Tuesday, January 11, 2011

The starting gun is loaded

I'm now only 6 days away from heading into third year, and am definitely excited about what's coming up ahead! Bought Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine (OHCM) after finding it at the cheapest place possible (on Abebooks.com for $33) and am voraciously reading it whilst waiting for mum to finish grocery shopping. The only downside of getting your P's (driving licence) for me was suddenly becoming my mum's chauffeur, and considering it's the holidays, she believes my main priority is to make up for the past 10 months of not contributing to the house - i.e. driving her around. So OHCM is my way to whittle away the wait... also got an ipod shuffle for Christmas, which I've loaded some New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) audio summaries on for some bedtime listening (or alternatively whilst jogging).

Turns out that that was pretty much the extent of my study this holidays. I finished reading a book on clinical decision making, but only because it was interesting and only a couple of hundred pages; borrowed a few other books and haven't really made much headway. So I guess I've had a pretty relaxed holiday, which is good - considering how rare holidays are going to become. Took up some more exercising, as well as piano (after practicing for a month, I still can't quite get the Pirates of the Caribbean theme 100% correct yet), which I've neglected for a long time - presumably, due to studies (...not really).

I probably haven't discussed third year in much detail before, so I'll just give a little bit of a rundown as to what I'll be spending 90% of my waking hours on this year (psh, actually more like 50%, need to account for time spent doing very unrelated-to-med things). The year is essentially split into three 'semesters', which are each split furthermore into halves (hence, six 'terms'). The semesters are known as Medicine in Context, Medicine, and Surgery.

Medicine and Surgery are pretty self-explanatory; they are both hospital-based, and as you would expect, in Medicine you would be joining a medical team (e.g. gastroenterology, neurology, geriatrics, other fields of medicine besides surgery or general practice) and expected to both learn and pull your weight as part of the team; whilst in Surgery, you would be joining a surgical team (in third-year, this is mainly general surgery, but depending on what you were allocated, you may be joining a vascular, maxillofacial, orthopedics or other more specialised teams in addition to general surgery) and expected to be on time to scrub in (get ready for the surgery by taking surgical sterilisation precautions) and to learn.

Medicine in Context, which is the semester I'll be doing first (in order to spread out resources evenly, a third of students will be starting with MiC, a third with Med, a third with Surgery, and then rotate), the week is divided into a one-day-a-week General Practice (GP) attachment, a three-day-a-week Community Organisation attachment, and a "reflective/presentation" day (Fridays) which seems to be either a go-back-to-campus day or "free" (read: they want you to study) day. In regards to the Community Organisation, this is an organisation which deals with the related elective or subject that you have been allocated (although I say allocations, you are given a preferences list to fill out), which for me will be Disability and Mental Health, my first and second terms respectively. Each term is six weeks in length, and each semester begins with a conference week, which as mentioned before, is essentially a week filled with lectures.

The GP I'm going to be attached to is very close to my house (about 3-4km) so I'll be looking to cycle there and back; my Disability organisation is also fairly close (about 8km) so that might be possible to cycle there as well. This is probably one of the big changes between pre-clinical (first and second years) and clinical years for me, as the return trip has literally dropped by >80% from 3 hours to 30 minutes - which is nothing to sneeze at. However, an equally big change is going to be the largely reduced amount of time with the rest of my cohort, as conference week is the only scheduled time for the whole cohort to meet; half of the cohort is in the south-west whilst the other is in the west/north-west; and a third of the cohort will be not in hospital the majority of the time (the third that will be doing the Medicine in Context rotation). Also, I don't get much time to get to know the Malaysian students, since they'll be at Campbelltown whilst I'll be an hour-and-a-half's commute away - which is kind of sad; in addition to the people from my cohort last year who won't be in my cohort this year (Medical Research degree, deferring, repeating). On the upside, I'll be spending a lot of time with a few people, which hopefully means I'll get to know them a lot better - my main partner for this year I barely know, so there'll be plenty to cover in the downtime.

So, it's time to ring up my allocated organisations, get ready those notebooks and prep my bag for what should be a very interesting year! As always, I'll try my best to keep posting during the year - still amazed that it's still here after two years, my longest blog effort ever haha...

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