These are my babies. At Manchester medical school there is a mentoring programme where second year medics mentor first years as they make their transition into the big wide university world. Mixed in with them are my housemates and my medical wife, Jess.
This was taken on my birthday in fresher's week, in the foyer of the medical school at about half 8 at night...yes we are wearing lingerie pyjamas, yes tom on the end does look quite comfortable with this fact! This was for the annual PJ pub crawl, none of us really knew each other then but we had a really good night. Except it ended at a foam party where i got a viral chest infection and Jess got a strep tonsillar abscess from the gross things that are put in the foam!
As you all know i have been somewhat of a cynic with regards to (most things really) but medicine in general. But this year has undoubtedly been my favourite of the 3 and yes we are only 2 months in as my mother pointed out. Work-wise it is an absolute joke. no joke. almost impossible on every level. but i don't really care about this because all of a sudden i feel like lots of people i actually like are in the same boat.
Jess was saying the other day that everything we do together ends in absolute carnage..this is true, we have just been on the Halloween night out where we inevitably managed to lose all our children in the club, one of which has a broken ankle and physically cant move, Jess went for a curry on the curry mile at 3am dressed like a car crash victim and i ended up doing the macarena with a smurf, a member of kiss and PAC man. Bearing in mind these are the responsible second years, not the babies. I'm pretty sure they were all sat in a corner somewhere behaving themselves!
I used to scorn the 'work hard, play harder' philosophy to which most medics subscribe, seeing it as an excuse to behave badly and blame the 'stress of the job'..
There was recently an article in the 'MancUnion', our student paper, about the medical rugby team: -
(okay i cant work out how to rotate it...) but it absolutely slated medical students, mainly the sports teams who do have a horrific reputation, for being cliquey, arrogant and a general disgrace. I was talking to one of the rugby team who said they had written back in retaliation, but in my opinion it would have been best just leaving it. Medics are cliquey- we are either inclusive- of each other, or exclusive, i cant work out which. Were all in it for the long haul,( i could have 2 normal undergraduate degrees, or one and at least a masters in the time its taking me to get a medical degree) and we understand that. We get registered for EVERYTHING. less than 80% attendance = automatic failure of the year as the GMC (general medical council) says you physically wont have attended enough academic sessions to be a competent doctor. We have weekly deadlines. And yet by the very nature of PBL we are teaching ourselves most things. Stressssful. so the clique thing is internally, probably seen as a mode for supporting each other and being in the same boat. but from the outside, in our lingerie or our smurf outfits, seen as a load of idiots getting hammered and doing daft things. i can definitely see it from the outside p.o.v, but maybe with this semester, i can see it a bit from the inside too....I'm not defending the arrogance or the general disgrace, or in fact the cliquishness, but sometimes it feels nice to be united in the carnage of medical stress-relief!
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