Monday, April 18, 2011

The tension is palpable

Holidays have arrived, yay! And, for the first time in quite a long time, our break is actually longer than everyone else - since we started more than a month earlier, whilst everyone enjoys their mid-sem break, for us it's actually our end-of-sem break.
The last couple of weeks of MiC have crawled by rather slowly, as the promise of our hospital attachments drew nearer. The last weeks of an MiC attachment are a bit dreary - the excitement of change between the last attachment and the current one has dissipated, many of the tasks you set out to do may have already been accomplished, and generally there's a sense of staleness that you want to be rid of. It's not really dependent on the quality of the attachment either - it's just the nature of community attachments. One of our professors commented: "the things you do in MiC - it's not until 10,15 years down the track where you go 'oh...so that's what it was all about'". That's exactly the sentiment you get when you do MiC, especially if you come out from hospital attachments when MiC is second or last; the amount you learn in practical skills at hospital seems to dwarf what you absorb in MiC; learning about service provision is just not as exciting as doing a cannula, no matter how badly our School wants it to be.
To wrap up the term, we had a Reflection-week, which consisted of a couple of lectures and tutorials about MiC - most of it, naturally, regarding reflection.

As I write this, I'm reviewing this draft post that I was meant to publish at the start of the holidays, but it's now the end. The holidays flew by quickly, in part because of my various commitments outside medicine such as the clubs and societies at UWS, and personal ones dealing with family and things I hadn't done much in a long time (piano, poker, learning Mandarin). And now I need to fulfill my role as the family's chauffeur. Sigh... anyway, till another time!