bonjour brightside

i saw 5 psych patients today. all of them had some form of schizophrenia, mostly the paranoid kind. all were nice and lovely. one taught me all i needed to know about clozapine. another left me with an original quotable quote: “people who write poetry only do so because they can’t write books.”

oh and i snowboarded over the weekend! it was lovely. the snow at falls creek was so white and pristine that i ate some. and snowboarding was EXTREMELY exhilarating and fun. we did the intermediate slopes and one of them was so steep i felt queasy just looking down. i spent the first day falling on my bum 378451 times while trying to master the sport. now my tail bone feels like it has been shattered into a million pieces and my knees are soooo sore i can’t squat. and ski-lift landings are my absolute nightmare! still. you know what they say- no pain, no gain. worth my every ache! now i can strike off ‘do some extreme sport(s)’ under my things-to-do-because-i-want-to list.

help! i am driving myself crazy trying to call shanghai to enquire about electives. for one, my mandarin is pretty much non-existent. i found myself saying ni hao, then i got stuck, and promptly switched to english. and the connection was so bad, i spent 5 minutes ni hao-ing and listening to the dialtone and then gave up. called again via my cellphone and this time i finally got a decent connection going, but the woman on the other end was the operator who did not quite understand my request. she redirected me to another number but no one answered. so after 3 attempts i threw in the towel… i shall try again tomorrow. perhaps i should make a draft in chinese beforehand. my level of mandarin is just …embarassing. can someone please tell me how i can contact the person-in-charge for international exchanges in Shanghai Second Medical University (SHSMU)? i’m getting a little desperate

anyway ive started my gp/psychiatry rotation and it looks to be a pretty peachy semester ahead *fingers crossed* we saw two patients with schizophrenia in psych early this week. one presented with attempted suicide, and the other presented with mania(?). it was really interesting, listening to them recount their thoughts and feelings and experiences….. i’m beginning to like the clinical part of psych but i’m not sure if i’ll enjoy the voluminous readings. haha. anyway i walked from my house to nottinghill for lectures today (must have been about 3 kilometres or so) and it took me 30 minutes. but it was a pretty nice scenic walk and i was dressed in 5 layers to keep myself warm and toasty. the weather forecast said it was going to hail but thank God, it only drizzled a little.

oh! and something amusing happened yesterday. for some reason i thought that class started at 2pm but in actual fact it ran from 1 to 2pm. so at 2pm i waltzed in feeling pretty breezy, while the entire class looked at me in utter shock. i was completely oblivious, until nesh told me that tute was at 1pm. oh my. i wanted to laugh out loud then, but i had to regain my composure so i could apologize to the tutor. and seriously this is not the first time i’ve pulled off something along these lines. i think i have a knack for doing silly things. haha!

exams in 4 days! i am officially in panic mode now. anyway i was reading through my paediatrics notes, and i can’t decide if medical people love or hate food. here’s why

• intussusception : red-currant jelly stools
• pyloric stenosis: olive tumour
• Maple syrup urine disease
• Sturge-Weber syndrome: portwine stain
• Transposition of the great arteries: ‘egg on its side’ chest x-ray finding
• Prune-belly syndrome

and these are just some of the references off the top of my head. of course there are references to animals (eg.spider naevus, stork mark), plants (eg. ash-leaf pigmentation in tuberous sclerosis), objects (eg. scissor legs in cerebral palsy, cogwheel rigidity in Parkinson’s), events (eg. cocktail party syndrome), weather (eg. thunderclap headache of subarachnoid haemorrhage), and of course people (the eponymous syndromes like Down’s, Tay-Sachs, Marfan’s. Turner’s, Edward’s etc)… as you can see i derive joy from making a list like this. anyway, going back to the food references, i have no idea why they are so rampant in the wonderful world of medicine. you would think i would be repulsed by now, but no actually i’m slightly hungry.

p.s. can anyone think of more food references? share, please!

since it’s approaching wintertime and i haven’t been able to go out for runs now nearly as much as i used to (or rather haven’t been able to exercise AT ALL), i’m slowly becoming a couch potato sooo…. i hatched a little experiment: i’m going to use the wii fit program (courtesy of housemate) in the comforts of my own living room (with toasty heater!) and see how much weight i can lose in a month! of course i’ll continue with my normal diet and all and make a very concerted effort to stop over-snacking. i’ve tried the yoga and it’s a pretty good back stretching session, which i like, and the only thing i don’t like is having to run on the spot for 5 minutes. otherwise it’s pretty excellent and fun, i love how the wii fit trainers tell me off (gently) if i’ve had a snack too many, and encourage me even when my posture is severely skewed to the left. so yes in one month’s time i shall be reporting back on the wii fit’s results! stay tuned!

in other news, gynae clinics have been very enjoyable. i get my very own room to see patients in (on my own!), and my registrar is such a sweetheart. what’s not to love?

i scrubbed into theatre today for a total abdominal hysterectomy that i wanted to watch. it was 2 hours long! i got a little bored halfway through because i couldn’t really see what was going on from where i was standing, just bits of bowel and fatty tissue here and there and of course the resected uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries. we cut open the resected uterus to look at its cross-section, and there was a white mass growing into the uterine wall (this lady had endometrial cancer).

+ as you can it’s not really grey’s anatomy-esque… save for the green surgical drapes, and scrubs that we all have to don. there is no drama in a hysterectomy, at least. although at one point the anaesthetist instructed the nurse to take the patient’s temperature during surgery and the nurse said “there isn’t a reading”, to which the anaesthetist jokingly said “nothing? she must be dead then!” and i sort of laughed – not at the remark per se but at the way he said it so mockingly (which, in that situation, was extremely inappropriate of course- i need to stop laughing at the slightest things.)

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