Sunday, September 02, 2007

I can hear the bells, well don't you hear 'em chime

EssEyePea ended yesterday, and suddenly I feel rather bereft, a strange hollowness aching in my heart that has been filled to the brim these past four weeks with elation, passion, accomplishment, idealism, optimism, excitement, fear, frustration, cynicism, confusion, and so many other emotions that I can barely begin to name.

I guess you can probably guess without any difficulty that I belong to that group of people in our batch that absolutely love the posting. I've really enjoyed almost every moment of it, even with all the downtimes and periods of disillusionment and frustration, and some of the dark politics of working life thrown into the mix. I guess I've almost always been a wide-eyed idealistic sap-minded fool when it comes to medicine, especially the medical part of it (somehow surgery makes me angry and annoyed and hateful, mainly because of the many surgeons who are plain horrid, and because of my plain disinterest in the surgical field), and while I thought four weeks of EssEyePea would thoroughly disabuse me of these unrealistic soppy notions, but somehow it didn't quite happen that way. For some strange reason I found work as a mini-HO strangely fulfilling, enriching, and fun, and I felt more content with everything than I have been in a long time. It felt like a kind of affirmation that I had chosen right, that this was where I wanted to be, more than anything.

Haha, I shall not continue to evoke feelings of disbelief, cynicism and nausea in my unconvinced readers. When I told my MO that I felt quite happy doing the work I was doing, he said he should let me talk to all the full-of-nonsense family members of patients that he had to deal with on a near-daily patients (and truly, some patients and/or their family can be extremely dense and rather aggressive no matter how hard you try to let them know you mean well and are trying to do your best). I think it's quite true that as an SIP student I have been largely shielded from so many annoying things in hospital life that cause even the most dedicated of our profession to become jaded - lying patients; aggressive family; malingerers; nurses who call you for the most tiny matters, and call you again, and again; and very importantly the responsibility that's placed on your shoulders when you are a full-fledged doctor, that another person's life lies in your hands and everything you do or not do can change that life. Whenever I meet a situation in which I'm out of my depth, at least I can still declaim my student status and get someone more senior to take responsibility, but what about when I'm a real doctor? Thinking about that sobers me up a fair bit and dulls that sheen of effervescence. SIP is only the tip of the iceberg, and whether that tip can be counted representative of the life that awaits us is a point of contention - I would say the answer is no.

I guess I've also been extremely lucky to have landed in a nice department of my favourite hospital, and with a great team of doctors that are friendly and don't expect unreasonable things from us. Not to mention the Neurology ward nurses do most of the blood-taking so we are rarely ever asked to go around taking bloods from patients after morning rounds, a luxury that I do enjoy very much because it frees up time for the loads of changes we have to do - blue letters, discharge summaries, calling family members yada yada. I can't even begin to thank them for doing all that for us without complaints.

Procedures-wise I'm quite happy that I managed to do at least once (and succeed in the attempt) of each of all the main procedures we were supposed to. Most of these were done during my three calls (of which the two passive calls I converted to active and found some place in the hospital to snooze in - yes I'm really quite madly fanatic about medicine), and after practising and getting the hang of doing them, and also developing a more average success rate compared to the intial dismal results, it's true that procedures then start to feel more boring and chore-like.

One of the things I liked most about SIP was having the feeling of ownership with regard to patients - I always start pre-rounding on the B2 side and see the same patients every day from the time they are admitted to their discharge, and a bunch of new patients after every take day. After a while I get rather attached to them when I know their histories, and say good morning to them every day, and ask them how they're doing. It really feels quite nice to be involved in the management of patients, as compared to the medical student way of popping in, getting a history or doing an examination, and going off to look for another patient, most likely never coming back to find out what more was done for this patient, and whether or not he or she improved, whether or not he or she was discharged well, what was done from admission to discharge. After a while it becomes easy to remember the names of all the patients, and their lists of medical problems, and their reason for admission, because these are people that you have to think about all the time. Sometimes watching the progress of my patients seems like a process of living vicariously through them, because each progress is its own special story that is shared between the patient and the team of doctors, written by both parties. Even the most simple of stories is interesting because no one else will have the same story. What pains me most about the end of the SIP is that I won't get to see these patients any more, and I won't know their full stories.

Anyway, all in all I think my EssEyePea was really fantastic, I loved it so much I wouldn't mind if I was asked to do another week or two of it (I'm going to get stoned, but I definitely won't mention this in my feedback - I still think 4 weeks is just nice for EssEyePea), and I think I'm going to wake up at 5.30am tomorrow morning and feel incredibly lost because I no longer have to go to EssJeeH.



Anyway, enough waxing lyrical about EssEyePea, I shall turn to gushing about something else.

Went to watch Hairspray today with G, and boy was it fabulous. In the span of two weeks (two alternate Sundays) I've watched two musical extravaganzas, 881 and Hairspray, and wholly enjoyed both of them. I guess I just have a weak spot for anything of the musical variety.

Plot-wise Hairspray is rather flimsy, since the music is what forms the bulk of the show and the plot is only there to facilitate the singing heh. The message of racial integration and that people who are different from the mainstream should be accepted, such that everyone can live harmoniously together, is almost cheesy to my cynical self, but typical of feel-good musicals like this. Actually it's much like High School Musical, just a few hundred times better in terms of sheer enjoyment, song quality and acting; if High School Musical had come out after this I would call HSM a cheap imitation, though still enjoyable. The songs were just plain goosebump-inducing greatness, all really uplifting and catchy they seem to make all of one's woes vapourise, and I couldn't help but be infected by many a song to start moving involuntarily to the rhythm.

The cast is also spectacular, what can I say - Nikki Blonsky as Tracy Turnblad is bubbly and superbly cast with a most amazing singing voice that blows you away, especially in the opening song "Good Morning Baltimore"; John Travolta as Edna Turnblad is so in-character I kept forgetting he was John Travolta; Michelle Pfeiffer is deliciously bitchy as the nasty Velma Von Tussle; Queen Latifah as Motormouth Maybelle simply the grand diva; James Marsden and Zac Efron as Corny Collins and Linc Larkin are suave and darn hot, Zac Efron especially.

I simply must get my hands on the soundtrack, the songs are so many times better than HSM's. Hairspray is definitely one of the must-watch movies of this year for anyone that loves musicals, I'd give it 5 stars heh.


Later on we passed by Haato at Wheelock Place and I was reminded of the fact that I had been wanting to try Haato ice-cream for the longest time but somehow never remembered or never passed by; I was also in the mood for ice-cream with the hot weather. I got a cup with 2 scoops - green tea with red bean, and chocolate hazelnut. The green tea one has a very thick matcha (the type of green tea that comes in powder form, not the tea leaf variety) fragrance, added to the creaminess of the ice-cream, and it's not too sweet, which makes it quite delightful, but the taste of the matcha gets a bit cloying after too much of the ice-cream. The chocolate hazelnut was much more divine, the not-too-intense chocolatey goodness accented by the light touch of hazelnut - it honestly felt like I was eating liquid Ferrero Rocher heh. Superb.

Avaris / 9/02/2007 11:47:00 PM

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