Wannabe Medic

So yesterday I did a full day of revising pretty much. A friend came round in the afternoon and revised with me but I looked over the treatment and management of diabetes, hypertension, taking a cardiology history, taking a respiratory history, differentials for all of their different symptoms. I'm not really sure what to do this morning. It's the first Friday i'll have my Patient Centred Consulting and Themed Case Discussion in the afternoon (so finish at 5, boo) so i'm not used to actually having the morning free. Normally I wouldn't do any  work on a Friday. I think I might look at the treatment and management of heart failure, counselling patients on warfarin and interpretation of x-rays. Then I need to look at how to perform a DRE and peripheral vascular exam. It's so hard to know where to focus your energies. On one hand, I need to make sure I have examinations down as that is the only thing I can practise and know whats happening for. On the other h...

So on Monday I had my induction to my new block - Urology surgery at a DGH. Utter chaos. This is the firs time the DGH is considered a "teaching hospital". How though, when their organisation is the worst yet, is beyond me. I was given 3 different timetables. The cushy - 2 days a week situation I thought I had? Completely different. Eventually I was told just to follow the one the surgeon had printed out for me. This involved always attending something morning and afternoon but little to no teaching. In fact the teaching he had scheduled us was actually MDT meetings on a Monday afternoon. While MDT meetings are great opportunities and I appreciate the invitation; that's not teaching. That's inviting me to a meeting you're already having. We left shortly after the induction. Tuesday I had my first experience in surgery as a medical student. The patient was having a TURBT which was really cool to see and the consultant was brilliant.  Took a lot of time out to t...

Ok so by Saturday I had caught up on a couple of cases that I hadn't done before (only 4 more to go, christ what was I doing those weeks? Oh yes, I remember, I was sat around my dining room table by the window having a fag and chatting shit with my friends who endlessly drop by for tea, for hours every day of the week) and decided to reward myself by going to a friends birthday party. This birthday party was going to be a chilled out one, have a couple of drinks and be home before 2 sorta thing. Me? Oh no, I decided not to leave till 4 and to continue the after sesh back at mine till 6. At least I didn't throw up in my wardrobe this week though - true story. I had to get up for work, in an hour.  Do you think I made it?? No. It's a miracle they haven't fired me yet. A miracle.  I've decided I spend far too much "having fun" on the weekend and the only way to curb this ridiculous habit is to literally give my money to someone else to hide. It is no good w...

So; it's a Friday evening. I'm at my dining table, i've got a pen and paper pad out - I am not going to be pulled away yet another evening for fun and games. The formative OSCE has given me a real kick up the backside and now i'm going forth, determined to kick ass for the real thing. I've ordered some books that I should have ordered long ago and i'm going to get my head down and make this work. I'm based at a district hospital next for my surgical placement. I'm not looking forward to a) travelling that far b) having such a poorly organised timetable or c) the surgeons who already have a bad bad reputation. Fortunately, i'm finally partnered up with one of the girls in my group that is lovely and I think we'll both be really good for eachother in the sense that we'll encourage eachother to actually turn up to things, give eachother confidence to go do things and we'll support eachother massively. I had a meeting about my APEP today....

So this year, as we are joined by the cohort from St. Andrews we are given a formative OSCE. This is basically a "mock" type thing, so doesn't affect any overall grade and consists of half the number of stations of the real thing. It's to give everyone an idea of how it's going to go in March. I had done a fair amount of preparation for this formative. We know that 2 out of 4 examinations are going to come up (Abdo, neuro, cardio, resp) so we could nail those in our own time, we know there will be 2 history taking stations [and they'll probably be one of the 4 above] so we could really nail those and the rest would be a bit of a free for all. 1 data interpretation, 2 sharing information, 1 prescribing. The real thing will be about double all that. So reflecting on the formative like I have done every exam so far let's go: Station 1 : Abdominal Examination I was confident I wouldn't do too badly in this station. WIPE, strong approach, bit throw...

SO,  the Christmas holidays were a weird two weeks where for the first time in forever, I didn't have exams to revise for. Sure we had the progress test, but that was it for the immediate future. I could have / should have / would have spent time reviewing any  of the material we've covered this far but I couldn't. I had hit a mental block and needed these two weeks to just do nothing. I saw friends, I stayed at home (which I never do) and just chilled out. I had an amazing two weeks but it felt so fucking short. We've not had a week off since we started in September and having two weeks off and then thrown right back into A+E very much felt like we hadn't had a break at all. This hit people quite hard. We came back quite deflated, not wanting to really be there and really required some kicks up the backside to get back into it. As a result of this, any eagerness I had to spend all hours of the day in hospital had diminished. I was barely there for the last couple...

So, following a duller Endocrine placement I was looking forward to being thrown right back into the thick of it at a very busy tertiary emergency department at the heart of Manchester. The way we do A&E placements is very different to how other placements are held. For a start, there aren't any outpatient clinics, there aren't any ward rounds etc. Secondly, you are assigned shift patterns for the duration of your four weeks. My four weeks will run like this: Monday - nothing Tuesday - 1700-0000 Wednesday - 1200-2200 Thursday - 0800-1600 Not including the teaching that we have every day from 4pm - 5pm and the Friday's usual themed case discussions etc, and clinical debrief and all of that. We also get the pleasure of wearing big pocketed-scrubs much to my other colleagues' envy. Placement clothes are not fun, a pain in the backside to pick out and for women - have like no pockets on a skirt. You then risk wearing your stethoscope around your neck and being ...