What a day

I think people were kind of looking at me oddly on the train today. Thanks to the hot sun and my forgetfulness, a melted chocolate in my right pocket spelled disaster for the earphones, ipod shuffle, mobile phone and parker pen (No, my pockets are not abnormally large) nearby. Thanks to my amazing foresight and provision, I also did not carry tissues or a bottle of water with me that day. So lets see. Brilliant genius medical student is confronted with messy electronic goods, and *almost* nothing to clean it with. What to do? Well, use the closest replacement to tissues - good old-fashioned paper from a notepad! How I managed to clean my earphones with pieces of paper, you can figure out for yourself, heh.
Anywho. Today was also a notable day because it was the last day of ICM. This means that I will not be seeing Blacktown Hospital for the next 4 months (until February at least), but more importantly (of course, what could possibly be worse than not seeing a hospital for months?) a new ICM group and tutor. My group and tutor are...LEGEN (wait for it, wait for it, wait for it - and I hope you're not lactose intolerant, because the next word is)DARY. I can't really rate one over the other - I think the group is so important in terms of your experience in ICM; whilst our tutor is a brilliant physician who has such a great love for people and for teaching us young whipper-snappers. I will miss them. Of course, the aforementioned chocolate was the result of a farewell gift thoughtfully thought of by one of us in the group (the rest of us all forgot, or didn't even know that this was the last week of ICM).
Anyway, the reason why I was on the train was not because I was going home, but because I was doing part of another PPD assignment (talking to a health professional). I went to Hornsby where I met my cousin (a registrar), and we and my friend who's also in first-year had a nice long chat about what we should expect in the future, and tips to manage stress and adverse situations. That was cool - I've just finished typing up my notes taken during the session; we'll have to present it at a time and date I'm not sure of. Thus, one would assume I am quite free for the rest of tonight - not so, too much work to catch up. Should get cracking, then.

So Tired...

I thought I'd name some of my posts in honour of several of our PBL cases. So this one's an appropriate one to start off with. PPD today - a 3rd party recollection and informal presentation based on our patient barriers to care interview - was alright. It kind of killed the mood for the day though - 2 hours listening to person after person speak; it was HSC English speeches all over again, except a little bit more interesting, haha. I did concentrate though, which may or may not have been the right thing to do, as I was phased out for the rest of the day (it was first thing in the morning). I think our PPD tutor is getting better (obviously, no names); he genuinely does care, although presenting with a few rather conflicting ideas. Our next two sessions are all going to be about talking about ourselves. And our life experiences. YAY...
I've found that taking a few lectures off and a friday PBL session really knocks you back hard in terms of keeping up with what's happening. Everyone is talking about the cardiac cycle this week, and I feel that I don't really understand them. I'm not exactly a model student, but I do make a serious effort (this is medicine after all) - this kind of thing worries me; not because of whether I'll do good in an exam or not, but rather just the feeling of inadequacy. I guess one gets used to it as the entire field is littered with over-achievers; but still, it is nice to feel like you know something.
ICM though was once again as interesting as always. We had a patient with an arteriovenous (i.e. arteries and veins) fistula (a bulge or protrusion) in his wrist; the turbulence in the vessels was so noticeable, both via a stethoscope and by simply resting one's fingers on the area. We started the cardiovascular system exam; I do feel like we're making serious progress in ICM, with the abdominal exam out of the way in just a few weeks, cardiovascular for these few weeks, and probably respiratory in the weeks to come before our big OSCE (clinical examinations). ARGGGH SCARY
It's before our theoretical exams, in October. So close. Yikes.

Time passed so quickly...

I've always known that talking with a few of your best friends can take up hours of your time, and you don't realise it. It was a surprise to me though, that our patient interview for our PPD assignment went by so quickly. We (me and my partner for the interview) interviewed a really nice couple who lived in a self-contained villa in a retirement village; time just flew by as we listened to them talk. There were a few interesting things of note; they seemed quite satisfied with the public health system; the husband was in hospital many times and was really happy with how he was treated. So that was a really good thing to hear :) They were also happy with the retirement village and the social activities provided; something I will be mentioning to my parents in the years to come, as an option in the future (for some reason, my dad is very pro-retirement village, whilst my mum is very anti... I wonder why). The last thing I thought was notable was how positive they both were, how happy they were to have us over, and were in high spirits; this despite the significant medical conditions they had (over a dozen between the two of them) and their relatively moderate socioeconomic position.

That was pretty much the highlight of the day. Our 2-hour liver practical was a pretty hard slog (not an anatomy prac, just going through a program in our computer labs), and the PPD tutorial before that (discussing death and how it impacts patients and us) was quite intense as well. Follow that with two more lectures in the afternoon, and so it was with delight that, upon reaching home, I took a nice long nap. Ahhhh....

ICM this week was unremarkable, save for one spectacular patient who let us (all five of us) do an abdominal examination on him. I felt pretty bad once we said our goodbyes though, when we saw another group waiting outside, inevitably about to ask him for permission to examine him...eek. There seems to be a lack of patients willing to allow us to do physical examinations; I'm guessing part of the reason is the invasiveness of the procedure, compared to history taking. So for the patients who have allowed us to practice our clinical skills, and who will allow us in the future, I am really grateful. Our ICM tutor is awesome, she's learnt all our names by heart already! I wish we could just keep her for the rest of clinical teaching; it appears that ICM tutors can be a mixed bag, which is a shame.

On that (sad? disappointed?) note, PBL seems to have lost it's lustre. The excitement of diagnosis has, much like House MD episodes (at least, to me), vanished. Then again, interest in medicine shouldn't be propped up by styles of teaching; but yep, PBL seems to be more about learning issues related to that case (which is what it's meant to be) versus the case itself. If that makes sense. Which I'm sure it doesn't. Anyway, speaking of PBL, I should be working on the first learning issue for this week...

The leg bone's connected to the thigh bone...

A 2-hour anatomy practical really doesn't get you into the mood for a 2-hour statistics lesson (Yes, Statistics, you may be thinking wtf? in Medicine, but believe me it has it's purposes) straight afterwards. Add to that a lecture in the afternoon (which half the grade dozed off in) and I think Wednesday was a pretty long day...

I actually enjoy anatomy, to be honest; it's wonderful to know where everything's connected (actually we were looking at the abdomen this week, not the leg as the title so subtly implied), and wonderful to have some really great teachers of anatomy (we have this fairly old surgeon who's awesome at teaching, I think everything he taught went right into my head and displaced something else), and the cadavers themselves were (today, at least) far from obese, which was nice. It's just that learning anatomy, for me at least, requires intense concentration, somewhat alike to playing chess. Although I've played a four-hour chess game, a 2-hour anatomy prac seems just that much more tiring and satisfactory. So all that intense concentration took me right out of the zone when we started on database analysis in Statistics. *zzzz*

And oh dear, my computer just restarted after Automatic Updates. Thank heavens for Blogger's autosaving of drafts ^^

We were also meant to do our 'Interviewing of a Patient' (not official name) assignment, our first one so far (Yes, come to UWS if you don't like assignments!) yesterday. This is part of our PPD segment in the course, and the aim of this particular assignment is to interview a patient and give a recount of his/her experience, and empathise with the patient via means of a written response and a presentation. Our patient had his son come over to visit him, so he was busy, and as such we decided to reschedule the meeting, probably to next Wednesday. It's quite nice to have friends that can drive; Camden isn't exactly the most accessible place via public transport.
We were about to skip our last lecture so we could interview our patient, but since that didn't go to plan, we had the enormous privilege of dozing off through our lecture; I think I should go and look at the lecture notes/synopsis now. And probably revise anatomy... and probably write up my clinical ICM notes...and probably revise the statistics stuff as well... arggh.