New Year's B10gging

I love my blog. It's a thing I have full control over; I decide what I should write and when, it's colour scheme and design (which I do intend to change, when I get the hang of it all); any little detail that I want included or removed is completely up to me, and no-one can make me do otherwise (unless they get hold of my password somehow). I could even stick a random picture in or a word in a sentence somewhere and I won't 'lose marks' or have my editor tell me off; totally up to me. I could continue with what I've been doing the past year, writing my ovoviviparous monthly entries, but I want to take it deeper this year; I want to extract lessons from my adventures, a bit like the reflective pieces of writing I have to do for my GP placement.

I'm a person who likes to embark on projects, or intend to do them at least, and a great thing about having a Blackberry now is that I can quickly nip it out and record what has been going through my mind before I forget it, and so I'm able to compile my list of new things I want to do, unleashing as much orange as I can!  One thing I've wanted to do is share things I like, something I haven't really done on here, and what a better time to start but now?

There is a youtube channel called 'Shaytards', by a guy called Shay Carl, and he started a project up (yes, he's into his projects too... but on a bigger scale) where he was going to vlog every day for a year and put the daily video up on youtube. He's a cool guy, and his family is adorable! He has a habit of saying 'tard' after lots of things, such as his children (to protect their identity from internet snoopers); so his son's called sontard, daughter is princesstard and the younger daughter is babytard. He had another aim where he was going to grow his beard (beardtard) for three years, and on the first of January 2010 (3 days ago)  he'd shave it off. So he's a cool guy, and he gets together with other mega-rated youtubers to make videos with them, moving to LA from his hometown in Idaho. I think he actually makes quite alot of money from the number of viewers he gets, but his videos are entertaining, and he always gets ideas for new projects and gets other youtubers to take part, like the weightloss channel he's started (since he himself is a bit on the chubby side)... shayloss.

Anyway, this is one of the 300 or so videos at the moment; there are too many good ones to choose from, and he plans to continue past the year mark, especially as his wife is pregnant now (with foetustard of course). Some people may think everything he's doing is too invading on his family (and I do think it may be a bit damaging if his children aren't called by their real names all the time), but if they're alright with it and he's making money from it (after all, he quit his job to spend more time with them, and make videos), then why not? It's interesting knowing about the life of someone on the other side of the world, and you do get quite attached (maybe why everyone likes TV soaps so much). Some people even cried when he got rid of his beardtard!



This has actually made me want to start a regular video thing, maybe in the future when I have growing offspring to film; I doubt I'll put them up on youtube though!

December Deliveries, Disappointments and Delights

The final week of term was just awesome. Ok, there was snow, now there are relaxing holidays, but even more awesome was when our PBL tutor let us look around the maternity ward he works at (a couple of days after taking us out to dinner). Not only that, we went on a ward round and sat in on a meeting with all the healthcare workers, talking about the different problems faced with particular women giving birth. It was like a PBL session but with real professional people, and real lives at risk. With this speciality, two lives are at stake; the mother's and the baby's, which is why there probably is a greater emphasis on the teamwork aspect of the job. The consultants were discussing so passionately about guidelines and practice, while I just sat at the back with the junior doctors, trying to decipher the complex medical terms they were so casually throwing around.

After the ward round, my friend and I were given the chance to watch an actual live caesarean birth! An experience not even upper years have been through yet, we took the opportunity with open arms and asked as many questions as possible and felt so grateful for being there; witnessing a new life come into the world. The doctors were so preoccupied talking to us, they forgot to properly check if the anaesthetic was working or not, and cut straight into the woman's abdomen, with her feeling it! There was a point where each doctor took an edge of the hole in the uterus they had cut, and started to pull in opposite directions, and you could hear the rip as the amniotic fluid began to gush out, with them finally fumbling inside for the baby before pulling its head out with a pair of forceps. The stitching up of the three layers took some time, and the lady also wanted a sterilisation, meaning she wanted no more kids, so they tied off and cut her fallopian tubes (the tubes from the ovaries to the womb area- meaning eggs can't get to where they're supposed to). I found that quite puzzling, since she wasn't exactly old and now had three children, she may change her mind in the future. We actually walked in at the beginning when they were getting consent for the sterilisation, and since she spoke little English, the doctors had to make extra sure that she knew what a sterilisation was.

Anyway, with every new life that comes into the world, another one is lost, and probably through an unjust cause. I was actually incensed at the recent execution of a British man in China, convicted for carrying 4kg of heroin into the country; I would usually ignore these things when reading the news, but this guy had a history of mental illness, and it was clear, even to me, that he'd been tricked into carrying it. Having bipolar disorder and delusional psychosis, a person can dupe themselves into believing fantastic stories, let alone have other people do it to them. I know that there are people around the world in a similar situation but don't carry a British passport and haven't got the media attention this guy has had, but the injustice he has faced just leaves me lost for words, especially as there were reports of the judges at his trial openly laughing at his rambled speech begging for his life. So this year ends pretty much the same way last year did; injustice, death and a scarcity of common sense.

But ending on a positive note, I've learnt so much from this year, thankful for all the people and opportunities I have all around me. I've learnt that it can be difficult trying to keep a monthly diary thing, but hopefully I can look back in years to come and see myself develop in one of the most critical stages of my life, and just laugh at the petty things I used to worry myself with. I might actually continue with it, maybe, but vlogging is definitely easier! Today I spent my day at the BMA library with a friend going through the PBLs of the upcoming module which we actually managed to do, and I think it is the main lesson I can draw from this year (although implementing it slightly late); when you've got time to get something done and be ahead, just do it!

Deeper Than Skin Deep

Today, I ran into a person I hadn't seen for more than three years; I'd tried to visit him since, but he was always away.  The consultant plastic surgeon I did my work experience with back in 2006 was walking into our medical school building and I couldn't help but call his name. He was walking with two other doctors, one of whom I recognised as a 'lower-down' plastic surgeon, who I don't think properly recognised me when I talked to him. I didn't blame him; it's been a while, but the consultant (Mr Shibu- 'Mister' being the title they give to surgeons, taking away the 'Doctor' they'd been working for all those years) did recognise me, and even remembered my name (well, my brother's name, but close enough :P). Probably quite old judging by the number of years he must've put in to get where he is, he still looked quite youthful, and hadn't lost that playful glint in his eye.  The couple of weeks spent with him were of the most enlightening ever.  He not only opened my eyes to what medicine really was about, but taught me a few plastic-surgery related things, and didn't think I was a waste of time, as I hear most consultants tend to do. He's funny and friendly, trustworthy and caring; passionate about his job, someone I really look up to and hope to be like one day.

The work experience itself was amazing; seeing a wide range of diseases and disabilities, from genetic impairments to gunshot and knife wounds. There was a baby girl whose nerve supply to her face was underdeveloped, leaving her unable to even smile.  But for every problem there is a solution (well, almost), and the plastic surgeons were at hand to sew things back up and make people's limbs more aesthetically pleasing to them. A very rewarding and noble field, which I am seriously considering as an option (which is the same for every speciality at this stage I suppose, but this one more so).

Speaking of aesthetic pleasure, I went down to a car-boot sale which was at the school I took my brother for Saturday morning football. It's just the usual thing; people selling things they don't want, but with this being a good school (The Malorees, where a few of my siblings have been bullies pupils), there were a few middle-classish people selling their unwanted items (including, if I recall correctly, a Nintendo 64 for 20 pence!). There was quite a good stall of just antiques and paintings, and I couldn't help but be drawn to the liquid green embedded in glass paperweight (it caught my eye because I remember a similar one being in the George Orwell book '1984'). 3 pounds only? Bargain.  After a couple of rounds of the car-boot sale (and buying a Lord of the Rings DVD for a pound), I revisited the stall and decided that I needed a matching vase to hold my peacock feathers in (oh yes, some guy was selling peacock feathers randomly in the middle of Whitechapel.)
So in the end I decided on a cool red molten-twisted look vase, which I'm pleased with (as in, it's doing what it's supposed to... being a vase), and it sits happily atop my bookcase, displaying my picturesque plume of peacock feathers :)

Post FunMed Post

So, I've had a chance to properly unwind since that exam, and taking a proper step back from the hecticness (which really hasn't even properly started yet), I can say I'm actually happy. Alhamdulillah.  Yesterday I helped future students, interviewees, with tours and just sat with them and their parents before they went in for the dreaded interview, trying to calm their nerves. There was an afternoon shift and a morning shift for any students wanting to take part, and I opted for the afternoon (as I had PBL and lectures in the morning, and one missed afternoon lecture wouldn't be too difficult to catch up on), but I did find some time after my early morning PBL (problem-based learning, if you're wondering) to hijack a tour someone else was giving and discovered some things I didn't really know about the place, like the whereabouts of the museum I had wanted to visit (apparently displaying the bones of the elephant man). I really enjoy the experience of sharing with others, especially new people, and the morning tour I helped give was so passion-driving, the parents wanted to enrol at our university!  Yesterday was a reminder of how lucky I am to be where I am, doing the thing I've wanted to do. In the evening I also received my final result from the FunMed module (being a combination of separately-marked sections), and I passed! I got 62% overall, with the year average being 59%, but it has been a proper wake-up call for me to knuckle down and study for the rest of the year!

The cool Senior Common Room being used as an interview waiting area. On the upper floor are displays of human body bits.

 My earlier-than-normal PBL on a case of a woman giving birth was quite enjoyable, at 8 in the morning because our tutor had surgery later. He's an Obstetrics and Gynaecology guy, who basically sees new babies into the world and deals with 'women's issues' every day. He used to be the president of our union, and is quite a fun-loving guy, to the extent that he finds me 'extraordinary' and has to tell his mates about me. I tend to focus on 'psychosocial' issues in our cases, maybe due to the fact that I haven't researched the scientific side in as much depth as the rest of my group, but also because they are the cause of everything! Like the case of the pregnancy of our city-worker Cathy (the case we've been looking at), if it weren't for psychosocial issues, she'd never have got pregnant in the first place! Anyway, I do find that my rather quiet PBL group is a perfect audience for my attention seeking controversy-stirring outbursts.

The module that we're now learning is called Human Development, and it is a nice change to FunMed where you practically knew the stuff but in less depth. This is more or less new material we are learning, on the anatomy of the pelvis, all the reproductive organs and how they work, and the development of all the organs in the embryo. Interesting stuff. But the other components of our course are still on-going, like our GP placements and the poster task we had to present on Thursday. In our PBL groups we had to plan, design and produce a poster, and every week since the beginning of the year we had meetings and planned what we needed to do for it. Our group is quite laid back (leaving the printing 'til the day before), but in the end I thought our poster was too cool; the theme we were supposed to go with was "don't believe everything you see and hear in the media", and everyone else in the year focused on one issue like "does drinking coffee cure Alzheimer's?". We on the other hand looked more into the figures side of the things, using 4 outbreaks of diseases as an example, each illustrating how the media manipulates figures to produce catchy headlines in different ways.  Well I liked it anyway.

Looking forward to the holidays has been something I've been doing for quite a while, so I can catch up properly on work and take that deep breath before the beginning of another term. But this week has been rather relaxing, and I'm getting into the swing of things, even if it does mean waking up early when it's still dark and windy outside. It's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

Flow

When we are talking, all it really is, is just the transfer of information from one person to another, in a similar way to computers interacting with each other; you get a query, and then a reply. Emotions are the same sort of thing; electrical information travelling from the brain which has responded to other external information, and the expression produced; laughing, frowning, crying, body language in general, is interpreted by other people in the form of information, telling them how you're feeling or what you're thinking. Basically, we are just complex computer programs, in a complex computer network, bound by laws and limits... I wonder when the patch is being released.

November Nervousness and Nonchalance

What a day it has been! Eid celebrations, and two exams; rushing back from the mosque in the morning, taking the bus to the Mile End campus where I was due to take my Funmed exams, before realising they started half an hour later than I thought they had.  There was enough time to take out my notes and frantically memorise a few more names of drugs we may have needed to know (and yes, I am a supporter of last-minute revision!).  The night before, all I dreamt about was of all the Medicine I'd learnt over the 9 weeks, and this whole month (with me turning 21 in between) has been filled with on and off revision. To be honest, apart from all the extra lectures I've been attending since the beginning of the year, I don't think there has been a solid few days of just revision. If you plotted a graph of my revision activity against time (rediscovering the geek inside of me), it would look alot like a camel, with hemorrhoids.  You could say that in the run-up to exams I've done the least revision, as the day before I had MedSoc, and the day before that I was writing reflective pieces of writing for it.  But anyway, the 2 and a quarter hour exam was alright, apart from it being held in the noisiest exam hall EVER. Someone's table kept squeaking as they wrote, and the district and hammmersmith and city undergound lines were running underneath the hall (yes, really!), so everytime a train passed, everything would rumble. But the most annoying thing was the invigilator's shoes... tap tap tap clock clock clock. She knew she'd be striding along the rows of nervous exam-takers that morning but still insisted on wearing her tap-dancing shoes.

The second exam was computer-based, and as I always have the fortune of being in the group that goes first for everything, we took the exam at around 2pm whilst the rest took it at 3 (them having another hour to revise anatomy and the oft-confusing microanatomy).  We all sat down at the computers, knowing that we had 45 minutes to answer 45 questions; and from my calculations that makes it a question a minute. So we were 15 minutes through identifying bones and tissue and nerves and blood vessels, until the invigilator (yes, the tap-dancer again) said that we actually had 30 minutes to do the exam, and so she reduced the end time on the board by 15 minutes. Great. I almost had enough time to finish, but for the timer in the top right corner of the screen showing the actual time rather than the minutes elapsed like it usually does.  I guessed the last few and then finally, freedom! It didn't feel that great to be honest, but we bumped into our eccentric 'head of Funmed' lecturer and thanked him for his entertaining lectures.  Then I and a few friends sat in the campus Costa with my green tea and carrot cake (and chocolate cake, because I didn't want to pay the 25p charge for an under £5 card transaction), and just chilled. And where I discovered that I got clinical hypnosis and then brain structure and function for my module choices, which is quite good, although not my top (most competitive) choices of reconstructive surgery and dissection. But I'm still happy :)  Oh, and on the tube home whilst I was finally completing my delayed learning objectives for MedSoc, I turned to the pregnancy page, and just as I did so a pregnant lady boarded my carriage! So in exchange for my seat, I got to ask a few questions and fill in my page without having to do any research. Sorted.

So, I'm in need of a solid weekend of sleep before our next module which starts straight away on Monday, and more intense than the first, Human Development. I just hope in the meantime I can develop myself a good work pattern and not leave things til the last minute! Yawn. Bye bye November!

September Streptomycin and October Oncogenes

Well, it has been a HECTIC month and a bit, and here I sit, faced with a backlog of notes on what I did during September and October, with my daily tube journeys filled with thoughts that I feel I have to record on here, but not find the time when I arrive home to type up, and forget by the time I wake up the next morning.  So far, my new uni has been amazing, which I obviously have been planning to delve deeper into on this blog; like the MedSoc days where we go for our GP placements and (unique to only a few practices) go on unsupervised home visits! We have to write reflective pieces of writing after each time we have these days, which I've found myself typing up the night before (as with every deadline I'm meeting so far), and this past week has been a week where I've found myself having the most free lessons, intending to wake up early on Friday (deadline day for our module choices) and write on here finally, but I didn't, and later found myself joining the afternoon 'Practicing Medicine' session with a lady theatre director.  We did some cool exercises on self-confidence and public speaking and the different possible states we could all be in as doctors (although, I didn't know when we'd ever be tired enough to be 'floppy'). She asked us how we were finding the course, and I could relate to every response the others gave; hard work during the day, long journey home, tiredness in the evening, and then waking up the next morning for the same, and really only Sunday to sit down and think about working (that's if you get home early from football), otherwise it's just doing the work the day before the deadline. With exams coming up in a couple of weeks, I need to change my ways!

So, September was obviously Ramadan, and for a couple of full weekends I went on a course that more or less covered the whole Quran, and then there was the 27th night spent in the mosque, and how we had to go home straight after fajr. And then there was the start of the football league; quite difficult especially as we were fasting and couldn't drink at half time.  But it's been good.

On the last day of Ramadan I went to a Japanese culture festival with Ismael which was cool; seeing a culture I haven't really delved that deeply into, and going around the stalls was very insightful. I bought a few things, including my name written in Japanese, which apparently means 'strong desire and ambition', met with Ismael's friend called Akira, and his mum and little sister. Afterwards went to a little introductory lecture to uni, and met a few new people, but left for the mosque as everyone went to the union for drinks; wanting to spend my last hour of Ramadan somewhere worthwhile, cramming in as much worship as possible!

Eid was enjoyable alhamdulillah; we left for the mosque at quarter to seven (we had to be ready at the park for a league match at 9:30; yes, football on Eid!) but the tube wasn't working and the bus drivers must have slept in or something, so we were walking back past our house about to pray locally when my dad offers to drive us down to Fulham to pray. I'm glad we did; I met a few old friends (and I mean ancient-old!) The khutbah after the prayer I thought was quite inspirational, and even though alot of people don't like the shouting style of sermon, I thought the message he conveyed was quite powerful.

We got home, played our match in the local park (for once, and with my mum and dad catching most of it!), lost the game which was mostly down to the sorry state the pitch was in, and went back home to discover a chocolate fountain, strawberries and marshmallows waiting to be consumed! Then our unique Fatine party games; the traditional treasure hunt, a blow-the-marble-with-a-phenomenally-long-straw competition, and an alphabet game where you have to think as many words as possible starting with that letter (like when you're on the phone and trying to spell out your postcode). Then presents: a stress ball with ears, a t-shirt with a large light-up digital clock on the front, a few funny books and some other nifty gadgets, as well as the prizes we got for coming second to the girls in every party game! Then pizza hut, then home, preparing for enrolment the next day!

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Hmm, October has been so busy that it's difficult to remember what exactly went on every day, but some memories stick out more than others:

Getting my new Blackberry with more texts that I could shake a stick at, and unlimited internet.  And with the nifty keyboard, I could find myself reflecting on the day without forgetting what happened by the time I got home :)

Ah this post is long overdue so I'm just going to polish up the rest of my notes without going into every little detail...

Family reunion for Grandma's 70th, it was good seeing all these half-posh (and in one couple's case full-posh!) people who were in some way or another related to me, and I found I could mingle with them quite comfortably. There are some amazing people in our extended family; like our great uncle Don who used to go deep-sea diving and defuse sea-mines for a living!

Freshers' football tournament- We had 3 people who don't even play football and lost ridiculously badly

Sunday league football- internal politics are tarnishing our team spirit- a new team has formed and we lost a game we should've easily won, and we are now sitting dangerously near the foot of the table. The manager has since left and we have our captain/chairman doing the team-picking.

Imperial ISOC freshers' dinner- I had to recite Quran, again, but I'm happy that they let me (and our uni) join the Quran competition this year! And there were various other dinners I found myself taking part in one way or another, but no breakfasts curiously.

Met my old Imperial buddies, including Annas, finally... 'twas good catching up with them.

So in a nutshell that's what happened.  So I'm off to do more hectic things like reflective pieces of writing (which I could put up here I suppose), and think about how I'm going to remember everything I've done in November!