medical schmedical

This summer i may be one step closer to finding Clooney!!! I'm going to the USAiiiii! (he'll probs be in lake como as usual but whatevs)
I am very excited about this, especially since i went to my oldie bestie local pub with my oldie bestie Hanhan the other night and we talked about our trip and how we do really need to get on with booking things.
But anyway, i seem to have mainly written about having fun recently and am acutely aware that very few medical references have been made.
Well, to be honest i have found the gastro-intestinal tract not my favourite part of the body. Especially when our anatomy demonstrator (so calm, so kind) is chopping up poo-filled bits of duodenum and making us clean them out as punishment for not watching closely enough during dissection...
I sent a text to a few of my friends saying this,
'if youre ever having a bad day, be thankful youre not cleaning out a dead persons dissected intestines and having to poke poo lumps down the plughole with your finger'
i take my own advice occasionally when im feeling miserable, and am thankful that i am not back at that sink......
But that is the last dissection i will be doing for a while at least. WE.HAVE.FINISHED this year.
again i will say, what a joke. we still have 2 'early experience' visits to gps/hospitals and a few straggling lectures from when the lecturers were striking about their pensions, but it is the 14th april and i am on holiday!
this means i should be doing some work, but i am taking a (self awarded) well deserved break!! i have my anatomy book here so will have a gander at that, and i also have some of my case notes so might look at those, but i am content with doing practically nothing, for today at least!!!

Old friends for the win

so as i had previously stated i was pretty excited as it was FRIIIIIIIIIIIDAY (gotta get down its frrrrrrrrrriiiday..i hope youve all watched the video).
Well i have had the most brilliant weekend, the weather was lovaleey and we had our first barbeque of the year. what was best though, was this-


LOOK! its my homegiiiirllsss. well some of them, the others were sorely missed, but seriously, this sort of thing when 4/6 of us are together is as RARE as hen's teeth. especially now people are graduating/qualifying a-go-go. so we made the most of it and gorged ourselves on charred meat and potato salad and a few cans of stella (for old times sake).

Im meant to be packing to go home for easter now- also winning!

So bad, its good...

its kinda like magic the way that some things can be so bad theyre amazing. not everything works in this way, for example, driving.
Theres a much discussed song (over the mediums of youtube and facebook) called 'Friday' by rebecca black. now, when she sings it, its terrible, but, when its sung like this.............


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5Asg5ww_Iw

ITS FRICKING AWESOME.



im so exciitteeeed cos some of my homegirls are coming to visit! EPIC WEEKEND PLANNED! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

That Friday feeling!!

Today, for the first time in ages, i have THAT FRIDAY FEELING!! this is no April fools, i genuinely am feeling great. And who doesn't, for it is the end of the week you may ask? well yes, but recently my weeks have been so all over the place that it really makes no difference whether its Friday or not.
I blame our total lack of contact time with the university for this, i have never felt so unproductive as having to be in uni, in the 'second' year of my degree, for only 9 hours a week...It means everything seems to get put off, because there's so much time to do it, or you do something that should take one hour in 2.5 just because you can, so you feel like you're wasting time even when you are working.
But today is the last 'official' Friday of our semester, i know, its ridiculous, its only April, and this week for the first time in a long time, although Ive been incredibly busy, Ive actually got on with things....

Having said that i have just spent the last hour in bed watching 'Junior Doctors: Our lives in their hands' a recent BBC phenomenon taking the medical school at least, by storm..
It basically is following 6 junior doctors in their first year of hospital jobs, and its really great to see what you're getting into. However its also a hot and controversial topic of conversation.
you see, they live in a huge and beautiful house in Newcastle (merci beaucoup BBC) and spend their whole lives moaning about EVERYTHING! Up to episode 5/6 (where I'm up to..) they make junior doctors at least, look terrible!! moan moan moan, inappropriate comment about nurses, moan, drink on camera, drunk on camera, moaan, blah blah NHS, blah blah moan, paperwork, moan, arrogant comment about own abilities, moan, alcohol, moan etc etc etc.

Christ, no one wants to hear it, its your bloody job and your getting paid for it. yes its hard, you knew it would be etc etc etc

I know its a steep learning curve, and I'm not saying i don't moan (indeed i spend a vast amount of my time with my medic friends complaining about the medical school, but when you're paying £3300 a year to teach yourself, you'd probably have something to say about it too...) it just seems very unprofessional.
Ive heard whisperings that they re all been brought up in front of the GMC for misrepresentation of medical professionals, amongst other things...hardly surprising when they let themselves be filmed drinking dirty pints out of frisbees or out with the nurses to help the 'ward atmosphere'. my arse.
Obviously its fine to do these things (unless you re Jon who shouldn't consume anything more than water and lettuce for the next 6 months) but it seems to me its just a schoolboy error to be filmed doing them.
The episode i just watched was filmed in October, okay so they re going to have a bit more experience now, but if i ended up in the Newcastle Victoria Hospital and one of them walked towards me with a needle i would wonder what they'd been up to the night before....I know that's not necessarily fair, but equally this is how i expect to be judged when I'm working on the wards, and therefore what is the point of broadcasting your daily life for people to ACTUALLY see how many jagerbombs you drank???

Having said that, episode 6 seems to show them coming into the real world a bit more, and Adam (arrogant and nurse 'appreciating') seems to have found some humility somewhere...
Its interesting watching, anyway, i would recommend it.

Anywayss, it was my Homegirl Holly's birthday last night, so I'm heading to Mac to celebrate with her : ) should be fun, but we'll leave no trace......!

Well, i thought i'd be LESS busy this semester, but it turns out i was wrong....not for the first time... I managed to pass my january exams, which is obviously nice for me....
APPARENTLY semester 4 is a doss la la la laaaa. this is not the case, apart from the fact i have hardly ANY time in uni (seminars and dissection and the likes) i seem to have no time spare....
I have been learning to drive, needless to say, evidently from my ripe old age of 22, that i have been putting this off (for approx 5 years...) but it slowly dawned on me one morning in february, that this would be the last chance in a while that i would actually have the time to learn, and, its scary stuff. My instructor is somewhat a saint. i have no idea HOW he doesnt completely freak out every 5 seconds, but its helpful that he doesnt. Ive only nearly killed us both twice, and considering ive been learning for quite a while, thats pretty good!
Been doing some volunteering as well, initially to boost my 'Portfolio' but actually i've been really enjoying it so that'll hopefully continue next year....
SOoooooo, really I am coming to the end of this year already, which to 'normal people' is a joke...and to me it seems like for the price i pay to be on this course i am being severely short-changed.....i have 1 case to finish (meant to be doing that now....) 2 sessions of dissection, a hospital visit, a gp visit and orientation at my hospital for next year, 2 exams and......thats it. what a JOKE.
However, it does mean that i can make maximum use of the summer- im heading to the US with my homegirl hannah, we have 7 weeks to get from San Fran to NYC. HOW EXCITING! and then i have to come home, find somewhere to live, buy some clothes and shoes that i can wear in hospital and join the REAL WORLD.


Maybe i should stop complaining about having so little to do, i think im gonna get a serious reality check.

This bus smells like the dead...

I think I've finally got used to dissection. Ive stopped noticing that its weird to be stood, scalpel in hand, in a room full of the living slowly stripping down cadavers to their very core. Its not strange that some of the bodies are hemi-faced, or mono-legged. Our demonstrator took us through the basics of an abdominal exam on Thursday and said 'What is the first thing you would notice if this lady (gestures to our cadaver) came in for a check up?' and someone answered 'We'll i think the abdominal exam would be the least of her worries, she's quite clearly got no lungs...'- The first years have started their semester on Cardiorespiratory fitness you see...

Our demonstrator is very softly spoken and sweet natured. She is training for her exams to become a surgeon and is a proverbial font of knowledge. She finds us very funny, our morbid humour is not above her although never in a million years would she make a lighthearted remark about the dead...
She asked me to find the transversus abdomonis muscle and when i say 'find it', literally, dig away with a knife until it is discovered.
'Dig' perhaps is not the appropriate word because it is actually an incredibly delicate task navigating your way through the skin, fatty tissue layer and fibrous layer to reveal the different muscles of the abdominal region. My friend Sam said he felt physically inferior to the 90 year old man he dissected who could only be described as 'Tonk' or 'Ripped'- a 6 pack to rival the best apparently!
Anyway, the most important thing about me completing this task was not that I found the muscle, but was that I could do it. Slicing an ex-human no longer bothers me!
In fact its got to the point where I need to remember that discussing this weeks anatomy session is not appropriate in a restaurant that sells slow-braised pork resembling human flesh long retired. People LOVE hearing about it, i often get asked 'have you cut up dead people recently?' and its funny to see the response when you reply 'why yes, i spent Thursday morning knee deep in gangrenous intestines'...people have a morbid fascination for these things, but providing a little too much detail is an easy thing to achieve.
I went to the doctors today and was sat in the waiting room reading a book my uncle got me for Christmas-Was this too far too? Its brilliant, and it was in my bag and my iPod was out of battery. But i did get plenty of funny looks, especially from those closer to the grave than me...(can i say that?!)

I was on the bus with my friend Kyle the other day, she was telling me that she had had to iron her lab coat for her exams as it had been shoved in a drawer for Christmas, having been newly washed, and then crumpled. The hot iron brought out the fatty, phenol-y, formaldehyde-y smell and filled her living room with 'essence of Dissection Room'..Gross....
It truly is an original smell, it gets into your hair and wafts around you for many hours. On my way back from the doctors i kept getting drifting whiffs of the exact scent as i was sat on the bus...i couldn't see a medic (post-d.r the buses, filled with anatomically accurate medical students often smell...interesting) or an abandoned lab coat.....







Must have been my mind playing tricks on me.....

Long time coming.....

Sorry fans, i know its been ages, I've been pretty busy, what with reading ENTIRE neuroscience textbooks over my Christmas holidays and the likes....Here's an UPDATERRRRRR on my life since i wrote about never being able to understand the brain-

APPARENTLY i was meant to have some holidays- they seem to have not materialised between finishing on the 19th of December and the commencement of my DEATH EXAMS almost exactly one month later. Seriously its the most stressed i have ever been, we finished them a week ago and it seems like a lifetime already. I am sleep deprived and utterly exhausted, how am i ever going to cope with night shifts? I clockwatch from about 6pm until it gets to an 'acceptable' time to go to bed! We have gone from exams straight into 4th semester, which is all about the digestive system...which is not gripping, i no lie when i tell you today i had an HOUR lecture on mucus. yes folks, snot.
The exams were hardd but i think the work i did paid off, i put everything into them, i think i have been running on caffeine, adrenaline and sugar....not a health combination, you don't have to be a health care professional to tell me that (at least i gave up alcohol though hey?!?!) and now i am seriously crashing and burning.
I went to see hol in mac after my first two just for a break and could not put a coherent sentence together, i had nothing interesting to talk about and found it nigh impossible to make a decision about dinner, let alone about what i wanted to do for the day....So we went on a crazyfun road trip to a place called Wizard's Walk and ran around the forest with her housemate Malcolm duelling with giant staffs made from sticks and played 'Guess Who in 20 Questions' and i came home feeling slightly more normal...

Holly and her housemates are only here until September, and my housemates are all graduating in June and its slowly sinking in. I'm pretty sad about it all to be honest, were just in the process of getting tickets for their Graduation Ball, which i am apparently allowed to go to, and i cant stop thinking about how much these last 3 years have been excellent and how much i am going to miss them all This is us at the festival at our student union last Saturday, with an assortment of friends, relatives, girlfriends and boyfriends....It was an 'Out of this World' theme....dunno really what half of them are wearing!

But i am very excited for all of them and very proud of how hard they work and i know we will be in contact for years to come and they will probably come to me for medical advice and i can go to them when i need to be made sane again by normality. I'm grateful at the moment i have 24/7 access and will be making the most of it....expect better costumes in the summer!