med school mumblings...

Saturday, February 26, 2005

i woke up this morning to a huge straits times article on senior specialists leaving the public sector to set up a private practice. frankly, i don't know what to make of it, since i'm only in first year and i don't even own a stethoscope. but i was reminded of someone's comment made several days ago, that seventy percent of doctors eventually regret their career choice. granted, it was uttered by someone who isn't even in medicine at all, but, what am i supposed to make of all this? have we chosen the wrong path? but i guess we cross a bridge when we come to one, so i shall kiv this topic for now.


have finished reading intern blues, which is the true story of three pediatric interns in a major new york hospital. throughout their internship year, they recorded on tape snippets of their lives. interesting and an eye opener. what caught my attention however was a passage stating how women have to overcome stereotyping as doctors. since the nurses are women, some might not like to take orders from women doctors, and no one took the female intern in the book seriously though she was as good as any of the guys. guess what? i've experienced that too, twice in fact, people asking me when they see me studying anatomy on the train, going to be a nurse? and i've got to tell them, no, i'm doing me-di-cine.


dr yip brought us to see two heart failure cases for the last ics session on thursday. both had some sort of mechanical valve, and you know, it's a queer thing to listen to their hearts. instead of a strong dub-dub-dub (or lub-dup as the textbooks say) you hear dub-dub then a whir. one of the patients had a rather quick heart rate and that sounded amazing. oh well, right now, all the heart sounds are pretty much the same to me. everyone's telling us, you'll learn it in third year, so all the heart sounds i've heard so far are all mixed up. eeks.


and pULSE is out! get your free copy from the borrowing counter at the library! feedback and suggestions can be sent to medwelco[at]gmail.com. or, if you're too lazy, just tag a comment here. =)

Sunday, February 20, 2005

okaay, took the medical specialty aptitude test posted on mc's blog and here are the results:


1 pathology

2 endocrinology

3 allergy & immunology

4 gastroenterology

5 urology

6 general surgery

7 otolaryngology

8 orthopaedic surgery

9 colon & rectal surgery

10 emergency med


uro and gastro before gs?! oh my, and pathology! i'm sorry but i've always gotten the impression that patho was for people who end up being hep b positive, no thanks to a tutor's comments! and endocinology. hey guys, maybe i'll end up being the endocrine guy for our anat tut group.


and guess what? family practice is ranked 33 out of 36 for me, followed by psychiatry and peads. this is extraordinarily interesting, and js, perhaps you need not worry so much about us going into e med.

i didn't know that the rest of the university is having a mid-term break this week, until wz messaged me last night. -faints- this week is my last week of lessons. woo, my first year of medical school. going, going, gone.

Saturday, February 19, 2005

oh wow, the biochemistry department is organising the year-end review in the form of a game. they'll pit anat groups against each other for the top two prizes. hmm oh well, some motivation to do more biochem this weekend.


breaking news: endocrine is pronounced as en-do-CREEN and not en-do-CRYN. checked up the oxford college dictionary the other day when i was feeling bored.


and a bit of self-advertisement:

the inaugural edition of pULSE will be out next thursday. this is a newsletter for medical students, by medical students and covers a wide range of issues and more. best of all, it's free!! preclinical years can get it either at lt28/29 or the library (i think). clinical years...i'm not quite sure, but there're copies set aside for you guys. grab a copy, and do give us feedback!!


back to en-do-CREE-nology.

Thursday, February 17, 2005

i don't wanna blog about the recent yahoogroups topic, cuz i really have nothing to say about it. it's just so...bo liao. by remaining anonymous no one will ever know who you are, and no one can help you if you need any. and generalizing our batch and comparing us with the other batches is simply unfair and unjustified and will only bring more hatred and irritation on the part of the first years. so, let's quit it ok?


first pros are coming up real soon, so i guess this blog will be rather quiet for a while.

Monday, February 14, 2005

hurrah! prof goh has agreed to postpone our pdp sessions this week till after the first pros. perfect! it means we do not need to stay back till four twice this week, and that we will probably learn more from our last two sessions since it's after the exams. but we'll need to do it before the end of april cuz the year twos are having their e-med training or something. must be exciting huh, a very momentous time in our training, from stethoscope-disabled to stethoscope-enabled.


and for the first time ever, the med library was full. oh man, you wouldn't believe the number of people mugging away. came up with a theory that since it's valentine's day today, those singles must be burying themselves in the books in order to forget the fact that they're not attached. -grin- so us singles in my anat group had to go the science library, and i must say it's quite interesting there. different environment, more spacious, and more seats.


happy v-day everyone.

Sunday, February 13, 2005

how could i have forgotton?


last friday, this ent cancer surgeon who used to be a student of prof raj(who isn't?!) and raj senior came to give us a talk on the anatomy of the head and neck. since he's a cancer surgeon, he spends his time opening up necks and jaws to remove cancerous growths. and since he does so much damage in the process he has to reconstruct the jaw using bones from the forearm and leg. the pictures he showed us were awful, and it wasn't just terrible to look at. i just felt so sorry for the people who had to go through all these just so that they could live. the surgeries usually involve removal of the jaw, so in the photos all you see is a big, bulbous red mass where the lower jaw used to be. it's something you have to see for yourself; no amount of description and imagination can give you the right picture.


and it made me think as well. the surgeon could laugh it off, and he was very happy to show us the pictures, and i thought, so this is what being a surgeon does to a person isn't it? having to distance yourself from the gore and grotesqueness of your handiwork, so you joke about it. maybe that's why there're fewer women in surgery. being able to help is one thing, but having to make that first cut knowing that you'll be making a huge hole in a person's face is another.


fyi, those people he showed us did make good recoveries. using flesh and bone from the arm, he made them new necks and mandibles, and they can now function normally again.


and, i spent almost an hour printing those damn notes. can't they just standardize it to powerpoint so that i can print six slides to a page and not two?! and can somebody teach the lecturers how to resize picture files so that we don't get thirty one meg files to download?! i chalked up over seventy-three megs of downloads in one a half hours yesterday; i'm scared to see the next bill.

Saturday, February 12, 2005

i haven't been blogging for the past two weeks because there were so many things to blog, and so many other other things i couldn't blog about. it takes so much effort to put the stuff that has happened into a readable post. i did try, but it was too hard.


so here's a brief rundown on the stuff that has been happening:


first, my new year. everyone i meet going, whoa! meh-dee-sen ah? must give discount next time ok? i wonder how many of my compatriates experienced this. but i can't complain, cuz on chu er everyone came to my house for the first time, and everyone likes the kitchen. woohoo. and my income for this year is something i can't complain about either.


secondly, there's only two weeks left to school and i'm not in the mood to study. two weeks left!! unbelievable. my first year of med school is drawing to a close already. and did i mention i'm not in the mood? last friday before the forehead-mopping lecturer's lesson on temperature regulation, hweech suggested we go to holland v for a walk. so she, mary and i piled into fishie's car and set off. with four crazy girls in the car, of course we never made it. fishie missed the turn and we ended up in orchard road. to make it all worth the while, we went round to coronation plaza to pick up santhya who was ordering flowers for v-day. so much for an outing.


talking about outings, i went with fishie to orchard popular to buy some stuff for her friend. having only eaten a bao before the histo lecture, we were feeling hungry so we went over to taka for lunch. tried this omelette noodle thing that tasted quite nice, but was a little too salty. reeeenaaal. guess what happened next. fishie gave me a lift to potong pasir station thinking i could save the journey, and what did i do? i walked into the harbour front bound train and fell asleep. at dhoby ghaut i woke up and found out i was right back where i started. don't ask me, i've got no idea how the heck i got the wrong train.


thirdly, my dad bought the michael buble cd yesterday, and found out that i really like buble and gershwin. hmmm. the cd's ok, not outstandingly wonderful, but enough swing and jazz to keep you in the mood.


fourthly, i love ami. simon is getting nicer and sweeter, paula is holding her ground and randy has a bigger vocabulary. ryan seacrest's still the same easygoing guy but he no longer greets the people when they come out of the audition room. doesn't matter. it's good, clean fun every week, and it's music music music. what can be better?


and i just remembered i once declared that i would not dump my silly life into this blog. oh well.


ps. ooh spacefan, i'm really sorry! thanks for visiting my blog though, and you've got one loyal reader here. ^_^