Guys, I’m moving house! I’m moving my blog to blogspot, so that you guys can comment easily! The warped me didn’t think that some people don’t have friendster accounts; which explains why the comments section have been kind of quiet over here. Now that I’ve moved, there’ s no more excuse!
Jellio, thanks for the tips!
So jemputlah beramai-ramai ke insane student’s new blog!
Eunice, my cousin, is back from the UK. Great excuse to be all girly and bimboish and girltalk-erly again. We are planning to play with eyeshadow tomorrow. Oh yeah, I’ll do that in between STUDYING. So don’t worry.
I wrote this on a piece of scrap paper and stashed it in my laptop bag for times like this; because, you can take the computer from the blogger but you can’t take the blogger from the computer.
32 hours to your final exam, you know you’re close to breaking when:
i) You find that the carton of milk in the fridge has soured and coddled up, but you refuse to throw it away. You get a (not so)brilliant idea and start washing your hair with it. Because you read somewhere that milk is a moisturiser. Did I mention that the milk stinks bad time? It does. And the hair still stank after a good wash. Like baby vomit. Stress does bad things to your head.
ii) You start talking to yourself. Well, you do that all the time, but this time it’s much worse. You alternate between laughing out loud and scolding yourself for laughing out loud, and you start scolding yourself again; it’s a vicious cycle. Did I mention stress does bad things to your head? It does.
iii) You start being obsessive about washing everything. You start dumping all your clothes and bedsheet into the washing machine. You run the machine continuously and feel perversely satisfied after.
iv) Your heart beats at one million beats a minute and you start gasping for breath.
v) You blog on paper. On paper! Because you still use dial-up connection. Yes, you are so form the dark ages. And it takes a lot of precious-time-which-can-be-used-for-studying to set up the connection.
UM has dropped from the 89th position to the 169th position in the World Universities Ranking. Part of me feels sad, part of me says "That’s what you get for being so mighty proud and arrogant and boastful (UM ternobat antara 100 universiti terbaik di dunia!! on every damn lamp post)even though you’re only in the 89th position" and part of me feels secretly hopeful that the dynamics of things will start changing to make things better. But above all, I’d meekly say that I’m quite embarrassed, really. Cause you see, it is my university after all. I’ll get an MBBS(UM) at the end of the day. But I think a lot of good can come out of this. If the people higher up there would take heed and stop giving excuses as to why we fell.
For one, politics must not mix with education, although this is rather inevitable. We have seen our tertiary institutions go further and further down the ladder mainly because of the whims and fancies of many top leaders who make unwise decisions and implement absurd policies. For once, please, please, for the sake of the future of our nation, use your brain before you act. Shut up and listen, for once. Stop being defensive. We’re all on the same side, if you’ve forgotten. If you wanna set sail, you need to face the storms. Stop altering and twisting policies to make things easy. That’s only a temporal measure. Stop lowering standards. If you set the bar high, we’ll work harder to reach it. Don’t underestimate us. It’ll destroy us. Make us sweat. Make us toil. There’s no secret - hard work is the key to success. Cliched but so so so so true. Applies to students and in this case, you decicion-making people up there too.
As one of my lecturers say "We owe it to our alumni to uphold the prestige of this institution". If nothing else.
I’m starting to think that nobody really cares about reading this blog that much anymore, and I have a hunch I’m right. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe nobody ever really cared. Ever. Maybe I was just fulfilling my own narcissistic desires and having hallucinations of grandiosity thinking that people flock to this blog 4 times a day like moths to fire. But. Whatever.
So.. CRP. Stands for Community Residency Programme. Frankly, I enjoyed it. Yes, I’m a weirdo. It gave me a homey kind of feeling, being in the exteriors and near the jungle, going into kampungs and talking with simple minded people. Well, simple most of the time. There was one heart stopping incident where a man wrapped in only a towel tried to get into our car of three girls when our guy friend went down to ask him directions. Luckily my quick thinking gal pal quickly locked the door, and that guy friend managed to get into the car minus man-in-towel. We were real frightened but it was funny afterwards when we talked about it. We had dinner almost every night at a restaurant in Alor Gajah, Malacca called Dimensi. It was the only Chinese restaurant in the vicinity, but it had great food. Vinegar pork in clay pot for RM7 - lovely. One real nice bonus from CRP - freebies. One bag of cookies, 2 dozen eggs, one bag of chicken and sausages. Yes, I’m a sucker for free stuff. So CRP was great, there was greater bonding with team mates as well. Comedy relief almost every night from one of my group mates. Made us laugh till our stomachs almost ruptured from too much air. And we got to make many sniggering comments about how useless some programmes were (like driving 20 minutes to see a freaking hole of sludge behind someone’s house and pretend to be interested in the mechanics of the hole by taking multiple pictures of it). Us girls, bitching without really bitching. Cool.
I left my room in Asrama Hospital Tengku Ampuan Rahimah for the last time today. It’s still kinda unbelievable that 11 months had passed since the first day I stepped foot there. I still remember thinking to myself," How am I gonna survive in this place for one year?!!" during my first posting. In my first few months there, I would be the first to speed off back to PJ in my Kancil once tutorial ends on Friday afternoon. I’d be literally running to my car, one weeks’ worth of laundry in tow! My lecturers would be so disappointed if they know I didn’t stay back to clerk patients during weekends. So don’t tell them.
I remember the tears I shed during my first and most gruelling posting, Paediatrics. Yes, I cried. Because I was a pampered and spoilt post second year medic softie. If you’ve been through second year like I did, which was, I would say, rather "relaxing", you’d understand. But I’m proud to say that I’m a little tougher now. Haha..After all the scoldings, the rejections, the please-speak-up-if-you-want-to-be-heard sessions, the blunders and countless making-a-fool-of-myself incidences, the inspiration from lecturers and Klang doctors, the inspiration from readings on the Internet, the discovery of student blogs which made me aware that things are not much different (maybe worse!) in medical schools elsewhere. Tough as it was, I’m really proud of my Paediatric Posting curricula and my Paediatric Professors who taught us for that 2 months. It is one of the most fulfilling postings I have had. We were made to work really hard and had to clerk patients day and night! The first tutor, Prof Hany, was a no-nonsense paeds haematologist who would not tolerate late comers. She herself would be in the hospital at 730am for a class that starts at 830! She does not tolerate "cincai" work and demands that we clerk all our patients thoroughly. You could see that she is commited to producing students who not only graduate, but graduate with high standards as expected from UM Faculty of Medicine. My second tutor was the uh, rather eccentric and famous Prof WS Lee, a paeds gastroentrologist, who everybody was really terrified of when he came for the first day. My goodness, we were stuttering and had our knees banging on each other on the first ward round! We had heard news of how he was a tyrant and very fierce lecturer from our seniors, and were expecting the worse. Surprise, surprise. He is an excellent teacher who can be friends with his students, and provided a lot of comic relief during rounds and discussions. He’s, like I said, a little eccentric, but overall a lot of fun and learning. I remember how he once lost a bet he and I made during rounds about fecal impaction and abdominal mass and he had to treat all 10 of us to drinks at the hospital canteen. We were sad when the posting ended, because we really enjoyed his teachings. And his funny intonations, like the way he exaggerates his NOoooo! when we give the wrong answer. So Paeds was intially a torture, but it ended with a bang. And chocolates, (Ferrero rocher nonetheless!!) from Prof Hany and Prof Lee, actually given to the group leader and best student but those generous fellas shared it with all of us. Thank goodness it wasn’t some cartoon stickers. Paeds, remember?
And then there was the first medical posting, which could have been better utilised, in retrospect. I wasn’t being very proactive in my learning, and probably missed a lot of learning opprtunities. One thing I learnt is, if you don’t ask, you won’t get. So ask and volunteer, beg even, although I didn’t, if you want to learn. And don’t be afraid of being scolded. After a few times, I got used to it. I don’t recall being scolded by any of the doctors. It’s usually the nurses, but that’s because we probably irritated them. Be humble, but not timid. Something I’m still learning. I don’t remember much of my first med posting, although I recall hearing my first diastolic murmur of aortic regurgitation. And my failed attempts at taking blood.
Surgery was very interesting. I remember helping to ventilate a patient in Accident and Emergency using the ambu bag and feeling rather proud for it, though it only involved me squeezing a bag of air at certain intervals. And it was also the first time I got to catheterize a bladder, although I was damn nervous at that time. I got to see a man’s scalp literally torn off his skull like a flap and blood oozing out and pieces of glass retrieved from his scalp. And I remember one making-a-fool-of-myself moment when I went to feel the pulse of a dead patient and wondering why no one seems to give a damn although the vital signs machine was sounding like crazy. "Hey guys, come resuscitate!!" My friend and I were giving each other puzzled looks until a nurse told us that they just want to confirm that the patient is actually really dead. Funny thing was, her relative was beside her reading but he never looked up once when we tried repeatedly to feel the patient’s pulse. And I remember seeing my first radical mastectomy, which was kinda shocking seeing the whole breast removed en bloc, with the nipple nicely attached. And oh, the surgeons. They are one of a kind. Interesting characters. I had Dr April as my second tutor and she was lovely. She is one lecturer who made sure you know what you’re doing and not just acting for showmanship. She corrected a lot of our wrong examination techniques and taught us a lot of practical stuff. She’s demanding, but not in a patronizing kind of way. She’s one that always emphasized that "We want you to be HOs that we can trust when you graduate" and "When you are a HO we trust what you write and it will affect the diagnosis and management". That kinda puts things into perspective and make you more responsible, eh? She is an exemplary role model, someone I want to be like when I grow up. And she’s kind of fashionable and cool too!
Next: CRP, Second medicine posting, Primary Care and OBGYN
There is no higher mission in this life than nursing God’s poor. In so doing a woman may not reach the ideals of her soul; she may fall far short of the ideals of her head, but she will go far to satiate those longings of the heart from which no woman can escape.
Sir William Osler
I know, I know. Go study. I say one thing and do another. What the heck. I’m already feeling very guilty. No, not really. Cause I’ll make this work-related. You hear that? I said it’s WORK-RELATED! So shut up, now.
Ok, now that I’ve made the aggressive, kiasu, cynical, forever-anxious, patronizing little one sit in the corner, we can proceed.
So today I was feeling kind of lethargic and sleepy after an afternoon nap. I went to the OBGYN clinic, because I haven’t been there once in my whole posting. I’m not actually that enthusiastic anymore, what with the finals being so near and the panic attacks and being piled upon by the amount of material i need to cover and the sun shining so hot. I know, I’m a wimp. Unfortunately, there was no clinic today. So i was deliberating whether to go back to my room and continue sleeping, or to do something more academic. In the end i ended up in the computer lab. I need rehabilitation, I tells you. Cold turkey from Internet addiction. Soon, baby, soon.
Then the little one started making noise and I thought I better get my ass to the ward, even if for a while. Just so to shut ‘it’ up. And i was also thinking that all that effort, dressing up for an academic session, changing into formal clothes, tying my hair up, applying sunscreen, putting on socks, fighting the inertia, all that for nothing? So I got me ass to the ward. And I’m glad I did.
Because I learnt something. It’s always like that. I’d be so lazy and heavy hearted to go to the wards especially in the afternoons. There I said it. But always, almost always, I’d learn something new. Something that’ll just spark the fire once again. Ignite that interest.
I saw a lady with advanced cervical cancer today. She wasn’t actually my patient. Something about her being asleep in an almost 90 degree position caught my eye, and i just had to know why she’s in the hospital. So I looked through her notes and found out she was in for shortness of breath, vomiting, abdominal pain and giddiness. And she has defaulted radiotherapy for stage 2 cervical carcinoma.(So they do radiotherapy for CA Cervix, huh? I didn’t know that! In fact, I know near to nothing about Ca cervix, other than HPV 16,18;post-coital bleed bla bla bla;boring stuff…until I saw this patient. Those facts just jumps out at you when that happens. You itch to know more. You itch to search for information) Why people default treatment for cancer, i don’t know. Maybe they didn’t understand the seriousness of the disease. Maybe they couldn’t stand the side-effects. Maybe there was a breakdown in commnication with the doctors. But it’s really sad. Shouldn’t have happened. So anyway, her renal profile showed her urea and creatinine to be high. And there I was, blur medical student, wondering why she had renal failure. And pulmonary oedema. Until I found out inthe TEXTBOOK, nonetheless, that the most common cause of death for patients with advanced CA Cervix is URAEMIA due to ureteric obstruction. The cancer compresses the ureters, which are very near to the vagina, causing Acute Renal Failure. And renal failure causes fluid retention, leading to pulmonary oedema, and that’s how the lady presented. Fluid overload and uraemia. She’s been treated, hemodialysed and looked stable now, and I hope she’ll live a good life, whatever time she has. Cancer-it fascinates me, yet it’s our body’s greatest enemy.
So i learnt a lot today. Just from reading a case note and looking at a lady asleep.
So you see, Adeline Wong, it’s never a loss to fight the flesh.
I should really start making a concentrated effort to eat my elephant. That is, to tackle my revision. Finals coming up in three weeks. I’m having this unhealthy addiction to the Internet and blogs in particular, it’s eating up a lot of my time. But I just can’t help it. It’s bad, I know.
What’s to be done? I should lock my laptop up in a safe and throw the key into the lake in UM. But then again, I can’t lock up the university computer lab and throw the key into the said lake. So I would have to depend on good old self-discipline on this one.
This final exam is extremely important, because I need an undisputable pass to enable me to go for my elective. There’s a lot of material to cover, and I should be chipping away at the workload. I shouldn’t be here.
So goodbye, Chronicles. For now.
Mothers out there(though I doubt if any mother would read this), how does childbirth really feels like? Is it really THAT painful? I was in the labour ward earlier, and despite the seriousness of it all, I secretly found it kind of amusing, really. There was a lady who was screaming her lungs out "Tolong, tolong!AAAHHHH!!!!" as the nurse was trying to assist the delivery. She will scream, SCREAM, each time the nurse touches her uh, vagina. And I think all that screaming and loud verbal stuff became infectious and another lady in another cubicle starting screaming at the top of her lungs too. So we had two screaming ladies in the ward and it was great. A real boost for the nurses and doctors, something to wake them up from postprandial lethargy.
I know it’s mean but it’s really kind of scary when you see the ladies in labour. I have many times caught myself thinking if the ladies in labour, especially the primigravidas(1st childbirth), have some sort of psychiatric disorder, what with their wide-eyed look and contorted facial expressions and incomprehensible sounds coming from their mouths. The first time I was in the labour room, I was looking at the CTG by the bed when the mother reached her hands out. I sorta flinched a little and almost ran away. I was afraid she was going to grab me and sink her nails into my skin and not let go for the next hour, like in tv. Thank goodness I forced myself to stay put and patted her hand, albeit a little stiffly. I still get that fear sometimes, although much much less. And oh, the look that they give you when they’re in pain. It’s the "DO SOMETHING!" look that sends lightnings of erm.."do something" into you. Being a helpless medical student whose job description is To Observe, you either feel sorry for them, berate yourself for not being able to help, or you just give them a weak smile, which they can’t see anyway because of the face mask.
All I can say is, forgive me ladies. For laughing at you. My payback shall be severe, I’m sure.
