My Week At Medical School - Tuesday

6.35: Alarm goes off. Stumble out of bed.

6.36: Stub toe on the door frame. Swear loudly enough to wake up the whole block of flats and stumble into the shower. Get dressed and have breakfast as per usual.

7.18: Set off for the train station 3 minutes later than normal because I couldn't find my headphones. This disproportionately annoys me but strangely I make it to the train station 2 minutes earlier than I usually would. Clearly the stubbed toe didn't disable me.

8.15: Take my headphones out and realise ink from a pen which exploded in my bag is all over one. I know have a nice blue ear canal. Lets hope noone gets out the auriscopes today.

8.30: Lecture begins on time today. It's a surprisingly interesting lecture with loads of cool 3D echo pictures. Even more excitingly the lecturer only talks for half an hour rather than adding loads of technical mumbo jumbo we have no hope of understanding. Unfortunately lecturer number duo doesn't turn up.

9.03: Frantically scramble to the ward with the nice registrar who likes teaching in an attempt to beat any other students.

9.04: Drat. The other students beat us.

9.06: When all else fails go for a coffee to cheer up. During the coffee we chat mindless rubbish and make a new game plan for the morning. We almost go into cardiac arrest when we realise this has taken 45 mins.

10.00: Sit in the library and try to do a little more of my presentation. Unfortunately for me the library is one of the social hubs of the hospital and I end up having a good old natter to lots of people I haven't seen in ages.

12.00: Mmmmm... hummus for lunch again. Shame the bread is a bit stale.

13.00: A really informative and interesting teaching session from one of the surgical registrars. I also managed to answer a lot of the questions correctly. It's reassuring to think that deep down I'm actually starting to learn stuff.

15:00: With only a few minutes to stretch our legs, we then have another teaching session but this time with one of our consultants. He's surprisingly nice and not scary although the further we get into the rotation the more annoyed he gets when we look blankly at him. Yet again I manage to answer a fair few questions as do the others in the group so we don't look completely stupid. I'm sure I see a small smile of satisfaction on his face that we're finally absorbing the things it's taken him weeks to teach us.

16:46: Wait for the train. It's late. I'm unimpressed.

17.20: Pop to Starbucks to kill time before a 6pm meeting. Do some of the work for my special study module while sipping a gingerbread latte. It's completely not science based which is a nice change but it's been at least 5 years since I've done anything similar.

18.00: Meeting for the charity committee I'm on. Basically it's a major freak out because an event which another group were holding on our behalf has fallen through and we may have to let a lot of people down. We spend ages brainstorming ways to make the best of the situation we're in. Fingers crossed we've kind of got it sorted but my stress levels are way way way high. I've also agreed to make 250 posh raffle tickets for the 26th. Eek.

19.45: Get home. Have some pasta and jump in the shower afterwards. I always find a hot steamy shower helps me when I'm feeling really stressed out.

20.30: Crack on with my presentation for tomorrow. Things are a lot more complicated then they first seemed so I'm trying to keep it as simple as I can. I've still got a fair bit to do later on tonight but I'd guess that I'm well over half way now and I'm pretty confident about the subject which is what matters most.

The rest of this evening will be taken up by finishing my presentation (hopefully it won't take more than an hour), calling the boyf for a chat because I miss him and reading whoever's updated their blogs.

As you can tell this has been a pretty hard working boring day overall. Thankfully all the teaching I had today was really interesting as otherwise days without much patient contact can get pretty dull.

Lily xXx