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.