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

Catty Consultants

I finally feel truely part of the team within the hospital. My chums and I have been witness to some proper inter-consultant bitchyness, much to our amusement. There we were thinking all the consultants are sophisticated and professional. Not so.

When one of our consultants (who, to be totally honest is very very arrogant, but in a funny cool way) asked another consultant if he could use a seminar room, none of us were taken aback by the usual sarcastic witty banter. What happened next was enough to shock me into almost choking on a cup of tea...

as the funny arrogant consultant stuck his head out of the door to see if any other rooms were free the other consultant stuck his two fingers up and mouthed "F*** off, W*****" (it's not usually my style to star things out, but I'm still in so much shock I can't get the words out).

Glad to see it's not only us with our improfessional, petty grudges.

Lily xXx