PBL 5 keep the party alive!!

Soo, nearing the end of my first semester as a 'proper' medic....I have to say its been muchhhh more successful than my first sem as a premed.
The fact that I actually get to learn about medical things is greaat, and now I’ve had 8 cases I can kinda see how my knowledge is loosely meeting in the middle, I can make rough associations between bodily processes, and things that I found so difficult last year are kind of taken for basics now.
Today we viewed our first houses of the year, for next September! Ella and Sam are leaving House35 so were downsizing. Neither today were that great, although loft and cavity insulation are a must, we have discovered.
One of the best things about this semester is my PBL group- 5. At the beginning I think we will now all admit, we didn’t exactly gel. However, something happened along the way, whether it was Ethel and her fatty spatterings or the new phenomenon aka ADD (after dissection drinking- union prices, empty stomachs..) we have suddenly realised that us being incredibly different is only a good thing.
On Tuesday we had our last Hospital Visit of the semester...Wythenshawe is my hospital for year 3. We caught a bus, it took us through basically every council estate in manch, and we ended up there hungry and a little creased an hour later.
We were given a patient on a ward and told to talk to them, practising the 'talking techniques' we had been through...
by the end of it we were strutting around the hospital with our badges brandishing our alcohol hand gel pumps, complete with extendable belt clips....only 4 and a half years to goooO!!!
Spirits were high and yet having only just got to know these people we all knew it would be the last time we were ever together in a clinical environment.
PBL is a great way to learn and it prepares you for the lack of constancy within medical careers, but it’s really sad that the first friends I’ve made in the medical school are going to be reallocated..
never again will I be able to roll my eyes at Carla who ALWAYS sits across the table from me, she will never shout 'this is STRESSIN me out!', we wont be able to sigh 'oh ivann' as he delivers a perfect molecular explanation of something none of us understand ten minutes after it was required, Andy will never breeze over something none of us want to talk about by telling our tutor we had a lecture on it.......
I guess I’ll end up in a new group and hate it for a while, and then hopefully, all things being well, we will bond and have squirty hand gel wars outside the ward and race wheelchairs down squeaky clean corridors....
However, I hope PBL 5we still all line up together after dissection, and practise washing our hands the proper way, the way no other group does....I hope me and Carla still argue about who has the best clinical partner...(I do. he carried my chair for me. he bought me a caramel kitkat chunky and I didn’t even ask for one...he texts me to ask the details of the patient we’ve spoken to 3 hours before because he cant remember them...its mutual ok.)


PBL keep the party alive- it’s our tagline, and hopefully at some point we will all be keeping patients alive...