med school mumblings...

Thursday, December 29, 2005

nearly a year ago i did the medical specialties test. found it again on angry doc so decided to do it again. here are my top five:

1 radiology
2 pathology
3 neurology
4 occupational med
5 pulmonology

last year it was:

1 pathology
2 endocrinology
3 allergy & immunology
4 gastroenterology
5 urology

very odd. i seem destined to become those lady patho profs who can crack jokes about anything morbid. hmmm.

anyway, microbiology and the related drugs are driving me nutty. i woke up this morning and the first thing i thought of was "aminoglycosides!" how exciting.


















Tuesday, December 27, 2005

just back from yet another "shopping" excursion. i say "shopping" because it was meant to be an outing to puchase useful things for myself (like clothes) but i've only come back with someone else's present. i mean, yes i'm happy to have gotten those, but it isn't the first time i've gone to town thinking i'll come home with fantastic shoes, beautiful skirts and funky accessories, only to return empty handed. hmmm.

caught the premiere of grey's anatomy. it feels like a show that will grow on me. the medical bit is only a convenient jumping off point for the stories, but it is the stories that really engaged me. the intern who's got big shoes to fill, the one who screwed up on his big break, and the one who wants to have it all. aren't we all a bit of each? it's got potential, so it stays on my tv list for now.

Saturday, December 24, 2005

merry christmas to one and all. and did you know that harry potter is taking away business from emergency rooms in the uk?

Thursday, December 22, 2005

now that i've been tagged...

1) i don't like coffee, ya know, those thick black ones. it all began in primary two, when our teacher told a classmate to bring a whole bag of coffee powder, and she dropped it and spilled coffee all around our desks, so for an entire day, i breathed in coffee smells. that sounds like heaven for many of you out there i know, but for me that day, it made me nauseous, and from then on, i've disliked coffee. i can only tahan the starbucks concoctions, but i suppose this will change when i hit clinicals/sip/ho year.

2) i watch soccer. or rather, watched. supports bayern munich and die Nationalmannschaft. would crawl out of bed at 3.25am during jc days to catch the champions league action.

3) (this is getting hard) i, uh, like neatness, but my bedroom is on the contrary. study desk, computer table, stools, and bed are littered with lots of stuff.

4) i'm an only child.

5) i used to live in the east.

there, i'm done. now i want willz, yf, pofun, hc and mc to do it. if you guys are reading my blog, do it!

caught my first episode of house on tuesday. hugh laurie is side-splittingly funny as the oh-so-cynical senior doc. btw, grey's anatomy hits our tellys next monday at eleven, right after project runway on channel five. there's sandra oh in it, and i wanna know why there's all that hype about her. heh. isn't it great we've got all these doctor shows?

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

had an anat group outing yesterday at east coast park. grabbed lunch at the hawker centre, which has been renovated (that's how long since i've been there), then rented a bike each at a nearby bicycle rental shop. rather expensive (five bucks per hour) and the bike wasn't that great (made my butt hurt like hell) but it was the nearest shop and we didn't want to walk all the way to the better shop. we went all the way to fort road and found the path closed. the only way across was to push our bikes up and onto an overhead bridge, so we decided to turn around and head towards changi coast road. about half an hour later, we stopped at the airport perimeter fence to ooh and ahh over the planes which were taking off before heading back. i forsee such outings to be rare in the not-distant-future, which is a real pity.

*added* - just found out from a friend who attended the sunday bp concert that the audience cheered when abuden came on. argh. now i know, go for the afternoon budak concerts! saturday night audiences expect to maintain decorum, ie they're -so- the wrong audience for me to watch bp with. eeks.

Sunday, December 18, 2005

last night's concert was fantastic! more or less worth the thirty dollars, but i think last year's show was more worth the while because the audience was really into it. last night's audience was muted, and whenever someone cracked a joke on stage, there would be laughter, but not the whole-hearted laughter of last year. missy j was saying that the woman next to her seemed displeased that we were laughing and giggling at every little thing they said. aww c'mon man, it's budak pantai! you're supposed to roll on the floor laughing, which was what last year's audience desperately restrained themselves from doing. oh well. anyway, the concert was as expected, zany jokes, small digs at the local politics, multi-lingual song fest as well as crazy lyrics. i only wished that joseph, kah keh and especially danny boy, uhm, danny, spoke more. -sigh- what a group of men. hilarious, creative, and great at singing. oh! and we got their autographs too! never thought i would say this, but yes, i'll treasure my cattle are lowing cd very very very much. heh.

and i got a new phone. my old one was a panasonic, and, i'm not sure about their newer phones, but mine had terrible graphics and colours. only the shape of the phone was nice. woke up yesterday morning and saw that singtel was selling the sony ericsson for zero dollars, so immediately went down to compasspoint to get it. someone's christmas came early.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

ok it's finally up. pre-sen-ting, the new tag board!!

seems like the whole world is going for budak, it's gonna be like some mass outing of sorts. i can't wait.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

haven't been in the mood lately for blogging. over the past few days i typed out several paragraphs each day and then abandoned them because i didn't have the heart to press "publish". anyways, the shoutbox does not seem to be working at all, so perhaps tagboard.com is still the reigning king of all boards for now. therefore i'll restore my tagboard. soon.

our class had a mini christmas concert yesterday, complete with a holiday movie. missy j sang a duet, a few guys danced to the chicken little song and someone's song was performed. it really felt like, ya know, in primary school and the like where we have fun and games on the last day of school. it was also the last dance class for the year, and the teacher celebrated by giving us the hardest of steps to execute, and turned me instantly into a bumbling baby elephant.

so...the hols start in a few days, christmas is just around the corner, and the mango sale is here again. 'tis the season to be jolly!

Thursday, December 08, 2005

removed my tagboard cuz the darn tagboard.com isn't so reliable anymore. i'll look for some other alternative. sorry guys.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

i'm sitting at my compy because my hair's still wet and i don't like sleeping with damp hair. did my final edits to the pbl presentation, and i hope it'll be ok. one thing about pbl, it forces you to learn this little bit of a multi-faceted topic, and you've got tutors who ask you questions and it's so difficult for me to answer because 1) i've never seen a real case before 2) i can't memorize all these bits of info with no context at all. there're some people who can i know, but i'm just not the sort who are able to do that!

it's late, and it's a long day tomorrow...

Sunday, December 04, 2005

two days ago, a convicted drug trafficker was hanged in this country. as it always happens with such "barbaric acts", the western media descended upon our tiny island, broadcasting emotive scenes of a mother weeping and resigned to her son's fate, and the numerous vigils held in the condemned man's adopted country. a well-known opposition party leader (introduced as a lawmaker) was given the honour of an interview with an american news channel, and proceeded to spew forth comments intended to contradict every single statement made by the government, and even claimed that we happy islanders are aware only of what the government said and nothing else.

is the death penalty barbaric? i honestly have no idea, but i do know that it's very odd that a country can weep and pray and hold vigils and have minutes of silences for a man who had enough dope to destroy the lives of twenty four thousand people and their families. are they saying it's all right to supply your countrymen with heroin? talk to any smoker and he can tell you how hard it is to quit. drug addicts sell their bodies and their souls to feed the habit, and you can find them slumped on the streets with respri rates as low was four/min (no kidding) and you're saying that's a lifestyle worth defending? to think he would probably sell the heroin to the country who took him in when his country of birth was unable to give him the life he wanted. talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

the media isn't helping at all, what with the cover up of his brother's previous and numerous past convictions and interviewing experts who predict that people are going to boycott our goods etc. but at least they are foreigners. what i heard on the news was nothing short of comical. i mean, sure of course we're entitled to our own views and in any case, who said everyone on this tiny island agrees with capital punishment? but going out and talking to the foreign media who like to lap up such comments is kinda unnecessary, isn't it?

oh well, another of my humble opnions. on a lighter note, i saw chicken little last night. it's a funny show really, with lots of potential, but with pixar out, disney is obviously struggling to put up a decent animated movie. the alien/war of the worlds part is so tacky that you wonder what happened to the great disney legacy. zach braff was a good choice for the lead, but having to repeat the show's motto of "today is a new day" several times was too much for me and by the end of the movie, i felt sick hearing it. there were weak attempts at satire, for instance the puritan turkey who's the mayor, as well as the parody on hollywood's 'ability' to blow things out of proportion and the casting of gorgoues actors to play simple folk. there were all these snatches of brilliance that were never fully developed, which is a pity, because the disney of my childhood was that of beauty and the beast and the little mermaid.

Friday, December 02, 2005

there seems to be this group of people who go round to blogs and leave sarcastic comments about doctors or medical students. mr dm has kena-ed one recently, and i've visited other blogs several months ago which got similar comments. typically, this sad folks who've nothing better to do are fond of labeling med students as a naive and bimbotic lot and criticize doctors for not "following the textbooks". such statements either make you want to laugh or cry, don't they?

i shall state here for a fact that there will always be the naive and bimbotic in any profession, though i hope that med has fewer of such people. studying medicine doesn't "make" you smarter or more mature automatically, however it makes you more aware of human suffering and disease. the drawback of course would be that because, as meer mortals, we are unable to cope with such emotional suffering and hence become desensitized, as all relatives, friends and the local papers like to remind you.

and how about not following the textbook? who, i ask, follows any textbook down to the letter?! you've these people who read up "medical" books and end up trying to prove to their physicians that five years of medical school can be summarized in a few thick (ie less than a thousand pages) books. scary but true. heh.

all that's above are just some of my personal opinions, which sometimes change over time. but i was truly amazed by some of the stuff brought up on these commenting pages. maybe, -i- am the naive one.

anyhoo, i haven't been able to collect my shoes because the studio's closed in the afternoon. i've called and called and went down personally yesterday but no one was there. grr. my shoes!!