TUESDAY

6.15 – Another early start. I didn’t get the best night’s sleep due to my boyfriend waking me up at 4am and telling me that it was time to get up (I think he was still asleep at the time and dreaming), so I wake up in a bit of a grumpy mood.

6.20 – I shower, dress, eat breakfast and pack my bag for the day.

7.10 – I leave the house (late) and have to run for my bus. The bus driver kindly waits for me, which I appreciate as a lot of the time they don’t.

7.50 – I arrive at uni and make a quick cup of Earl Grey tea before the start of my lecture

8.00 – Lecture. Yup, I have a lecture at 8am. Thankfully this only occurs once a week, but we’ve had 8am lectures once a week every term since starting uni. Normally I really enjoy clinical skills lectures, but this week I wish I’d stayed in bed. The lecture’s supposed to be on MSK clinical skills, but the lecturer spent the whole lecture going through case studies of different MSK patients and didn’t actually teach us any MSK clinical skills. This happened last term also, so I still don’t have much idea how to do MSK examinations (eg. how to examine the hip, shoulder, back etc.). I hope our clinical skills tutors cover this in our hospital session next week, otherwise I’ll be clueless if these come up in our OSCEs.

9.00 – I eat the (home-made) brownie I packed for my lunch early to cheer myself up

9.15 – Our next 2 lectures start. This lecture’s on Pharmacology so I find this material pretty straightforward. It’s good revision though as a lot of this information I’ve not had to use since my Pharmacy degree. I use the lecture time to make really good Pharmacology revision notes on the material being covered (cardiology pharmacology).

11.15 – We then have small group work doing questions based on the pharmacology material we’ve just covered.

12.30 – Home time! I get this afternoon off as half the year has their hospital placements on Tuesday afternoons, but as I have mine on Monday morning, I get this time off. I walk to the bus stop and get the bus home.

1.30 – My boyfriend’s off work this afternoon too so we just do a few errands and I get a bit of work done – just writing up notes from last week’s lectures.

4.30 – I get an email from the medical school telling me that the special study module I chose to do (which ran on Thursday mornings) had been cancelled at the last minute (“due to unavoidable circumstances”) and that I’d been reallocated my third choice option of Diagnostic Imaging. I’m disappointed, but learning how to read x-rays and things will be pretty useful. The only thing is that Diagnostic Imaging is run on a Wednesday (tomorrow) morning at the local hospital, so I’m glad I checked my email when I did otherwise I would have missed the first session! I now have to figure out how I’m going to get to the hospital (a 1 and a half hour, 2 bus journey from my house) in time and then back to the med school for afternoon lectures.

6.30 – Have dinner of left over lasagne with salad.

7.00 – Do the washing up and sort things out for tomorrow.

8.00 – I watch the Great British Bake Off and then TheMidwives, both on BBC2.

10.00 – I get ready for bed and then go to sleep!

A week in the life of a second year med student - MONDAY

This week is my second week back as a second year! The first week back went really fast. It was good, but it looks as though there's going to be a LOT of work this term. I thought that I'd document a week in my life as a pre-clinical med student for anyone who's interested in what med school might be like and how much work is involved.

6.30 – I wake up, get breakfast, shower and get dressed. I’m in smart clothes today as I’m in the hospital seeing patients this morning. I also put together a quick lunch of leftovers as I'm not sure if I'm going to get an opportunity to buy lunch.

7.30 – I leave the house and walk to meet 2 friends. We then walk 20 minutes to the nearest bus stop that will take us to the hospital.

8.00 – We get on the bus and travel for 1 hour 20 mins in rush hour traffic to the hospital. Normally I’d get a lift to the hospital, which would decrease the travel time, but my friend’s car is in the garage getting fixed this week, so the bus it is.

9.30 – At the hospital. Our small groups spilt up and we sit with our clinical tutor and talk about what’s expected of us over this next term. We then go up to the ward to see a patient, take a history and do whatever examination is appropriate, as for this week there isn't one specific clinical examination we're focussing on.

10.30 – Our group went and talked to a young lady with Crohn’s disease who had come into hospital with bad colicky pain and other symptoms, and who was probably going to end up having an operation. I took the history, and it was really nice to be able to introduce myself as a second year medical student. Second year sounds so much better than first year! My partner then performed a general and abdominal examination. The patient was really co-operative and didn’t mind us practicing on her, even though the examination probably didn’t help her pain and she wasn’t benefitting from us seeing her at all. I’m really grateful when we get nice obliging patients like her! It’s so much better practice to take histories and do examinations on real patients, rather than on other med students.

12pm – We all go back to meet our clinical tutor and fed back about the cases that we’d seen before finishing.

12.30 – We luckily don’t have to wait long for a bus, and at midday it only takes us 1 hour to get back to the university. This gives me just enough time to quickly eat my lunch before my afternoon lecture!

1.45 – We have a lecture on medical law from a really engaging lecturer who used to be a barrister.

3.00 – We then have small groupwork which involves discussing some case studies involving ethical dilemmas with a clinical tutor.

4.00 – Another lecture, this time looking at ethics and consent

4.45 – Home time! I walk to the bus stop and get the bus home

5.30 – I arrive home and do a bit of housework, prepare dinner and quickly look over the lecture notes for tomorrow.

8.00 – My boyfriend gets home from work. He doesn’t work a 9-5 day, so sometimes he’s home early, but other times he doesn’t arrive home until later. He helps me finish making dinner (sausage, beans and mashed potato) and then we eat whilst watching a bit of TV.

9.30 – After cleaning up after dinner we just watch a bit more TV and faff around a bit. I get my notes and things ready for tomorrow and then get ready for bed.

10.30 – I go to bed. I normally go to bed at around 11pm, but after a busy weekend and an early start I’m tired and want to get a good night’s sleep before another early start tomorrow.

Tales from the pharmacy

These are several stories that happened to me whilst working recently which I thought I’d share (any identifying details of the patients below have been changed!).

• It was the middle of a busy shift when one of the healthcare counter staff came up to me and told me that there was a patient requesting to see me who was having an asthma attack. I went out to see her, and she was indeed having an asthma attack and at that point was really struggling to breathe. There are certain prescription medications that Pharmacists are allowed to give to patients in emergency situations without a prescription or the patient being known to the pharmacy, so I took the patient into the consultation room and gave her a salbutamol inhaler. After several puffs she started being able to breathe again, which I was very relieved about. I stayed with her to ensure she recovered fully, and after 5 minutes or so she’d recovered enough to be able to talk again. At that point she got pretty upset as I think the attack had given her a shock. I comforted her and stayed with her for a while until she felt ok to leave. She thanked me a lot and claimed that I’d saved her life (probably a slight exaggeration!), but it was nice to think that I’d made a difference in that women’s life that day.

• On another occasion, 2 sisters came into the pharmacy I was working at, both with prescriptions for the morning after pill. I asked them if they knew how to take it, and as they didn’t seem to know much about it, I took them into the consultation room to counsel them on it. I said that I could talk to them separately, but they were happy to come in together. As part of the counselling I always check how long ago the unprotected sex was to ensure that the patient is still eligible to take it, and to advise them on approximately how effective it will be. When I asked the question to these sisters, one of them said the early hours of the previous day and the other one nodded in agreement. I didn’t probe further but I couldn’t help thinking about what on earth had occurred? Had they both just happened to have had unprotected sex with different men at the same time, or had it occurred in some big orgy?! I’m glad I did talk to them though as the doctor didn’t seem to have told them anything about how to take it (or else they’d forgotten everything the doctor had said), and hopefully they’ll have good outcomes from it.

• Lastly, I was doing a medicines use review with a patient and talking to her about her medication. She had recently been prescribed a cream, so I asked her what she was using it for. It turned out that the patient is a naturist and was using the cream for a shaving rash “down below” from a recent naturist holiday! She didn’t need to tell me so many details surrounding the need for the cream, but it was interesting to hear about and the patient seem to mind telling me about it! 

Recently my locum agency wanted me to work 25 hours in one weekend at the end of September – a 8am to 11pm shift on Saturday and a 9am to 7pm shift on the Sunday. I agreed to work the Sunday shift but not the Saturday one. I know that in the future as a doctor I might have to work long hours, but as I currently have the liberty of refusing shifts, I’m taking full advantage. I just wouldn’t have felt confident in still being clinically safe to work after 15 straight hours, plus when I’m in uni full time Mon-Fri and have work to do outside of lectures, I need time off at some point! How much need though is there for a Pharmacy situated on the outskirts of a small town to be open until 11pm on a Saturday? It seems a bit pointless to me.

The joys of med school

My boyfriend’s father is currently in the process of buying a holiday house in France. My day dreams of long and numerous holidays lazing in the French countryside were rudely dashed however, when I found out that over the next 3 years at medical school I get a grand total of 2 weeks off in summer and 2 weeks off over Christmas. Erm, what happened to Easter?? Adding to this, the nature of my boyfriend’s job means that he can’t take any leave off over Christmas and it’s very difficult for him to take leave in the summer months so we’re going to have hardly any time off together over the next few years :(. I wish money was less of an issue so that I could have spent this one proper summer break on long holidays and relaxing (like many of my classmates) instead of working!

Back to the real world

I’ve just come back from a 9 day holiday in the countryside of France. It was such a nice break!

(photo taken by me)

Back to the grind tomorrow though. I’m doing a locum shift with a company which requires all their locums to perform 2 Medicine Use Reviews and 1 New MedicineService every day. These are essentially services where the pharmacist sits down with the patient and reviews their medication with them. Sounds good in principal, but setting targets means that in reality pharmacists often end up doing the services on patients who don’t really require the service in order just to reach targets and earn the company money (the pharmacy gets paid approx £27 for every one carried out). Some days you just don’t get the patient’s through the door who match the minimum criteria to allow you to carry out the service on them, or the patients just don’t agree (are often too much in a rush) to sit down with you, so trying to reach targets can be pretty stressful.

This is the main reason why I dislike community pharmacy – it’s a business with the main priority of making money. Patient care is secondary and there’s always going to be conflict. I’m glad doctors still work for the NHS where making money isn’t the primary aim.