Translating Medicine

Had a fun day today.

Taught a friend how to do an ABG, so that completes my "see one, do one, teach one" achievement for that (ding!).


I also had my first job as a consulting translator!

I say "job" yet I wasn"t paid.

In fact, it was a random intern/RMO/reg who happened to see me, asked if I spoke mandarin, and asked me to translate a few sentence for him. After a few words, he realised there was no way he was going to remember what I was saying, so he asked me to follow him.
In the waiting room of the AMU, there stood a young man of Chinese origin.
[Hello] he says to me (square brackets indicating mandarin).
[Hello] I reply.
I turn to the doctor who looks at me with a smile on his face. "This is a good start." He comments.
He begins to talk to the man. I manage enter some kind of trance in which I can somehow translate what is said.
The man appears satisfied and leaves with the nurse and the doctor.
In an amused daze, I return to retrieve my bag and books from the doctor's office.
The doctor returns and asks me to translate one more thing, he needs me to tell the man that he needs to hang around to get a CT scan of his lungs.
I agree. I then wonder how to say "scan" in mandarin. I then wonder how to say "lungs" in mandarin.
After pausing for a moment, I begin [The doctor wants you to wait here. They want to use a machine to look inside your upper body.]
The man looks at me like I'm an idiot, but somehow understands what I'm trying to tell him. He agrees and waits in the waiting room.

I feel so accomplished.

Where did this come from? Oh yeah...

A month without making a blog post? That doesn"t sound like m- oh wait.

It totally does.

I blame the surgical careers evening.

Anyway, where was I?

Oh yes, I was blogging.

I am blogging.


This is pretty much the worst blog post ever.

A few topics to discuss in summarised form:
1. The past month.
2. The next month.
3. Exams.

So anyway, its been a vaguely interesting month.

3 weeks on the respiratory ward flew by pretty quickly as I managed to see a certain respiratory consultant as little as possible while trying to be as productive as possible in order to gain the marks on my in progress training report. Not that it mattered as the registrar left in the middle of the week leaving me to get my ITPR done by the new reg. Such wasted effort.
Saw some interesting cases, the highlight probably the tuberculosis patient with zero clinical findings. So that sort of outlines how exciting respiratory was...

The week on cardiac care was... Yeah. So we just throw 5 drugs at people and let them go home with varying amounts of work leave. Exciting. Saw an angio done though and a stent inserted. Wanted to see the "full metal jacket" stenting but decided it just wasn"t worth standing around for.

Now though, I"m on the AMU! The newly constructed acute medical unit is all shiny and white and has lots of short stay patients that I can pretty much just ignore continuity of care because they get dished out elsewhere within 48 hours! Yay!
We"ll see how excited I am with 3 more weeks of AMU though.


Exams in 4 weeks. Getting nervous. There isn"t much more to say on that...


Oh, and I thought this was a fun, valid plan for OSCE stations: