played table tennis with the pbl group today at the sports and recreation centre (src). i really do miss the game a lot, and there's also badminton and tennis and swimming!


and there's been an interesting development in the figure-of-eight dance...

read the autopsy report today, and as i looked down the list, i felt a certain horror i've never had before. it wasn't just the horror at the extent of injuries, but also the horror of knowing exactly what the coronor was talking about. the blow by blow account of his injuries and the image i could conjure up in my mind was what scared me. the full extent, the detail that i would not have know if i hadn't chosen this path, my mind just spun. all the terms that i've been studying these few weeks, humerus, maleollus, illiac fossa, whatever, everything! suddenly they had taken on a new meaning for me, a more tragic one. each represented something, something that can never be replaced. this, i realized, was knowing. this was the lost of innocence.


and they might have broken your body, your heart, but they can never, ever break your soul. it still lives.

i got my panasonic x70 last night. it's weird. in the afternoon i was bored from looking at my lecture notes (yeah, after like ten minutes) so i decided to take out that cute korean thingy kane and von gave me two years ago after the choir olympics. it took me a while coz the thread got stuck. then i decided to take a photo of my phone, assembled and disassembled. little did i expect to give i up so soon; i had been planning to purchase it on friday, but the kind staff at compasspoint hello shop got approval from her manager to count me as twenty one months since it was only five days away. so that's how i got it.


if you're wondering what's this got to do with med school, well, five minutes after i reached home, someone knocked on our door. i answered it, and it was a young girl with a huge bluish-black patch over her right eye, telling me that her dad just recently lost his job and is now wheelchair bound, and she asked me to buy some packets of nuts. my dad decided to buy two packets.


the incident left me thinking, i had just spend two hundred dollars on a mobile phone, and here was this girl who would have better use for that money than i. it made me feel so guilty about spending money this way. then i was reminded about the amount of money my parents are spending on my education, just so that perhaps, just maybe, i'll be able to make a better living than they did. and i'm beginning to understand the implications of being a doctor, to have the ability and knowledge to help a person in a way most people can't. and i'm grateful for it really, since i've always wanted to join doctors without borders. but i'm not even one-fifth of the way yet.

i've just realised, to my utmost horror, that i've been posting all sorts of details about my ordinary life on this blog. what started out to be a record of my activities in medical school has been diluted to include the rest of my mundane life. so no more, i'll return to escapisms for now and will only post stuff here pertaining to med school. i guess it's not very exciting at this stage, everything we learn is from the textbook. vaguely interesting will be our weekly prosections (we no longer do dissections here in singapore) where we get to prod formalinised copies of ourselves. the best part about m1 so far would be the hospital visits thanks to our pbl tutor. we're the only group who has had the chance to see the cases in real life, and i might as well blog about them now.


the second session was on ulnar nerve paralysis, and we went to the occu therapy dept where a therapist spoke to us. she showed us the tools they used to help a patient and we saw this foreign worker whose nerve was cut when some glass shattered. instead of reading a case history, here in front of us was a guy with claw hand. later in the lecture room, our prof let us examine a patient who was injured in april, but has yet to regain much function to his hand. we could see that the muscles (hypothenar) were atrophied; the classmate examining him reported that they felt soft. it was a short session, but nevertheless educational.


on the last day of the half-term, our prof showed us two patients with liver/gall bladder disease. one had the unmistakable yellow skin of a jaundiced patient, and the other, a hokkien old lady, had her belly full of staples after an opertation. a liver surgeon came to talk to us, but unfortunately, we were too ignorant to understand him. but there were certain stuff that were useful in our understanding of the disease, like the three types of obstruction and the three areas where obstuction can occur (pre-hepatic, hepatic and post-hepatic). also viewed the results of their liver function tests (bilirubin conjugated and unconjugated), GGT, ALT, AST, alkaline phosphotase and albumin.


after all these, i'm really looking forward to the bedside visits next half-term.

i just saw zj online! woopee, this must be my lucky day, even the webcam finally worked. and i met conrad and val at kino, as well as, wait for this, my dad. yeah, he was wondering around the mooncake displays like a lost boy. what food does to men. ha.


went for prof ling's extra tutorial on histo, which was really helpful because he went through almost everything in two hours. it really was an information overload, considering my mind hasn't been working these few days, but somehow, after listening to him, the things are stuck in my neuroglia cells ya know. they support the neurons so hopefully they'll cling onto every bit of info i've read and at the right time, they can axonal transport it to my hands and it diffuses out onto the answer booklet. then i shall get an A. -maniacal laughter-

inertia. that's it, inertia. it all boils down to that, why i can't ask what i want to ask, why i'm online right now instead of catching up on the lectures i fell asleep in, and why my life seems to be a total standstill other than medicine. i know i haven't printed the tutorial from enzymes ( yes, that long ago ) and i know i'm supposed to polish my piano ( coz the last time i did it was a year ago ) but i haven't done them. the german book gives me a stoic stare each time i settle down to study, the piano scores whisper amongst themselves as they collect dust and my bed groans while i slumber.


i'll have to figure out what to do with my life soon. i hope raffles jam will materialize and not be another of those pipe dreams. and the europe trip too. that would give me something to look forward to.


didn't have the time to review the terminal, which i saw last wed with the anat/pbl group people, or rather guys. it wasn't as good as i expected it to be. i mean, steven spielberg and tom hanks. it's like the best pairings ever, but the show struggled to take flight. act two was awfully long, and i really was sick of watching the main character do weird things and the host of oddball characters that orbit around him. no direction whatsoever in the film, even the romance with catherine zeta-jones was so weird. she knew that grey-haired chicopek was never faithful, why then did she go back to him even though viktor was a better man? i have no idea what the scriptwriter was thinking but the saving grace was the awesome set. i mean, to build the whole place just for a movie? no wonder the rest of the world is so mad with the americans. the attention to detail was tremendous, i wonder what they did with it after filming wrapped? so i'll give it a 6.5, ha.


just downloaded skype, talk to me!

yippety, i've done the new layout. all thanks to somebody, the one whose name shall not be mentioned. haha, you know who you are. you spurred me on to hit the 'delete' button.


and regarding the esplanade incident, thanks for the suggestions man. i could think of nothing better than to poke her in the eye.


zig dearie, you're going to have to start posting soon, i'm beginning to wonder if you've lost your way somewhere near shearwood forest. then perhaps robin hood might guide you.

tried to post about the farewells but blogger threw it out. can you believe it's been a week since i sent sangyu and zj off to their new lives?


anyway, went for the acapella express concert yesterday evening. lots of people around, it was like a gathering of the who's who in the acapella scene. the group was great, but the hall didn't do them justice, and neither did the sound system. however, i enjoyed their music very music, very spontanous and lively. bought their cd, which had only twenty five minutes worth of songs and cost twenty five bucks. oh well. i liked their performance, but i didn't like what happened next.


they had an autograph signing session after the performance, so coming out of the hall, we located the queue, then ducked below the barrier to join the queue. mind you, there was not a soul around, no one walking towards us to join the line. in fact, about a minute passed before someone else joined us. but an esplanade staff decided that we should be reprimanded, and she yelled at us about not going round the barrier instead. suffice to say, we were pissed, damn pissed. i mean, if we had been older, or if we had been white, would she have raised her voice at us like that? and announced to everyone in the foyer that we were "so young and so rude"? no wonder esplanade seems to be having so many problems with their staff.


whatever, it spoilt an otherwise perfect evening, and start to my one week break.

you know, i've been hoping and waiting and praying and wishing for so many years, but somehow that has not materialized. i'm confused, stumped and frustrated. i mean, the answer can only be a yes or a no, but i don't have the courage to ask the question. yes not the question but THAT question. the one which would put everything to rest, the one that would put me out of this. i just wanted to scream this afternoon on the train. it was that bad. i apologize from the depths of my bowels if i'm sounding incoherent. i've never been very eloquent on the issue anyway, which could be one of the reasons why it's not turning out well.

i'm just so tired i could just collapse. came back an hour ago from sending the one and only zig off to the uk. the day before i'd sent sy off to sand diego, and i really felt like crying. tonight was worse. what do you feel if your friend of seven years leaves you and everyone else for three years? it was both tears of joy and tears of sorrow and while my brain is thinking coherently i pray that her flight will be safe and everything will be all right.


if you see this dear, hi!


and i've always wanted to ask that question, you know, like do you still...? but it's too hard.

i can't study anymore, nothing's going in. i've reached this saturation level where i just end up staring at the page and only one word registers. before lunch was at the bench outside the library glaring at snell and listening to disc three of the symphonic recording of les miz, which made me very distracted, coz i tend to listen to the orchestrations and the lyrics then the anatomical knowledge i'm supposed to absorb.


whatever, there's this bunch of guys next to me discussing some testing proceedures. enough, i'm outta here.

was on my way to town yesterday on the mrt when i met this smrt staff, and we exchanged a few words, which enlightened me on why there's always a green-shirted man in the first carriage. turns out they're there to reset the microsoft system should it hang or something. and i, unaware of the foreshadowing that would follow, quipped that such a breakdown seldom happened, he agreed and went on to talk about his orthopaedic surgeon, whom i know. but that's another matter. when i entered dhoby ghaut station thinking home was twenty-three minutes away, announcements were ringing throughout about a disruption of the train service. i ended up taking the train, with zj and sy, to potong pasir then taking a bus back home. so this shadow that has been following me through my life has stepped into the light again.

Had a talk with joanna yesterday after lunch, thanks dear, it's all coming back to me now...and i've rediscovered les miserables! the music, the emotion, the story. it really is the best musical ever, coz there's not a single one out there that can capture the soul of the human spirit as well as les miz can. and jo, if les miz gave you french, then it gave me singing. yup, i never knew what singing actually was till i heard the power and the emotions behind each song. i've heard them countless of times ( yes i used to play it every sunday ) since i got the cd in p3, but a decade later my heart still aches for fantine's dream and my soul stirs when the students ask, do you hear the people sing?

Do You Hear The People Sing?
Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again.
When the beating of your heart echoes the beating of the drums,
There is a life about to start when tomorrow comes!

Will you join in our crusade who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade is there a world you long to see?
Then join in the fight that will give you the right to be free!

Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again.
When the beating of your heart echoes the beating of the drums,
There is a life about to start when tomorrow comes!

Will you give all you can give so that our banner may advance?
Some will fall and some will live, will you stand up and take your chance?
The blood of the matyrs will water the meadows of France!

Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again.
When the beating of your heart echoes the beating of the drums,
There is a life about to start when tomorrow comes!

fucking server deleted my post. not the first time. blogger should try to figure out something.


anyway, i was trying to blog about how tired i have been these past two days, after the sgh high. it's like the glucose crash thing, where after taking lots of suger you hit an energy low. same here, but i don't know what's the cause. know i slept late on monday, but didn't think the effects would be so far-reaching. whatever. and especially after driving home yesterday, it just took the energy out of me. i wonder why it's so strenuous, it isn't supposed to be like that is it? maybe it was the heat and the sun which kept getting in my eyes even with the visor down.


am in the med library now, the place where mr c spent most of his time in his undergrad days. yippee.