Moan

 Yesterday one of the people in my group went home with a “migraine” brought on by not wanting to sit through our afternoon group work. This really annoyed me for several reasons. First of all it was annoying that this person couldn’t be bothered turning up for a few hours when the rest of us made the effort. Secondly, people often use migraines as an easy excuse to be off ill (I suppose because they come on quickly and don’t last too long). I genuinely suffer quite badly from migraines, so much so in fact that I have to take propranolol daily to try to prevent them, although I still sometimes do get them. Since taking the medication I get them less often, but when I do get them I can’t do anything but whimper in bed and wait for it to go away. I get severe photophobia, visual disturbances, nausea and vomiting, and worst of all is the pain which is unbearable at times, but because everyone’s always got a “migraine” I think that people don’t realise just how severe and debilitating they generally are.

If people call in sick regularly then other colleagues/students and managers tend to lose sympathy and start having the attitude that people are probably just pulling a sickie or exaggerating symptoms to have a day off. This leads to people feeling guilty when they genuinely have to take the day off due to illness and puts people under pressure to come in even if they are ill. This culture seems to be very prolific in doctor land where it’s often heavily frowned on to have a sick day -  “letting the team down” or “not very hardcore”. Fair enough, doctors rotas and workload are often very tight in hospital, leaving the rest of the team to try to cover the sick doctor as well as carrying out their normal work, but sometimes people are genuinely too ill to be in work and need to take the day off without feeling guilty about doing so! Doctors look after everyone else, but it’s frowned upon to look after ourselves? And what about infection control and not spreading illnesses to patients?! It’s not just in doctor land that this type of culture exists either, from my experiences it’s also very prolific within pharmacists and nurses too. Last year I witnessed one doctor who was in so much back pain that she could barely walk down the corridor. A few of her colleagues acknowledged her pain and gave her some sympathy, but not one of them offered to help her or suggested that maybe she should go home, which is where she clearly should have been. Compassion and empathy anyone? I’ve also been reading accounts of pregnant doctors who felt pressured to carry on working and doing on-calls until very late in their pregnancy, beyond what they felt comfortable and safe doing. If a pregnant woman came into clinic, the doctor would be the first person to tell them that they shouldn’t be exerting themselves beyond what they felt was safe for the safety of both patient and baby. Basically, just don’t call in sick unless you are genuinely too ill to come into work, and don’t make people feel guilty for being off sick if they are genuinely ill.

The second thing that annoyed me today was a fellow student in my lecture this morning. We had a guest lecturer who was a consultant in the field he was speaking about and was generally a very good and interesting teacher. The lecturer made a point (about what’s not really important), to which this student put up his hand, and without waiting to be acknowledged by the lecturer, said “I think you mean……”. The lecturer seemed taken aback by this but then clarified his point, to which this student then interrupted again, saying “are you sure” and then at the end of the lecture went up and challenged him on it. I found this incredibly rude and disrespectful! If the student had a point to make about what we were being taught there’s a polite way of discussing it with the lecturer, without interrupting him and being quite hostile. The guest lecturer didn’t have to agree to come in to teach us today, but he did and personally I think that all lecturers should be treated with respect, but more so if they’re a guest lecturer as his behaviour reflects badly on the rest of us students and the med school and may mean that he may not agree to come and teach next year.

8am

So my 8am Friday lecture was cancelled today so I’m sat in the library writing this as my brain’s not yet awake enough to do proper work.

I had a meeting with my personal tutor this week. He very nicely told me that basically if I don’t buck up my ideas I’ll fail the summer exams. I knew this already so it wasn’t an unfair thing for him to say, but it still left me feeling a bit rubbish afterwards.

I’m going to an obstetrics and gynaecology conference tomorrow. The timetable looks really interesting, but it does mean that I have to get up at 7am and won’t get any uni work done for the day so I’ll have to try to fit all my work in on Sunday as well as catching up with house work etc. Recently I’ve been doing Pharmacy shifts on quite a few of the weekends and I went home last weekend to spend some time with the bf’s family, which was really nice, but has meant that I’ve not really been getting much work done at the weekends lately. I am getting quite a lot of work done in the week time, but I think I need to start making my weekends more productive. I calculated that it’s 14 weeks till my written exams. This sounds like a lot of time, but I’m sure it’ll go by really fast.

Before uni I really thought that I might want to become a surgeon (mostly thanks to the TV show Grey’s Anatomy), but since coming to uni I’ve realised that anatomy is the area I least enjoy out of all the subject areas that I have to learn about. I know that anatomy is important but I just find learning reels of names of different things in the body really boring! I much prefer learning about physiology and clinical things.

Has anyone been watching the recent BBC show “Brain Doctors”? I find it really interesting and it’s been well made, still scientific but at a level that lay people will still understand.

Chance Encounters

My first chance encounter was when I was sat in our uni canteen. I was waiting for my friend, who was buying lunch, to join me when this older man comes up and sits next to me. He says “I hope you don’t mind me joining you” and then proceeds to tell me that he’s a visiting lecturer and was waiting for his contact at the uni to come collect him. We ended up having a really interesting conversation comparing our universities and he told me about interesting recent discoveries in the role aspirin might play in preventing and treating certain cancers! When he first came up to me I was a bit on my guard as its not every day that old men come and sit next to you, but he turned out to be lovely. I was disappointed that he didn’t turn out to be my lecturer for the afternoon!

The second encounter of my week really was a very random chance encounter. I was on the train travelling home for the weekend when a man came and sat next to me as that was his reserved seat. We got talking and it turned out that he was also a Pharmacist who had worked in hospital pharmacy and was also now in his first year of a graduate entry medicine course! I mean what are the chances of meeting someone in the exact same (not exactly common) situation as me! Unfortunately we didn’t have long to talk as I had to change trains but it was fun meeting him and comparing courses/exams.

Exam results

So we got the exam results back, and………….. I passed!

It’s not a big celebration though as I only just passed, but considering I knew I hadn’t done enough/the right type of work I’m pleased. On my first exam I only passed ¼ questions, but that was the exam where I had a bad migraine the day before and got myself pretty worked up and panicky for it, whereas I was a lot more calm for the second exam, and for that exam I passed 4/4 questions. I have used this as an impetus to change and so far this term I’ve been staying a few hours after uni each day and at weekends, writing up my lecture notes and doing extra reading each week. I feel a lot better about my revision and my grasp on the teaching topics than I did last term.

The one exception to this is my musculoskeletal module.  For all my other modules I’ve been typing up revision notes for each lecture, but I’ve found that this hasn’t worked for musculoskeletal as these lectures are mostly just pictures. I also find musculoskeletal very hard as I did absolutely no anatomy in my previous degree and I find it really difficult to remember the plethora of names of things in the body that we have to learn. Before I started med school I honestly thought that there were only a few key muscles in your limbs, I didn’t have a clue about all the little things in there as well! I think I’m going to have to buy some anatomy flash cards (such as these), but other than that I don’t really know how best to revise this subject. If anyone would like to share how they revise anatomy/musculoskeletal or give me any tips I’d be very grateful!

Other than getting my exam results, nothing too exciting has happened recently. At hospital this week we saw a man with an inguinal hernia which was interesting to examine. I also met up with my special study supervisor and we decided on my study topic: elective caesarean sections. I’m really excited about this as it should be really interesting and will help consolidate some of the topics we’re studying at the moment. I’ll be going in to observe the caesareans which I’m really looking forwards to, but I’m also slightly nervous as I’ve never seen an operation before and I’m hoping I don’t do something embarrassing like get in the way or faint! It was also really embarrassing in the meeting, as we were discussing different topic areas and then once we’d decided on caesareans I had to fill out a form for my supervisor to sign documenting this. The only thing was, in that moment I couldn’t for the life of me remember how to spell “caesarean”, so I just wrote an approximation of it in scrawled handwriting and hoped that my supervisor wouldn’t notice! He didn’t say anything, but maybe he was just being polite. So embarrassing!

I had a really horrible locum Pharmacist shift last weekend. It was really busy (which wasn’t the problem although I didn’t get a chance to have a drink all day, let alone stop for lunch), but pretty much every other patient who came in had a problem or a complaint (about things from earlier in the week which I didn’t have anything to do with but I was still the one to get shouted at). There were also loads of people coming in claiming that we should have their repeat prescriptions made up, and that they didn’t have any medication left, but when I looked the prescriptions had only come back from the doctors late the night before, so shouldn’t have to be ready until the Monday, or just weren’t back from the doctors at all. This meant either hurriedly making up their prescription and keeping them waiting, or else having to do emergency supplies. This caused the patients to be grumpy and more often or not this was taken out on me. It was just annoying because all of the problems and complaints came from the regular staff not doing their jobs properly and poor store procedures, but it was me who ended up looking bad and incompetent. Grrrrr. I’m going home again for another locum shift tomorrow. Hopefully this one will be a little better.