Glum

I don't know why but for the last week I've been a little glum and this afternoon it seems to have completely get on top of me. I just can't stop crying. The boyfriend must think I'm totally nuts because I keep having little episodes of sobbing but I genuinely have no reason why I feel this bad, so instead I feel like I'm totally bonkers.

This happened last year a couple of times as well. It's not nice. I want to cheer up but I just can't.

Lily xXx

1/4 of the Way

Yay. I'm 1/4 of the way through this placement woo hoo.

This week has been much better than last. Turns out my hardened medical school immune system is norovirus proof. I also met a really funny and nice surgeon, who apart from making me rectally examine far too many people was really good at teaching and made standing in on surgery really interesting.

I've noticed something very weird about being on this placement. I don't cook. I love cooking, but here I just don't have the energy. I live off tortellini and pesto, plain pasta and pesto or cheese on toast. This week I might actually try to cook something. It's clearly laziness. At the moment all I want to do is knit and chat, cooking or any uni work doesn't really fit into my mental timetable.

I'm also still trying to sort stuff out about this car. It's amazing how much hassle it is to cancel my car insurance with my insurers. Especially considering I'm on placement so I can't actually get hold of my certificate until I go back to london. I can't wait until all these little stressy things are over. It's really getting me down.

I want all the car stuff delt with, my essay done, my presentation done and then I'll be able to sleep easily. Although I'm enjoying being on clinics I'm already looking forward to having a 2 week summer holiday, I really need the break. Bring on the end of August!!

Lily xXx

Norovirus

All I have to say is ew. I've managed to avoid the winter vomitting bug so far. Unfortunately my other half hasn't.

Poor boyfriend isn't very well and spent all night being sick. In fact so much so that in he middle of the night he actually took a pillow into the bathroom and fell asleep on the floor.

I'm hoping my hardened medical student immune system is proctecting me from catching it too!

Lily xXx

Life's Not Fair

I've had a rubbish week.

It's just been one rubbish thing after the other.

I'm still struggling to sleep because of the monster fridge that roars all night. Otherwise I guess my placement is OK. It's hard work but I can't deny that it means that we're all learning a lot. It's also such a bonus that all the students on placement there are all really friendly so it's nice to chill out with everyone.

My main bug bear this week started on Wednesday. Because the boyfriend's car is being repaired I lent him mine. As he's fully comp on his car and his insurance has always in the past covered him to drive other cars neither of us thought twice about it. Turns out his new policy doesn't cover him to drive other cars. Ergo the police fined him and gave him points and then they impounded my car.

The poor guy was really upset and apologetic, so at the end of the day it was a genuine oversight. Because of this I'm not annoyed in the slightest at him. What annoys me most is what happened next.

My car is in the pound. On Thursday the boyf went to the pound to try and get it released. He took all the paper work the police on the roadside told him to take and I paid to have him put on the car's insurance. They wouldn't release the car. He didn't have the right paperwork and they said they needed me.

Friday I accepted a telling off from my consultant and trundled to the pound to rescue my car. As I've literally just reinsured my car over the telephone it'll take up to 2 weeks for my insurers to send me out the certificate. I also never received my change of address on my car logbook so the DVLA have to send me a new one of these. Although the police can check this all on the computer to verify it they won't. Thats £20 more a day and if I dont have all the stuff within two weeks they're crushing my car.

To make it worse they stopped someone unrelated to me with his drivers licence registered to a different address. Impounded the car. Let him say it was his girlfriends. Released him. Noone from the police has yet called me to tell me they have impounded my car.

Anyway I'm really annoyed so I've told them to crush the car if they want but I'm suing them. The horrible rude ladies on the phone when I was trying to sort all of this out have just pushed me over the edge. I never raised my voice. I constantly repeated that I was more than happy with the fact they confiscated the car as the driver in it wasn't insured because that's actually the safest thing to do. I even thanked them for their time but they still snapped and shouted at me and were generally really rude. Stupidheads.

Lily xXx

End of the Weekend

Two days have never gone so fast. The weekend is now practically over unfortunately and I've done NO work. Oops. I really should get started on the 5000 word essay that's due in in 5 weeks. I've had such a nice weekend so now I've kind of got a mental count down until I'm back in London permanently. Only 11 weeks to go.

Its rare that I appriciate a long hot shower as much as I have this weekend. It's so nice to be able to spend as long as I want in the shower, with it properly hot, without having to worry about using up all the hot water. I've also been able to sleep without the noise of my noisy fridge that's in my room in the hospital placement. I also didn't realise quite how comfy my bed is. It's amazingly comfy. Ikea matresses really do rock.

I really haven't got up to much at all this weekend. Yesterday I had a big cooking day. I cooked an amazing slow roast lamb (stole the recipe off Saturday Kitchen) and then a stew for the boyf to have in the week. I also made an apple crumble. Mmmmm. Makes up for the fact I live off tortellini when I'm on placement. Amazingly however we get free lunch twice a week on placement. One of these is sandwiches, cake and fruit while the other has a hot option like a pasta bake and salads. We've never been spoiled so much

Anyway I have to pack up my clean washing and trundle off back to placement-town now. Grumble grumble grumble.

Lily xXx

Cravings and Addiction

Deary me. The lack of a good/private internet connection at this placement is driving me insane. Thank goodness I'm back home for the weekend. The fact we don't have internet in our rooms, nor Wi-Fi anywhere in the hospital means that it's pretty hard to blog and remain anonymous. Hence the lack of posts.

The lack of internet has shown me how addicted I am to blogging and reading blogs. I've actually been getting internet cravings. Last night I even had a nightmare that through some strange event I could never access the internet again... nooooooo!

Anyway, more interesting is my first week. By day one we were clerking patients. Everyone is so friendly at the new non-London hospital and goes out of their way to help us. On Tuesday a consultant spent over an hour with us showing us examination techniques on patients. Virtually unheard of by people on placement in London.

On Thursday I was in theatre and did my first rectal exam. Embarassingly I took the glove off too quickly and flicked pooey KY onto the wall much to the consultants amusement. We also saw a HUGE hernia. Like the whole of someones guts in their scrotum. It was insane.

I also got my exam results back. I passed! Woo!!! The station I was pretty confident about I got 77 on, and the one I was worried I may have failed I got 65 on, both pretty respectable marks.

Today I also did an assessed Grand Round, which went surprisingly well considering I knew very little about the subject. Thankfully the consultant didn't ask me anything about liver function tests because I just haven't had a chance to learn the reasons why things can be derranged.

I have so much work to do for next week. It seems that on this rotation there is a lot more to learn as it covers a much wider and more complex assortment of topics. We're also going on a firm outing next week. I think because there are only 20 of us, miles away from home, everyone's being really social. It helps that everyone is genuinely nice too.

For now I'm going to enjoy my evening with the boyfriend. Order a takeaway, curl up on the sofa and have a whole weeks worth of missed attention and cuddles.

Lily xXx

New Year, New Town

Sorry I haven't blogged for a couple of days but I've been pretty busy... again.

This time I've been getting ready to go to my placement in the countryside. Well actually a city, but still kind of the countryside compared to London. I moved into my new flat yesterday. In typical student fashion it's a little scruffy, but miles bigger than halls in 1st year. Everyone else also seems really nice. I'm in a girls flat so that takes away my huge worry of hairy boys shedding all over the shower. Sorry boys... but its so true! The main downside is NO internet in our flats. Boo hoo :(

Anyway today was the first day and lets just say I'm feeling a little intimidated. We started off with just filling out forms and getting locker keys etc. Then we got our timetables. Eek. It looks like we have some serious work to do this term. Talking to our firm head confirmed this. Deep down I know this is a good, not a bad thing. The more work I'm forced to do, the better I'll learn stuff, but it doesn't make losing my lie-ins and lazy days any easier. I want the holidays to be longer!! Amazingly this rotation seems super organised so that should be good.

Today we saw 1 patient. Took a history and examined them. It was a lot of blagging as we've never done this type of examination on a real patient before, but it went okay. Tomorrow the real work starts...

Lily xXx

Surprisingly Busy

For a post-exam day when I'd be planning to chill I was surprisingly busy today.

Not only did I have to go and get my eyebrows done (yes thankyou, I do look like less of a yeti), I also had lots of things to pick up, work to do and I need to start packing. I also spent a lot of the day stressing about how much I had to do.

I'm getting a bit peeved with the whole moving to the seaside for a 12 week placement. So much packing and stuff to be done. To make it worse all my clothes are falling apart but I'm too stingy to buy more clothes.

Which leads me to my next point. Knitting. It's going well I think. I've been doing a practice piece madsadgirl suggested, so tomorrow I'm going to start on the real thing. I was going to start tonight but I'm getting a bit tired and my main problem is concentrating on counting stitches. Turns out when I'm tired I struggle to count to 10 let alone around 80.

Lily xXx

Oh What A Day!

Deary me. Today has been pretty eventful.

I started the day being woken up by raised voices. A rather big argument, followed by a crash. Didn't think much of it until the boyfriend left for work. About 2 minutes later he was back in the door. Someone had thrown a telly out of the window and it has gone through his windscreen, inflated his air bag and destroyed the side of the car. Not impressed.

After that I had my exam. Possibly the longest 14 minutes of my life. In all fairness I had pretty easy stations compared to most. My first one was resuscitation. I'm pretty sure I've passed that. My second station however was explaining cardiovascular risk factors. I seemed to get through it pretty quickly which leads me to think that I left something important out. However, we will see by the middle of next week what happened. Unfortunately some of my friends had less enjoyable experiences. A lot of people asked to do examinations didn't have enough time to complete them in 6 minutes, leaving a fair few of my friends fearing a resit in a fortnight.

After the exam I had some lunch and a lovely glass of wine in town and did some shopping. I managed to get some bras that fit, after a rather unexpected boob growth spurt, in the sale. I also got some lovely wool with which I hope to make a jumper. Thankfully madsadgirl is being generally amazing and giving me loads of advice.

I then went for the dreaded threading of my eyebrows, but they'd overbooked. Shame. So now I'm going for my torture tomorrow. If only it was a permanent thing. I can't cope with all this maintenence. It's hard work being a girl.

After that I went to the pub with some uni mates so we could all meet up post-exam. Bad Idea!!! Everyone just talked about the exam and I got gradually more and more worried and more and more convinced I'd failed. So I made my excuses and left.

Being the exciting soul I am, I'm spending the rest of the night cleaning the kitchen, which looks like a bomb site, and doing lots of washing ready to start clinics again on Monday. Sadly as my treat I have sent the boyf out for a KFC. Sometimes I disgust myself. So bad yet so so so good. I shall try to make up for it by having a salad for lunch tomorrow or else I'll be scraping the cholesterol out of my arteries in the near future.

Lily xXx

The Morning Before The Day After

Tomorrow is my exam.

I've decided I'm pretty okay with the examination techniques and most of the stuff we have to do. All I'm worried about is interpretting blood results and interpretting ECGs.

Rumour has it that the blood results we get don't come with normal values so I have to try and remember all the normal values. This usually wouldnt be a problem, but once I'm nervous I find it very hard to remember lots and lots of values. I'm going to try and keep rememorising them all day, but I'm not sure it will help. With ECGs I don't know what's happened. 2 weeks ago I was really good at interpretting them. Now I just look at them blankly. It shows how 2 weeks without practice can really allow a lot of information to just leave my brain.

The worrying thing is not so much this set of exams, but is the fact that after my next rotation not only do I have two OSCE stations on that rotation, but one on this early rotation. Then even more worryingly after my last rotation I have stations on everything. I guess this is a good way of making sure we don't forget things straight after a rotation, but worries me with the amount of work I'll have to be doing at the end of term when I also have written exams.

By this time tomorrow my exam will be over and I'll be on my way to get my eyebrows threaded. What a treat post-exam. Excruciating pain. Lovely.

Lily xXx

New Beginnings

Two exciting things happened today.

The first is exciting to me personally. I finally got a special front door key for the boyf and he moved his clothes in. This is the beginning of the next stage of our relationship and I'm really excited. I realise that it's been really quick, officially we've been dating just less than 6 months, which means I've put up with a lot of criticism from different people. They are generally only criticising because they're worried about me, but at the end of the day it's my life and my choice to make. All I know is that nothing has ever felt so right. I'm so happy.

The second is exciting but doesn't really have anything to do with me. Michelle Au from The Underwear Drawer, the first medical blog I started reading, had her baby Mack in the early hours of this morning. Congratulations Michelle! There are some very cute pics on her blog of the very handsome little Mack. Go check them out and prepare to go all gooey inside.

Lily xXx

Disneyland Paris

I've literally just got back from my trip to Disney, my Dad's birthday/xmas present for my 8 year old niece. I managed to blag my way on the holiday too.

It was really good but really cold and in typical Lily-style I got ill. So ill in fact that I spent all Saturday in bed and then in the evening threw up my dinner. At least that helped my new years wish of wanting to be able to lose a few pounds. When I wasn't feeling ill I managed to go on all my favourite not scary rides like the peter pan ride. I also got to spend a lot of nice quality time with the boyfriend.

Most amazingly I saw Stich Live! I adore Stich. I was so impressed when it was actually interactive, but Stitch fell in love with some woman called Mila and not me. I cried myself to sleep.

It's shocking how much everything there costs now, especially considering how weak the pound is. A diet coke was over £3!!! Because of this I resisted my usual urge to buy something cute and disney. I must be getting old and responsible now. Scary.

Anyway I have an exam on Thursday so I better go and do some work.

Lily xXx

Ouchies

I learnt something new last night.

Cocodamol + 5 vodka tonics = vomit + near unconciousness

Needless to say I will not be taking painkillers, forgetting I've taken then, and then drinking ever again. Miraculously I don't have a hangover, but I felt pretty awful last night.

This morning was much better. I had a lovely cuddle with the boyfriend, then a lazy warm bath, closely followed by a delicious cooked breakfast. There is something so wrong yet so right about fried bread and baked beans. Mmmmm.

Lily xXx