Wannabe Medic

Here in our first two years of medical school we go on about 3-4 placements a term, usually 50/50 between GP and hospitals. This morning I had a placement in a GP surgery and a home visit. The placements we get can be very variable in terms of quality of doctor, amount of interest they have in teaching you and what you get the opportunity to do. Today, I met a brilliant partner of a GP surgery who was at the top of her game. She showed us a few things, really let us get hands on and spent some time discussing the patients with us. She was brilliant, explained things really simply and showed us what a great doctor looks like. What I really loved and appreciated though was that she took some time at the end to ask us about us.  She wanted to know our backgrounds, explored our thoughts about career prospects at a time where a lot of graduates and newly qualified's are running for the hills. I took the time to ask her about her family life. She had two photographs up on the windo...

To those of you familiar with cranial nerves, I am sure you will also be be familiar with the pneumonic above as well as the painstaking soul crushing hours one must put in to get even a vague understanding of the brain. If you aren't all that familiar, then the title of this post makes me look like a right weirdo but I promise you it's a real pneumonic! I don't know whether it is just this week or whether it's been the whole term (I can't remember one week from the next at the moment it's all blurring into one) but I am working so full on. And I don't mean like, always at university, having to do work every evening; I mean like full-on-revision-schedule-6-minimum-hours-of-studying-a-day-full-on. Has it always been like this and I've just done the bare minimum of work previously? But now I've opened up my eyes, finally have a grasp of what I need to do and now I'm just doing what everyone else was doing last year? Or is it a whole new Sem 3 thi...