Presenting...

I did my last case presentation of this rotation yesterday. Surprisingly it went really well. It's so much easier to present to a room of people that you know quite well. Nerves totally go out of the window.

I also discovered that the hospital does a pretty good cooked breakfast. Unfortunately the sausage tastes just like rusk with no meat, but otherwise it was great. However this could be because I have a slight addiction to hash browns. Yum yum yum.

Now that all the case presentations are out of the way I can spend the next 5 weeks focussing on getting the rest of my sign ups. I have 9 left to get so that means I need to try and get 2 a week.

Because I did so well I'm treating myself to a laid back weekend. I'm going to cook a lovely dinner tonight which no doubt I'll blog about later, and I'm going to spend the rest of the day mooching around and playing my new computer game. Hospital tycoon. It's great!

Lily xXx

Not Another Meeting...

This peripheral attachment is pretty weird in some ways. One of these ways is the amount of meetings we have. In London, once a term some students are invited to represent the rest of the year to the dean and subdeans. In the countryside every Thursday we have a meeting with all of us to discuss our problems, eat sandwiches and have lovely little slices of cake.

Most of the time these meetings are pretty boring. It's just the 5th years moaning about how their shower doesn't work, or they can't get anyone to teach them NG tubes. At the moment there's something I want to bring up but I don't quite know how and when.

A student on my firm.

He's really really clever, but totally selfish and only out to cover his own back. In the rest of my firm there is the attitude that we can all do well so the best thing is to support everyone, he doesn't have this attitude.

Recently he's been making up excuses every week as to why he has to go back to London during the week. This is totally only allowed if it's urgent. Therefore if we have a presentation with our last SSM tutor we can go, but we can't just go because whatever teaching is on that day isn't really relevant. For the past fortnight he's excused himself from a days teaching and we've found him either in his room studying, playing computer games or on his way to London.

Now he's asking our firm head to give us a test at the end of the 6 weeks to assess our clinical knowledge so we can be given a mark. Obviously as he's taking at least a day a week off to study his will be better than ours. This so isn't fair.

To make it worse when we have group presentations he always claims to be busy and dumps it on someone else in the group. Not a team player. It's getting us all down.

Unfortunately noone wants to be a grass.

Lily xXx

Sleepless Nights

More and more I'm having trouble sleeping.

On the weekends I can't sleep because I'm so excited about being home with the boyf. When I finally do get to sleep I'm constantly waking myself up by rolling into him because I'm not used to sharing a bed anymore.

Sunday nights the boyf stays with me in my placement accommodation. This makes sleeping even more difficult because it's a single bed. I usually think it's worth missing a proper nights sleep on Sunday though because it's an extra night snuggled up next to him.

Then all week there are loads of problems. As with all shared accommodation noise goes on until at least midnight each night. This isn't a huge problem in itself. It's the fridge, extraction fans and banging door that keeps me awake until the early hours of the morning. Annoyingly this morning I didn't fall asleep until after 4am. At 6.51am I was woken up by the man who works here revving up his retro american Dodge Viper. Seriously unimpressed. Any tips on cutting his ignition wire would be appriciated, otherwise it'll just have to be superglue in the locks.

Needless to say I look and feel like a zombie at the moment. It is not a good look.

Lily xXx

Always Busy

Yet again I'm stupidly busy. The fact I took Thursday and Friday as drinking days for a friend's birthday hasn't really helped.

This week I have TWO presentations!! I haven't actually started them yet. One is only a quick non-examined one. The other one is actually part of my in course assessment so I should probably get along with it at some point.

I have also lost all faith in the Royal Mail. I'm either not getting post or post I send to people doesn't arrive. Therefore all my rush in getting my essay done early so I could post it off to my SSM supervisor went to waste. A week later and it still hasn't arrived.

I only have 6 weeks of this rotation left, so now I have to start another special study module. Fun fun fun. I also have loads of sign ups to get. Some of them are really tricky ones. It's surprisingly hard to get a doctor and a patient to both agree to helping us learn how to examine the male external genitalia.

Lily xXx

Halfway Home

By the end of Friday I'll be halfway through this placement, so halfway to going home for good.

I think it's actually gone pretty quickly although there have been moments that I've felt like this rotation is dragging on forever.

I thought I'd give a quick summary of the good, the bad and the ugly bits so far...

The Good:
- Actual teaching from consultants. It always happens. It's always of a good quality. This is virtually unheard of in the London hospitals as reg's end up covering for the consultants. Even when it is the consultants a lot of the time it's just spontanious teaching. Here they prepare powerpoints and split topics between us so we can do mini presentations to each other.

- Meeting new people. The girls I live in a flat with are great, as are all the other people on this placement. It's great to get to know people so well, which only happens in such a short amount of time because we're living together.

- The knitting oportunity. Here I can knit lots because there's no telly to distract me. For the first 3 or 4 weeks I also had no internet. That left knitting or work. Knitting won.

The Bad:
- Being away from home. It's tough being away from my flat and my boyf, which has been making me cranky. I'm sure I'll feel a lot happier within myself once I get home.

- Evil Consultant. One of the consultants takes us on a ward round to learn examinations every week. He's evil. He always picks on me first so my examination is never as good as the people who've had the revision of watching me go through it. Most worrying though is his choice of patients. He gets us to examine half dead patients which isn't fair on them. He even made an old lady cry once, didn't notice until I told him and then told her off because he'd apparently explained what we were going to do. I'm pretty sure in my mid-rotation review I'm going to make a complaint about this.

The Ugly:
- Rectal exams. My clinical partner split her glove. Ewwww!

Overall I think this has been a really useful 6 weeks so far, I just hope that the next 6 weeks go by quickly and that I manage to get all the sign ups I need.

Lily xXx

Finally Finished!!!

Yay!!

I finished my essay today!

Woo!

I also cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom. As well as all of that I cooked 18 ready meals in the freezer for the boyf. 18!!! (Granted it was 4 different dishes in huge portions...)

There's bolognese, braised beef and carrots, chicken curry and turkey swedish style meatballs. Thsi means that yet again we managed to do a shop that'll last us around a month for around £80, with the exception of a few more pints of milk and perhaps some salad.

I'm now going to celebrate with a big glass of chocolate milk. Mmmmm.

Lily xXx

More Procrastination

I am getting worse and worse at this procrastination. I have 222 words of my essay left until I hit the minimum word count, probably 350 until I actually finish the essay. That's about an hour or two. I then have maybe another hour of tidying the essay up and then a little bit of fiddling around with the wordings I don't like.

Do you think I can concentrate? No. I just can't be bothered, which is awful. No doubt I'll panic on Sunday and get it done then, but I hate spending ages doing work on the weekend.

To top things off the company I insured my car with for 2 days before it got crushed, so I cancelled the insurance are going to refund me £650. Considering I paid £1196 I don't really think that's good enough. So there's all the stress of that too. I need to write to the insurance ombudsman but I'm a bit stuck with what to say. Hopefully the boyfriend's mum will give me a hand as she used to work with insurance.

Lily xXx

Stupid Essay or Stupid Me?!

This essay is hard. I've done 3250 words and I need to do somewhere between another 750 - 1750. I think I'll hit the word count but I'm seriously doubting the quality.

This essay isn't a science essay. It's a literature essay. I was rubbish at English Literature at school. Totally rubbish. I picked this essay because I love reading and then discussing what I've read which is 40% of the marks of this special study module, but I've only just remembered how awful I am at literature essays.

Reading through what I've written most of it is total drivel. I'm now torn between just deleting it and trying for a complete and paniced rewrite, or just continuing on and hoping for the best. Ideally (although probably not realisitically) I'll finish it today and then on either Friday morning which I have off or perhaps Sunday afternoon I can fiddle around with it and improve it before I hand it in on Monday.

The other annoying thing is that I have to hand it in to my supervisor in London. Thank goodness I have next monday off but it would be much less of a bother if I could just email it. As we need to sign plagerism stuff that isn't really an option.

Anyway I better get back to it. Once the essay is out of the way I have a story about a horrible doctor to tell. I feel I need to share my rantyness and see if other people think he's as unreasonable as I do.

Lily xXx

Waste Not Want Not

Get ready to be impressed.

I am so impressed with myself and the other medics I'm living with on this placement. We did something amazing last night. We opened the fridge to find about 2 pints of sour full fat milk. We didn't bin it. Oh no. We made paneer.

Paneer is a cheese used in indian cooking which is lovely.

To make the paneer we took the soured milk and heated it to just below boiling. We then added lemon juice by the tablespoon to curdle it until it had fully separated into the lumpy curd and the greeny-white runny whey. Then we strained it, rinsed it a bit, strained it some more, squeezed all of the water out (ideally this would have been in a cheese cloth but we used a clean blue jay cloth), then we put it in the fridge in kind of a flat patty shape.

Today we made mutter paneer. A cheese and pea curry.

To make this we cubed the paneer (about 1cm x 1cm) and shallow fried it in vegetable oil. We then took that out and cooked 2 finely chopped onions until they were golden in the oil. After this we added a homemade paste of garlic, ginger and corriander. Then some tomato passata. Then the cubes of paneer and lots of petis pois which we had defrosted. After this we put some tumeric, ground corriander and cumin, red chilli powder and garam masala to the sauce as well as a big pinch of salt. All this cooked and was totally amazing.

I can now impress everyone by being able to cook something authentically indian. I can't wait until I can impress my friends and family at home with something they'll never have tried before.

Lily xXx

Another Busy Weekend

When oh when will I actually get to chill out?!

This was another stupidly hectic weekend. Although the boyfriend has been living with me since the end of Decemeber, so as not to leave his old flatmate in the lurch, he was still paying rent until the beginning of this month. This means we've been moving bits and bobs of his stuff up bit by bit as we've needed them. This weekend we took everything else though. That in itself wasn't too much of a mission, what took the time was cleaning the flat. It still amazes me that landlords will insist on cream carpet. That teamed with the fact it's been hoovered only once or twice for the year the boys have been living there meant that I hoovered for over an hour and a half without stopping. It's amazing how bits of astroturf imbed themselves in carpet.

On top of that we now need to get our flat in order as it's a mess. It's just got piles of stuff everywhere that needs to be organised. To make it worse I can't finish decorating the living room until the broken guttering on top of the window is fixed because it's making it all damp. Grrr. So after this busy weekend I think next weekend I shall be trying to get my flat into some kind of order. That level of mess and disorganisation upsets me and I'm no neat freak.

Lily xXx

Internet Connection

Finally I've got an internet connection in this countryside hospital placement. Considering the hospital computers have been broken with a virus for over two weeks now I was suffering serious weekday internet withdrawl. Unfortunately it costs £19.99 plus VAT each month for each of us to connect which is poo.

I also still can't find the cable for my camera to hook it up to my computer. I've taken some cool pictures of the snowman I built on Monday, but you can't see them so there's not much point in me telling you that.

On a completely unrelated note my immune system isn't what I thought it was. I spent all of Tuesday vomitting and pooing. It was not nice. Fingers crossed it means I won't catch anything nasty again for a while.

A quick knitting update too. I've finished the back of the jumper and I'm getting along with the front now. I've had to hide my knitting so I do the essay I have to do though. Knitting is much more fun than essaying. I think next I'm going to knit some amazing socks I've seen a pattern for. It's actually addictive.

Lily xXx

Snow Day!

It's been snowing. Yay. That makes everything around here in the countryside look totally lovely. In fact today I am feeling more festive than I did over Christmas.

Crazily the snow is so bad that in London ALL the buses have been cancelled. Yes, all of them. It's actual insanity. It makes me wish I was on placement in London so that I could have a proper snow day. Unfortunately living on site for my current placement that isn't a problem. Annoyingly I am not on site so soon the boyfriend is going to have to trudge through snow covered country lanes to get me back. Thankfully we're in no rush as I have no actual set teaching today. This week I'm going to go insane with work and hope to get the first draft of a really hard essay done.

Amusingly I text my Dad who is sunning it up in the French West Indies (very unfair as when I was young enough to go on Holiday with him we went to normal France) that it was snowing. He officially has 4 days of nice weather left there until he's back. Muhahahaha. It serves him right for the funny postcard he sent everyone at work/home (it's the same place you see.), it went along the lines of "Wish you were all here... not really!!!" Meanie.

Fingers crossed by this weekend I should be much jollier because I won't have that hanging over my head. According to the boyfriend our flat is a tip because he's been rearranging stuff so maybe I'll actually have a more moany weekend. We shall see.

Lily xXx