Wednesday, July 22, 2009

A Small Update

Thought I might write a bit more, since some time has passed. I got my stethoscope, but my books haven't arrived yet. It came with soft ear-tips, a back-up pair of soft ear-tips, a pair of hard ear-tips (haven't used them, and hopefully never will), a name tag, and two paediatric attachments - the bell and diaphragm. I quite liked the smaller diaphragm, and am yet to see why a larger diaphragm is more useful than the smaller one - the adult-sized diaphragm is not changeable though, probably because of my engraving. Speaking of which, I thought the engraving was done well, quite happy with it :)
One thing the Medshop description fails to include of the C&R Trikoph, is that the rims are non-chill. I was pretty worried about this actually, since every stethoscope except this one had "non-chill rims" in its description, but yep, rest assured.
I'm yet to have any other stethoscopes to compare the steth directly with, so I don't think I'm quite qualified to make a recommendation for this based on acoustics. From what I can hear, the acoustics seem pretty good; nice differentiation between parts of the sound, and it seems quite loud. I'll comment about this once I get another yardstick to compare it with. Also, if you ever come around to purchasing your first stethoscope (like I was), don't worry if the ends of the steth seem to put a lot of pressure on your ears, and even if it hurts to use it at first. After about an hour (cumulative) of usage, my ears seem to be getting used to it, and it's not really painful now, but merely slightly uncomfortable (which I hope will subside very soon as well).

I had my first abdomen physical examination for ICM this week, on a patient who could barely speak English (thankfully, our tutor spoke whatever language he was able to speak), which hindered communication somewhat. He was really nice though, very compliant and happy to sit through whatever I was doing. Other than that, nothing really remarkable occurred this week... except for today, when 2(!) lectures were suddenly cancelled. That was a bit of an eyebrow-raiser. Oh, and only one more week till UMATo9! The tension is palpable (get it? get it? naww yeh k that was lame) Signing out,

No comments:

Post a Comment