3 days down

Hey there, didn"t expect a blog post so soon did you?

Well, I sent an email to friends and thought I"d edit it down a bit and put it here.

Yes, very lazy I know.

I don"t really have much of anything that is quite as exciting as other elective destinations, so you guys will have to do with a quick summary/diary entry of whats happened so far...

After disembarking the plane, I went with priorities first. I found myself some internet to let the masses on Facebook know I was still alive.
After that I managed to work my way through customs (impossible to find a working pen to fill out those immigration cards!) and snuck my 16kg of uncooked beef and fish through the "nothing to declare" line. Yes, thats right, my parents priorities on packing were to get fish and beef to family friends. Luckily, I was allowed to bring 2x23kg of bags, which is actually a ridiculously large amount. Packing everything I could think of amounted to about 20kg.

Stepping outside, I discovered one thing:
Singapore is hot.
I"ll say right now that going from 12 degrees or so to 30 degrees or so is killer. I have no idea how the Canadians do it.
Apart from that, what strikes you is the humidity, with sweat dripping off you as there is no way it can evaporate into the already water filled air.

Oh, the pollution and population ain"t great either.
There were about the population of Adelaide trying to get onto each train I wanted to get on. Luckily, I had 40ish kg worth of frozen goods to use to clear some space. It worked surprisingly well.
Arriving at my destination (family friend's apartment), it seemed like everyone smoked. The lower level is a shopping complex type thing (which I think is the same with every building in Singapore...) and all the shopkeepers would be chainsmoking their hearts out. The only places that weren"t smoke filled were the food places. Everything looked so appealing, especially after airplane food (fake scrambled eggs and baked beans? Really Singapore Airlines?).

Have to admit, the view from the 14th floor is quite good. The layer of smog you can see silhouetting the city not so much.
My cough has gotten worse, and seeing a doctor at the hospital (they have a staff clinic), cost $10 and the bastard barely examine me. Wanted to send me for X-ray until I argued that he was a fscking moron and to try, I dunno, doing a respiratory examination? He ended up prescribing some cough syrup (which I"ve discovered is one of the ingredients of what I believe the cool kids call "purple drank") which hasn"t helped spectacularly, and I"ve taken the first two days off.

Had a brief stint in the anaesthetic setting with a breast tumour removal. Got to experience the "Time Out" thing that they had in our Patient Safety Workshop, they found incorrect consent! The system works!
Surgeon still went ahead with it following the consent they got and chased down extra consent. Not sure how that worked considering the patient was under a general.
Had an infection control lecture with N95 mask fitting. Not exactly very exciting.
Then there was a 5 hour ENT (LaFort I) operation. That was hell boring.
The consultants and regs love to drill you here... Luckily, my "mentor" is really nice and is happy to explain things to me when reply with "I don't know..." Which happens quite regularly.

But yeah.

Food is great here though!
The hospital cafeteria is like a super food court! You can get so much asian food for so cheap! A plate of noodles for $1. Almost everything is under $5. Crazy stuff!

Anyway, I think thats all I have for now.


Ciao!

Conservative Treatment

My intern and consultant discussed "conservative" treatment (ie. not surgery) of a patient"s prolapse today.

It was an interesting discussion because the main treatment options were:

• Sprinkling sugar on the prolapse.
• Taping the patient"s buttocks together.

No, I am not joking.

I don"t think anything more needs to be said.

Fringe Go-er's Lung

Friday was a big day.
Friday morning was, as an understatement, annoying. Apparently being able to be in two places at once was a requirement for medicine, one that I seem to lack.

Friday afternoon definitely got better, with a crazy gym session that left me in quite a bit of pain (and especially now as I am typing this a day later...) but in a good way. Like when you scratch mosquito bites, even though in this context it is actually a good thing, rather than a bad thing. Perhaps I started with a bad analogy. It"s my blog, if you don"t like it, go write your own.

Friday evening was quite interesting as I went out with some friends to see the Adelaide Fringe Festival opening parade as well as the free concert. I do not recall ever seeing so many people in one place in Adelaide before, which made actually seeing the parade quite difficult. So we went and had a beer.
Following the failed parade viewing, we met up with some other friends to find this concert area. It was then we noticed that with the combination of dry heat and thousands of people, there was quite the amount of dust raised. There was pretty much a constant haze in the air that tickled at your throat and made you cough. I dare say the cigarette smoke didn"t help matters.

Being the group of nerdy medical students we are, our conversation inevitably turned back to medicine, and an amusing topic. We had previously learnt about interstitial lung diseases of amusing aetiology, such as cheese worker's lung and pigeon fancier's lung. With the amount of dust and cigarette smoke in the air, it was only a matter of time before the blame game continued and passed the cause of interstitial lung diseases to Fringe Festivals. Perhaps attendance of Fringe Festivals should be added to the "common medical problems" section of a history.

So the bands were quite interesting, a particular Canadian friend was quite taken by the rap group "Killaqueenz", laughing almost continuously at the amusing lyrics. Personally I was quite impressed by the energy of our English classmates as they danced and jumped and got lost. It really was quite amusing with the number of times we lost people.
Our overly excited, high pitched and fascist hating friend was in her element, criticising those who left early, smuggling drinks into restricted areas and making friends with random German medical students.
Eventually, we called it a night and wandered through half the city looking for an available taxi before finally managing to catch a bus back home.

The shower I had once I arrived home was heavenly, finally being able to scrub the dust and smoke off, before finally being able to fall into bed after being awake for 20 hours or so.

This morning was warm, but delicious. Oh wait, I missed a part there. The scrambled eggs with mushrooms I made for breakfast was delicious.
The trip into Central Market for groceries was a chore as the temperature had decided to skyrocket, with a good percentage of humidity.
There was a celebration going on in Chinatown, making it very difficult to get around. I"m not entirely sure what the celebration was for, but I"ve decided that it was a 1 week late celebration of Chinese New Year. Which I blame on Adelaide always being just that little bit behind the rest of the world...
Bumped into a certain colleague who was shopping with his "smaller half" as he likes to put it. I always enjoy putting links in my blog, though I never seem to be able to do it much, so a mention of him and a link to his blog (even though anyone that reads my blog most probably reads his anyway) is always fun.
Decided to have lunch in the market and finally after 2+ years of wanting to go but never actually making it, Lucia's was the place to be. It was as good as rumour had it, with a delicious bolognaise and rich, creamy mushroom sauce.

All in all, its been a good day (though very hot) and I"ve spent way more than I should have. Oh well, not every day is a weekend, gotta make the most of it!

Thorsday!

Sometimes I wish I had a big magical hammer I could use to smash things and throw around a bit of lightning.

Today started as any other day (any other day where I wake up while its still dark anyway...) with a trip to the RGH and ward rounds. Following the ward rounds I managed to acquire the signatures necessary to lock in a patient as a CoC patient. This was exciting for a while, and I spent quite a while talking about all aspects of his care.

After hours and hours* of chatting and various examinations, I decided that I had probably done quite enough on the wards and decided it would be a good time to go home for lunch. I decided to call this "good time" lunchtime. I thought it seemed quite apropos.

Our PBL was uneventful, though very informative as one of the consultants shared a little bit of the amazing amount of information that senior medical practitioners seem to pick up along their careers.

The trouble came afterwards when I happened to bump into the registrar from the ward I am attached to at the RGH. He was quite surprised to see me, wondering why I was even at FMC. I told him we had a tutorial from a consultant. He told me that they (the RGHers) wanted to give us tutorials but could never find us. I was amused at that considering I had not seen him since midway through ward rounds. I told him that we had our scheduled classes to be at. He told me that one of the consultants at the RGH wanted to give us a tutorial, tomorrow morning at 11am. We were also to prepare a patient to present. I asked him if there was any way we could reschedule, as we had an orthopaedics tutorial at FMC at that time. He repeated that the consultant would give us a tutorial at 11am, as if there was nothing to contest, and then walked off.

I stared off into the distance, with a slightly perplexed frown which deepened into a full blown contorted look of horror as I realised I had to somehow bring this subject up with a consultant that I personally thought was more than a little frightening.

Tomorrow will be an interesting day.



*With slight error from a time dilation effect