Phase III: Randomised Clinical Try-All

I’ve done eight of thirty-eight weeks of clinical placement, and yes, I’ve started counting them.

I do two full days a week of General Practice in a small town a half-hour drive away, half a day in the Emergency Department of my local hospital, a day on campus, and sundry random activities to fill up the rest of my timetable.

The random activities to date have included placements with a dentist, an optometrist and a diabetes educator, a day of oncology, radiology, and a weekend on the labour ward (yay babies). These were all good learning experiences.

It has taken me this long to find my footing in the ED, but I feel like I know now what it is I’m supposed to be doing there. Even better, I have an approximate idea of how to do it.

One day a week, my GP placement feels like utter drudgery. The other day is fine. The practice staff are great, and the GP Registrar in particular makes me feel like I’m part of the team.

The day of utter drudgery is putting me right off General Practice as a career. This is a little disturbing. Rural GP was pretty much the plan from the get-go.

On the upside, there are a couple of patients who I’ve been seeing for repeat visits on mental health matters. Those consultations are definitely my comfort zone.

I’m not at the point of taking GP off the table, but I’m definitely adding dishes to the smorgasbord.

That Awkward Moment When…

I was reading this post and was reminded of my own recent special moment. That awkward moment when the bank manager suggests you have a baby so that you can borrow some money.

No seriously, he did. And helpfully added “…but even that would take nine months…” Ah, buddy, if only it were that simple.

“Well then, could you lend me eight bucks for a turkey baster?”

Ok maybe that last bit didn’t happen.

A couple of days after the end of exams I zipped off to our mortgage lender to see if we could leverage some of our essential renovations into enough of a buffer to keep paying the bills until I graduate. Sadly for us, government study allowances are not considered a secure form of income. Whereas if we were receiving a family allowance, we would apparently be a much safer bet.

It was a good-natured encounter, and I walked away feeling that I had put my argument well. Plan A, not to be. Luckily we had Plans B through D up our sleeves.

I guess we could develop Plan E, in which E stands for Embryo… It just seems a little extreme.

Seek And Ye Shall Find

The search terms which have caused people to find this particular patch of internet are a regular source of amusement to me. Sometimes the search term itself amuses me, and sometimes it amuses me that someone would actually click on the link to this site when it pops up in their results.

So to thank these faithful searchers for the hours of amusement they have provided me, I feel it is incumbent upon me to provide some answers from time to time.

Let’s start with something recent, and I admit, not unreasonable, given that I present myself as providing advice on how not to hit a golf ball.

golf ball not going in the air when hit

Keep hitting it the way you are hitting it. See, I’m qualified to tell you how not to hit it. If you want someone to tell you how to hit it, I’m not the best person to ask. However if I were pressed, I would suggest that you hit it somewhat inferiorly to the current point of impact of club on ball. This should give you some loft.

Loft is such a great word.

in which countries is the term “dad joke” used?

I’m curious as to why you need this information. Is it to be used in planning a travel itinerary? More likely you are employed by a pharmaceutical company and are testing market viability of a new cardiac drug you’re considering naming something like “Dadjokesin”. I will help you regardless: You may add Australia to your list. Of countries, not potential drug names.

cell organelle analogy harry potter

It sounds like something I would know about, but I honestly can’t think of one. If Harry Potter were a Golgi Complex… I think I shall come back to this after exams.

soob medical terminology

This is an important abbreviation, and close to my heart. It is used when writing in patients’ notes to record observations. SOOB stands for “Sitting On Own Bottom”. Sometimes you will also see “SOSEB” which stands for “Sitting On Someone Else’s Bottom”, which is indicative of significant improvement in the patient’s condition.

free air underwear

This is a good idea, but I think I should test the market with t-shirts first.

An Unexpected Email

Dear Mum,
Thanks for your offer of KD Lang concert tickets ad an early Christmas gift. I’m just not that big a fan. What I’d really like right now though is an Epilady (TM).
Mwah, etc,
Toast

Not A Cinderella Story

Did I mention I am home now? Hopefully for good, minus the odd week here & there when I have exams and such at the mothership. This weekend I am in fact home alone, with nothing but the company of various mammals, fowl and underwater creatures for company.

This afternoon I took the hound to the beach. He is, after all, a Beachhound. It was a hot day, but being late in the afternoon, a wind had arisen and driven most people away. Nevertheless, there was a clump of people deposited directly at the entrance to the beach, flopped like seals on an icefloe.

I kicked off my trusty Havs and strolled down the beach, dog lead over my shoulder, footwear dangling from my hand. The hound waited all of thirty seconds to poop on the sand, and as I pulled a plastic bag from my pocket in order to pick it up, another bag flew out and billowed (in a small and rapid way) toward the dunes.

Being an avid environmentalist, I sprinted after it, and thanks to a convenient clump of dessicated seaweed, caught up with it in less than 100 metres with only a minor twist to my ankle.

Luckily, the wind was strong enough to mean my journey back to the origin of the poop was a straight line. Although the hound had cleverly camouflaged his excrement to exactly match the sand, its unmistakable cigar-like form remained, enabling me to locate it and employ the miscreant plastic bag.

Not much wanting to add a bag of poop to my stroll, I tracked back to the dune-grass line, and left the bag in a prominent position, carefully noting its location for collection on the return journey.

Back to the walk. Strolling back down to the high-water line, I found a cuttlefish bone the size of a MacBook Pro. I picked it up to marvel at the size of the calamari rings its owner would have produced. As I marvelled, I wondered whether chickens like cuttlefish bones. Now that I am A Scientist of sorts, I decided I should put this to the test.

I returned to the poobag at the dune-grass line, and added the giant cuttlefish bone to the To-Be-Collected pile. I cavorted with the hound somewhat, thus distracting him from a miserable Retriever on a Halti lead, and we continued our stroll. Before too long, he pooped again.

I congratulated myself on having made the effort to chase the second plastic baggy. Knowing myself as I do, I decided I would be unlikely to remember the location of two bag-drops, so the second offering joined us on our walk to the calm end of the beach.

The water was deliciously warm, and on arrival at our destination, the hound and I disrobed and enjoyed some salt water time, much to the amusement of passers-by. Waves excite and repel him. He made all sorts of friends while I got thumped in the back by the chaotic distant cousins of a tsunami. I dried myself on my shirt and we headed back down the beach, poo-baggy and cap in hand.

About half-way down the beach I was enjoying my bare feet, when I realised that I had arrived in my Havs. Bugger. I searched the windswept landscape of my recent memory. The sprint. The Retriever. The second poop. A fishing float. When had I discarded them? No clues.

I was reasonably sure I’d have noticed them in the re-clothing part of the adventure, and decided against retracing our steps to the swimming end of the beach. Peering about the beach as we continued the stroll, I stopped to ask the hound’s new best friends if they had seen some missing silver thongs.

Sadly, they were of no help, though they did manage to crank out some jokes about Cinderella and a metal detector. They had a variety of northern hemisphere accents, and I’m not entirely sure they all knew we were talking about footwear. Shudder.

Bemused at yet another irrefutable example of my intractable vagueness, I resigned myself to the barefoot drive home and headed toward the clump of seal-people and my treasure-pile of poop and flotsam.

Behold! There beside the cuttlefish bone were my trusty Havs, stuck criss-cross fashion and heel-down in the sand.

Maybe it was the seal-people. Maybe it was Halti-woman. Maybe it was me. I have absolutely no idea.

If Wishes Were Fishes I’d Have A Rainbow Trout

After loving psychiatry so much, my rotation through the maternity ward reminded me of all the things I will miss out on if I follow the psych pathway instead of rural general practice like I had always planned. So the seed of doubt is planted.

Luckily I have a good few years to figure it all out and see where I best fit. That’s assuming I pass everything… Exams are more than seven months away but I’m already starting to feel some niggles of apprehension. I think this is mainly because of my intractable lack of organisation. Grand intentions and massive failure to follow through.

I feel like I need a system and I don’t have one. Bits of mind maps, bits of flash cards, bits of handwritten notes, bits of typed up ones. I doubt I’m the only med student in the world who struggles with this, but the balance of evidence suggests that the majority have neat folders, stacks of home made flash cards, and reams of tidy notes which are complete and cover a single topic per page.

I basically have a couple of lumps of blutac, some string, and a dog-eared spiral-bound pad of coloured paper covered in multi-coloured random scribble and semi-logical diagrams. Couple this with a misshapen muesli bar, a paper clip attached to a blue rubber band, a petrol receipt and one of those individually-wrapped tropical fruit Mentos you get at conferences, and you have my study compendium.

The electronic equivalent is presented below.

How about that… Informative and colourful.

( … help me … )