bonjour brightside

my weekend was a semi-nightmare! obs&gynae is more challenging than i ever expected. i went to hospital at 10am on saturday in the hope of catching a woman in labour (have to get 3 deliveries signed off in my log-book) and i waited and waited and waited. but there was no lady in labour, and it was only until 130am sunday that a lady came in, and at 300am she gave birth to a lovely little baby boy.

waiting in vain is an excrutiating experience. i had been waiting for 14 hours and nothing happened. my friend who waited for about 3 hours got a baby because the midwife she was assigned to was looking after the lady in labour. i was so frustrated that i retreated into the backroom and cried secretly! i know i’m a crybaby but at that instance i was so disheartened and not to mention miserable…at one point i even asked God if He was doing it to me on purpose! yes i was that sore! haha. i had to repeatedly psych myself that med is tough but i will hang in there and get through this, even if it means going without sleep for 25hours

i slept 9 hours out of 48 hours, drank too much coffee for my own good, fell asleep on the couch in the visitor’s lounge and pinched biscuits from the pantry to keep my hunger pangs at bay. yet i also followed the residents on duty around and learnt quite a fair bit, answered phonecalls from anxious women thinking  that they might be in labour, cuddled a few crying bubs and patted them to sleep… maybe it wasn’t that bad after all.

+ oh and special birthday shoutouts:

Happy Smashingbulous Birthday to Sip and BigJem!

sorry, i meant to update sooner but obgyn is proving to be more intense than any rotation i’ve experienced thus far. i’m sooo knackered! it is not fun waiting for hours and hours on end for babies to be delivered. but then again i understand that birthing is a beautiful process and so good things are worth waiting for. *must.be.patient!*

anyway, i need to come up with places to go for med electives next year. ive got a list of countries that i’d like to visit, and i’m particularly interested in UK and china- does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations? thanks in advance

was doing my regular fashion-blog browsing when i came across this post from the lovely ms spinach, whose site i frequently love to visit. there was a picture of some very gorgeous lace-up shoes that caught my eye, but it transpired that the post was evidently not about the shoes but about a little girl with a brain tumour. i fully agree with ms spinach that we’re incredibly lucky (in some way or another), and i was inspired to make a donation to this little girl’s family, rather than splurge on something that my closet cannot accommodate.

please click on the link to read the post, and donate if you can! even if you can’t give financially, it would good to drop them some kind words of encouragement.

obviously there are many other people who have to go through the same things, if not worse, and you probably are thinking that stories like these are a dime a dozen and/or clichéd, BUT if everyone felt like that, there would be absolutely no hope for this little girl. i only say this because i’ve seen lots of suffering children in my paediatrics rotation, and often i have had no chance to help them (in a medical way at least), and all i could do was to listen and try to be extra nice. it’s easy to shrug it off as ‘yet another sob-story’ but remember that in every story like this there is a kid and her family involved, along with huge financial and emotional ramifications- and they can’t shrug it off like we can, because it’s their kid. you probably don’t know this girl and her family personally (neither do i), but you know their story now- so please help them, any donation/encouragement is certainly good enough!

on a related note, my paeds rotation ends tomorrow. cannot tell you all how much i love paediatrics, i have enjoyed every single moment of being with the little bubs and toddlers these nine weeks, and am very sad (!!) to move on to ob&gyn.

+photo from theage. dunno if you can see it, but there is a faint skyline of the city(that has been engulfed in dust), and trees have toppled over everywhere.

i was in the hospital the entire day and was blithely oblivious to the winds that were raging at 100kmh outside, until there were at least 5 code yellows about some power outage and how the hospital was only running on generator power. it was so bad that there was darkness everywhere, visitors had to be turned away or kindly shooed out of the hospital, and apparently lou said that there was falling debris (from the roof) outside the main entrance. eeks! i kind of flipped out when i had to walk to the station and the winds were crazily strong! saw lots of uprooted trees and fallen fences- yes it was THAT bad! it started to rain just as i got off my stop and my umbrella flipped inside-out at least five times (very annoying) as i tried to walk home in a straight line, without getting blown to the side (it was so hard to merely advance forward and i thought of this song lyric: “stop and stare, i think i’m moving but i go nowhere”)

so when i got home i checked the news and read that apparently this was one of the worst winds to hit victoria, engulfing the city in dust, causing major traffic and public transport disruption and power outages all over victoria. there was a report about a woman who got killed by a wall that collapsed on her as she was passing by *egad!* poor lady!

so this morning i decided i’d hit the snooze and stay home (and be lazy/err on the side of caution), just in case the weather was going to act up again. storms are scary!