Monday, April 09, 2007

And none but fools do wear it; cast it off

It's been a really long time since I last posted something, my apologies, as always. I'm going to backpost things that happened during the break so if you're interested I guess you could go through the past entries to read them. A bit late of me to do that now, I know, but better late than never, goes the cliched excuse.

I think I can say the break was a pretty good one for me as breaks go: I didn't fall sick, I didn't get all depressed and moody, I managed to finish a good amount of anime and series watching as well as book reading, went out a fair bit to interesting places, ate nice food, and in summary enjoyed myself quite well without feeling like I wasted any part of my break on things I didn't feel like doing, or end the break not having done things I really wanted to do. How I wish all breaks were like that. Things I didn't like about the break: primarily that I put on a considerable amount of visible weight in terms of abdominal fat, woe (I refuse to weigh myself). That's what happens when you eat and sleep and eat and sleep, slouch around all day, and also add two buffets to the dietary excess. Sigh. I find it totally strange that I keep agonising about my weight gain, but refuse to exercise. I'm probably the worst kind of person to persuade to adopt regular exercise.


Even though I'm not as moody this break I still spent some time brooding over certain issues. Somehow I couldn't help feeling a strange sense of envy reading other people's blogs or watching people's nicks change on MSN and see them having fun of their own during the break, in their own happy worlds. I just couldn't explain why I kept feeling this way, and it makes one feel rather wretched. Then, some things I read got me to come to the conclusion that I was just being stupid, that it was ridiculous for me to be envious of others when I have nothing to be envious about. Was I not enjoying myself during the break? I was, most certainly, doing the things I wanted to do, doing them mostly alone, granted, but still having a good time, and feeling content, in the process. So what if other people had their own fun that I wasn't a part of, wasn't I also enjoying happiness that other people weren't a part of?

Envy is a terrible thing, a toxic feeling that only makes you see the differences between others and yourself, but never the similarities. After coming to that realisation I finally began to cast aside the melancholy, to truly realise I had happiness in front of me but was giving it up in the unrealistic yearning of another's happiness, not knowing how fortunate I was, how content I could already be. Humans are a weird bunch, we are. And, amusingly, I was possessed a sudden bout of, shall we call it self-determinism, to shape this break into a time of my own joy instead of waiting for others to include me in theirs. That makes me sound bitter but I'm not, I guess I was just getting so tired of expecting things to fall from the sky; sometimes we just have to shake things a bit if we want them to happen, but also not shake them too hard or risk a backlash. Oops getting cryptic here.

I shall stop here and not go into more cryptic babble otherwise everyone will fall asleep.


Electives started today; I'm doing Internal Medicine at SGH (my favourite hospital) and I guess it was as good a first day as any. We got a bit of a surprise in the morning when we met our tutor and he told us we didn't have to follow ward rounds. Mornings kind of feel rather empty without ward rounds, and though most people feel they don't learn much from ward rounds I find that there are always the odd pearls that pop up while looking at every patient in the ward. Perhaps not the best investment of time and energy for the yield one gets, but I kind of like just following the doctors around and watching what they do - it gives me kind of a feel of how everything works and how physicians think. Anyway it turns out our tutor just doesn't think we would learn much today because he was rushing through rounds to make it to morning clinics; he suggested we join on Thursdays and Fridays when he doesn't have clinics.

There was this overwhelming feeling that it had really been a very long time since either of us had done any adult medicine, and I had totally forgotten most of my physical examination techniques and how to take a history, so we retreated to the student's lounge to read up on those things in preparation for the afternoon tutorial. In the end I just read briefly the examination steps and lazed around talking to other people in the lounge. We tried going to clerk a patient in the wards but finding him asleep decided to go for lunch instead. We clerked him in the end, just before tutorial, and our tutor also wanted to use him as a short case for us so we proceeded to do the physical examination. Infective endocarditis, something I've not really seen before. I think my medicine posting at ann-you-h was so woefully inadequate when it comes to so many things, sigh. Thank goodness for SGH teaching.

Oh by the way, look what I saw on the way to school in the morning:



I'd like to think of it as a good sign for the weeks ahead heh. 4 more weeks of fun medicine, hopefully it doesn't get too boring.

Avaris / 4/09/2007 09:41:00 PM

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