Easter

So I"m not doing too well on the "regular blogging" front. I"m sure things will pick up sometime...

Easter long weekend has come and just about gone. It was a lot of fun, filled with horse riding, biking, playing with little dogs and endless amounts of food. Yes, that"s right, we were in Keith!
The family of a certain colleague saw it in their hearts to embrace these dirty poor med students yet again and showed us yet another great time in the fair town of Keith. I"m not sure if I"ve mentioned it before, but the last time we were there, I and certain other colleagues who have skills in the area of defeating any attacking piles of food, were completely sated, defeated by the vast quantities of delicious food. This occasion was no different. It was incredible.

Unfortunately, I appear to have picked up a bit of a bug. By that, I mean I think I have the flu, so if this post seems more incomprehensible than usual, blame the drugs which are attempting to hold back the muscle pains, hacking cough, chills and severe headache...

I think I"m going to end it at that and pretend I want to eat something so I can go make something to eat and sustain my immune system to attempt to fight off this evil attacker.

Friday! Finally!

4 weeks done, meaning that next week, I start on General Surgery at the Repatriation General Hospital.
This could be a good thing or a bad thing, I haven"t quite worked it out yet.

Today was a good day though, waking up for the first time in 3 or 4 days not feeling like absolute crap. I think this cold is finally moving on, so in the next few days I should be all good.

Made it to ward rounds on time, which is always a good start, especially when you"ve missed the last two days (illness, breast clinic) and it being the final day on this ward. The Senior Fellow was really cheerful, and usually in these cases, its a trap.
And it was.
She had decided that we would do a mini-CEX (or "mini sex" as she pronounced it) after ward rounds. Oh hooray.
Surprisingly, I did quite well. Sure, it didn"t feel like it when I was under the spotlight, with her firing question after question at me during the history. But afterwards she gave some very good feedback and gave me good marks! I received a 6, which is quite a surprise because in our introduction lecture when they explained the mini-CEX, they told us to expect the initial few to be very bad...

So I"ve been pretty happy.

Thursday morning

Slept in. Who cares about ward rounds right?

Its all good, I have breast clinic at 9, so I can make that and use that as an excuse as to why I didn"t go to ward rounds. Despite the reason that ward rounds started at 8...

But I"m sick!

I"m out of drugs, so I was up half the night coughing :(

Gotta go buy some hard drugs* after this clinic.






*Note: Hard drugs mentioned include something containing codeine phosphate and pseudoephedrine hydrochloride. This phenylephrine crap doesn"t do anything.

Wednesday, fin.

Still sick, ginger tea is starting to annoy me, but butter menthols (with honey centres!) are as delicious as ever. They also kind of help my sore and irritated throat.

So I made it into the CoC (teeheehee) introduction/tutorial.
Not the most exciting, or informative of sessions, but nice to find out that I won"t be in the state for the 2nd tutorial.
I still have to do my work though, just submit things early and liaise via email.
At least I vaguely know what to do now, just have to find a patient with a chronic illness, get consent from them and follow him/her as they are treated and attend follow-ups for 5 months. This includes visiting them in their own home, as well as visiting their GP, preferably while they are there, with a maximum of 6-8 meetings.
I take this to mean that I have to improve on my stalking skills, raising them to a comparative level of a ninja or perhaps Batman. I"ll have to hide in bushes and on stone gargoyles and the like, hoping that my patient is just like every other person in those movies and that they never look up just as I"m somehow holding myself in the upper corner of a room. Luckily the SoM has understood that we"re not all as physically active and able as others, and have given us the leeway of a maximum of 6-8 meetings. I assume that we"ll start with 6-8 credits (I guess they haven"t decided yet) and when (or if! HAHA!) we get "caught" by the patient, we"ll have to hand over a credit and continue from the last save point.

You know, now that I think about it, Continuity of Care could be quite fun, and besides, I still have that imaginary cape.

Bleh.

I feel like crap. Sore throat, couldn"t sleep, muscle aches.

Hopefully its just viral and will die down soon.

So I"m taking the afternoon off. I"m going to make myself a nice yummy lunch and have a nice long sleep.

I managed to go to ward rounds this morning, which was good fun because it seems like half the patients are being discharged today. Unfortunately we had a MDT (multi-disciplinary team) meeting today and from lack of seats, I was seated in the front row, alongside all the consultants and senior consultants.

If you haven"t been to an MDT meeting before, picture this:
A nice quiet room, the soft hum of a computer and projector, main lights are off and instead you bask in the nice warm glow of a projected contrast CT image of a patient"s lower abdomen. Beside that is a large LCD screen displaying a beautifully colourful slide, a slice of the vague metastatic growth from said abdomen.
As the drone of the radiologist slowly relaxes you, you fight.
You fight with all your will because you know the consultants have to turn to look past you in order to make eye contact with the radiologist, for politeness" sake, as well as to get his attention to ask questions, or he may go on forever.
Suddenly, out booms the voice of a certain anatomist/histologist we shall call "TT". His golden voice rings throughout the room, conjuring to mind a majestic and brave lion or perhaps an overly tanned well build older man.
"Yes!" you think to yourself, "I can"t possibly fall asleep with him talking!" But as your eyes droop, you realise far too late that histology is and has always been a trap. Luring you in with pretty colours and golden voices, it takes you and leads you, like a child, with wide eyes questioning all. But just like a child, you grow weary of such opulence, not understanding the point behind it all. Your eyes close, you sleep. Until the new day dawns.

Or at least until you start driving a pen into your leg because you really, really, really don"t want to be falling asleep in front of everyone. Really.

Sleep...

So I"m trying to get into the habit of keeping this regular, even if nothing interesting actually happens.

Unfortunately, that leaves my blog material much to be desired (I can never make that line make sense in my head, but cool people use it and my mum says I"m cool so I thought I should use it then...).

Luckily, the 2 people who read this probably won"t care.

I"ve just woken up from a great night of movies, though really, it really should just be known as one giant movie. Yes, some "Esteemed Colleagues" (if I may borrow a term from a brilliant blog I"ve been reading, by someone in my class!) and I decided to have a movie marathon and went through Back to the Future I, II and III!
We ended up finishing around 2am, tired, hungry, slightly intoxicated (or was that just Shawn?) but wishing that there were more great corny 80s type movies like that (or was that just me...).

One thing I haven"t mentioned is that I have been sick for the last 2 weeks now. It all started with innocent symptoms not unlike that of the common cold. Unfortunately, they then progressed until my friends were quite sure I had fluid and quite possibly consolidation in my lower lung fields. The end-inspiratory wheeze and mid-late expiratory wheeze probably didn"t help things. Not to mention the cough that actually sounds less like a cough and more like I"m fighting for dominance against some inner force for the control of my lungs...
So anyway, I"m finally going to see the doctor today (it was either on Tuesday when I still had to study for my Renal System exam, or today...), but as always, my symptoms are hiding. All I have left is a pathetic little cough.

Its really not fair.