Friday, August 17, 2007

A stroke of good luck (and some hard work)

The end of the second week of EssEyePea. Well, technically not quite, since there's still the weekend, and I'm supposed to cover Sunday if the post-take list is large and my help is needed. Today's our take day and at the end of the day we only had one new patient (on our previous take day we had four by 5pm), which our consultant thanked the rain for, so with luck we'll have very few new patients tomorrow and even less on Sunday when we discharge some old patients tomorrow. That means I don't have to do to hospital on Sunday, lucky me. :P

In a way my horoscope prediction has been quite accurate; I am really quite exhausted this week, though not because I go home late every day. I should probably consider myself quite lucky I'm in Neuro and that somehow my team is having a rather uneventful time lately, because we ended up having not much to do by the end of the week. Which is also thanks to some enthusiastic pre-discharging on our part which means that any patient only requires a little effort to formally discharge.

Most of my exhaustion comes from my second call, which I yet again converted from passive to active - it's really a lot more useful that way because I get to do quite a bit more procedures (my first cath!) and also clerk new cases, and really I see no point in going home at 11 to end up sleeping at near 1am only to have to wake up at 5.30am to drag myself to hospital, so I might as well stay in and find a nice comfy couch (in our ward 74 MO room) to sleep on. On post-call day one of my registrars and one MO was also post-call, my fellow intern was on MC, and my HO was on leave, thus I decided to stick around in case the remaining MO needed any help, and only went home at 5pm. Extremely zonked out, I was, and crashed into slumberland at 9pm that night. I still think it's worth it, though, because luckily enough I was pretty successful in most of my procedures on call, setting several plugs and taking cultures as well as doing one cath. It definitely felt a lot better than my first call where I failed so many procedures I ended up feeling rather useless.

EssEyePea is really turning out to be extremely fun, but I guess I can say that because I'm rather relaxed and slack in Neuro; probably won't be as enthusiastic if I had to stick around until 8pm every day heh. Today was a perfect day: the weather was wonderfully cool with the overcast sky and on-and-off showers, and of course we had very little work since we had only one new patient through the day. I even went around doing bloods for our team's patients without being asked by the nurses, and I was successful for all of them, which made me happy haha. Did more assiduous pre-discharging, especially for this patient with a particularly complicated clinical progress (somehow I have this perverted glee in comprehensively laying out complicated histories in nice organised points lol). And because we were so free, our MO gave us an impromptu tutorial which was really quite useful in terms of learning how to sound smooth while presenting a case - something I really need to learn because I keep saying unnecessary things that make my presentation very cumbersome. After a quick run-through of the outstanding issues by the Reg we went home at 5pm. Possibly the best day of the posting so far.

Oh, and we attended this HO/MO teaching today about stroke management which was very useful, given by one of our department registrars. He also showed us this highly interesting video at the end of the lecture which had high entertainment value (if only all lectures could have such cool media additions), so I'm putting it up here for those who haven't seen it.



The song is quite catchy; we should have something like this in Singapore so that people can know what stroke is and do something about it promptly. Some patients only come in hours after they develop symptoms, like seriously.


Ending off with a small book meme stolen from grrliz (I get so many memes from her, I feel like a leech o_O):

Are you careful with the spines? Or do you crack your books open to make them lay flat?
I used to be very anal about my book spines so that I only open my books up to a maximum of 90 degrees to make sure the spines don't crack. But I have this bad habit of flipping my book face down to keep my place when I have to leave it for a while and get back to it later, so that often ends up cracking the spine especially if it's a heavy book. Now it isn't a real big deal to me whether the spines get cracked, though I still try not to damage them too much.

Do you use bookmarks? Or do you dog-ear the corners? If you do use bookmarks, do you use those fashionable metal ones? Or paper?
I've always been a fervent supporter of bookmarks because I hate dog-earing books. People who have seen my bookmark will know that it is a triangular pocket contraption that fits on the upper corner of the page I'm at, so it doesn't jut out of the book's border at all and thus doesn't get damaged like conventional bookmarks with parts sticking out of the book that get bent after the book tumbles around in your bag a bit.

Do you write in your books? Ever? If you do, do you make small marks, or write in as much blank space as you can find? Pen or pencil? Highlighter? Your name on the front page?
I never write in my fiction books, though it's a completely different story with textbooks - I've picked up the habit of highlighting liberally which does help a bit in the learning process.

Do you toss your books on the floor? Into book bags? Or do you treat them tenderly, with respect?
I'm quite tender with my books, but sometimes in the process of putting them in my bag (especially when I'm in a hurry) I don't realise that the bottom corner gets bent up resulting in a crease on the book cover, which gets me rather vexed. I don't really leave books lying on the floor unless I'll be back to read them in a few moments.

Do you ever lay your book face-down, to save your place?
Yes, unfortunately. See above.

Um--water? Do you bathe with your books? Hold them with wet hands? Read out in the rain? Anything of that sort?
This is such a crazy question, because I can't imagine people doing that. I sometimes hold books in wet hands especially if I'm carrying a book and have to stop by the toilet on my way to or from school, but only the cover and not the pages, and I wipe the water off as soon as I can.

Are your books lined up on a bookshelf? Or crammed in any which way? Stacked on the floor?
Bookshelf, though I'm rapidly running out of shelf space to cram my books into; my dad keeps nailing new shelves into the wall for me.

Do you make a distinction — as regards book care — between hardcovers and paperbacks?
Is there a difference? I guess I tend to wrap my paperbacks in plastic so they don't get bumped up so easily.

Avaris / 8/17/2007 08:50:00 PM

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