Embrace the Wait

This episode is about celebrating 10,000 downloads of the podcast and welcoming new listeners and subscribers. This podcast started because I listened to an inspirational  podcast during lockdown and felt compelled to go deep and honest about myself. I encourage listeners to do the same, look inside themselves and speak and own their truth. I have invited other people along on this journey and am proud to have reached 10,000 downloads globally.
 

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Transcript

[0:00:00]  A: Welcome back, my beautiful people. Now, this episode is a nice, short and sweet one. And even though I said welcome back, I'm making this episode about welcoming new listeners, new subscribers, and celebrating 10,000 downloads of my podcast. Some of you have been waiting for a host like me. It's all about real people and me and real talk. Some of you have commented how I'm quite natural when I'm interviewing people. I'd rather see it as a bitter banter, if I'm honest with you. But for all of those people who have commented, and thank you very much, I would just like to give those who are new a little bit of background as to how my life, not yours, started very simply, during Lockdown. I started listening to a podcast. Didn't really know what they were, but I remember listening to this fantastic podcast and thinking, oh, my gosh, this is a way for me to go deep and honest about myself.

[0:00:58]  A: You know, when you look inside yourself, especially when there's a pandemic or something else that happens and you think, it's time for me to just get in touch with who I really am and speak and own my truth. And that's how my life, not yours, originated. It was purely for pleasure, to talk about stuff and also to instill some life lessons. And I've brought other people along on this journey. So much so, as I've just said, 10,000 downloads globally. I'm just bursting at the moment. If you could see me, I'm grinning from ear to ear. I've released 69 episodes and my heart feels really full. There are some random topics I talk about, but most of all, I will give you something to walk away with. Whether it's about self love, whether it's about relationships. I'm no expert. I'm just talking about my life experience and adding some facts into that. Now, this week's episode, again, as I say, is short and sweet, but I just wanted to share with you a word called waiting and what it really means. The reason why I thought about waiting is because how many of us actually detest waiting? When you are waiting for something, anything, what goes through your mind? What do you do? Don't you think it depends on the scenario? Well, what brings me to this, you may be saying, where is she going with all of this BS? Is my shenanigans in a waiting room?

[0:02:14]  A: Last week I've been having a problem with my eye. To put this into context, one of my eyes has gone very droopy and at first I thought it was because of an allergic reaction to hay fever and I've got a bit of a sinus problem. And so I've been through this whole thing with the general practitioner. This is for people outside of the UK. We have a national health service where health is free, so you can go to your GP, et cetera, et cetera. So I went to the GP and I said, Look, I've got blocked up nose, my eyes drooping. Oh, I can't see it, Tina. Let me show you. Are you sure you can't see? So I looked, I showed her some photographs on my phone and suddenly she got it. Now, they're called GPS for a reason because they don't specialize in any particular area. So she said, you know, maybe it's your hay fever and and so forth. So let's give you some nasal drops, steroid nasal drops. Let's give you some antibiotics and see what happens. Plus, I'd like you to go and see an optometrist. So I did all of that. They tested the back of the eye, they couldn't find anything. But they gave me some really expensive eyedrops, 14 pound, $28, something like that, to put my eyes nothing was working, people.

[0:03:22]  A: So what happened is then when a friend took pictures, I'm starting to freak out. So I knew it was time to go to the More Fields Hospital, which is a specialist hospital for eyes. Let me tell you something. I went into this hospital last Friday, I think it will be by the time you're listening to this podcast. And very interestingly. You've got a waiting room, you sign in, the usual thing. And I hate hospitals. Let me just tell you that now. I hate hospitals. I'm scared of what I might see. I'm scared of just walking around the corner and seeing, I don't know, someone headless or something really weird like that. And it's an irrational fear, but I get on with it. So I'm sitting in this waiting room. I've registered it's half a state in the morning, and I've got multiple emotions running through, including mild anticipation. And I'm a little bit anxious because of previous experiences that I've had in hospital. So obviously a lot of you know that I used to be an athlete and I had to go and have my Achilles tendon scraped. In case you don't know your parts of your body, people, this is at the back of the ankle. My Achilles tendon was extremely inflamed and had scar tissue from years and years and years of doing long jump and bounding and jumping on hard surfaces. That's probably the easiest way. So I was admitted to hospital to the ear, nose and throat ward, but I was flung in there. And to my left, this one woman looked like something out of a horror movie. There was yellow mucus shit coming out of her eyes and her nose. And then the woman next to me had died and they didn't realize for a couple of hours. So you can understand my anxieties when it comes to hospitals. Also, I was thinking, what will my diagnosis be? And I'll be honest with you, I went into that waiting room that day thinking, the doctor's going to say, tina, you've caught an infection. You've got a bit of sinus problem going on in the left hand side of your face, which is affecting your eye. Nah, that wasn't to be. But before I get to the diagnosis, I sat in this waiting room and I love people watching, I love observation. And actually, a lot of us should do it more because you learned so much. What I learned from sitting in that waiting room and let me tell you, I waited two and a half hours before I saw a consultant. And what I witnessed, that everybody had someone with them apart from this other man and me. And at that moment, just for that moment, I felt so alone. But I was confident because I thought, it's not going to be bad. And it was interesting.

[0:05:45]  A: Culturally in London. It's so rich. But in certain parts of London, a little bit like in the US. Where you might get a propensity for a lot of Jewish people living in Upper Brooklyn now. Or I've seen it in America where I'm sat on a subway and it starts off all white, then it goes black and we can say some of the ghetto areas. And then it goes a completely different culture. It could be all Jewish. I found it fascinating. And in the waiting room this day, it was definitely a lot of Muslim women, older women like mummies and grandmas, with either their daughter, a niece or something accompanying them, and a lot of them were going in for cataracts. So not only am I observing, I'm listening to these conversations going down. I'm sitting there so long, I've got nothing to do. And I also was a bit fearful because I'm thinking, what will my diagnosis be? But at this point, I'm just fearful. But I'm not fearful. But again, my observation from the nurse cleaning out the water tray on the water tap, that people get something.

[0:06:43]  A: The receptionist moaning about her lunch break and she's had it cut short because she needs to cover a medical student who looked really bored. And then the doctor came out and said, oh, I think you're observing me today. And off she goes. And then she was actually in my consultation, which was interesting. And then the weirdest one we're not weird, this is wrong. I think it brought it home to me how some your eyes are really important and how your eyesight can go in a minute. There was this young guy who literally had his mobile phone sitting on his eyeball, reading. It made me feel really uncomfortable that he could not see. And when I looked at his phone, because he was literally sat in front of me, he hadn't expanded the text to be bigger or anything like that. So, as you can see, I'm a nosy bitch. But I kind of think it's important to be quite observant, whether it's in work personally or what's going on around you. One of my pet hates is cyclists that have their eyes, but they don't use their ears because they've got headphones in and you need to know when a car is going to come up and smash into you and put you over the handlebars. That's just a little aside, but you get where I'm going with this. I also recognized the over niceness.

[0:07:50]  A: Sorry. I also recognized that I was being really nice to the medical staff because in the UK at the moment, we have an ongoing drama because it is a national health service, which is free, that the staff are out there marching, picketing on strike because they're not getting paid enough and they really aren't getting paid enough. So this current climate is really shit for them. So I always say please. Thank you, Doc. But the truth be known, I'm usually in awe of these people. It takes four to five years of medical school, I can't take that for granted. And also, I think I want preferential treatment from them because I'm not on private health. So let the nurses think, oh, she's really nice, but make sure she's okay.

[0:08:31]  A: And the waiting room, I'm a bit squeamish, I'm a bit squeamish. I'm rooted to the same chair for hours. And then later on, following the diagnosis, which I'll talk about in a minute, I'm transported through this hospital of corridors and stuff because I've got to get blood test taken because I'm going to have an MRI scan to see what's going on with my eye. But when I'm walking through, I engage or encounter this woman that looks like she's had her eye blown out, another one that's clearly blind in one eye because it's all gray. And I'm just really sensitive to eyes people. So I'm walking through with a doctor, I'm just like, oh, God, what am I going to see when I turn the corner? So my diagnosis is called Horner's syndrome. Horn and then, ers, look it up. It's a one in 6000 syndrome. Where the nerve? There's something wrong with a nerve going from the eye to the brain. This is a little bit scary for me. So where I am now, I've got to have a scan to find out why the nerve is blocked and this is why the eyelids drooping. A couple of people have said to me, Are you really scared? Well, until I have the MRI scan, the scary part will be hearing, what have they found?

[0:09:37]  A: And the doctor said to me, try not to go on the internet and look at all the possible diagnosis of Horner's syndrome. And of course, when someone says to you, don't what you do, you go, Knowledge is power, right? I want to know what this thing is. And it's everything from it could be cancer in the nerve, it could be something really slight, they might not have a diagnosis, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Sorry to tell you all about my eye, but that was short and sweet. What I will move on to now is we can define waiting in so many different ways, right? It can be procrastination, deliberation, indecision, hesitation, delaying, sitting on the fence, doubt. Or sometimes we just have to freaking wait.

[0:10:20]  A: We wait for public transport in this country. We line up for our lovely red bus. We got red buses in London particularly, and I am in London from London, so I'm talking about London particularly now, but we wait in an orderly queue. Most of the time. We wait for the doc to call us in, like I did. For nearly two and a half hours, we wait in a supermarket queue. The Brits are known for queuing, so anybody who hasn't been to the UK, and if you're ready to experience it, if you don't do it in your native country, come to the UK and see how we love to queue for everything.

[0:10:53]  A: So waiting, in short gives me time. It gives me time to think, but sometimes my brain goes into overdrive. That's my little piece on waiting. It's just short and sweet. But the good news is, since I'm coming to the end of this podcast already, I've got an appointment for my scam, which is on the 1 June, I believe. So please, please wish me luck. And I just want to say a huge thank you for listening to this short and sweet episode. To my new listeners, I thank you. I hope you've subscribed. My loyal listeners, I love you. I love your feedback because you've subscribed. But not only that, you email me and you will talk to me about an episode that you've really loved and why, which gives me inspiration to do something else. Sometimes it's really difficult on a podcast when you're not being sponsored or anything like that, you're doing it out of love, to come up with the ideas and who you can interview or what you can talk about. And my loyal listeners are doing that in abundance. You give me the strength to carry on. So thank you. As one of my loyal my loyalties, as I call her, said, although I know you as a friend, Tina, and haven't seen you in a decade, it's like we catch up over coffee week every two weeks. And I thought that was so beautiful because that's when I released my podcast, every two weeks. It really was getting too much to do it every week. But you can find me on Instagram at my life, not yours or Nubian Queen. That's what I'm under. Was it Nubian Tina? I actually can't remember. But you can find me on Instagram. And finally, if you are listening and you like what you hear, please, please do leave a review and subscribe and you can do the reviews, particularly on itunes or Apple podcasts. That's where everybody seems to default to, but I am on every single platform.

[0:12:43]  A: For example, we've got Spotify, obviously, an Apple podcast, two biggies, there Audible, Google, everything I am on. And actually, let me just come back to my Instagram handle because can you believe I didn't know it nubian. Tina spelled nubianteena. And I've also got my Life Not Yours 2021, I think, but you can get it off my main handle. I'm available everywhere. I'm available to you, the listener. I just wanted this podcast to be about a big thank you to those who are still tuning in. I have some exciting guests coming up over the next couple couple of months, so do stay tuned. Thanks