Hello readers! It’s been a while since I last wrote a Being confused with Jean entry (or any blog post at all), I hope you’ve been doing well 🙂 Here we are, months later and lots has happened since! 

The most obvious thing is that I am now done with my lab work and am working entirely on my thesis. I will return to medical school in September so thesis submission will be in August, in the weeks before medical school starts up again. The timings are tight but with consistent effort, I have been making good progress so far! There were a lot of ups and downs leading to the writeup – the cells I was growing for samples in a final big experiment became infected around a month before my planned end date in the lab so I had to start growing them from scratch. Because some of these cells took a long time to grow up and I needed a lot of cells for samples, it was touch and go for a while as to whether I could finish in the lab on the originally planned date. During that time, I was pretty much in the lab 7 days a week and working very long hours, very glad that it is over now (and I would not recommend it)! 

I started mostly working from home for the writeup and the first thing that hit me was: where do I even start? A thesis is such a big piece of work and there’s a lot more to it than just writing the text – think tables/figures, various lists e.g. figures, tables, abbreviations, the abstract, other university requirements, etc etc, the list goes on! It was very daunting to enter my writeup period even though I have been working on my thesis before this, so it took some time before I got into the swing of things. 

Outside of the PhD, I completed the London marathon and a few other races in between. Marathon day was really warm and I had to really dig deep to finish the race. It was a great experience overall with so much support along the course. I was very very grateful for everyone who showed up for me in their own way, whether it was cheering me on along the course, tracking my location on the race app or sending a simple good luck message. After the big race, I was at a loss with my training and didn’t really know what was next. There were a lot of things I wanted to try and like with writing my thesis, I didn’t know where to start. I just made it a point to spend my time away from focussed training to get away from my work regularly and to try something new once in a while. It’s been working well so far. For example, I did a coast to coast cycle a few weeks ago and wow, the landscapes were beautiful! Physically, it was tough but I would brave those hills just to see the views again. 

Now that my brain isn’t focussed on a big race or churning out samples on a time crunch, I’m also feeling my creative juices flow a bit more? I want to pursue more creative endeavours like writing here, trying out new hobbies, changing up the decor of my living space, just doing a lot of things that have been on my “one day” list for ages. I was very nervous about my PhD ending and the imminent return to medical school, but that anxiety has been replaced with excitement. My life as I currently know will change but there’s so much potential to it. I’m really looking forward to seeing how things go and I will take you along for that journey – I hope you enjoyed reading this little update and stay tuned for future posts!