Sunday, February 10, 2008

I wish someone had told me at the beginning of M5 to start mugging very hard

Hi all, here's my usual once-in-a-month post. I'd really like to be posting on a more regular basis (come to think of it, I seem to post on my other journal a lot more often than this one haha) but exams are nearing and there's not much to blog about really. Grumbling about how I'm stressed and my studying is in shambles would make for a pretty boring and annoying read.

First off, happy CNY to everyone! This has been a rather sedate CNY for me, and I'm glad for the long weekend to catch up on some studying. For some strange reason there have been no invitations for my parents to go to any relative's place this year, unlike previous years when someone will invite everyone over, so we are staying at home mostly, and we can't really go out shopping when half the stores are probably not open and finding food is a problem in itself. Speaking of food, I had the good fortune of waking up on the first day of CNY with a horrible sore throat, which I blame on all the hotplate-fried meat I had the night before during our reunion dinner (my parents bought this small steamboat-hotplate thingey so we had steamboat and hotplate-fried stuff for dinner), and also that one pineapple tart I ate. Sigh. No yummy CNY goodies for me these few days, which makes me rather sad. I miss the pineapple tarts the most. Even now I'm nursing a blocked nose (the mucus turned greenish this morning) and the sore throat is no better. Not much of a cough though. I just hope it doesn't get any worse; I can live with URTI symptoms, but not a fever.

AyeH surgery has ended, and frankly it was quite a bit better than I expected, having heard all those nightmarish stories from the previous batch. I think we really have to thank them for their feedback and suggestions which made our own posting a lot more bearable and exam-friendly. While bedside teaching was limited by the lack of patients (we really had a lot of problems even finding one patient to clerk for our test because the patient-student ratio (considering all the surgical teams) was probably 1.5 to 1, and it doesn't help that a lot of them speak tamil or malay only. Needless to say short cases were difficult to find aside from the hernias and skin lumps that we found in the day ward. Aside from those problems the teaching was really quite good, covering all the major surgical topics (I don't think I actually learnt very much about oesophageal cancer until this posting; why didn't we cover it in TeeTeeEssH surg?). The schedule was really packed with all the lectures to squeeze into effectively three weeks of posting (because of the CNY break) while having to go back to NUS very frequently for revision lectures and other stuff. I can't imagine why some people would say that we don't get enough lectures and tutorials (haha won't launch into a bitchpost here).

Of course I can't forget to mention the most wonderful thing of our posting, and that was all the teaching we got from Mr K.M., whose brilliance cannot be described in mere words. Perhaps another AyeH surgeon said it best when he asked us "So, what planet do you think [K.M.] is from? Why is he so good? Is he human?" His way of succinctly providing an amazingly comprehensive and yet easily understandable overview of every topic he teaches us on is just ambrosia to the medical student (you can't blame us for loving tutors that make mugging facts so much easier). You just can't get enough of him haha.

All in all I guess it was an enjoyable posting, barring the occasional hiccups and histrionics.


There's not much for me to talk about regarding my leisurely activities now, because they've basically dwindled to a mere fraction of my usual.

There are so many many good movies opening around this period which makes it really annoying for me because I have to resist watching every single one of them (a short list of things I want to watch now: Sweeney Todd, The Assasination of Jesse James, Away From Her, The Kite Runner, and there's Juno and No Country for Old Men opening this week, and Guillermo del Toro's The Orphanage next week). ARGH. I gave in and watched Atonement two weeks ago, and found it quite enjoyable - loved the British accents, couldn't understand why people love Keira Knightley (she walks in such a gangly inelegant manner urgh), loved the young Briony played by Saoirse Ronan).

I caught Cold Mountain on television last night (albeit a heavily censored version, sigh) for the first time, and actually managed to watch it to the end (which is surprising because movies on television usually don't manage to keep me watching to the end because of the irritating commercial breaks). It was really quite a good watch, and I don't regret spending three hours in front of the television for it. The ending was so so sad though, sigh. And now I'm tempted to get my hands on the book, which I can't because I don't have the time for it. Another thing to be relegated to the post-exam period. I seem to be accumulating a long list of "Things To Indulge In After This Awful Exam Is Over".

Season 4 of Lost started its run in the United States last week, and I'm already addicted after watching the first two episodes. I know most people think Lost is too messed up to understand and all, and I'm probably one of the very few mad fans who've followed it all the way, but the storyline is actually quite good and captivating, and it does seem like it's getting somewhere. And I'd really hate not knowing the ending after so long, so that's one of the reasons I'm still following it.

Which brings me to the topic of the Writer's Guild strike in the U.S., which caused many serials to stop halfway, Heroes included. It seems like after so long, the end may be in sight, which is something to be happy about.

Nothing much else to say now, so I'll leave you. 29 days, 20 hours, 17 minutes to the first paper, people! (Haha I should like get a widget or something on my desktop/blog to do the countdown, though admittedly that would be really freaky.) If I don't post until then, good luck to us all for the last stretch.

Avaris / 2/10/2008 12:43:00 PM

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