Sunday, June 01, 2008

僕らの青　キャンバス

Both days off this weekend, and boy, the feeling is good. Can sleep in late (though I still wake up by 9am and find myself unable to sleep any longer) and slack around at home doing nothing. I'm quite the workaholic when it comes to working (but probably not as much of one as some other people la, really :P) but I enjoy the breaks too; one can't help but feel a little burnt out after working on end for weeks without a break, not to mention with calls.

Met up with K and S yesterday, at Central (the most popular dining destination of the moment) and we had Marutama Ramen for dinner. I actually secretly wanted to try Wakashachiya but I'm the annoying kind of person who will always say "Oh, I'm okay with anything, you decide" when I really have something in mind already. But it's not that I'm lying also, because I really don't mind eating anything else. Heh. Yeah, I ought to be stoned. But Marutama turned out to be really great; I don't know why but the ramen actually tasted better than the first time I visited the store. I was worried that the quality might have gone downhill with time so I was really pleasantly surprised by the fantastic ramen, and even more so the ajitsuki tamago which was the highlight of the meal. Maybe it was because I had low expectations, or that I was famished, but I slurped up the ramen in delight. Hurhur. Yummy. I almost wanted to ask for an additional serving of noodles and one more tamago, but decided to keep the gut space for dessert.

Dessert was at, no surprise, Haato over at Liang Court. It's becoming quite a habitual haunt of mine, and also becoming quite the habit is standing in front of the counter agonising over what flavours to get. The headache is always between choosing flavours I've tried before and really liked, and flavours which I haven't tried. I fell into the "tried and tested and loved" hole yesterday and got Yuzu Sorbet (really really love the zesty pomelo bits in this) and Sweet Potato with Honey and Chestnut (I have two immense weaknesses when it comes to sweet food - sweet potato, and red bean paste). Got the ice cream with a cone this time instead of the usual cup, but the guy who served me was hopeless at heaping the ice-cream onto the cone, and it looked ghastly - I sort of regretted getting the cone after that. And of course the cone is absolutely no good to eat since it feels like you're chewing on cardboard. The ice cream is heaven, lovely.

Ended up at TCC for drinks when the Meidi-Ya supermarket started closing (we sat there talking until 9.30 p.m.) and chatted away until midnight at which time we had to stop as I had to take a bus back and didn't want to miss the last one. It was really wonderful catching up with old friends that I haven't seen in so long - S at least more than a year, K since last July. Wish we could have had more time to talk.


Spent today catching up on drama and anime - finished the last few episodes of Honey and Clover and somehow got very teary for all 3 episodes. It was really nice, and there was a lot of bittersweetness in the endings of the various characters, how each of them liked someone but that someone liked someone else. The only happy ending was for Mayama I guess, since he ended up with Rika, but I'm also glad about the Nomiya and Yamada possibility - I'm in love with Kashiwabara Takashi now, by the way. Hee.

The Lost Season 4 finale was also broadcast in the U.S. just a few days ago, and boy was it another thrilling season finale worthy of Lost. Won't say much because of spoilers; but really I know too few people who still watch Lost, and for the rest that don't watch it, there's no point in writing too much about it also. Just can't wait until the next season, which will be in Jan 09. Sigh, long long long wait.

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My one month posting at Renal has ended, and I feel really reluctant to leave because of many reasons. There's still so much that I feel I've yet to learn from this posting, as work is always so busy and I hardly ever have the time to sit down and think about something or to ask someone senior a question that's been bugging me. The first two weeks of the posting were wasted just getting used to HO work before the mind can settle into thinking about renal problems, so there wasn't much time left to learn very much. I really feel like I want to do an MO posting in Renal, but still not too sure if I'll choose that for my first MO posting.

As always for me, leaving a posting is quite difficult because of the patients; I always worry unnecessarily about whether their continuing management will be taken care of, whether they'll have any problems with discharge summaries, etc. I stayed until quite late on Friday night to write up the summaries for the patients under my care and make notes in the case files about certain aspects of their management so these will be clear to whoever is taking over. I don't know but I just feel like it's only right to do this much for them since a lot of the time I think I don't do enough for my patients because certain problems just don't cross my mind until too late.

I'll really miss the people in Renal, but also looking forward to the next posting at Geriatrics. I actually quite like Geri; the only downside is that the Geri cubicles are in ward 63, that awful dungeon of a ward (I apologise to anyone who works in 63 and actually is angered at my insulting the ward in this manner, but it's really horrible and no one that's honest can say otherwise). I'm quite glad that Geri is my one month equivalent of a DIM posting, since Geri is really quite the good place to learn internal medicine (at least from what I learnt during my CGH Geri posting in M5) and some other DIM postings are quite rubbishy. Heh.

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I think I need some serious financial planning - have been spending waaay too much money after the paycheck came in last week; I think I've already spent nearly half of it already o_O; Yes, don't ask, I don't even really know where it all went to, except that I spent a few hundred quid on shoes and clothes, it being the Great Singapore Sale, with tonnes of irresistable offers all around, and my wardrobe screaming for some new additions. Woe. And it's another 24 days until the next paycheck. Must scrimp and save until then, I guess.

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Just some silly observations of mine on hospital life in general:
- There's no greater joy during a call than to go and clerk a new case only to find it's already been clerked by MO8/9 (the MOs stationed in the A&E to clerk the lodgers there, the numbers of whom I've heard hit 50 last week, scary).

- Or to go and set a plug only to have the nurse tell you she's set it. Yesss.

- You know when you spend a lot of time in a swimming pool and after you come out of it, you feel like you're bobbing in water the rest of the day? After my call my index fingers kept having this weird bobbing sensation like I was pressing on imaginary veins. -__-;

- I gave a very slow bolus of phenytoin loading dose the other day, over 20 minutes. It was one of the more painful things I've done in my life because I had to keep preventing myself from going too fast. And I still think I gave it too fast. The drug conc over time chart must have looked like a series of hills instead of a straight line. This was during my call. For my own ward patient (i.e. not under the coverage of my call area). Which means I was actually quite free during that call, which I was. Haha. HO1 call some more.

- I have a bad mouth. Every time I say I'm quite free, bad things happen. So I've learnt to keep my mouth shut. And to find things to keep myself busy.

- Rude nurses that call me and say "Hello, HO1 ah, can you come and..." Like hello, I have a name! I wonder if this is how BTS MO feels, everytime we call him/her and say "Hi BTS MO". But we really don't know the name of the BTS MO!

- Mispronounciations of my name. I don't even need to say too much about it because it's totally imaginable. But what really gets my gall are nurses who misspell my name in their reports. Like, I totally understand if you can't pronounce it. But my name is printed there on your on-call list, so please don't spell it as "Andrew". Thank you very much.

- Family members who demand you give them an update when you're on call, and you've never seen the patient in your life. Err, I'm not the best person to update you on these issues, I tell them, and they say, but you're a doctor aren't you? You know more than us! They are completely missing the point.


I think I've way exceeded the limit of what is humanly readable, so I shall end here. Heh. Have fun, folks.

Avaris / 6/01/2008 09:38:00 PM

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