Saturday, January 13, 2007

A little breather of a post that is pretty boring

Hello again, haven't blogged in a long time as usual, but I guess that's not a big surprise to anyone.

2 weeks of O&G posting have passed (and already it feels like an eternity) and I think it's possibly the most stressful posting I have ever had in my medical school life, and the posting in which I've done the most amount of reading divided by time. The first week or two of a new posting is never easy; you have to grapple with the loads of new information and specific diseases they teach you during the lectures, and also have to figure out a way to get a good comprehensive history by asking questions you have never thought of asking before. Add that to having to study for MCQ mini-tests every other day and your supervising tutor tell you matter-of-factly that he expects the 2 mandatory writeups to be handed in at the end of week 2 and week 3 while most other people have to hand theirs in at the end of week 3 and week 5, and what you get is stress. Haha. But I stand here alive at the end of the horror that was the past week (because we had a ward tutorial with "The Boss" on Friday, more about that later) and it never look too awful on retrospect, though when you are in the midst of living it the pain is undescribable and you just want it to end. This is probably the reason why many people who have finished O&G tell me that it is "quite fun". Ahem.

Anyway tutorial with "The Boss" was quite funny on retrospect because we were all so panicky preparing for it and trying to clerk every gynae patient in the wards and fearing that we would get scolded during the tutorial, but when he came he simply asked the HO for a patient and did a supervised clerking tutorial without any scoldings. Haha. A bit of a waste of our preparative efforts, but it was also a good thing considering some of us clerked our cases off the case files because the patients were either sleeping or unwilling to speak to us. And it was a useful tutorial because he gave us a clearer idea of how to take a gynae history, just that it came a little late at the end of the second week. Rather amusing to note was how the air in the ward seemed to congeal (yes, it's a lousy cliche) when he walked in for the tutorial, and everyone became instantly more tense. What amazing reiatsu, lol.

It's quite amazing how my time spent at the computer has undergone a definite drop this past week, and how I actually sit down at my table and study after coming home every day (a relative rarity unless exams are coming) so my mom was quite surprised. I am trying to adopt the approach that I should grasp a large proportion of what I am supposed to know in these first 4 weeks so the next 4 weeks in KK will be more relaxed and focussed on revision and consolidation of the existing knowledge. Sounds good, doesn't it? Well I hope it works out as well as it sounds too.


Had wanted to post something last week about the new year and my hopes and stuff, but we started painting my room on New Year's Day and it dragged on to the day after that so I wasn't able to use my computer those two days, and after O&G started there was even less time, what with me going on call on Thursday (a so-so call where I saw one delivery and felt useless standing around making lame attempts at encouragement) and being subsequently zonked on Friday, yadayada. Excuses, haha. I guess there's not much point in posting something about what I thought about 2006 and what I hope for 2007. Suffice it to say I don't think I've started 2007 on a particularly good footing. I just hope that the rest of the year will be better than its first two weeks, but a lot depends on my own attitude towards what I want to achieve with my time I guess.

I managed to watch Death Note 2: The Last Name before school started. It was kind of like an impulse thing - I flipped open the newspaper, looked at the movies page and thought, Hey, why don't I go and watch DN2 today? and off I went. Watched it on a Sunday at Toa Payoh, so I paid $8.50 for the ticket but I thought it was completely worth the ticket price, with all the amazing twists and suspense that lasted for 2.5 hours before it ended spectacularly. Such a good movie! Hurhur. Anyway I found out why Light's dad looks so familiar, it's because he's the Chairman Kaga who appears on Iron Chef and theatrically takes a bite of an orange pepper (I think it's orange at least) at the beginning of each episode and looks damn comical doing that lol. I still can't shake off the image of him as Chairman Kaga every time I see him.


Just a complete swerve off the previous train of thought, into something more pensive. (I almost typed pensieve, drats) I think one of the more profound lessons I have learnt from being in medicine so far has to be that I should never take shortcuts in life. I guess it's something that comes with my personality, or being too "smart", but I often have the tendency to plot out a path that I want to take in order to get things done in the fastest way possible, and then go about doing it in this so-called efficient manner. But the one thing you learn about life as you go about living it is that however well you plan, there will always be things that go wrong, or things that happen when you don't expect them to, and then you have to change your plans. I found that when such changes occur I'm often tempted to do risky things just to save time and effort, so-called shortcuts, and thus make the situation as beneficial for myself as possible. As you can very well expect this is where problems come in, and I think I've been burnt quite a few times by this risky behaviour already; thankfully they are minor incidents so I really have to learn a lesson from them and do things in a proper and safe manner so as not to make bigger mistakes. This, I guess, is especially important in medicine where people's lives are at stake, and I am rather thankful that I've learnt this lesson before I started working. Honesty really is the best policy, and sometimes spending a bit more time to do things the right way can save you a lot of trouble in the future. Haha sounds incredibly complicated, I know, but I can't find a good way to say it.


Now, back to studying.

Avaris / 1/13/2007 10:42:00 PM

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