It's Over - The Relief

had a good day's out shopping, walking around orchard road with dad and friends. bought a dress for someone's wedding tomorrow, so i'm feeling pretty relaxed now. will be the mc for the solemnisation, and i hope i don't mess it up!

caught the winter's tale last night. in a way i think it was madness on my part, since it was the last day of mbbs and there i was trying to concentrate and follow a -shakespeare- play. i hadn't read the play before so i spent the first half of act one getting used to the accents and old english, but was later able to sit back and enjoy the performance.

it's an interesting story, essentially about a king who throws his pregnant queen into jail because he suspects she is having an affair and conspiring to take his life. misfortune befalls him after that, as foretold by an oracle, and the king, and the life that he knew, is shattered. years later, he is reunited with the ones that he lost, and the play ends happily. yes, that's the long and short of it, and yes, like all other shakespeare plays, it lasted three hours.

this version was brought in by the singapore reporatory theatre (well done srt!!) and stars ethan hawke and is directed by sam mendes. it's part of "the bridge project" which aims to unite talents on both sides of the atlantic, so it was a bit strange hearing two different accents on stage. act one was more subdued, more "british", but the scenes in act two were festooned with balloons (red, white, blue no less!) and top hats (a la abraham lincoln) and furniture straight out of a western movie. to add to my confusion, they had these minimalist sets that seemed more appropriate for a contemporary play and hence did not help in defining the setting. i did, however, love the idea of having the musicians on stage as part of the cala fare and having those ominous cowbells chime to signal yet another dramatic scene.

what i really -could not- understand was why the audience laughed at some points. i think singaporeans have a weird sense of humour, and i'm not sure where they get it from. the best example i can think of is this scene where the statue of the dead queen comes to life (dont' ask me why!) and the king embraces her. the king has regretted his past actions every day of his life, his "sorrow was too sore laid on, which sixteen winters cannot blow away, so many summers dry", and it is a tender moment as the queen reaches out for his embrace and he feels, for the first time, forgiveness and absolution for his deeds. he exclaims, "o, she's warm!" - and that's when the audience laughed.

for the life of me, i saw nothing funny in that scene, so why the laughter? my poor mbbs bombed out brain can't remember the other examples, but this alone is enough to illustrate my point! wanted to throttle those who laughed. perhaps they were expecting a jack neo type of humour (to be read as "so warm ah?"), where such exclamations are meant to highlight a ridiculous situation or bring out the ignorance of a character without spending much time on character development. whatever the case, it kinda spoilt my enjoyment of the play.

after all my rambling, i must say that i still prefer "the seagull", which was the other srt coup two years ago. the language was easier to understand, the setting less...contradictory, and featuring a cast that appeared more at ease with each other. but i must applaud srt for bringing such fantastic productions to singapore - nothing like learning from the best, yes?

It's Over - The Rant

a short post just to mark the end of the mbbs. am relieved beyond words. there's much more i want to blog about, but i'm just too tired. all i want to say is, these three weeks must have been some of the most exhausting and tiring times of my (student) life. nothing compares to it. at all. and along the way, it revealed a lot about myself, and about others, both good and bad, and honestly it has changed the way i see things and how i view others. the demands placed on me by the exams and by others really was a wake-up call. it wasn't at all pleasant, so i'm not grateful for it.

maybe i'm just pms-ing, but at the end of it, i knew i had no choice but to redraw the boundaries.

The End Is Near

very near in fact - just less than a week away.

surgery clinicals were much better than expected - chronic limb ischemia with typical history and well primed patient. shorts were all right too. examiners were pretty nice, and didn't really push. managed to reach management for most, so i take it as a good sign.

after the two weeks of theory horror, i'm glad my surgery experience ended on a high(er) note. was pretty depressed before that, and stressed, because i had two days to pick up the pieces and prepare for saturday. and even though i was complaining before that about being on the first day, i realise now that it has its advantages. the rest of the class was positively trembling after reading our accounts, but we were spared that by going first. plus i got the weekend off, and managed to have a nice dinner at chomp chomp, talking about absolutely non-medical things with a good friend. it felt good haha. not only that, i got pretty excited when my caregroup leader started talking to me about moving on to the young adult ministry, and signing up for genrev camp in september. like, finally!

for now, it's back to the books for medicine. can't wait. plus i'm watching ethan hawke on sunday. woohoo! that's some incentive for me to mug mug mug.

till next time.

Desperado

you know how when we in primary school and all the "model compositions" used to describe a person pinching himself to wake himself from a bad dream?

i wished i could do that now. i think i speak for my batch when i say it has been the worse two weeks of exams ever, with more carnage to come. misfortune does not come in threes, it comes in sixes. every exam day, we all picked ourselves up while nursing the wounds from the previous day, and marched towards the inevitable outcome.

here's a summary of the written papers:

surgery essays - two on trauma, including one special discussion on trauma in a pregnant patient, one whole question on the entire obstetrics, and one on pid. yes, a surgery paper with NO surgery question.

surgery osse - high level o&g instruments (fetal scalp monitoring and urodynamic transducer anyone?) and a few weird questions.

surgery mcqs - torn between two lovers and feeling like a fool. after cancelling out 3 options, many of us were left with 2 choices, and it was a toss of the coin to decide which option to shade. most of time, we chose wrong.

medicine essays - absence seizures! kawasaki's! dengues! af! NINE marks on the management of absence seizures! go figure.

medicine mcqs - as someone said, tossing a coin had never been more useful in an exam before. i don't think i could have described it any better.

medicine meqs - the jews in the concentration camps were told that they were going for baths - and proceeded to step into the gas chambers. history repeated itself today when we were told at the start "it'd be an easy paper - we don't want to kill you", and then we clicked on the scenarios. mumbler has only seen one status in her life - today she was expected to manage one complicated by anaphylaxis. mumbler has always believed in ruling out life threatening conditions whenever a patient presents - today she was expected to reach a diagnosis after ONE investigation. mumbler has always been taught the standard work up for a man with cough and loss of weight was down the sputum-chest x ray path - today she was introduced to using a BMA to nail a diagnosis of haematogenous TB.

i just think we signed up for the wrong paper. maybe we mistakenly chose "mrcp/mrcs" instead of "mbbs", methinks.

there's no time to waste. surgery clinicals on saturday. the conveyor belt is bringing us closer to the tiger's mouth.

Soon

the big m starts this week, so mumbler will be taking a break from blogging for a while. then, hopefully, she can move on to a new blog to chronicle her life as a doctor.

for now, it's just cramming for surgery. needless to say, mumbler's miserable. mugging doesn't do very much good to your soul, and reading the seniors' accounts about how they can ask about anything that's humanly possible about the subject just makes your heart sink even lower. at least she had an awesome first service today, and she came out more energised than before. pastor prince is indeed a blessing to many.

so all the best to the medical class of 2009. may we ALL pass the first time round (and save the dean's office and profs the trouble of organising another one in september).

The Joy Of Mugging

or not. this has got to be one of the most painful periods of my life - the same if not worse than a levels. all that cramming is really turning me into a zombie, this sleep-walking machine that crunches data continuously. it wouldn't have been so bad if the info i studied didn't leak so rapidly, but no sooner do i complete a topic that i forget stuff that i studied previously! argh.

the a level results will be released tomorrow, and each year as i see the joyous rafflesians wave their perfect scores on the news, i recall the day in 2004 when -i- did the same...and put myself on this path, and for which i am now currently mugging for with my life. seems like the cycle will not end anytime soon.

and just when i need like uplifting songs (like josh groban's big hit) i stumble upon a beautiful but very sad song - dreaming with a broken heart, by john mayer. the version i'm listening to is by a college a capella group from the states, and the arrangement is just fabulous. i can't help but listen to it again and again. not that i've got a broken heart - probably quite the opposite actually, but there's something hypnotising about the tune. here's the original.

Revisiting The Past

not quite, but for some strange reason i went on youtube and searched for "raffles chorale", and out came recordings from their exploits from last year. listening to the polyphonic melodies is oddly comforting and familiar. there's something about the chords, the latin, the -agreement- of the four seemingly different but yet harmonious melodies that brings about a certain peace in my heart. or maybe it reminds me of the hours and hours that i spent in school, remaining standing until the conductor was satisfied with the tuning, pitching, phrasing and whatnots. it was important, you see, for us to perfect the anticipation, the climax, the endings. it wasn't enough just to end a note - it was an art to stop singing but yet leave the last strains of it hanging in the air. it was beauty at its richest but most intangible.

i'm not sure why i'm in such a melancholic and nostalgic mood, and listening to choral music isn't helping at all haha. on top of that, i'm convinced that i have dvt developing from the long hours of sitting at my desk and pouring over my notes. what's sad is that nothing much is going in anymore because i seem to have reached saturation point. bleagh.

and so i leave you with the raffles chorale performing "o magnum mysterium", directed by mr toh ban sheng. this must be the best version i've heard so far, and i recommend listening to it with your eyes closed. just enjoy the music.



oh, i just found out, seems that since we first performed "mate saule" in 2003 for syf, other schools have decided it's pretty trendy to do it. this would be in keeping with the prevailing attitude of the local school choir scene. well, i think our version is still the best. heh. BUT, nothing beats hearing the latvian radio choir singing it. so if by any chance there are jc choir folks reading this blog whose choirs are intending to perform it, please don't use any local choir as your inspiration, use this. listen and be blown away.