whew. first day of clinicals was, what they like to call, "whirlwind". it was rather peaceful at first, when we were greeted by a nice surg registrar, who went through the necessary housekeeping stuff then briefly talked about taking a history. the head of surg spoke to us for a while, then an ot nurse came to tell us how to scrub in for ot. was totally exhausted by the time we got to the end of the video. man, the way we gotta scrub our hands and hold the gown this way and that, then turn clockwise so that we don't dirty our "sterile" hands sounds like instructions on how to build a car.

my cg was assigned to the clinics today, so stood in a corner of a room, where we were grilled by the reg who thought we were third years doing clinics. realised i've forgotton most of my anatomy when he asked about the anatomy of the gallbladder. oops. but he was quite a good teacher, explaining to us certain details on reading an ultrasound. we had lunch, then wandered into the gs wards and convinced two very nice seniors to let us tag along. after that we were given an infectious disease talk.

it was during the pm session of clinics that we got to see some really interesting cases. one was this elderly lady who had a lump in her left breast for the past one year, but never told anyone. only recently did her daughter notice it and bring her to a doctor. the diagnosis was advanced breast ca, and later we watched as the reg did a biopsy of the lump. pretty sad, because her daughters who brought her in today didn't want her to know the diagnosis, and were fighting back tears so she wouldn't suspect anything. we also saw a case of fibroadenoma in a young woman, and other older women with cysts and breast ca. one of the few gs cases we saw was this old man from a nursing home who had a huge inguinal hernia. it was really quite impressive, and using our stethoscopes for the first time, we heard bowel sounds in a man's scrotum. our reg even attempted to reduce it, but it was too huge.

well, i must say it's been a fairly memorable first day, what with getting lost as a whole group trying to locate the conference room and all. am looking forward to more. heh.