leaving soon...see ya guys soon. will try to upload pictures...=)

carrie is the new american idol. woo. i was somewhat hoping for it to be bo, though i've been rooting for carrie since day one. but bo will be ok, it's gonna be like ruben and clay, where both fill separate niches, and thus become big together. i mean, like, has anyone heard of diana degarmo lately? yeah, you geddit.


anyhow, just received a mail regarding ovarian cysts. it alleges that eating chicken wings is bad because they jab steroids to make the chickens grow faster and bigger, and these are absorbed into the body when we eat, and they cause woman to have ovarian cysts. any comments? think a lot of physio has flown out of my brain, so am i missing something here?


there're so many of these chain letters, and almost all of them about health. remember the one about taking paracetamol? and the one about eating the wax in you cup noodles? or drinking milk with antibiotics? i honestly wonder how much of this is true.


last thing, the next pULSE is going into pre-production. anyone who wants to contribute, or has an idea for the magazine, please tell us. just tag ok? thanks!

really should be sleeping now. just finished doing the changes to the excel sheet dr d wanted. found out today he'll be leaving the day after me, and coming back on the same day. great coincidence yeah?


went to see star wars today at cine with js and greg. fantastic show. if you like movies and you haven't seen it, why the hell not? it's got hayden christensen and cool cgi and fantastic fighting scenes. but if you are not a fan and are easily freaked out by gloom, then this ain't for you. this is by far one of the darkest movies i've ever seen. heck, i don't remember any recent movies as gloomy as this one. sure, there were light moments, but they didn't detract from the fact that anakin was already evil, and would become even more so at the end.


right from the start, mr lucas plunges us into the depths of war, before taking us back home to where padme reveals to anakin that she's pregnant. anakin is freaked out by nightmares of padme dying in childbirth, and seeks to find ways to ensure she lives. meanwhile he feels underused and not trusted by the jedi council/senate, and emperor palpatine knows this and also knows anakin's potential, therefore he decides to woo anakin to the dark side by promising him to teach him the way to save padme. as we all know, he succeeds, and anakin's final transformation takes place when he no longer can differentiate evil from good, and kills padme.


in this movie, we see a young man turn evil, but george lucas and hayden christensen did well in making us feel somewhat sorry for anakin. a man struggling to find his own identity("why am i not made a jedi master?"), trying to feel useful and trusted, on top of being a husband and father. and although christensen is a little wooden, he has this rawness and aura about him, like in the part where he puts on his hood and his eyes narrow with hatred and evil. raw emotion man.


oh well, i could go on and on. further reading is available here. enjoy.

just came back from a rather tiring but fulfilling day.


went for the public health screening in the morning. arrived rather early, so i helped to arrange the chairs and tables. was initially assigned to do the kids' quiz, but the registration obviously needed more manpower, especially since many of the old folks could hardly read, so i helped them with the questionaire. almose all could speak mandarin, and z- passed me a canto lady. stumbled through all the technical terms because i hardly use or hear them being spoken.


but it was interesting. what with the lady who wept because her husband is as good as dead (stroke, needs intubation, can't breathe on his own), the seventy-seven year old ex-british army guy who goes to mcritchie every morning, rain or shine, at five thirty in the morning to walk five kilometres, and the woman who was adopted and so has no idea at all about her family history and her risk factors. this woman in particular doesn't see the doctor at all, not even with (what i suspect to be) floaters and a skin condition on her leg. the woman who wept, on the other hand, asked me to let the pharmaceutical companies know that vegetarians aren't supposed to consume milk that has added vitamins or chemicals in it. she used to have osteoporosis (can you ever -fully- recover from that?!) and now she claims to be better because she became vegetarian, stopped taking milk, and does some moderate exercise. hmmm. food for thought. i listened to her for a long time, since it's the only chance i have to listen to her at leisure. prob won't get to do that once i start working, which, of course, is rather far away...

whew. it's been a whirlwind of a week, not really that tiring, but perhaps the few weeks of holiday before gave rise to immense inertia. let me recap the week for you.


pdcp. professional development and communication programme. essentially means that they teach you how to communicate on paper. lots of analysis of communication styles, tutorials which used modified psychological tests to determine the type of people we are, and finally, an open book exam, to see how much we have picked up in a three day psychology cum sociology course. ugh. the exam was crap, and everyone smoked i think. someone said the lt would be terribly smoky at the end of the paper. haha.


-but-, it was interesting nevertheless. about personality and socialization. very artsy and literature-ish. last time i wrote such a long essay was in sec two lit.


now i've got to deal with my urop stuff. i forgot that next monday is a public holiday, and that leaves me with four days to rush the survey forms, and i haven't even got my excel sheet up and running, and i leave in about a week's time. this is just great.

some goon who calls himself 'black prince' keeps messaging me to ask me how to study chinese. argh. anyway, went to see the doc at the mrt station at the insistence of my parents. turns out i have slight bronchitis, -again-, and so she gave me a bagful of drugs and charged me thirty four bucks. and may i add that the clinic's range of magazines is -boring- with a capital b, because they're ALL medicine related. in the half hour that i was waiting, i learnt that heparin for short term use, and warfarin is for long term, and that heparin is an aldosterone antagonist, so patients with renal disease and those on ACE-inhibitors should watch out. there are also at least five types of hepatitis virus, of which b and c can give rise to cirrhosis and liver cancer.


c'mon, i'm sure you agree a stint in the waiting room should not turn into a pharmaco/microb crash course?


so here it is, pharmaco 101:


amoxicillin: under antibacterial drugs>beta-lactam>peniciliin>ampicillin-like. their antibacterial action seems to reside in their ability to inhibit metabolic functions vital to bacterial cell wall synthesis and to activate enzymes that destroy the cell wall. thus, penicillins affect only actively multiplying bacteria.


cetirizine: the nonsedating antihistamines astemizole and cetirizine should not be given together with the macrolide antibiotics since they will block their metabolism. some of these drugs cause an arrhythmia (not loratadine and fexofenadine). finally, all but loratadine have a category C pregnancy risk.


those are the only two durgs i could find; she gave me three other types. -sigh-

i can't say i'm elated about getting the results that i got, but i'm grateful. grateful because anything could have happened.

hmmm. i realised that people might be mistaken about my post yesterday about being "immature" after i got an msn about it (to you know who you are : you just made me think about it). so, i'll rephrase it. "immature" because it's a mundane, run-of-the-mill reason why people want to be doctors. the sort you find in primary school essays ("i want to be a doctor so that i can help people"), but the truth is, as everyone knows, there's much more to it, and simply saying "i want to help people" is like...saying "i see dead people", isn't going to help anyone. so yeah.


it's time to change the layout. i'm moving into a new phase of medical school.