surgery clinicals today, hopefully i'm a clear pass!
couldn't have asked for nicer examiners (well, except one).
tired, more to come but thanks a million for all the good wishes!!!! :D
final clinicals on sat and sun. 4 more days!
week 2 is down, we've trolled our way through another 3 horrifying papers plus a communications skills OSCE of 10 stations worth.
medicine essays were alright for me, but mcqs were again another horror. this time, i fell asleep despite during the paper despite drinking coffee in the middle of it and 3 toilet breaks to wash my face :\
plus i'm pretty sure i got a lot of questions wrong so that was even more :(
eg: young girl who is febrile, signs of SLE, renal punch +. what is your first step in mx?
others: RESUS
me: give iv ABx. :( OMG! :(
but at least i made one lucky guess - entacapone turns your urine ORANGE :D
go me, i am the queen of ridiculous answers.
modified essays were a HORROR. it's an evolving scenario but you just can't be sure of what they're asking for.
plus the questions were really really BAD.
eg: using a bone marrow aspirate to diagnose TB
eg: managing a patient with status epilepticus complicated by anaphylactic shock to phenytoin
eg: reaching a diagnosis of an elderly man who has just travelled overseas to a rural place infamous for having CSWs (commercial sex workers) with his family, and is now feeling malaise and has a fever, and you get ONE investigation. lovely.
and you know the best thing? our "lovely" prof even commented on someone's facebook note: i think all the papers to date have been fair.
FAIR???? far from fair if you ask me. give ANY ONE, including profs some of the questions we had and see how they do before you tell me it's fair.
osces was like a game, i zoomed in and out of stations and talked alot of rubbish, thankfully mock patients were nice. my hands shook so badly when i was suturing that the examiner laughed at me!
and i've never removed staples before so my prof even showed me how to do it in the middle of the station whilst saying:"girlie, it's obvious you've never done this before yah."
to which my meek reply was: " err, not really prof". duh.
at least osces was alot better!
clinicals are coming up - rumours abound about weird cases aplenty eg. von Hippel Lindau syndrome, charcot marie tooth (HSMN1), osteogenesis imperfecta etc.
i have no clue what to expect, but hopefully i'll recover from this beating by the medicine theory papers to face the clinicals with my head held high!
day 3 of exams has ended, and i'm exhausted. i've averaged 4 hours of sleep a night (my usual is 7! AHHHHH). my skin is sallow and my eye bags are HUGE. a friend who doesn't study with me had a big shock on seeing me today in the exam hall and said i looked terrible.
i then got a further shock on looking at myself in the mirror. OH MY GOODNESS :(
the things stress does to you - i forgot to eat breakfast before my exam today! :\ thankfully i was saved from hypoglycaemia by the sweets i sneaked into my pencilcase throughout the 3 hours. gracious.
exams so far have only been surgical theory papers, but oh my goodness they seem to be going from bad to worse.
doing 180 multiple choice questions with tricky tricky wordings and double negatives made my head spin. people tossed coins, fell asleep during the paper, and headed for plentiful toilet breaks. MY GOODNESS.
and me? i had diarrhoea through all my papers. WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME????
thank goodness i sit in front of the toilet in the exam hall!!!!
2 more weeks!
2 days to doomsday!
sorry for lack of updates, been sitting in school attempting to squash stuff into puny little brain (seems to have gotten smaller, much).
lots of discussion going around school - realised that if i had gone to states instead i would have had an easier time facing boards rather than being at the mercy of examiner's questions and unfair distribution of cases etc etc but that is another story for another time. first to pass my MBBS and then i'll talk about USMLE and heading to states to train!
2 days to go, 2 days to go. brain is shrinking by the day, tiredness is increasing exponentially. many of us are all bemoaning this, and wondering how we will ever pass with our current little knowledge (of course, typical med school "snipers" kick in - lots of moaning and groaning and wailing about being stupid and daft, and then owning all our arses with their immense knowledge and making the rest of us feel like dirt - i have plenty of friends like that. HMPH).
but i am also going to miss this last round of studying together, we will never do such things again and have such great company! :(
there is that long, unrelenting "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH" in the background noise of my head every minute of every day, a clue to the underlying stress.
final year is really a cycle of ups and downs - stresses and boredom. you keep looking at the same material, thinking you know it already, only to be shocked into stress when some doctor pops you a question on basic stuff on to find you've already forgotten it/ don't know it quite as well as you thought/ totally clueless.
(FYI, i am usually in the last catergory :( how daft)
my stress levels have been rapid cycling several times in a day, up down up down up down up down. something to that extent, maybe more!
it's enough to drive a person mad. plus i get resting tachycardias and sometimes i wake up at night with palpitations and drenched in cold sweat from an exam nightmare. AWFUL :(
worst of all is not being able to sleep because of the stress induced palpitations! :(
i should really start taking a beta blocker soon or i'm going to fall to pieces before the exams even start.
i'm manifesting my stress externally by having pain in every single place you can think of. my orthopod tutor was laughing at me for having more pain than an old granny.
i have chronic back pain, knee pain (from chondromalacia), shoulder pain (from impingement), thumb pain (from cheerleading, zookeeper's thumb), a mucinous cyst on my finger and toes, hyperlaxity causing flat feet and lax ankles.
and oh, neck pain from not sleeping well and headache from all the pain :\
no wonder he was lauging at me as he went through my list one by one! but he was very nice about it and offered to prescribe me beta blockers if i needed them. i think i'll take him up on his offer soon!
the long unrelenting AHHHHHHHHHHHHH? i have to learn to deal with it (no, i am not hearing voices yet. just one voice!) and hopefully it will spur me to actually studying instead of sitting in front of my books and mountains of papers pretending to study so my parents won't nag at me. :\
2 good things about this week:
1) ortho is FULL OF EYE CANDY :D my favourite tutor has a lovely sexy baritone and is really hot, to boot. he radiates charisma and i've obviously been swooning over him and my friends are so exasperated with me they roll their eyes at me every time he walks by. haha.
2) i saw cute medic boy (now a doctor!) and he remembers me! :D oh, joy!
happy valentines, you all! :D
infectious diseases is over, and i have failed the test miserably. i'm a little shocked and dismayed (alright, make that quite, it's been quite some time since i was failing mathematics regularly). but i suppose i deserve it, having not studied as hard as i should have!
anyway. there is this new thing on facebook, a meme called "25 random things" (which reminds me, i haven't done dragonfly's old toy meme yet! oops i'm so sorry!).
and to my ultimate shock and horror, i realised that so very many of my classmates have put down: i don't know what i'm doing in medical school/i think medical school is the wrong choice for me/i shouldn't have chosen medical school etc.
it breaks my heart to read that. i know of so many others who would have given an arm and a leg to get in but couldn't because these people have taken up their places (not undeservingly though).
coupled with the facts that:
1) medicine is no longer thought of as a "noble" profession - litigation rates are up, patients are becoming more and more non-compliant
2) complaints against medical personnel are on the rise
3) burnout rates among doctors are higher
4) slipshod work is also higher
stuff like that gets you down.
i was really depressed for quite a bit to learn that so many people thought that way.
i was one of those people who decided that i wanted to be a doctor when i was young (i really enjoyed bandaging my sister and jabbing her to make her feel "better", all in the name of play, of course!), and i firmly made my choice when i was 14. nothing has changed my mind since then (except for a short period of time when i really felt that i should have done nursing instead, but i'm over that now. more on that some other time).
but such is medicine, such is the job and the demands on you.
i never expected to make such a huge lifestyle change, to have almost no "university life" to speak of, to be totally out of the loop with the rest of my friends in other faculties, to wake up early early early and go home late late late. so many things, so many things.
but it has never changed my desire to be a doctor, as much sadness and ugliness and frustration i have experienced (there has been a good deal more than most people, i am sure! largely due in part to my hearing problem and others). i still hold onto my idealism, and i can only hope it won't fade that much 20, 40 years down the road.
i still want to hold a granny's hand and tell her it'll be alright, we are here to take care of her; to tell a pregnant lady to keep pushing, her beautiful baby is coming out soon; to play with a kiddo and watch his smile (which will make my day); to tell jokes to an elderly gent and see his eye crinkle. people make my life, and my life is medicine. there isn't any other way.
