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

First Week Survived

Against the odds I survived the first week of clinics. More importantly I loved the first week of clinics. We've been warned so much that this year is the time that even some of the most dedicated medical students go out onto the wards for the first time and realise that perhaps medicine isn't the career for them. Because of this, in the back of my mind, I've been worrying that even though I loved the first 2 years of medicine, that maybe I'd completely hate the actual being in hospitals and putting my knowledge to use. So far this totally isn't the case.

My firm heads are both really approachable and helpful. They've also already given us some amazing teaching. I've probably learnt as much in this week with these two consultants as I learnt in a whole month of lectures in 1st or 2nd year.

I also got to see a double coronary artery bypass graft (CABG), findly known as a "cabbage". I found it totally amazing that this surgeon was precise enough to be able to bypass the coronary arteries with little bits of radial and mammary artery. There is no way my sewing could ever get up to that standard.

The only bad thing about clinics is early mornings. Who knew there was a 6am?! I've got into a Grannyish cycle of being in bed by 10. I was so confused this morning where I allowed myself to have a lie in. My body was almost trying to drag itself into the shower and out of the front door by 6.45.

I need to teach myself everything about ECGs before Monday so that I don't look completely stupid, so I should probably go and try and do some work. Or maybe sleep. Sleep would be nice. Really really nice... Mmmmm sleep.

Lily xXx

Apparently I am a "Morning Person"

This is going to sound a little weird, but I actually enjoyed getting up that early in the morning. With the lack of cars and people London was like a totally different place. The air smelt fresher and travelling on the tube didn't make me so angry my head wanted to explode.

Everything went surprisingly smoothly today. I picked up my samples on time without having to wait hours to find someone to let me in the freezer. The tubes ran fine. I arrived at the labs at 7.32... only 2 minutes late. I then spent the next 4 hours putting test tubes in racks and learning the boring parts of lab work until the nice people let me out before I lost the will to live. There was a really nice surgeon lady who is starting her PhD there too, her enthusiam and exciting sounding research project has made me think that research maybe isn't THAT bad. Not that I'd want to do it again.

Unfortunately my addiction to naps kicked in when I got home and i slept for 3 hours... So much for getting any work done. As of tomorrow i really need to give myself a kick up the bum and start writing some revision notes and getting my head around stats for the project. Not fun.

Lily xXx