The Year of the Rabbit

Okay...I know this is 2 weeks late but...

Happy Lunar New Year!

It's time to say good bye to the fierce trouble-causing year of the Tiger and welcome the more peaceful year of the Rabbit.

Wishing you all the best for this year!

Halfway Point

Two weeks ago, my Surgery Clerkship came to an end. Finally. To be honest, 4 weeks of that was quite enough for me. Now I'm on Internal Medicine and I'll admittedly say that 4 weeks isn't possibly enough. 

In surgery, we stayed with one firm throughout the clerkship. Medicine isn't the same. We change firms weekly along with having a number of tutorial and clinical skills sessions to attend. Frankly, you don't really get to know people on your team (except maybe the interns, maybe) and you certainly don't get to know the patients on each firm. Medicine has quite a lot of patients with so many different problems and, as we move from one firm to the next, I find it difficult to clerk patients and follow up on them as we're expected for our case books to be handed in at the end of the rotation. 

I have my qualms about each of the two clerkships so far. Surgery was wonderful in that it was structured and you knew what would be happening every day but it wasn't so great in the hours and amount of work involved. Medicine is wonderful in that it has shorter hours and much more free time, the atmosphere is more relaxed but it somehow feels to have much less structure to it because I feel like I'm being rushed to learn things in my clinical skills sessions. In fact, I quite hate the clinical skills sessions because the person in charge of them (who's also in charge of the entire clerkship) is so iffy and strange. You'd think he's just being particular but he's so obsessive-compulsive over the things only he knows and ends up focussing on only those things. Hypertensive drugs aren't all there is to life and medicine!

Too often I feel frustrated about the knowledge (more specifically, the lack of it) that I'm receiving. That's not to say that nobody's teaching me things but so many things are being taught that it's not possible to remember it all, so you write them down to go home and read up but when you read, you don't remember. That's how I am. For some reason, the things I manage to study, I cannot manage to recall when I need to. It causes me to become anxious about a lot of things. Sometimes I feel like I can't really be bothered to keep up with the environment I'm now forced to work in due to my anxiety. It's difficult to shave off my fears when I can't answer a question because I can't recall what I read the night before. So now, I have difficulty even getting myself psyched to study at all. This further adds to my frustration and the fact that I don't like my team much doesn't help either.

I've reached the great halfway point of this semester. Another 6 weeks and I'll be facing my first clinical OSCE-type examination. At this point, I've been feeling a lot of negative emotions...lots of upsetting things have happened and many things continue to frustrate me but I'm going to do what I always do: continue working through my difficulties until I come out on top. I'm sure soon enough I can bid these fears good riddance. My lifestyle has changed so much and it's become so unhealthy. Working at the hospital has changed my eating habits entirely. Breakfast is at 6:30 AM (6:10 AM on surgery) and it's only cereal. On call nights (twice a week) leave me eating dinner when I get home after 10:30 PM. On surgery, lunch was any time between 12 and 5 PM but now on medicine its usually around 12 PM. Dinner is whenever I get home so that I can eat home-cooked food at least once a day. Lunch is food I purchase from the hospital cafeteria (which is terrible food that I ate for 4 weeks straight on surgery) or from any of the food places near the hospital (which I can only do now because I have the time on medicine and is better than that hospital cafeteria any day). I don't even get to drink as much water as I need anymore and I've become dehydrated.

All in all, there are a lot of intense adjustments that I need to work myself around. I don't like the hospital life or the hospital environment (though I'm not sure if that's a general feeling or just how I feel about this one). Add all that to my never-ending feeling of wanting to leave Barbados and I'd be a tortured soul. The only thing that saves me from the despair is daydreaming about learning more interesting things at Bastyr University and thinking about where I'd like to go for my electives during my next couple of years of medical school.

Escape to the Future

If you've read my blog enough and you know me personally, you'll realise that I like to do a lot of daydreaming about the future. To be honest, I really do it to escape the unpleasant reality of the present.

Today, I went to one of the university on-campus housing facilities to pick up some stuff. I had to wait for about an hour for a friend of mine to be free so that I could pick up some other stuff from her place when she got home. So, I didn't bother leaving. I remained parked in front of the halls of residence and tried to do a bit of reading up for surgery. Fun as that was, I couldn't help looking up and watching people go about their business in their buildings. Almost instantly I was warped into a daydream once more...wishing, dreaming, wondering what it must be like to be living away from home...independently, for the most part. I know the day will come when I will undoubtedly have these experiences myself and I tend to look forward to it a lot.

That's not to say that I'm extremely miserable and unhappy here. Surely, I'm not at the brim of the happiness jar...I'd say it's about a 1/3 full. There are the goods and the bads and the happys and the sads, the advantages and the disadvantages to each way of life. I know I'll have the experience of both but I'm a little tired of the repetitiveness of my university. 

I don't really think about how I'll escape my labyrinth. I think about having escaped it already. The how isn't an issue, so much so than the when. Regardless, since starting clinical rotations, I've been so busy that these thoughts come to me less and less but the desire to leave will never go away.

Chronically Fatigued

Medical school. Clinical years = chronic fatigue. Or so it feels so far. I've only been doing this for three weeks and I'm tired of it. I'm not sure if it's the environment or the people I work with, but I'm just not finding much joy in what I've had to do so far. I'm relatively sure it's not the patients though! Like I said before, a lot of it has been ultimately frustrating and infuriating. There are hardly any highlights to my extremely long days at the hospital.

This is the pivotal mid-way point of my 5-year degree. I'm halfway through to getting my Bachelor in Medicine & Surgery. In part, I feel like the past 2.5 years has flown by faster than the Enterprise at warp speed but at the same time i can't help feeling that time isn't moving quickly enough. Over the past 48 hours, I've been feeling very much like I can't wait for the end of medical school to come. I can't wait to graduate, obtain my degree and complete my 12-month internship. I look forward so much to a future in naturopathic medicine. All my hopes and dreams and prayers are in leaving Barbados to get that degree at Bastyr University.

Of course, I could just be feeling this way because I'm not enjoying my Surgery clerkship very much. Maybe it's because I feel discouraged as much as I feel encouraged. Or maybe it's my hormones and I'm getting emotional for nothing. I'll probably be able to tell you in a week or two when surgery is over and I start a new clerkship in Internal Medicine. Although, to be honest, I'm not satisfied with the service I've been assigned to for surgery. I don't feel like I'm being taught very much when I hear about the teaching that happens in other services. Of course, I should try learning the information on my own, but these things tend to stay with me better under pressure. From what I hear, that pressure's going to be pounding me from all sides from day 1 of my medicine clerkship.

I'm chronically fatigued. In a 4-week clerkship, I only got 2 days off and took a sick day. That's 24 days of being at the hospital for a 4-week clerkship from 7 am until...anytime. I generally spend about 8-11 hours at the hospital most days and approximately 15-16 hours there for on-call days (which are every 4 days). I've gone from sleeping up to 8 hours to sleeping up to 6; from sitting in a lecture theatre all day to standing and walking all over the wards and hospital. Such a drastic lifestyle change, how could I not be constantly tired? I pray it gets better.

Ignorance Is Damaging!

"You don't know that you don't know."

This is one of my surgery consultant's favourite lines.

To be honest, he doesn't know that he doesn't know anything about natural medicine. That coconut water has some very healthy properties. That cod liver oil doesn't make gallstones but prevents them. He teaches his patients and students wrongly when they ask about simple natural products and supplements. Too bad for him. I know better.

That's all I'll say here. You can read more about this and a bit more about cod liver oil on my natural health blog: here.