Friday, May 29, 2009

Surveys, Tiredness and Yummy.

Yeh, wow random blog title, heh.
First off I'm surprised this has lasted a month. Hoorah! I'm so happy I could hug you right...now :)
Mmmm kay first on the agenda was a survey...
We had an anonymous survey today for constructive criticism of a lecturer. I won't name him, but I thought he was just average. Problem was that I thought it was a survey about the PBL experience, since it was our last PBL for the Semester today. So I started the survey off *very* positively, then saw the name of our lecturer at the top of the survey (my friend nearby had to remind me too...), and after that I aligned my marks more towards what I would actually give the guy. Tried to give some constructive criticism though - get your lecture notes on time, be a bit less boring, try to encourage some discussion - but I thought it was a rather poor effort on my part. I had an excuse though, which leads me to the next situation:
Tiredness. I have no idea why I felt tired today - I slept a grand total of 10 hours yesterday, after promising myself I'd "just take a 15-minute power nap". Problem was that I took this "power nap" in my bed, and my bed felt so comfortable...so I just slept early. So you'd think I would be wide awake in the morning, and to an extent that was quite true. Until I had my first lecture. Metabolism.... zzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Woke up 10 minutes before the end of the lecture, and that set the mood for the rest of the day. Oh wells.
On a brighter note, I ate my first ever brownie today at our last PBL session of the Semester! And it was super delicious, haha. And I'll leave on that happy note whilst I start my intense cramming for my end-sems (only possible in Semester 1).

Friday, May 22, 2009

Work Balance, as our first semester in med draws to a close...

I tutor 3 (temporarily 4) students on the weekend, one-on-one, for a cumulative total of 7 (temporarily 9) hours per week. So far it's been working out perfectly, but as exams draw closer, I'm wondering whether I should cut down on my sessions, even if just for a week. Then I think, if I had more time-management skills, I shouldn't need to at all. Which gives me a challenge; to continue tutoring during the exam period.

Since it is Semester 1, Year 1, and my formative exam result was a pass (even if barely), I'm going to take up this challenge and see whether it would have any negative contributions to my exam performance and studying for it. I've already noticed that I finish Friday pretty drained, but I seem to rebound back on Saturday, in time for tutoring, in essence, from 10am - 6pm. Then I have a temporary student on Sunday afternoon, and I also have church, which means that both Saturday and Sunday's mornings and afternoons are occupied.

At the moment (Friday night), I'm very drained, and kind of fell asleep in the last lecture (Pathology of Diabetes), which means I'm feeling pessimistic about this challenge and whether I'll pull through. Even though I have a big aim (First in my course, I know, laughable) and bigger competitors (great thing about med: everyone's a nerd, so everytime you go anywhere in the med building, there's a big group studying), I have a feeling it won't be enough to pull me through this stuvac block. But who knows...

Not to mention, I haven't even met everyone in my course yet, and its nearly the end of Semester 1. Haha... the groups I haven't met yet are the ones I have not had much to deal with yet; Indian girls, and caucasian guys and girls. It's an improvement from high school though - I think I could name a few people who I had never spoken to, in all of the 6 years we had; mainly because I would not be in their classes and my group would be very, very far away from theirs (both geographically across the school, and in terms of common interests). So yes, indeed.

I also found it ironic that we're so nostalgic, at the median ages of 18. Many of our conversations drift to high school, although I know that's all we've really experienced. But yes, interesting. Currently I'm in a nostalgic mood myself - listening to 1 Litre of Tears' Main Theme song (which by the way, is a very moving Japanese drama series. Very, moving. I was bawling by 5th episode, 11 episodes in all.) which summons back all the memories of Year 12 - the series, in fact, has a very strong nostalgia element, and all this classical music really accompanies this mood well. So I'll leave on this note - our first ever semester in med is drawing to a close, and I will miss it :)

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

2nd Last Week of ICM for the Semester...

Today our ICM, and next week's ICM, was a review session. In essence, we didn't watch the videos of actors portraying medical students doing interviews, but instead went straight to the wards for some friendly non-assessable assessment of our History taking skills and bedside manner. We managed to fit three histories into one session, and I just so happened to be the last, which caught me unaware - nonetheless I did my history without any real fuss, but wasn't really thinking quite as optimally as I would have liked. Today was also special because:

1) We introduced our tutor, Dr Zelas (a middle-aged male surgeon) to Twilight via a patient who was reading New Moon (one of the novels in the Twilight series), and;
2) We spent a good fifteen minutes after the session planning what to get for Dr Zelas as a thank-you present for this semester's ICM; apparently we will be switching ICM tutors next semester(but not our group, yay), and may be thinking of including said novel in the present package. Hah! It would be amusing if he finds he quite likes Edward and Bella; perhaps he's an old-faashioned romantic, in which case he should take quite a liking to this novel aimed at the teenage female demographic! I have male friends who enjoyed the series; and I certainly enjoyed it (stayed up to 4am reading Twilight, and yes I'm quite straight) so the scenario of Dr Zelas sitting on a sofa reading Twilight until...twilight, might perhaps be not very farfetched at all, haha...

Apparently, we also switch PBL tutors this semester too. So we'll be looking to get something for our PBL tutor as well; although my absolutely shocking PBL assessment mark of 14/20 doesn't quite encourage me (though on second thoughts I was a bit quiet...) I will look forward to writing the cards. I get the impression that Dr Zelas has no clue what our names are, and that we might be quite forgotten in a few years time, but I hope the gifts might help jog his memory when we become colleagues, hah.

So it appears that each semester, we switch PBL and ICM tutors, have no idea in regards to switching PBL groups (although that may be quite possible), stay in our ICM groups, and stay at our chosen hospital (Blacktown, woo!) but also stay on the same day. It's unfortunate abotu switching PBL groups but I guess I look forward to working with other people and see what dynamics will appear in the new group :)

Friday, May 15, 2009

John Flynn Placement Program

I nearly failed the JFPP interview on Wednesday immediately, when I forgot to bring my proof of citizenship/permanent residence on the day; and not only that, but not realise that our med building had an almost hidden 4th floor which was were the JFPP interviews were held; so at 1:30pm (interview scheduled at 1:40pm) I was running around like a chicken without a head around our med building, trying to find the interview. So yes, not a good start at all.

Found the 4th floor (which can only be accessed either by lift or through a stairwell inside the 3rd floor's administrative staff room) at 1:35pm, thinking that I'm probably not going to get a spot now that I'm all flustered. There were 3 people who were at the actual interview, and one came out to invite me in (I immediately raised the issue of the missing documents, and he brushed it off and said I could bring it in tomorrow, which was rather nice, as that would've been an easy way to cull down the numbers...); it appeared that of those 3 people, one was the actual marker, one a previous/current JFPP scholar, and one a community contact, such as a rural/remote practicing GP, or the like.

The interview went alright, I spent 20 minutes which was a fairly long time (reports were an aaverage of 15min for an interview) for a JFPP interview. My odds were given to me straight uup - 15 candidates, 11 spots. Not a bad chance, I'd say; knowing me though, my chances are always much less than that. I tend to fail pretty hard at interviews for some reason, not sure why. Anyhow, I answered most questions, got stumped for one of them which I won't reveal, and so now I'm waiting for 4 weeks for ACRRM to process the interview results and see what the outcome is. So watch this space in 4 weeks, I guess.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Expectations and Deep Breathing

We received our Formative exam result back yesterday.
To recap, we didn't have mid-semester exams, unlike other courses at other universities. So to replace it, we had an exam that did not count - i.e. meant to be used as a measuring tool to see how large your knowledge base was.
I got back my exam results, and, on counting, I scored 54%. Which was a pass. It's about this stage that I see that there is no comparison with high school results; with the kind of work I was doing, I could easily expect 80% or more (I didn't do any revision for the exam, but did do continuous work during the mid-semester), but I'm wondering how to broach this result to my over-expecting parents. I can envision the scenario:
"Mum, dad, I passed my first medical exam!"
"How did you go?"
"Umm 54 percent. I beat heaps of people though..."
"What was the top mark?"
"Oh it was horrible. Really hard test. I think it was 65% or something"
"You must study harder. Your grade is not smart. You should have got much better."
"But it was a really hard test."
"Nothing is impossible. I told you those games are a distraction. Maybe you should stop tutoring as well."
"But........."
I was pretty content with my result, relative to our cohort, because marks are fairly meaningless when you don't have comparison results. Looking at the bigger picture though, this mark doesn't make me feel like I'd be a competent doctor in the future, and that really worries me. So study I shall, now. Or tomorrow. Maybe next week.

On another note, we had ICMs today, and this week we focused on respiratory problems, mainly coughing/shortness of breath. For ICM tutorials, we usually get a booklet for the specific tutorial on vUWS (virtual uws, or our online resources/lecture notes hub) to print out - however my group fell out of practice of printing those booklets due to lack of usage. Next week, however, we might change, since we never touched on respiratory symptoms before. I came to realise that most symptoms had many basic questions overlapping, such as when did it start, describe the symptom, and things that made it worse and/or better. Our patient today was a picture of many elderly people in the Greater Western Sydney region; a frail old lady living on a pension with barely any savings. We seem to encounter many smokers in Blacktown hospital (my allocated hospital for clinicals) and she was another one, who suffered from emphysema, most likely due to smoking but also a pre-existing tendency towards it. It was sad to see that although she stopped smoking more than a decade ago due to her parents suffering from the same problem she has now, her daughter hasn't. Whether that is a case of young people feeling invincible or that the addictive nature of smoking is such that it can defeat something as powerful as your mother suffering from emphysema, I'm not sure; but I do know that smoking is a massive plague on health resources, and especially in the GWS area, for some reason. At any rate, tomorrow I'll be facing another interview of a different sort - a John Flynn Placement Program (JFPP) interview, to be precise. So I'm off for the day, to just do a little bit of preparation for that and try to do some study.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Ah, no uni today...

This medicine degree, in terms of contact hours (i.e. hours spent at uni or hospital), is pretty easy-going, when I think about it. Contrary to popular belief, we have close to 1 and a half days off - Tuesday is my clinical day (1.5 hours, so that counts as half), and Thursday is my 'off' day. It's kind of pleasant to have all this time to manage yourself, although it presents a great danger in that I more-or-less don't fully utilise this time off. Although I love this self-directed style of learning, because I never really was the kind that did well with 'spoon-feeding' (I think that's a pretty derogatory name for rote-learning, but anyhow), the week always ends up with Thursday being used for half-playing and half-studying, whilst the rest of the week was mostly unremarkable in terms of productivity. From my fellow cohorts collective responses, it seems like this is the case with more than just a few people as well, so I wonder how our time could be best utilised...
So this week we're dealing with starvation (more specifically, a 40 day fast due to being caught in a blizzard 4000m above sea level in Nepal) and I've got a heck of a lot to do, hence I'll be off now.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Hospitals are not cheery places.

I keep hearing that ICM (Introduction to Clinical Medicine, or hospital visits) are the best part of *insert students name here*'s Medicine experience. While I think it certainly is necessary and is useful to build up communication and clinical skills (later on), I don't always agree that ICMs are the best part. Today was a rather shell-shocking day; an elderly man was gaunt and straining to exhale due to progressed emphysema, hard of hearing and generally in a poor state. In the next few minutes of our interview we were introduced to his life as a result of decades of smoking. It's not like we aren't aware of the dangers of smoking, or the possible consequences and risks; but more the fact that it confronted us here, right then and now when we were just expecting to practice our history-taking and interview skills. His condition was such that he could not work, mow the lawn, do most housework, and look after his wife; confined to sedentary activity and struggling with every breath, he remarked that he felt suicidal. When he said that, we were all stunned; 6 first year medical students meeting a man in whom hope did not exist and despair reigned. And this reminded me of what we were here to do, but also, it reminded me of what we couldn't do; when all we can do is really give painkillers and pretty much pray for a painless death. In PBLs and other ICM interviews we have encountered a few chronic diseases, and its nice to be a doctor and be able to make someone get better, but with specialities like Pallative Care I wonder how they get through every day intact. Our patient re-iterated "don't smoke" and its a fair warning, considering his personal testimony, and all I can think of is how he hopes to stop others from going through what he is right now. Whilst cases generally make me motivated to study harder (in light of an application for that knowledge later on), this one just hit me and hasn't had any positive effect so far, except for this reflection. Much food for thought.

Monday, May 4, 2009

Mid-Year Exams

So our mid-year exam timetables were released today.
And as of today, I have exactly 1 month and 5 days to both catch up on everything I've done previously, and keep up to date with the next 4 PBL cases, including this one. Looks like I've got to buckle up a bit and stop major procrastination.
I was actually fairly excited about exam timetables, because I felt pretty ok about my position in terms of lectures and PBL cases; but the fact that it is barely over a month away has really hammered into my mind right now, and it's kind of frightening. We haven't received our Formative Test results back yet, so I'm not sure how much I already know and thus how far the bridge is between simply keeping up, and starting to put in maximum effort from today. It's annoying that I know I will inevitably lose an hour or two PER DAY to gaming, or MSN, or facebook, or some random crap that isn't at all related to my future - but hopefully I'll still remain productive.
These medicine exams feel a little different to high school exams; I know that this forms my education towards a career, and most especially, towards dealing with patients, instead of a competitive Maths test or English speech, working towards a number. All the same, i think a little bit of healthy competition is strengthening me; I've found a really smart colleague (our PBL tutor called us this; colleagues. I was amused, as was everyone else) who is keeping on top of things, so my aim, childish as it is, is to do better than him. I know that if I do, I've kept on top of things; but even if I don't, I've done my best for the best cause I can possibly think of at this stage: my own life.

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Laziness

Even though most of the content in Medicine is really interesting, there are times, like today, where I can't seem to do any work. And it annoys me because I'm trying to read a textbook or something productive, but I don't concentrate because I'm not in the studying zone. Or a gaming zone. Or anything-at-all zone, really; it feels like a do-nothing-cause-I-can't-do-anything-else day. All the while it's paining me that I could be using this time to work towards something, anything.
*yawn*
I also tutor high school students in my subject of interest, Software (SDD), for HSC. To be frank, tutoring has nil impact on my study situation at the moment (which I think is ok compared to my HSC, but still dismal), and I tutor... 7 hours a week. So it seems like its more than doable to hold a job whilst studying Medicine.

I'd like to comment on Medicine's workload so far - and it's lived up to the expectations in terms of the amount of content covered, but also the relative ease of the content, versus some really brain-boggling stuff my friends are dealing with in Law, Computer Science and Engineering. The exception to this is probably the huge mechanisms for things like the Kreb's Cycle (google or wiki for the goodness of this 8-step cycle taking place in the mitochondria of a cell) and the biochemistry; and perhaps some pharmacology, but the rest is pretty easy to digest. It's also possible, at the moment, to only do 4-5 hours of week per week and still manage to get by, by simply using the time at university productively (I'm doing about an hour a day, which is pretty low methinks - aiming to obviously ramp it up a bit). I'm certain both the difficulty and quantity of Medicine would increase, mainly the latter. It's all just a matter of keeping up with the program though, and you're in no danger of having no time for a social life in your med student years. The future, however, is a little less uncertain...

Friday, May 1, 2009

A review of the first half of Semester 1, Year 1

This should actually be a much larger post, since the beginning is pretty memorable, but I'll condense it since I'm posting this at the end of Week 1 of the second half of semester 1 (wow what a mouthful).

So our first week begins with a whizbang (or perhaps not) introductory lecture by UWS Medical School's Dean, Neville Yeomans, to which our parents were invited. Made new friends, found some old ones, and the rest of that. We then had an introduction into the PBL style of teaching, which I had much forewarning about and so wasn't really that revolutionary; and then a series of lectures on what it means to be a doctor, ethics, morals, and all the rest of it.

The rest of the first half of Sem 1 was pretty much an introduction to all things medicine. Our lectures were mostly named 'Introduction to MRI', 'Introduction to Pharmacology', 'Introduction to Communication Systems in the body', etc. The UWS Course has two main components; Foundations of Medicine, which you could call the science side, and Personal and Professional Development (PPD), which you could call the humanities side.

Those components are covered by a week-long Problem Based Learning (PBL) case study (Monday being the introduction to the new case of the week, and Friday being the debriefing of that case), as well as lectures, practical sessions which were all in the computer lab for this first half, our ICMs (Introduction to Clinical Medicine - one 1.5hr session per week at a hospital as part of our clinical experience) and later on, dedicated PPD sessions.

So the PBL style of learning is essentially studying a fictional case of a patient who presents (or comes in with) a certain symptom, upon which we would hypothesise over reasons for the symptom (i.e. diagnose), note down anything we didn't know about the case that we should need to know (Learning Issues, or Objectives), and going away for the week to research by ourselves on the case. Lectures were generally related to the case of that week, which provided a little oddity in that we could predict what the problem with the patient was by deducing information from lecture names, hah! Then on Friday we would gather back and report on what we've learnt, and find out (a) what the actual diagnosis was (which is usually not a surprise by Friday), (b) what the official Learning Issues that UWS wants us to know are. PBL Groups are groups of around 10 people, with 1 tutor who is not a 'content expert' - i.e. we aren't meant to ask him/her about details of the information in the case (such as: "Is this really a myocardial infarction?") because he/she will reply with "I don't know, maybe you should put that up as a Learning Issue", heh..

Over the cases we had in that 1st term, we covered a host of things such as epilepsy, spinal injury, myasthenia gravis, anaemia, heat stroke, and sunburn, along with many others due to the broad hypothesising that we were meant to do as part of the PBL process. So it's been an interesting first half of the semester :)

We also had a Formative Test (read: a test used exclusively for your own standards to see how well you would do, andd it does not count towards final year marks) which we haven't received the results of back yet; I'm not too sure we were taking it seriously, but I certainly saw that there was much that I had not covered or had forgot due to lack of revision. Which brings me to...

...how much effort I put into this first half of Sem 1, Year 1 of Medicine, versus the HSC. I must say that I've done exceedingly more than I ever did in the HSC, and I probably would have done much better, were I to have put that same amount into last year. I didn't though, and it's a regret but I've learnt from it, so I've decided to just do as well as I possibly can, in the knowledge that this is part of my career, and not working towards a certain number. So yep, that about wraps it up :)

Oh, and I spent my holidays semi-productively, revising most lectures, but also visiting old school friends and things. So I thought that was a very good start to a non-procrastination filled life ;)