My first year at Bristol university saw me residing in an all male hall of residence. I opted for a male hall of residence because I wanted a sheltered environment free from involvement from female peers, partly because I was single minded and did not want any distractions and also because I had a chip on my shoulder, or complex about women from some incident at school. As it was, my room mate started to talk about his exploits with an innocent woman and one night I got drunk on some cider that was an special offer at another hall. I went around to her room, burst through the door and criticised them abusively in an aggressive manner. I went back to my place of residence and had to be restrained and I threw a tantrum headbutting the floor. Luckily the house tutor was a doctor and he said he wished I would drink steadily instead of saving it all up for all at once.
This thought has remained repressed for a long time as I have felt ashamed over the way I behaved, acting in a foolish manner which has left me feeling embarassed each time I think of it. Eventually I moved into another room in the house annexe in the hall and my new room mate moved leaving me to study by myself. At the end of the year my exam results were C for cell biology, D for bacteriolgy and E for biochemistry. All passes and significantly better than the C, D, and an E grade I got for my A level subjects at school.
During my summer holiday after my first year at university I got a job painting a gasometer in a town near where the rest of my family lived. I had been obsessive about motorbikes and bought a small 100cc motorbike with the earnings. I think fate took a bad turn wth this and in the second year of university I was distracted from studying by looking for excuses to ride my bike and I became preoccupied with my sexuality wondering if I fell in line with some kind of self image. At school I took up weight training because of some rubuttal from a girl at school and now in my second year I was playing up to a masculine strongman identity.
I went around to another hall of residence to an aquantaince's room where there were people waiting for him. They invited me in. One person was a drug dealer who asked if I had any drugs. He was sitting next to my aquaintance's girlfriend who I assume was dating both of them. I did not reply to the question about drugs and the dealer and the girlfriend got up to leave and the dealer said I am very disappointed in Bristol university students' as they left. Shortly after my aquaintance returned saying he had met the dealer on the way back to his room and the dealer had been verbally abusive.
I was carrying a broken croquet mallet handle and my aquaintance and myself went to the girlfriends hall of residence where the dealer was trespassing in an all female hall of residence. On the second attempt I managed to kick her door in and my aquaintance and I ran off laughing. The dealer came out shouting threats after us so I threw the croquet mallet handle down and went back and punched him a few times and kicked him when he was on the ground. I had to see the university security after this and security chief said 'dont paint yourself all black'. When it went to court the police statemt read 'I knocked on the door and when the plaintif answered I proceeded to beat him around the head, face and neck with a baseball bat'. The police had earlier made me sign this statement or else there was the possibility of being thrown out of university. As I did not agree with the statement in court I pleaded not guilty. I was bound over to keep the peace for a year. I heve recently thought that if I did not have a suit and tie and was arrogant the judge may have been more strict.
So after motorbikes and violence my studying suffered. I got an E in microbiology, an E in Botany and an F in biochemistry. As a result of failing biochemistry when I passed my degree the university reduced my class of honours by one grade to penalise me. I really wished I had made more of an effort in biochemistry in a subject area such as enzyme kinetics which interested me with the use of differential equations which I learnt about in my maths A level. Maybe the words enzyme kinetics and differential equations are buzz words to bolster my deflated ego.
During my summer holiday after that a medical student friend who was also a drinking associate invited me to catch a bus across Europe with him to get to Cyprus and stay with my Cypriot relatives for the summer. With some of his money and some of mine we hired a fast motorbike to tour around. One day in my mother's home village I pulled a pulled a wheely to try and show off in front of some passers by and I dropped the motorbike and us. I had a grazed arm and I was almost tearful as I washed the gravel out of my wound. My friend also had a grazed arm. I still feel sorry for him to this day. Also wich fuels my sympathy is the fact that he did not take the advice to cover himself and protect himself from the heat of the sun while sitting on the beach. He actually developed blisters on his skin. My relatives drove him to the house of another medical student who lived in Cyprus and was an aquaintance of my friend in the same year at the university of Bristol medical school.
I decided to leave Cyprus quicker than I wanted to as I had to find lodgings for my final year at university as I had been thrown out of hall of residence for assaulting the drug dealer.
On our last night on our way back in Greece my friend went to a drinking festival, I think, with some people he had met. I stayed in my room and a read a book written by James Herriot which some of the series 'All creatures great and small' was based on.
The next day my friend seemed a bit put out saying there was only one seat on the bus back to Britain. He caught the bus leaving me in Greece. The next day I was having a breakfast of a kebab I think and I saw two people on a bench who had been in the same university hall of residence as me and in the same year. They too had gravel rash. They had hired a motorbike in Crete and had hit a tree and fallen off their bike. Could this be synchronicity?
As I was panicking over what time I had left before term started at university, I saw an aquaintance in the road with his motorbike. Apparently he had just failed his driving test that day and might have been in a bad mood. I still asked him for a lift to the accomodation office as I had been thrown out of hall and needed somehwhere to live. While I was on the back of the bike he started his engine up while he was still in gear. He pulled a wheely and my left knee hit a rack on another parked motorbike, the back of a car I think, and knocked a few stones out of a stone wall. The ligaments and tendons of my knee were severed and my lower left leg was hanging with a crushed kneecap. I would imagine that most surgeons would have put a pair of scissors through the knee and possibly remark 'you wont be needing that any more', but a brilliant surgeon sowed the upper and lower left leg together and repaired the kneecap.
The university accomodation office took pity on me with my broken leg and gave me a room in a university house.
The first term of my final year started by meeting my project supervisor who was supervising my research thesis entitled 'The differential inhibitory effects of Tetracycline on protein synthesis in Escherichia coli'. E. coli is a commensal organism which means it exists as part of the natural flora in the gut. It was exacting walking each day from my accomodation across part of the city to the university medical school to do my reasearch. Part of the research was to do enzyme assays. One batch of bacteria, the control, would not contain antibiotic, while other batches of bacteria would contain different doses of tetracycline. At each dose of the antibiotics an assay was used to see if enzyme activity had been affected. If protein synthesis was affected at different doses of Tetracycline then there would have been a decrease in enzyne activity. This was measured by adding supernatant containing the enzyme studied, from a centrifuge, to a vial containg the substrate of the enzyme. If there was enzyme acivity the substrate would have been converted to products making the solution in the vial more turbid or in other words cloudy. The amount of turbidity was detected by passing light through the vial in a sprectrophotometer.
I used the unversity computer room to use a graph plotter to plot graphs of enzyme activity against doses of antibiotic. This first use of computers was my introduction to information technology. My thesis supervisor said that my thesis was top heavy on protein synthesis. He is now I believe a doctor od science (D.Sc.) which is the highest accolade you gan get for science.
From time to time I have had moments of calm thinking about doing my research experiments in the quiet of the night with nobody else in the medical school. I would take a coffee break from preparing my experiments and I would be on my own in the medical school common room. It was peaceful. Here fate took a good hand showing me that I had nothing to prove and everything was ok, and I accept now that these moments could well have been a peak experience.
I was awarded a 2(ii) which is a lower second class honours degree.
No comments:
Post a Comment