Another Pair Of Eyes

Day by Day

Today is a waiting day. Yesterday was my last exam, tomorrow is results.

Waiting day.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

Medical Humanities

I am feeling melancholic
and I’m from my work aloof
and my blood pressure systolic
is going through the roof

I’m into depression sinking
with my worry and concern
and I find that I am thinking
Intermediates can burn.

Interesting fact: type ‘image’ into Google image search and this is on the first page.

Extending

It’s a bit on-off at the moment. Some days I feel powerful, knowledgeable, people ask me questions and I answer them, draw the strings together and understand. Other days it seems that I’ve simply not heard of things, never seen that, what’s that drug, I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I feel small.

Some days I feel old. I’ve seen an entire year through their entire degree course, and I’m still here. By the end of university there will be an entire year to whom I can say ‘I was here before you arrived, and I will be here after you are gone.’ Five years is a long time. My student ID card was phased out at the end of my first year for a new style. We’re some of the last people to have the Southampton Dolphin logo, and I feel a bit nostalgic and a bit proud at once.

Other days I feel young and inexperienced and that I’m not ready, and I am shy and without confidence and I try to avoid patients. Who did I think I was kidding, saying that I felt I could (eventually) be a doctor? I forget sometimes how much I’ve seen, and that I have skills, and that already there are patients notes which start with my name and finish with my signature. I forget my privilege.*

Some days I wish I didn’t do medicine. I could be finished now, could be done and free and be holding a certificate with my name on it and hunting a job with money and paychecks and similar. I could have a summer holiday, and a life outside medicine that is vibrant instead of dying away. Especially now, as I eat and sleep and breathe and the food and the dreams and the air are all medicine, I wonder what it would be like to just lie in the sunshine like my graduated neighbours and be finished. To talk about things without mentioning cytokines and HLA-DR4 genes and the endless tide of acronyms.

Other days roll around, and I remember that the grass is always greener, and I think about what I’d do otherwise. The answer, I think, is wilt. Other days I appreciate just how lucky I am, even if I’m only going to go home for about 6 hours between now and October and I’m only spending 2 weeks of that time outside hospitals. It suits me.

Some days I write introspective, long, pretentious blog posts filled with dichotomy and pretending that it matters to the interblag at large.

Other days I write nothing at all.

Is it ever going to be enough?

*I was speaking to my mum the other day about my Obs and Gynae attachment, and she suddenly said that she felt a bit like she’d missed out having never seen a birth. Experienced, yes, but seen, no. And actually, it’s pretty amazing and messy and emotional and wonderful, even at 4 in the morning when you’ve already seen three others that night, and I forget that too sometimes.

Pauses

You may have noticed I’m not here so frequently as I might have been before. The workload is stacking up rapidly – I’ve taken today off from placement to finish my essay and a bunch of cardio notes, and been up since half six doing the same. Day off, pffft.

Not, you understand, that I’m complaining. The more I learn the more elegant everything is, and the more I can link things together, understand the consequences of things and the cascade of consequences consequent of those consequences. Why can alcoholic liver disease cause catastrophic haemorrhage in the throat, or swelling in the ankles, or rupture of the spleen, or kidney failure?* I know I’m endlessly banging on about medicine but it’s increasingly an integral part of my identity, for better or for worse. Probably for worse, but hey – in some ways it changes me for the better. Currently I’m on a one-week-on one-week-off routine in sync with Helpful Teaching Consultant’s morning ward rounds. Next week it’s back to Dr. See-no-students-hear-no-students so I’ll revert back to going to a bunch of random stuff, neuro and GI and endocrine and phleb clinic, if I can swing it.

We’ve got some new neighbours, postgrad nurses-to-be; in number, three. We were worried first that there was a family moving in, but they were just the landlords. As of last Sunday we are officially surrounded by students on both sides, which is good news. And we invited them over for cocktails, and they are pretty chilled out, which is nice. That, the discreetly unmentioned valentine’s day and a couple of sunny days and nights with sleep in have cheered me no end, life is better again.

Now, I need to crack on with my essay. It’s a bit of a strange reflection that I want to finish this essay so that I am finally free for the remainder of the year to get down to working on medicine proper. Who’d've thought that the homework-hating me of yesteryear would become so driven…

Essaytime.

*don’t get alcoholic liver disease, kids.

Español

I do not speak spanish, and my exam is tomorrow. Yes, on a Saturday, the world is rubbish. Anyway, this is basically a post of regret – the Spanish course I have done is easy and under other circumstances I’d've enjoyed it, learnt it well, probably continued it and actually ended up speaking spanish well enough to get by in a spanish speaking country. I have not done any of these things, because in the end when I weigh up my workload spanish always loses out to medicine, because medicine is quite simply more important. From that stance the quality of my spanish goes rapidly downhill and thus the enjoyment wanes in proportion.

Yes, it is entirely my fault, but I just think it’s a shame that it is. I’m aiming for a solid 40%, which I am currently over with coursework etc, so I don’t need to do well to pass. Flipside, I hate doing things badly when I know full well that I could have aced the whole course if I’d put in a bit of effort.

Shame on me.

To make myself feel better, here is something cheery I found on the internet.

Impatience

We have a week of introductory lectures. All very well, but I think a week was too long – I for one am itching to get going and I am certainly not alone. Still, I suppose it does give the opportunity to meet everyone and go out meeting gorgeous barmaids etc so it’s all good. Certainly think that we should have progressed beyond basic life support courses though – CPR isn’t that easy to forget, so hmph for BLS classes.

I bought a psychiatry textbook today, and have been browsing through it* looking at some of the stuff I’ll be coming up against in the history taking – turns out, it’s going to be pretty hardcore. It’s vaguely similar to a normal medical history, except for a section entitled ‘Personal history’ which is described as aiming to:

“…trace the patient’s development and achievement from conception to the present.”

That is a phenomenal amount of information. From conception? You could be covering anything up to about 80 years of history in that one sweeping statement, and you have to really get your teeth into it as well. “Include gestation and delivery,” it says, “childhood milestones, family relationships, upbringing, peers, schooling, occupation, marital and sexual history….” and it goes on. No wonder they tend towards calling them interviews rather than histories!

In other news, I have applied to do Spanish evening classes this year as one of my SSUs (student selected units, dontchaknow) which should be good – it’s the only major European language I don’t speak AT ALL, and it is also one of the most useful what with being the most widely used language in the world.** It should be a bit refreshing although I’m sure the second I get my teeth into tenses I’ll regret ever have chosen it and rue the day speech developed at all.

Also, today was 09/09/09. At 09:09:09 this morning on 09/09/09 I was in a lecture on venesection and cannulation.** Where were you?

*and I quote: “For example the patient, on being handed a glass of wine, may then believe he is Jesus Christ.” I think this will be pretty eye-opening…

**Pedants; Chinese is the most spoken by population, but not the most widely used.

***Yup, we have to spend a portion of time this year stabbing random patients, rubber arms, and each other. This is terrifying, but it is also real medicine so it is exciting. Same goes for suturing.

Rotation & Failures Thereof

This year I am on rotation, and the first rotation for my group is Mental Health.

Oddball. It’s the strange one, the one that doesn’t fit with the usual rhythm of medical practise. I’m not sure if I’m pleased with it or not – surely a stint in Ordinary Medicine, if there is such a thing, would have been a more elegant introduction? Still, done is done and it’s set – daunting, but exciting. It will be interesting to see how it goes, I think. Going to be a nervous first few days…

That is not, however, the reason for the title of this blog post. Yesterday I was very down and out, and while at least a decent healthy portion of that can be attributed to the Time Traveler’s Wife, there is more to it than that. That post on aging didn’t come entirely out of the blue, either.

Basically, I was meant to be going on a big, albeit significantly shorter and faster, cycle ride this Thursday. Now, I’m not. The reason? My knee won’t co-operate with me – on a hard training day a short while back I began to feel it, and it whined about it for 36 hours. Well, knee, you win. I drop out, I give up, I cease and desist. Enjoy it while you can because over the next year I am going to hammer you.