went to sgh for pbl today, and it was great. it reminded me, after studying all that physio and anat for three weeks, why i'm bothering to read up on such ( relatively )dry topics.


we were first brought to the CCU, where my prof caught hold of a registrar to bring us round. they didn't have any infarct patients, so she showed us this old man who came in with dizziness ( vasovagal syncope? ) and chest pains. they ran the ECG on him and we had a look at it. she did point out the abnormalous QRS complex, which made the ECG look like a camel as it only had two big bumps. then we looked at the ECG of his heart after they had placed a pacemaker in, and the new ECG was beautiful, everything ok.


she also showed us the chest x-rays of the patient, to locate the pacemaker which shows up as a thin wire that convexes upwards, not unlike the diaphragm. i vaguely could make out the borders of the heart she was indicating, and she taught us this heart:thorax ratio. if it's more than two-third the length of the thorax, uhm, i can't remember, but it ain't good. think she did mention this guy's case is complicated by his tachycardia. i don't know which type he has though; i've found at least three types in the physio book. then someone asked how they put the pacemaker in, and she proceeded to show us the point of insertion, at the femoral vein. she actually pushed aside his hospital gown to show us, and i wonder how that poor man felt. i mean, it wasn't indecent, his private parts were covered, but to have this bunch of youngsters come in and gawk at you when you've obviously had a nasty experience ain't very nice, is it?


so anyway, second part of the tour we went to the ICU, and there was this guy who had just come out of an operation. the sister explained all the details about how they monitored his vital signs and what they do to keep the b.p. down and why.


guess i came away feeling more interested in cardio than ever, never imagined i would. it was a terrific experience, and hope prof tay will do it for every single pbl lesson. imagine! first cardio, then ortho, neuro, a&e...my dream's coming true...

going through again and again the details of the upper limb. i should be better at it after lunch. indeed, you eat, sleep, drink all the info that you've learnt. and i feel that anatomy makes you lose that innocence about your body, since you now know every little detail about the nerves, veins and muscles. you move around or see the muscles of the atheletes on tv these past week, and you think, deltoid, supinator, teres major, biceps...and the list just goes on. when my digiti minimi or little finger started hurting, i worried that the synovial sheaths had been inflammed and i might need steroid injections or something horrible. so you lose that child-like wonder, since the pain you feel is very real now. that's the way it is for medicine i guess. we can't shut our eyes to suffering anymore.

finally, a break from all the madness, thanks to my pbl prof. i couldn't wake up this morning even with my alarm. and this is only the beginning, the start of things to come, hopefully. i wonder how it'll be like for me, especially in the clinical years. i'll leave that for now to my imagination, since the lecture notes are beckoning me to take hold of them. have been neglecting the biochem/physio part because of anatomy. 'tis a good time to catch up on them, though every muscle fibre in my body is telling me to go out and play.

d&d's later tonight, which means i can't watch li jiawei's match 'live'. i really hope she wins. she did so well yesterday, if she keeps it up,history will be made.


in the end, i didn't go for script market. first aid test ended at three i think, and at frist i though i could stand staying back till nine, but half an hour later i had to call my mom. it wasn't that bad after all, coz i got to drive all the way to my grandma's house then back home, almost one hour of driving. woohoo.


there was supposed to be a foundation lecture yesterday morning, entitled "doctor for the 21st century". sangyu heard about it so she decided to crash, but most unfortunately, the lecturer decided not to turn up, so she stayed for embryology and anat lectures. well, we would have appreciated it a bit if they'd told us there would be no lecture instead of making us wait and wait and wait. prof voon's lecture was great, especially his ecto, meso and endoderm demos. he looked like he was conducting a choir. ha.


i'm bored. other than studying, there ain't much to do. there used to be film, but that one seems kiv-ed for now. argh.


and hi zig and zing!

prof tay postponed our problem based learning session to next monday because he's overseas. so now my group's chillin' out in the library. actually i think pbl's a silly idea, since they could have integrated it with pdp. what would happen then would be that someone can bring us to the wards, show us say a typical cardiac patient, and tell us to read up and present our new-found knowledge, as well as certain clinical skills. so there, since we're all dying to go for clinicals, might as well combine it and take the boredom out of sitting in yet another classroom and looking at a patient on paper.


and i guess i'll be left with no co-curricular activity(cca) now, since i didn't go for the welcome tea, and i'm not sure if i can go for script market on the nineteenth. it ends at, what, nine? by the time i reach home it'll be ten plus, and there's anat rush and crush every friday. oh well. there goes film making.


and i still have nothing to wear for d&d on sat...

first anat prac

had my first anatomy prac today. after the physio lecture everyone crowded outside the anatomy hall to put on their lab coats before going in. what greeted us was a spacious hall with five rows of cadavers, a couple of skeletons and several preserved specimens. what hit me was that the smell of formalin wasn't as strong as i expected. i was bracing myself for pungent smell of chemicals, that smell that medical students all around the world know, but instead it just kind of wafted around, but it did leave some tast on my tongue. anyway, i wasn't affected by the formalin, whereas there were some people whose eyes kept tearing.


my group got prof ling, the head of anatomy as our tutor. again, i had this picture of him as a huge, stout guy with a deep voice, but he turned out to be a pleasantly amiable and fairly soft-spoken person. he said, if we tell him we have knuckles, he would knock us on our head with the head of his metacarpels. we went through the bones of the upper limb today, including the muscle attachments and the related muscles of the joints. gosh, i can't imagine adding the nerves and blood vessels to that, and later the rest of the body to my brain. it's running out of disk space.


after class i went down to yusof ishak house to collect my ezlink card, thinking my troubles would be over. but when i approached the seng kang mrt counter, i was told i had to buy the concession, forty-five dollars for a whole month. i mean, can't they just give a discount or something like that? i did my calculations just now, it'll save me about ten to twenty cents a trip. i had this bad feeling about this ezlink card, indeed it came true.


i'm so drained from the first week of school. guess i'm still not used to waking up early in the morning to travel to school and to sit through a lecture and be expected to soak up the equivalent of a month's junior college lectures in one hour. last night when hc messaged something about printing something, i replied with one about stretching. the impossible happened.


and think i should just mention that i'm so glad ronald susilo triumphed in last night's match, but that despite all the congratulatory messages coming from the relavant associations now, perhaps we should also recall that when he did very badly recently, no one, not a single soul came to welcome him home. if he comes back with a medal and they all hail him, i'll be thinking about that.

anat lect

had a most awful lecture today. first anat lecture ever, on upper limb and prof tay plunged right in with all the latin and greek. the whole class was so freaked out from the lecture that after lunch, we all went to the library to read up. the m2s were like, what?! third day of lecture and you're here already? even the m3-5s seemed vaguely astonished, but i guess they were too tired from studying to show any emotion. so we hauled up mcminn's and snell up to the second floor, found a table and mugged. i think we were quite a sight, sitting there muttering to ourselves and feeling all over our shoulder and forearm. ulna, ulna, ulna. but i guess anat can be fun, since we'll know like almost everything that's in the body. so i'll hang in there prof.


and i didn't go for tennis 'cause there were no girls playing. considering my level of fitness and tennis ability, it was a no-no.


long live medical school.

intro to anat

urgh. the receptor and signal notes are taking ages to download. it seems to be stuck at 34%, i wonder why.


tomorrow we start on anat. prof raj gave a hilarious intro to the subject today. gawd, that guy's the stand up comic of the medicine faculty or something. every time he talks, he leaves the class in stitches. he showed us a video of the mortuary, the anat hall and museum. our anat tutorial groups are up, i'm under prof ling, and for this semester or so my prac session will end at one. woopee.


there's going to be a m1 welcome tea tomorrow afternoon, which means we have to stay behind even though our lessons end at twelve. -groan- on the bright side, my og will take the chance to play a bit o' tennis. so that's something to look forward to.


and the notes are still stuck somewhere on the internet.

first day

an eventful-yet-uneventful start to medical school today, as we sat through several presentations on the faculty, the programme, the research projects and the mbbs-phd "through-train" programme. then we left stranded because the schedule said we'd end at one, but they left us at eleven, so santiano had a lunch outing. thank goodness for orientation. holland v as usual, with the one thirty-nine swenson's ice-cream as desert. then it was back to school for first aid lectures, which put me to sleep in the middle. blame it on my adjusting body-clock.


after that, visited hc's room at pgp which is damn nice and homely! god, i feel so jealous. argh.


first day of lectures tmrw, cytology. how much of a cell must i know?!