Okay, so this week I’ve been a bit lax. I missed Beavers, because I was revising for my psychology PSYA1 exam which was on Tuesday. I’m also in the process of writing up a programme for them to use on one evening this term. As I’m learning Mandarin, both Squirrel (one of the adult leaders) and I thought it would be a good idea for me to design a programme based around Chinese New Year (Monday 23^rd this year). So that’s in the works – I’ll hopefully write something about how it turns out.

I have subscribed to a news feed called MedTerms Daily. It sends me medical words and definitions, and if I’m interested in what they seem to be about or related to, I look them up. Today’s was Caesarean Section (C section). This is the procedure where a baby, rather than being born vaginally, is surgically removed/extracted.

 It’s actually a really old procedure (something which surprised me) and dates back as far as the roman emperor, Julius Caesar, after whom it was named. It was also around, and prevalent enough to make it into the script of Shakespeare’s Macbeth – Macduff was not “born of woman”, referring to the fact that he was a C-section baby.  The “section” part comes from the surgical division of tissue – in this case the abdominal and uterine walls, in order to extract the baby.