Hospital Visit

Today we first years are seriously going to hospital to see patients. I didn’t bother to write about the one a fortnight before because basically what we saw and learned that day, could more or less be learned by anyone who visits the hospital, as in looking at the emergency room, looking at pharmacy and the other departments.

So this time we are actually going to be given the opportunity to TALK to the patients, aim of these sessions are not to really diagnose yet, its more to make sure we are able to communicate with the patients so that they can reveal more about themselves to us so it’ll be easier to treat them.So the day began in a quite humiliating manner, I had so much 9am classes the past week I thought the hospital session was at 9am. Arrived there only to find out that I was 1 hour early, darn it. Turned on iPod and slept in the student lounge for an hour.

So 10am, class starts with a doctor of the hospital giving us an overview of what we are going to do today. Explained to use the same thing that I told you, not to diagnose, just to communicate. However we will be learning to obtain critical health informations very soon in the future.Basically she told our group of 7 people that we were going to talk to patients about their experiences living in the hospital, how they feeling so far, how long they’ve been in hospital……..stuff lidat. So after the brief briefing, first wuestion the doctor asks us “Who wants to go first?”.  This is gonna sound stupid I suppose but because all my medical relatives were always telling me to seize any opportunity you get to try stuff out, so I was sorta hinking everyone else in the room was thinking the same thing, so rushed to raise my hand(even though feeling extremely un-confident about how the hell I’m going to do it).

Dang nabbit, apparently nobody raise their hands. So obviously enough I was going first. So we made our way to cardio thoracic ward to go see my patient ( probably should be calling him my patients yet since I ain’t exactly treating the guy).Patients name was Kevin, aged about 40+ I’d guess(I knew I should have asked that). The guy was transferred from Port McQuarie Hospital( I have no idea where that is but I can tell you its far, he had to be flown in then ambulance-ed to get to this hospital) after having a heart attack at his home and doctors at McQuarie realised he’s got serious clots at his heart. He was brought in here to have bypass surgery to relieve pressure on the clotted area.

So when we saw Kevin, as you would have expected from someone having a heart bypass surgery, he’s got a really long stitch down the middle of his chest, I’d expect he’s had at least a double bypass surgery since there was another long cut on his right leg.

[[[Just a little info, when you have serious clots around your heart region, you can relieve the clot by putting little stands inside your blood vessels which expands the diameter and therefore getting rid of the clot. But in serious cases such as Kevin's the clot's to serious that there's no use using a stand. So a bypass is needed, basically a clot'll be like a traffic jam on a particular road. So  making a bypass is sorta like constructing extra lanes so that the traffic(in this case the blood) can flow smoothly again. Double/Triple/Quadruple bypassess simply means the extra numbers of "additional lanes". For heart bypassess we can't use tar and rocks obviously, so normally surgeons will take 1 artery or vein from the somewhere around the joints of your arm and any additional ones will be obtained from the legs. And that is what leads me to the conclusion that Kevin's got at elast a double bypass. I'm really sorry for the technical section here, I'm jsut writing it down for reference next time in case.]]]

So I spoke to Kevin, the guy lives alone, and hasn’t been employed for quite a while (so I’m guessing the guy’s well off dee to be able to be sitting in the hospital so comfortably,or I guess it could be he’s got good insurance, heh.) Apparently the guy’s a heavy smoker as well as drinker,yeah I know what you thinking, he saw it coming too, yet he still does it, yea humans work in miraculous ways. Despite those facts Kevin’s been  really nice guy, makes a few jokes while talking to me, very easy to communicate with. Funny thing about the guy, After his first 2 days of pain recovering from surgery, the guy seemed pretty relaxed, claimed that he’s gained 5 pounds since he was hospitalised, I guess hospital food aren’t generally bad everywhere).

So that’s it with Kevin, when we left 2 of the girls in the group were feeling nauseas dee, I’m not sure whether if it had smth to do with seeing Kevin’s scar or just because of the fact that all 7 of them were looking at me interview Kevin in that small confined space.

Moving on to the next patient, finally my turn was over, wasn’t really as scary as I thought, before that was so extremely tensed, kept pacing about before entering. Now that its over, I figured it was not too scary and was in fact quite nice.So again, moving to next patient, the question comes again ‘Who wants to go next?”, you figure Aussie people would feel more comfortable talking to Aussie people, no hands raised again. I was sorta pumped up by the first guy that I sorta felt tempted to go for it again, but then that’s just be so greedy, so in the end doctor just picked 1 of them to go.

The girl that got picked did the interview quite well too, except the patient that she got…….not so nice to talk to.The patients was an old lady about 60 or 70 I’d guess, admitted for dermatitis on her foot. She had some hearing problems so it was quite hard to make good communication with her because normally when someone has hearing problems, they tend to pay less attention to what you have to say because that would mean having to concentrate harder. But all in all the girl did quite well. The lady revealed to have also diabetes as well as some heart disease as well. Dermatitis was growing around her leg area so you could see her legs looked sorta like it had been burnt.

[[[Dermatitis is norally due to some infection or allergy that causes parts of the body swell up with fluid. Like us getting blisters sorta thing, only on a much much larger scale, so basically the liquid had to be drained out. So that's why the patients legs looked like it was burnt, the skin was previously working like a bag to hold all that water, so now that the water is out, the skin looks all................(vocab not good enough to describe).]]]

So that more or less wraps up my first real hospital experience. yea I dun mind if u don’t read these lah, its more or less just for myself anyways. Oh yea and in case you wondering, only 2 out of 7 of us did the interview with patients thing. Other people who went to other hospitals all did interview, only our group……..something wrong. All in al feeling very fortunate that I did volunteer. hee hee.

The new category

Okay just going to give you a brief introduction to this new category. Her name is Medical Experience. Basically why i am doing this is because we were told that as medical students it is advisable that we keep a record of our clinical training experiences, this is so that by the end of our second year when we write a summary report, we can trace back these experiences easily and its suppose to help us pass some major exam.

So basically this category is going to basically record my experiences as a medical students. I’ll probably write once in every 2 weeks or so cause I only go to the hospital once every 2 weeks for now. I’ll probably be recording down most of my experience here whether it is special or not, so this category of my blog will probably be more boring than the regular ones.

Well that’s all for the introduction. On with the first post!!!

Are You A Good Listener?

There wasn’t much happening today actually, in fact it was quite boring. Today’s class was called “Clinical Communications Skills”. Basically it teaches us “soon-to-be”doctors on how to communicate with patients. So the whole 2 hours session was pretty much like rehabilitation therapy or something, we had to sit in a circle and discuss each others sad and painful memories.Because the class started at 9 am and I slept at 1+am that day, was rather sleepy listening to all that psychology stuff the lecturer was talking.But there’s this one part that attracted me…..There was this part of the session where we discussed on how to listen to others when they are telling you about something personal,this is not the part that caught my attention, what caught my attention was the poem she made me read out at the end of the class, I found it to be quite meaningful I thought maybe I’d share it with you guys

Here it goes:

Listen

When I ask you to listen to me

and you start giving advice

you have not done what I asked.

 

When I ask you to listen to me

and you begin to tell me why I shouldn’t feel that way,

you are trampling on my feelings.

 

When I ask you to listen to me

and you feel you have to do something to solve my problems,

you have failed me,strange as that may seem.

 

Listen! All I ask is that you listen.

Not talk or do – just hear me.

 

Advice is cheap : 50 cents will get you both Dorothy DIX and

Dr Spock in the same newspaper. 

 

And I can DO for myself; I’m not helpless.

Maybe discourage and faltering, but not helpless.

 

When you do something for me that I can and need to do

for myself, you contribute to my fear and weakness.

 

But when you accept as a simple fact that I do feel what I feel,

no matter how irrational, then I quit trying to convince

you and can get about the business of understanding what’s

behind this irrational feeling.

And when that’s clear, the answers are obvious and I don’t

need advice.

 

So, please listen and just hear me, and if you want to talk,

wait a minute for your turn; and I’ll listen to you. 

I dunno how well this can relate to you but I kinda see what the author is getting at. Often when people come to tell us about their problems, it may not be the idea to judge them/give advice/criticize.Often the easiest way to help them is to simply…….listen.

okay…..

You better not be laughing your ass off by the time u see the photo attached with this post.

Today hostel people organized a “formal” dinner, you know how during formal dinners you’re suppose to dress up to attend the event? well Shalom had a more creative way to run this “formal” event. Don’t get me wrong, you still get to dress up……just……..not exactly the way u expected.

There are a total of 10 tables, each with about 10 ppl. Each table is suppose to attend the dinner with 1 particular theme decided by the organizers(no you don’t get to choose your theme). Just gonna list down to you the theme(hope I rmb them all):

• cowboys
• 60’s
• 70’s
• 80’s
• TV characters
• Cartoon characters
• Bright & Tight
• Animals
• Bling Bling
• Clowns

Of all the theme I could have got, they just had to put me at Bright and Tight.Like WTF man!! Where the hell am I gonna find tight clothing. To those who know me you’d probably noticed that my cloths are all quite large sized(Not that I prefer them to be so large sized, its just that I need them to be long).So to get Bright and Tight clothes proved to be quite a challenge after all. First idea that came to my mind, why not go to the low costs shops nearby and buy a 2 dollar tight T-shirt eh? well that idea seriously would have worked if not for the fact that I was so keen to finish my last few episodes of House that I completely forgotten about it till it was too late. So moving on to Plan B,why not I get clothes from a girl?judging by their smaller sized they’d definitely be feeling quite tight by the time I wore them.Damn again wasn’t as easy as I thought, apparently however small size looking a girl maybe, one should always consider that they aren’t underweight like oneself. So I can’t wear any girls clothes, I need the smallest sized girl.Just so happens the smallest sized girl in the hostel was med student, managed to borrow a shirt easily enough. That is when I realised problem number 2, girl small sized, shirts are short. the bottom end of the shirt just barely touched the top end of my pants. Darn I look damn weird.

As I attended the dinner,didn’t feel exactly that humiliated, on the count that everyone was dressed up. Some of the more exciting ones:

• Pikachu(the 21yr old guy had a full Pikachu suit like a jumpsuit that covers his whole body exposing his face only)
• Austin Powers(darn the guy’s glassess, and the costume……..)
• Charlie’s Angels( I swear to god you’d rather see the Lucy Liu version)
• Rogue(Aw damn the girl dyed her hair with that white strip and had those leather shoes and gloves………)
•  Spongebob Squarepants( the guy did some special modifications to his original trousers to make it look more square and he had a hat made from about 20 sponges!!)
• Bright and Tight team leader( How to explain this?Look at him in the picture)

Dinner that day was more special in the sense that we were served our meals and not the normal buffet style,makes things more relaxing for us, but then other than the food is more or less the same.

Now the picture you’ve been waiting for(No doubt you’d already scrolled down to look before finish reading it.)

Abnormal

Abnormal, seems to be good enough a word to describe the events recently. Over in Sydney,apparently there are all round good days and all round bad days. Good days, yesterday all across uni, for some reason lovers jsut can’t stop kissing each other, walked back from class 1km away from hostel, stumbled across several couples just kissing like that ( when I say like that I mean in the hallways in front of the library where dozens of pepople walk by),even more surprisingly they seem to be super addicted or something, that kiss probably lasted for 1 minute or something( I never saw the kiss began,never saw it end,could have been longer).To be fair not all happened in hallways lah, some under trees, and some in more “secluded” corners.To be even fair I only spotted 3 so maybe wasn’t as unusual.

What’s unusal is Bad days seem to come right after that,next day while going to class(1km away again) saw 2 couples just sitting there facing the floor,guy tries to touch girl but girl turns away,looks so much like one of those love dramas eh?So I guess good part about this good day bad day thing is that you never have to worry about being miserable yourself, cause its most likely a bad day for everyone else. And that concludes my very meaningless article for now.

Now, to something seriously abnormal. Anatomy class again today,3-5pm.spent the first 1 and a half hour getting super bored listening to the guy read stuff of the booklet that was given to us about human skeleton and muscles. Dude if we already had them in our booklet, you think maybe the uni hired you to maybe give something extra?or at least make it look more interesting?But wasn’t all wasted, last 30 minutes guy finally opens the balnket covering the cadaver and we have 2 arms and 2 legs, skins all peeled dee so you could see the muscles and bones.after a brief intoduction with his “pointing” thingy, those with gloves were free to explore for themselves.(I didn’t have gloves !!!damn!!) Anyways today’s cadaver was even more disgusting that the previous one, again they took the limbs from a GUY!!!(why always guys ar?) and 1 of the 2 legs we got, the leg portion was still attaced to half of the hip, which means the piece had half a butt and………disgustingly……half a P3_1$. If you read my previous post on my anatomy class you’d probably realise why this disturbs me a lot. But why was today abnormal? haihz how do I put this…….oh ok……..

Feet examining we looks at the many pieces of muscles on the leg portion, there are alot of nice big hard muscles there ( I doubt the guy who died wad a really fit person, the preservatives probably made it so hard,the guy was over 70 when he died)but either way, suddenly while looking at these muscles, I can’t keep my mind off the fact that the muscles looks so much like the meat you see on chicken drumsticks,and then the thought came to me:”if human legs were legally edible……I wonder how they’d taste like?” . Wonder if these are beggining stages of ppl suffering from Cannibalism-itis or something. Then again I guess it could have been caused by the fact that I skipped lunch that day and was feeling so totally hungry in that class. Naturally I’d expect that people would lose their appetite when attending anatomy class and therefore I have classified today’s experience in time as ABNORMAL.

Damn I really feel this post is a load of crap.

Anatomy

Today we’ve had our first anatomy class!!!I can’t really say it went of in a nice manner though. Unfortunately I didn’t realise that we were actually going to go to the dissecting laboratory on our first day! And this is imporatnt how? Well guess who tried to by smart by not bringing his labcoat along? while everyone was getting seated in the room with their labcoats on I was running my ass off to get back to college(far far away) to pick up my labcoat. Legs were so piling with lactic acid I could see little bumps on my leg(I’m not sure if this is really a sign of lactic acid collection but i would think so since it went away after I slowed down)

So I got my labcoat and made my way back, was about 20 minutes late for the class but luckily the guy was still tlaking about safety precautions, basically trying to make us wear gloves at all times cause dead bodies and stuff may not be 100% clean still.Then he starts telling us all about all the organs and systems……..sensory,cardio…..bla bla bla. This went on for almost an hour, I was beggining to think we’d never get to see the bodies. Oh yea just so you know, throughout that whole hour while the guy was talking, we were sitting in 3 rows. Each row had a table, and on that table…………yeah lied the dead bodies covered by a dark cloth, you can see the water draining out from 1 end of the table……..and the smell of the formalin…..just makes nausea, and to think we just had lunch before this. haihz……the things we do for medicine isn’t it?

Well wasn’t all wasted, second hour of class he finally started to show us some stuff, I was actually worried that I was gonna see an infants body cause the size of the “item” under the cloth was just about the length of my arm only. Ironically, it was even unexpected, they turned out to be limbs!!! I seriously wasn’t prepared to see that, I mean u can actually see the whole “keratan rentas” at where they cut it(I’m using malay cause I feel it gives more emphasis that way)

First we were shown the limbs, a leg and an arm, both with their skin peeled off dee, meaning u can see the muscles,tendons, bones, nerves all that crap. Sadly the bodies havebeen in storage for months or years so the skin and tissues were all mostly turns gray already so it really looked like something rotten.Next we got to see lungs, lungs looked a lot like liver upon first impression, looked rather big as well. Then we moved on to see chest cavities, 2 in fact, 1 cut on the coronal plane and the other cut on the saggital plane(go look it up, new terms that I’ve learnt). Then came the finale that seriously got me the sickess……..the torso. Now I don’t think I would have been very bothered if not for the fact that the lecturer was removing the organs from the cavity so quickly, it was sorta too much to take in at such a fast rate. Even worse was that the torso was a male and so we saw parts of the torso from the chest all the way down to his………yeah, all the way down there. I don’t know ifthe other guys in my group were feeling this but to me, to see a fellow male (even thought dead) being chopped to this condition, really made me sick and sad at the same time, that was seirously the part of the class that I felt seriously sick. Luckily class was jsut about over that time, so bodies were covered with the formalin damped clothes to prevent them from drying out and we all packed up and left. I think we did not bad for first encounter, nobody fainted although I could tell there were others who looked quite freaked out as well.

Rest of the day was pretty much crap, med lectures were stupid again, talking about mitosis and meiosis, DNA replication and all that form 5 and HSC stuff. Its surprising to see that many local students there don’t take Biology, apparently this biology hatred thing is not just a malaysian thing, its an aussie thing as well. Then there was this lecture about telling us how to do a good presentation. In a weird sense, for someone whose trying to tell us how to make a good oral presentation, the person presenting the talk was well……..not presenting his case in a very interesting manner, had so much difficulty staying up listening to him

Well I think that’s all for now, I’m sorry but due to the recent issues at UNSW(the issue that mentions that the cadaevers are being sexually assulted,yeah I know no big deal right?) I am supposed to protect the cadaevers privacy and provide them with thehigest respect which means I can’t show you any photos, thena gain i don’t think I’d be allowed to show you photos even if the “issue” hadn’t happened, heh.

Two Words – Mardi Gras

Okay so today morning was a saturday. So happy that I made it through my first week at Uni, quite a milestone. So what to do on a Saturday? homework hasn’t really been piling in yet, and since orientation week is over, seniors hardly bother to make activities already. Then Kyloon comes along and tells me of BBQ party with the MSO( Malaysia Students Organisation) at Coogee beach. So I guess, what the hey I got nothing to do back home anyways.

So at about 9 o clock me and Kyloon set off on foot walking to Coogee beach. The organisation was gonna gather ppl and go by bus but kyloon wanted to save on the bus fare and also wanted exercise, so we ended up walking there ourselves. Wasn’t that bad a walk lah, considering I’ve done it before in the night, in the afternoon before already, might as well try again in the morning.

So we got there pretty much on time, in fact reached before the bus group even arrived. Got to meet with the president of the organisation. MGS girl lai, makes me feel penang ppl are way cool eh?  Well BBQ started quite alright. But then more and more ppl start pouring in, and then comes these big big bunch of Malay students. Kyloon made some survey, we concluded that probably 80% malays there are on JPA scholarship. Kinda gives me the feeling that they’re here to just show off since they seem to be only talking among themselves throughout the BBQ. But all in all, was a nice BBQ,  got to know some malaysian friends at last, altho none from penang.

So rest of the day mau buat apa?MSO gang suggested we go see Mardi Gras downtown. In case you guys dun understand the term, apparently Mardi Gras is sorta like a day where the gay and lesbian ppl in the city can gather together and parade down the streets being proud of their…….”gayness”?  So about 14 (or more) of u gathered together outside of Uni to take a bus downtown. One of the guys suggested to salvage for Milk cartons so that we can stand on them to see the parade later on cause we probably wun get front row views.

Guess what? He was right, you guys probably thought of that too, but we were prepared, prepared almost like 1 cartons per person, so we called ourselves the “milk carton gang” ( at least that’s what kyloon keeps calling it). Found a place to settle down and had our dinner(it was burger king for dinner, so sad case…….)Before parade started you can already see gay’s and lesbians walking by the sidewalks dressed in their supposedly “sexy” clothing, well……the females still look damn sexy(what?can’t help it lah)of course there’s alost some of those who went super extreme. You can check out the few photos I posted. I think I’ll just leave you guys here lah and let the few pictures do the rest. I took more videos than pictures so if u are still more curious, pls remind me to show you when you meet me. I recorded so many videos my 2GB mem card went full.

and now……..some pictures,I’m only gonna put a few cause or else I’ll be killing myself everytime I visit my own blog.

Doesn’t look like much? the parade on video is much more interesting I swear.

Little more about my condition

okay here’s some more updates about how I am doing. Today I bought textbooks!!! yay? well finally i have books, good news there, bad news? the 7 books +stethoscope + labcoat weights a tonne. and I have to carry that big load of crap all the way from the bookshop, which is even further than the med faculty, all the way back to my room. Damn it was a tiring walk for me. But then had some time to check out the stethoscope,got to hear my hearbeat, feels so cool.I know its just a simple device, but I still feel that really cool sensation in me.

So because of that tiring book moving in the early mornings, I was too pooped to concentrate in class( well part of it is also because I slept at like 1am the night before lah), kept dozing off and the following classess. haihz as  med student, that feels so damn dangerous.Oh yea wanted to tell you guys also canberra witnessed their first hailstorm in a blue moon. ANU ppl so lucky, their school clsoed for 2 days due to the hailstorm. Come drop ur cold crap over at Sydney lah!!!

Parents say if my midyear holidays are long enough they’ll let me go back. I think I’ll most likely take that option if the med programme doesn’t give too much holiday homework. feeling much more homesick today than before, probably cause parents are seriously leaving me tomorrow(as in going abck to Malaysia this time).Bought myself an iPod to distract me from noticing the quietness and loneliness of my room. also got a cheap 58 dollar printer from HP, hope it holds up.

Lastly before I sign off I promised you some pictures of my room…..so here you go:

(first 2 are when I first moved in, last 1 is the most most recent, the bathroom toilet…….the toilet bowl isn’t in the picture……but its there, and the last picture…….its my dad lah,definitely not me)