Belated Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas y'all!

I hope that everyone's had a good Christmas :). I'm back at home for Christmas which has been really nice; seeing all my family and eating lots of nice food! I got many nice presents, and people seemed to like the presents that I gave them which was good.

My boyfriend got a 42" flat screen TV for Christmas which makes him very lucky, but also me very lucky as I'll get to use it in our flat!

I went Christmas sale shopping today. I was worried that all of the good stuff would have gone already, but I found many nice things to try on! I bought 2 nice dresses, one for New Year's Eve and one work dress, and a leather case for my iPhone. They were all really cheap too so I didn't feel guilty about spending money.

On the Pharmacy front, I finally passed my MUR accreditation, and have done my first Pharmacist locum shift! In fact I've now done 4 locum shifts, for which I've earnt over £600, not bad! My first locum shift was rather nerve wracking and I was thrown in at the deep end when after just arriving at the store I was given a pile of addict scripts to dispense and check, when I've never actually dealt with dispensing methadone and supervised consumption before, other than in role play situations at uni. I think I remembered all the theory from Medicines, Ethics and Practice and I think/hope that I did it all ok. My second locum shift on Christmas eve was a lot better, although very busy. I did manage to put my clinical knowledge into practice at one point by diagnosing a man with tremours and shaking as suffering from side effects of excessive use of his salbutamol inhaler and referred him to a doctor for better COPD control, which I felt good about.

At the beginning of my uni holidays I managed to get a lot of revision done, but since coming home the revision has taken a back seat to all the holiday festivities and visiting relatives/friends. I started to feel a bit guilty and stressed about my lack of revision and the upcoming exams though earlier today, so instead of going to the cinema with my Dad and sister tonight I'm staying in to revise hernias. My first exam is the OSCE which I'm not really worried about as I think that I'm quite good at this, but the written exams the week after are scaring me! It's really hard to know how much depth you need to know topics in. Several people have told me that it's impossible to learn everything and to just try to learn a few key points from every lecture, but doing this is really hard as I tend to worry about missing things out and end up writing up notes on everything which isn't really effective. I need to improve my Medicine revision skills. I guess that's what these formative exams are partly for though, to help give us an idea of how much depth to learn things and to test whether our learning and revision techniques are effective.

Anyway I should stop procrastinating and go back to my revision!