Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Boring post to break the boring silence
Hey. Surprise. Yeah, I haven't updated in a while. A long while. And dear me I seem to be in a short sentence mood today, which can be rather irritating, so bear with me. Why haven't I updated regularly? Is there ever a good convincing reason? I'm just overwhelmingly lazy. Another point that keeps bugging me is the fact that when your mind is totally preoccupied with issues that affect you very profoundly and which you unfortunately are unable to post publicly, then a blogpost on any other subject seems totally insignificant and full of silly fluff. Which is part of the reason why I have not been able to find the need to blog, for more than two weeks.
Two weeks and a half in TTSH surgery, and my feelings about surgery are still mixed. It's not too bad on a whole, and I can say I'm enjoying myself, but somehow I can't imagine doing this for life. As compared to medicine, when I have to get myself out of bed at 5.45 in the morning and arrive at TTSH before 7.30 for ward rounds every single day, it seems much less an enjoyable experience, and more an obligation. It feels like work. Maybe it's just the hectic nature of the rounds, where it seems there is hardly any place for us medical students except as people who help draw the curtains, and act as obstacles in the already-crowded ward. I felt I knew the patients a lot more in medicine; in surgery everyone's running so fast between patients I can't even remember the previous patient's name. What I like: the variety, I guess. Clinics and OT are interesting experiences, though after seeing the umpteenth laparoscopic cholecystectomy one's excitement at watching an operation tends to get considerably dampened.
The other good thing that's happened is the TTSH administration breaking us up into small groups of 3, which is a pretty comfortable group to work with. I keep reflecting that if I ever had to work with someone exactly like myself I'd probably strangulate the guy. I have tonnes of annoying habits, like being unable to keep my mouth shut when someone else is taking a history (yes, I know how aggravating that is, and I am now consciously trying very hard not to say anything), and whining a lot about tired legs and giddiness, and being rather passive, always waiting for other people to do things. Yup, I hate myself. Otherwise we work pretty well in a group of 3, and it's more variety than a group of 2, and less bulky than a group of 4, so everything goes pretty smoothly.
I've done two night duties so far, the latest one being last night, and which was a lot better than the first one. The predominant reason why the first night call was so bad was all thanks to a new HO who is the grumpiest female HO I've ever had the poor fortune to meet and try to be nice to, because in return I got semi-screamed at (to go see another patient i.e. leave her alone). People reading this, please try to remember to be nice to medical students in the future. Really. The HO that I didn't like in NUH is currently in the team I'm attached to (you can imagine my horror when I found out) but he's really not that bad a person, except he's kind of an efficiency demon and doesn't look kindly on people diminishing his speed of action. Night duties are mostly good for giving us the opportunity to clerk newly-admitted patients, because TTSH schedules so many lectures and tutorials and added stuff that we hardly have the time to clerk anyone. And once in a while you get to see an operation, like we did yesterday.
One of the weird things we've discovered in surgery is that girls take a lot less time to change into the OT bajus than we do, because the girl in our group of three always has to wait quite a long time before the two of us guys finish changing and come out of the changing room. We've tried to figure out where the time deficit comes from, but those attempts have been generally unsuccessful. I wonder if it's the same for all other people, but I was thinking maybe guys just need longer to sort out the assorted clothes items. Who knows. Or maybe the two of us are just more vain. Ahem.
That's about all for now, I guess. Pretty boring, I know. Then again perhaps I see everything as being uninteresting because surgery is just intrinsically less fascinating for me as compared to medicine. This is a horrible thing because I can forsee Orthopaedics as being totally dreadfully boring as well.
Avaris / 9/07/2005 09:29:00 PM
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