so england has lost the 6 nations title, jonny wilkinson has been given the boot, anddddd, iain balshaw has been reinstated! :D no prizes for guessing which of the 3 make me the happiest.

it was a totally crap game that was a massive waste of my time. WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ENGLAND!!!! pathetic, really. i think jonny wilkinson, much as i adore him, is past his prime :(

anyway! on the medical front. i've started my electives proper and i must say i'm very happy with my current 3 week elective of surgery/A&E. we get to do both at one shot and that makes ditzy a very happy medical student, which means that i spend more time doing things instead of just sitting around waiting for things to happen :)

it really helps that the doctors i've sought out for this elective are massively nice and dedicated to teaching, i truly do adore them. we're going on call with the surgeon tomorrow and it promises to be interesting, given his penchant for yelling loudly at all times (he just speaks like that! but that's really good for me though, so i'm not complaining!). hopefully we'll get to do procedures and see some cases! :)

rounds have been hectic. surgeons walk so fast! i need more comfortable shoes, i was used to trolling slowly from bed to bed in medicine rounds, and spacing out in between get pimped. now, i can't! we're expected to run ahead of the surgeons, to get the files, to wake the patients etc. this, according to my tutor, is what we MUST do if we don't want to get kicked off rounds. (we got kicked off rounds on monday because he was sick and wasn't there to defend us, and there were 8 students in total on the team, making for a very pissed consultant who ordered us off for breakfast!) so by making ourselves useful, the consultant doesn't mind having us there :)

it's the upper GIT team we're on, and i've been seeing stomch and oesophageal cancers aplenty. makes me sad, thinking about the way they have difficulty eating. eating is one of life's pleasures! and also, given my medical history, i'm more likely than not to get oesophageal cancer. it hits very close to home.

today we clerked a patient who had metastatic oesophageal cancer. he was very nice about it, and didn't mind us taking up his time. a rather handsome gentleman, to be honest! i suspect he has hypopituitarism, he looked rather young for his age. he must have gone through radiotherapy.

it was rather sad. he's been healthy all his life. only thing was, he smoked 20 sticks a day, and drank loads of beer daily. now he's seeing the results of that (it's linked to oesophageal cancer). really sad. but he's lived long enough to see his daughters all married and his grandchildren come into this world, so i guess he hasn't really any regrets. he was sad, but rather jovial throughout the interview, saying that he had a duty to teach us. such patients make my day. funny, it's always on surgery rotations that i meet my favourite patients. somehow, patients in the medicine wards aren't really happy to talk to us. i think it's because they're alot more sick.

admittedly, i didn't ask many questions. instead, i left that to my friends and just looked at him this whole interview. i saw myself lying there, in that bed, in some 40 years. it's awfully scary, and i really should be prepared.

that aside, we went down to the ED later, and i clerked a lady with chest pain. my history was all garbled and i'd forgotten how to ask the right questions by now. my tutor was rather unhappy with that!

a while later, a collapse case came in. a tiny old lady with eyes opened, pupils blown. she'd had metastatic lung cancer and you could actually see the cancer on her skin in the supraclavicular fossa. it was quite terrible. i tried doing CPR, but i'm just hopeless and totally ineffective at it. my compressions didn't so much as register a spike on the ECG, sadly. everyone tried, but as it turns out, she'd probably been dead for 3 days before that until her family found her. loads of aspiration secretions found in her lungs.

it was very sad, really. i was disoriented for a bit after that. i mean, i should be used to deaths by now, shouldn't i? then again, it's a marvel how easily we lose our lives too. nothing is ever for sure.

it's been a long day, i've got loads more to read up on for surgery. i hope you all are well.