked to take a slower approach, but now I have certainly become more outgoing, indefinitely more caring and my communication skills have improved immensely. I have gained a lot from my voluntary work, but maybe more so than anything I am gaining incredible memories,  each week I have the chance to help these children, to improve what may have been an awful week for them, and have a great time at the same time. What more could you want?

New Malaria Vaccine?

Today's post will be reasonably short, and I fear for the next few weeks at least, the majority of my posts will be short, due to the unavoidable fact that is I have my AS exams in less than 2 weeks, so my time is solely occupied by revising for them. I apologise in advance therefore if there are a lack of posts in the weeks to come.

However, whilst revising transmission of different diseases in AS Biology, I was fascinated by malaria, the severity of the disease and how prevalent it is in the world. One thing that struck me the most about this disease was that my textbook did not mention anything of a vaccination, so I took it upon myself to research whether or not there was one, and if not will there be one soon. As my gut instinct told me, the internet confirmed there is no vaccination as of yet for malaria, and the ways of prevention are by tablets and of course a mosquito net (along with others). Despite knowing these facts already (particularly as I myself have taken tablets to prevent malaria when I travelled to India), I was surprised and also inspired by reading on BBC news that a new malaria vaccine could be available in months!

The article stated that this vaccine was going through its final clinical trial, and despite not being hugely effective on the young, I believe this is a huge step in the possible eradication of such a devastating disease. If a vaccine were found for malaria, no doubt would this lead to a gateway for the possibility of new cures to be found, and undoubtedly it would be a huge triumph for mankind.

I will leave a link to the BBC article below as I highly recommend reading it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-32446287

As a result of reading this article it reminded me one of the reasons why I want to go into medicine so badly, to help cure or relieve the symptoms of someone who is in pain, and using your own knowledge to help people for the better is undoubtably one of the greatest satisfactions and most rewarding jobs you can do.

The Dress...

This past week the internet has been raging over the question is the dress white and gold or is it blue and black. Whilst this dress is not actually related to medicine, I wanted to write about the true colour of this dress and the reason behind why so many people see different colours of it, in order to hopefully end some disputes. 

The divide in whether the colour of the dress is black and blue or white and gold, is due to colour constancy phenomenon. "Colour constancy is a part of the visual perception system which allows people to perceive colour in a variety of conditions, and to see some consistency in the colour." It allows the brain to make assumptions on colour due to it's surroundings.


The photo of the dress is so close up that the surroundings are extremely ambiguous, this in turn leads to the brain having to make assumptions on the surroundings of the dress.