Formal Dinner at Shalom

Tonight’s dinner was supposed to be some really cool formal dinner. Sadly as the stupid guy that I am, I had to screw that up as well. Have a test coming on monday so been studying all day today, before I go on I should probably point it out to you that this exam doesn’t count whatsoever to my end results, meaning I didn’t really have to study for it nad still nothing would happen to me, I just figured I’d make good use of this rehearsal exam that’s all.

So I was studying right, studied since 2 till about 5 …….then got tired dee. Figured since dinner is at 6 today I might as well get some rest first. Damn I overslept till 6 20!! Rushed to get dressed to some “formal” degree and rushed to the dining hall. Everyone was already seated by then, special guests have also arrived, I was a little underdressed for the event but luckily there were others worse than me so I didn’t look totally stupid.

Food was great on formal dinner, we actually got to eat turkey(yeah you never get stuff like that on normal days) and some other fancy food as well. Oh yes I should probably point out why the heck they made this dinner(no its not so I can dress p bright and tight again, this time its serious). The formal dinner was held cause apparently it was a memorial day for the college to reminds us all about that cruelty during the holocaust back in WW2 where there was the “event” where Jews(obviously) were killed in bulk.

The CEO of the Shalom institute(also a jew,pretty obvious I’d guess) pointed out how this “event” was much more special than the othergenocides in the world. One being because it was conducted in a civilised country, second being because it targeted not only Jews, but ppl who had Jewish father or grandfathers as well. Thirdly, really interesting one, major companies existing even till today were involved in helping to make the machines of death( such as the gas chambers where people would suffocate for 20 minutes or so before dying). There were several other reason’s but I didn’t really remember them all anymore.

In this special event the college has invited a special guest, a guy named Eddie. Eddie is a guy in his 70s already, and he’s a survivor of the holocaust and was here to share with us his story about that time in his life. The guy described how since he was a teenager he had to carry fake documents and be given a fake German name so that he wouldn’t be discriminated among the people. He was a bright student who went to the finest schools in Germany. In his school however, he was probably the only Jew among them all. He exaplined how difficult life was at that time for him, he couldn’t even shower with all the other guys cuase if they’d seen his…….genitals…..and noticed that he had “berkhatan(sorry i don’t really know the english term for that” they’d know hes a jew and he’d be in jail soon enough.

This is all probably really boring to you I guess. I jsut felt that for a guy who was just so young and having to bo so careful……its jsut really sad. Gets worse of course. The guy went home from uni or smth 1 holiday, didn’t know that the German army was on a Jew killing spree at that time, went home and slept all happily back at his home. 5am 10 Germans rushed in his house, did things to him( he didn’t really go into detail on that). The next thing he knew he was already bleeding all over him. Germans then blew up his 400 year old house, stabbed his cute little sausage dog like it was a sausage, and carried him to the camps.

If I told u the whole story you’d probably be asleep by the next paragraph so I’m jsut gonna tell some of the details that really disturbed me. The Germans had them walk everyday 7 km to and from their camps to their workplaces with just a piece of wood as their shoes and a rag as their socks. You can’t afford to get blisters at that time because if u do they’d develop into serious infections and then it’d be too painful to walk 7km. and when u can’t even walk to work, you’re useless and therefore there’s no point in keeping u alive, same goes for if u broke ur arm or leg while walking through the slippery roads to work.

The other thing that seriously got me so damn pissed was that while in the camp they were given food in a giant bowl, with rice and small fibres of meat. No spoons, no plates no nothing. So you’re pretty much just eating with ur face like a pig. Occasionally you’d be given some coffee. Sounds too good to be true? Damn right. Smart little Eddie smelt smth in the coffee, asked the kitchen lady why. Kitchen lady said to his face, we put bromide in the coffee. Now bromide is a really interesting thing, if u comsume it, apparently it lowers ur sex drive, now isn’t that interesting?So the continues to ask what measurements of bromide did she put in there. Lady answered something that went like “do I looke like a chemist to you? I just dump the whole bottle in” Another special thing about bromide, if comsumed in large quantities, you’d probably guessed it anyways but yea, men’d run out of bullets, permanently. So even if the Jews did survive this, many of them won’t be able to reproduce anymore. Now that’s just plain SHIT lah, kill ppl not bad enough gotta put bromide into their drinks………..*toot*

Then later after the story thy had this special ceremony where 6 of the college residents were supposed to light 6 candles(why always candles?) to rememebrs the 6 particular groups of ppl in the event. “the first candle is for the millions of children who saw horror and cruelty……………”, “the second candle is for the millions of men and women who had died for the only crime, that is for being a Jew………..” and this went on till the 6th candle. For some reason nowadays everything even in the mildest sense will make me feel so darn emotional. Dunno maybe I’m suddenly producing large quantities of female hormones or something, but yeah really made me feel so sad for the people in that genocide, sounded far worse than what Japs did to us back in WW2.

So yea that’s the end of that, not a really interesting post I’d guess but whatever lah. I’d really should have brought camera but since I was rushing like hell, so didn’t get anything.

Melbourne: Day 6

Alright so today’s the last day we’ll be spending at Melbourne already. Got up relatively early today( like around 10 am) Packed up any remaining stuff and we left for cze yang’s place, basically this is because phooi sin’s got school already today!! she’s going to class by 12 pm so we gotta vacate cause she wun be back till night time which is when we’re leaving for Sydney.

So went to cze’s. The guy brought us to go pick up his PC loo(remember? its ready by thursday). I’m not gonna emphasis too much on the 30 MINUTE ride again.Picked up the PC easily enough, OS-less tho since czedidn’t purchase OS. So we came back to his palce around 12 30 or so. Then spent the rest of our day just trying to set up the comp for cze. The guy thought so much about his PC, forgot the fact that his home’s internet is obtained via wireless, means gotta keluar buy a new wireless adapter lagi for the PC, haha.

So I’m upstairs jsut arranging wires here and there, conencting this to that. Kyloon’s downstairs with his laptop burning Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate for cze. Cze’s PC scored a 4.5 on the Vista compatibility Index(quite good dee). SO everyone seemed pretty happy about it. Then we started seeing some minor issues with this OS. Apparently the motherboard cze’s using isn’t compatible with Windows Vista. What’s this mean? means all the USB ports are just sitting there doing nothing. So gotta go download all those drivers online. And such a conincidence the internet line for the place has reached the maximum download for the month. So how? drive all the way to your girlfriends’s place to download lah of course, what else? so fianlly got the drivers all installed, wireles networks et up, antivirus prepared and the Vista’s looking nicer than ever, which is more than what I can say for the laptop, seems like its really gone case………….

Halfway throught the day working, when Kyloon went to the toilet upstairs, stumbled across something really interesting. An opened packet of condom, Now would that somehow have anything to do with yesterday?………………

By the time we finished was pretty late also dee, was slightly pass 6 o clock dee. So cze cooked a small meal(brocolli and curry chicken) for us, quite tasty I must say. So packed up and left for airport at about 7 pm. Good ol faithful GPS not so faithful this time unfortunately, nearly led us to some other airport pulak, luckily trusted instincts and shut off that GPS, just followed road signs and made it there with almost and hour to spare.

So I guess that ends my whole trip to Melbourne for the Easter Holidays I guess. Looking back now, I’s really gonna miss my friends again. Kinda wished I hadn’t come over there to see them, now that homesick feeling is attacking me so hard again now.

Melbourne: Day 5

Darn this has got to be the weirdest day of all I think. Woke up at around 12 pm as usual(yeah that’s considered usual), had no plans in mind today so everyone at phooi sin’s place basically just did what they did lah. Me and Kyloon by the laptop playing games, Phooi Sin by her laptop watching shows. Then suddenly out of nowhere, Phooi Sin starts to call her friends sounding so desperate, calling her friends and asking them where they were, as soon as she got hold of a friends with free time, was dashing off to get ready to leave the house. I really don’t know what to make of this actually, but apparently Kyloon sees it as a sign of unhappiness of some sort.

Kyloon proposed that we go over cze’s place, not nice to stay around phooi sin’s if she’s not home. So we left the same time as phooi sin. As we were leaving, Kyloon was again indicating to me that she’s leaving in such a hurry that she hardly bothered to say anything to us anymore. So okay, maybe osmething was wrong after all………I guess…….? Either way spent time just playing games at cze’s place( kyloon made me promise that we’d game all we want at cze’s, and stop gaming when we got back to phooi sin’s, just in case).By the time we reached dinner time,went to Some place far away called Sophie’s for extremely cheap and large portion Italian food. Phooi Sin was supposed to come, but because of the :went out with friends” incident, seems like she’s not interested in coming with us.

About an hour before dinner, Wanted to play 1 last round of DOTA, sady to say cze’s laptop seemed to be down with some terminal disease(I think its cancer),without any sign of warning, the laptop begins to give really slow responses and lags to the extent that you probably think it hanged. so remaning time for DOTA became dedicated to resuscitating the laptop.

Still went to eat at Sophie’s though. We ordered this special dish where basically it combines 3 different pastas into a dish meant for 2. I swear to god when I saw the dish come, I thought they sent the dish to the wrong table. There’s a picture at the bottom. Somebody among us asked exactly the same question in my mind, “how in the world could u expect this meal to be for 2 ppl?” So all 5 of us ate that dish, ended up seriously full. Kyloon and Hean probably got seriously spiced up as well since they were pouring ronnes of Chili Flakes onto their pasta. Such a big dish, when u divide it by 5, actually comes to around 6 dollars only. Told you was cheap.

After this we went to cze’s place and see if we could save the laptop or not. When we entered the house, I heard some sounds coming form upstairs, from cze’s housemate’s room to be exact. Told cze about it, cze thought was nothing at first, then alter told us that his housemate’s probably inside that’s all. Later on heard more noises from that room, but then cze again tells us its nothing, call us mind our own game. so we mah game loo………..Halfway through cze comes down and tells us his housemate needs some “privacy time” and that we all need to clear out? now what was that all about? SO might as well head somewhere else lah.

Well on the way back then, apparently Phooi Sin still not back home yet so we can’t go home either, so we stopped by to look at hean’s place for a while. dang nabbit this guy’s place so damn spacious, really seriously big living room, u’d definitely woulnd’t think that students would be living in places like this, it looks far too …………big for students to live in, looked more like a place for a whole family to live in.A picture of the living room will be posted.

Later on about 12 am, Phooi Sin was finally home, sounded quite normal again by then. So we decided it was safe to go home dee, but kyloon still insisted we better not game just to be safe. So when we got home, didn’t bother to take out laptops either lah, since tomorrow going to leave liao, wasn’t worth the trouble. Spent rest of the night just talking to phooi sin, and watching her korean/japanese dramas discussing which guy looks hot and which doesn’t (yeah it feels really weird).

Yeah that’s about it for today i guess.

Oh yes, Phooi Sin, in the event that you do find my blog, I really am sorry if I have upsetted you in any way, and hopefully everything’s fine.

Melbourne: Day 4

Ok So today Phooi Sin’s felling all tired and stuff so she’s handing us over to Cze Yang. Cze’s laptop’s been acting up again so he’s going to go buy a PC!!! SO me and Kyloon deicded we go along and have a look at this Shop known as MSY(forgot what it stands for). Its supposed to be a shop where you can get relatively cheap computer gadgets from.

Unfortunately the the palce is located even further than Monash Uni, which means another 30 minutes car ride with occasional dosing-offs, But we made it there all the same. Upon seeing MSY, I sorta get the point why its able to sell stuff at cheaper prices. The place is like a god damn warehouse!!Its got tonnes of stock and its only dedicated a small area of it as its store and office.

Walk into MSY and you’ll see dozens and dozens of keyboard and speakers and Mouse and Graphics cards. You name it they’ve definitely got it. Damn looking at this palce really makes you wanna buy something, too bad I’m currently facing insufficient funds as well as insufficient space(hostel room small lah), or else I’d definitely go back to the MSY in sydney to make my own PC.

Cze’s ordered his PC smoothly enough, changed to casing to a much more sleek design. Specs are pretty much okay. Hopefully this comp’ll serve him better than his laptop. So order is placed for a 1000 dollar PC to be ready by thursday morning.

Back at home didn’t have anything special liao that night so pretty much spent the rest of the day playing games, again. I’m not sure if I gamed the rest of the day away or not, but it seems that any empty time slots that I can’t rememebr, I’ll fill it with gaming. So actually I don’t game as much as you hear from this blog, the blog is not 100% accurate.

Oh yes for dinner…………..so darn cool, me phooi sin, kyloon and cze went all the way to box hill(15 minutes drive from where we are, cze drove)to find the KAYU restaurant!!! Oh man missed those mamak stall so much. Sadly to say, The Roti man went back to KL dee. Like, WTH!?!! So everyone had Nasi Kandar with Teh Tarik instead. Nasi Kandar here was just about as good, the fewmonths staying here must have lost my resistance to spicy food ler, eat the nasi kandar until I sweat like crap. Teh tarik here…………..don’t need to tell them kurang manis also its very kurang manis dee. I guess its good in a way but really doens’t feel like kayu teh tarik dee that way.

Overall?Kayu was definitely worth it meal since we won’t be getting this for at least a few months liao. Altho food costs us like 15 dollars in total, to have a taste of something like KAYU, feels worth it to me.

Melbourne: Day 3

Today its time to look at another Uni.

Today we make our way through a 30 minute long journey all the way to Monash University. Cze’s place. Huihui and phooi sin tagged along( I think they’re more into the shopping after this rather than to really check out Monash, oh well) Monash, cze’s campus, damn far from city, really sad case to drive here all the time, alrady dozed off twice on the trip to get there, Kyloon literally slept the whole journey.

Of course Monash has its good sides as well, really large campus, all buildings are well spaced out, Melbourne and UNSW are hardly ever this spaced out, out space is so limited we’d have to makeuse or evey bit of land we have, so different for Monash, they’ve got land after land after land, can expand so freely. Plus there’s all the plants around, makes it feels sorta like a zoo actually( I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing to have in a uni yet but I’m currently considering it as a good thing).

Visit to Moansh was relatively short cause all the buildings were locked and a lot of effort was also spent on looking for a toilet that was not locked as well. So after this girls were so excited liao, cause its their time for fun dee, shopping obviously. Went this this Mega large Mall called Chadstone or something like that. The mall was so much larger than Queensbay back home, really an eye opener. What’s even more cool is its got so many carparks, and its all free!! Free parking man, u don’t get that anywhere else besides monopoly.

Okay so Shopping in Chastone, Decided it was better to leave the girls to their shopping and guys to their shopping. So we split up loo. Girls went 1 by 1, From Esprit to David Jones to this and that, Guys went also 1 by 1, but all electronic stores, haha. From Tandy to JB Hi-Fi , looked at all the new gaming equpment and games released. After about 2 hours or so, Shops already closing( Yea they close at around 6 or 5 30, stupid right?) Phooi sin was so pissed at it, said she’ll be back someday to really give it all she’s got.Man that girl can shop.

Dinner eaten at cze’s place, the guy made Bak Kut Teh. Unfortunately the guy put so much meat inside the cooker, cannot use pressure cook, so have to slowly cook, only can eat by 9 o clock lidat. Even worse lagi was because didn’t cook long enough, the bak kut teh taste wasn’t really strong yet, but overall still a nice little meal.

Yeah that’s that for today. Sorry no pictures. Told ya.

Melbourne: Day 2

Okay today what did we do? darn the details are seriously getting more and more fuzzy.

Today cze brought us out to the marketplace to Look around. If you guys are from Penang reading thi, the marketplace looks more or less sorta like a larger and more classy level of lorong kulit if u ask me, they selling branded merchandises out in the open at much cheaper prices. something like that lah. Cze’s got a cover thingy for his front carseats, didn’t really think it was a really useful thing at the beggining, but after that everytime sit in his car too long u’ll really get comfortable and start to doze off. Anyways back to the market. Funny phooi sin told u to try out the doughnuts sold nearby. So as tourists, we tried it,wasn’t much actually, jsut normal doughnuts with jam inside that’s all. That’s when you find out in the end that phooi sin’s never tried the doughnuts before herself, she was just telling us based on other ppl’s opinion. Anyways we had Lunch over there as well lah, ate some fish and chips, darn those potato chips always make me full so quickly, wonder why………

Well after lunch we were pretty much donw for the day, didn’t wanna go back so early cause if we did that Phooi Sin’d surely scold us again. she’d say smth like “you guys come to Melbourne and ur gonna just gonna spend ur days at home lidat ar?” and all sorts like that. So we decided totake detour, go crash at cze yang’s place for a while before going back. Cze Yang’s place looked so cool(darn I didn’t get photo for you guys), damn his palce looks really awesome man, its double floored and the stairs are so well designed, looked far too classy to be affordable(and yet it is!!!) darn that guy’s got such a nice place. But cze yang’s got a few complaints still lah, apparently the guy’s getting a little annoyed by his housemate, so cze’s still considering moving to somewhere else again.

What we did at cze’s place, hiahz, so bad. We saw cze’s housemate and frens playing DOTA. And that’s where the sadness begins, me and kyloon begun taking “tuition” lessons from cze yang on playing DOTA. So now we’re like 2 noobies just training on our DOTA. At the present moment, I have learnt to use 1 character already, I’ve learnt to buy the correc items according to cze yang’s “prescription”, anything other than that, I still suck( I still get wned quite often as well)

yeah so when you waste a whole day for gaming, there’s really not much to tell anymore. Lesson learnt(little too late tho)

Oh at night we went to this place called Lygon Street I think, whole street full of Italian restaurants. Also since it was a Sunday, almost every restaurant was also full already. Luckily managed to find 1 restaurant that could cater for us all. The place served really nice pasta ad pizza(I think). everyone was real happy bout the food(except for the price maybe not too happy about that) also it was the first time we all got to see cze’s girlfriend in person,haha. If you guys know phooi sin you’d probably guess that she’s the most curious person when it comes to matters like this. She started interviewing cze’s girl(cheryl) throughout the whole night at the restaurant.( maybe its just a girl thing or something lah, nothing to be alarmed about)

Oh yea while making our way back home, passed by this really cool signboard, Mlaaysians and Singaporeans’d probably find it more interesting. I’ll post the picture up

Melbourne: Day 1

Okay because I’m doing these posts right after I came back from the 1 week trip in melbourne, a lot of the details are getting fuzzy in my mind but I’ll try to emphasise on some main stuff happening, might not be in chronological order or in correct amounts but the stuff that happened still happened lah that’s the main point anyways.

Well this morning (by that I mean 1 or 2 am sort of morning), Phooi sin went to sleep, me and kyloon worked around the clock trying to copy cze yang’s ORIGINAL CnC 3 game for hours and trying to crack the game and stuff so that we can play the long awaited game!!! Finally it worked and we went to sleep loo. 3am lah me really tak tahan dee. Next day wake up Phooi Sin got up extra early make us breakfast. Well she didn’t cook lah, but she did prepare the bread and peanut butter and stuff lah.

At around 12 pm, Felicia dropped by with her mum and cousin. Felicia’s mum brought over my HDD as well!!! I’ve been needing 1 of those for so long and so fortunately Felicia’s mum was coming over from malaysia and got me 1. SO thankful to have good people in the world isn’t it?

Went down to some Vietnamese restaurant down in the city to eat lunch, Servings were so darn large la!!Eat until so full. Damn worth it. To make things even more worth it, the funny Vietnamese ppl counted the bill wrong so lunch that day was extra extra cheap. haha.

We continued on to go look about Melbourne Uni cause after all, Felicia’s mum is here and she’d like to see the condition of her daugther’s uni mah. So yeah we went to see Melbourne, really good looking, has that really………….historic feeling everywhere. Some buildings gives you the impression of a “Harry Potter”-ish fantasy I guess. But then again i guess many unis are like that also. Surprisingly we found the most interesting part of the Uni to be the carpark. The carpark is like this huge cave, very spacious area inside, and the entrance, had all these old designs, makes u think”Bruce Wayne’s Carpark’d probably be like that,with the Batmobile hidden somewhere”

Anyways after that we made our way to International House, the hostel where Felicia, Jia Ren and Huihui are staying at. Darn for a place to be called a hostel, you’d definitely wouldn’t expect it to be so far away from the Uni. Despite the sad-ess in distance, the rooms were actually quite good, we had a look at Huihui’s room only, furniture was old(shows that IH has been here for quite a while) but all in all was really nice. The dining hall, really really nice, another place that’ll make you think of Hogwarts. They’ve got seriously big common rooms as well with really good facilities, my place is hardly anything like that.

After looking around IH continued just walking all the way back to phooi sin’s place, passed by Victoria Marketplace on our way back( hardly noticed that we’ve walked for hours over dunno how many kilometers dee) feet were feeling really tired by then so decided to call it a day liao. So rest of the day was pretty much spent back at Phooi Sin’s playing CnC 3.

Again here are some Photos.

Don’t be expecting more photos in the enxt few posts, my interest to take photos were slowly reducing over the days there.

Arrival Night at Melbourne

Sorry its been taking so long to write up these posts. been really too occupied(okay so I didn’t make time for blogging but I’m making up for it now alright?)

So flight to Melbourne was pretty much alright, went there super “on-time”. by the time reached Melbourne airport started to face some problems dee. at baggage claim…………the stupid Virgin Blue airlines put my luggage in the wrong plane!! like what the hell?!! Fortunately the plane that my bag was in was just 10 minutes behind my flight so my luggage came soon enough( just imagine if it was on its way somewhere else?)

So cze yang and phooi sin came pick us up, first time cze drove to airport himself, good ol GPS navigator looks so cool.Amazing to see cze driving manual car. still rather jerking the whole ride(with some occasional engine deaths) but all in all still very good lah, can’t really complain since nobody else can offer transportation liao.

Arrived at Phooi sin’s place to unpack(yea we staying with phooi sin!!)I don’t get whats the big deal but why are ppl so amazed when me and kyloon start unpacking our computer accesories before our other stuff?either way the stuff gets unpacked mah. Phooi sin’s place was actually not bad, probably looked much more spacious if she hadn’t converted her sofa into a bed for us.But seriously its quite an ok place for 1 person to live in.

Anyways nothing special there anymore, besides the fact that we filled phooi sin’s eating table full of wires and cables in matter of seconds, heh(guys’ll be guys). Anyways, after unpacking went to meet up with everyone else. When I say everyone else I’m referring to Felicia, Hean, Cze, Jia Ren, Huihui. All went together to go makan dinner. Went to this restaurant called Chom Chom. Apparently Carene works there(for some reason phooi sin also works there but her work schedule is so comfusing I’m not even gonna try to understand it). Eating here was actually quite surprising, didn’t expect to find so tasty hainan chicken rice around these places.What’s more surprising about that night was that for ONCE in my life, I actually saw Huihui not tie-ing her hair up. Brings me back to INTI days when we guys tried so hard to take that hair rubber-band thingy off her head only to find a second layer of protection beneath it(its almost as if its made to counter our attacks). Either way, Huihui looked much nicer like that lah, sadly I think that’s gonna be the only time we get to see her like that, Jia Ren and Felicia probably’d get more opportunity to see lah since they live with her. I ould show you guys all the picture but then the guys agreed that the pictures are far too valuable to just allow anyone to see it (espiecially ben, haha!if u wanna see it ben u gonna have to get it from someone else.)

After that we planned to go find a pub to check out. Being a complete noob in the world of pub, I let the Melbourne ppl lead us around. For some reason Melbourne people enjot bringing ppl walking up and down and up the same street over and over again before landing on pub in the end. Found a regular normal pub lah, sat down and had a few glasses of dunno what name beer, some ppl ordered their Long Islands and stuff lah. I could hardly take alchohol(having never tkaen more than 100mL in my whole lifetime) so just stuck to my beer lah. After 2 Glasses and a few more mouthfuls, already started to feel the whole surface of my face going hot dee, not sure if its sorta a symptom before getting drunk or not ( cause it could be all that porn advertisement showing in the pub as well I guess, haha) but either way i figured better stop dee before I give ppl trouble.

That’s more or less my first day at Melbourne, nothing much besides the stuff stated above, we arrived late so didn’t have much time left to do much, Mebourne pretty much dies down quite early in the evening.

few photos down here for you guys to look about.

The Pub Time

Wires wires wires………….so troublesome.

Last Day

Today, is the day before our easter holiday begins. I’ve got 2 hours of hospital in the morning and 2 hours of prac in the afternoon(wish they’d just let us get over with it all in the morning.) My plan for today was to basicaly just survive through the day with the least bit of participation, just wanna get it all over with and prepare for hols in melbourne. But apparently last day was exactly the opposite.

Today in hospital we saw things completely different from the last session. Last session we’ve seen a dude with heart bypass and an lady with dermatitis. You’d thought for first years exposing us to things this sad was bad enough. Darn they jsut had to go further. Today’s patients…………their illness, can’t be seen from the outside, but neither is it a mental problem, its still physical……….but its happening from the inside-cancer, they attack you when you least expect it often of the time.

First patient on the stage, was 39 year old lady, diagnosed with some sort of cancer of the blood(I know its not leukemia, it was some myeloma or something like that,but definitely blood related.). The disease has been killing her from the inside for quite some time and has attacked her bones till they’ve become weak. From the outside when we saw her she looked jsut like a healthy patient, but if we were able to look inside her body, probably would see 2 fractured ribsas well as a few backbone injuries. What really depressing for this woman is that this disease that she has, supposed to normally attack men(why men!) and not women, and even if the disease attacked, would have came sometime in the 50s. So she’s really depressed to be so unlucky. Also she’s explained that since she had her disease, many of her friends have began to keep away from here which really made her even more lonely, but what’s really touching too was that she was saying that people out of nowhere were coming to give great support to her and it’s really moved her(teared during the interview, not too much, but still teared lah). Kinda makes me wonder, do you think your friends will still be there for you when you get sick?It does worry me……..

Second patient, 60 year old man, diagnosed with testicular cancer 1 year ago. Returned today because the cancer has also returned and this time its going for the CFS (Cerebrospinal fluid, I don’t now why I’m using short forms when I still need to explain them in the end). So now to undergo chemotheraphy, they’ve planted this little plastic pipe-y thingy on his head so anytime they need to inject stuff in for the chemotheraphy, just inject it into the little pipe-y thingy. The guy began the interview really happy, cracks a bunch of jokes with really funny analogy. Soon into the interview, the guy started wiping his eyes more and more often, and closing in the end of the interview, when we started to say bye(for the first time), the guy starts looking real sad, and before we could really say a proper goodbye, the guy starts feeling all hopeless and all, was mentioning stuff about how he’s going to die, and how his mother used to die form this, and how scared he is, kinda makes u so sad( at least for me). So I guess often when u start talking to ppl, just because they crack a lot of jokes doesn’t mean they don’t have issues, if you really have connected with them, they’ll tell u a far different story.

Third patient, we’ve only got to see this guy for a short while, 21 year old, has been in here for 3 years undergoing chemotheraphy as well, for some cancer related ot blood once again, we were in hematology ward, duh!This dude was younger, and because he’s a dude, didn’t look so bad without hair, think the guy purposely shaved it off so he didn’t have to look like a weird thingy when the hair starts to fall off chunk by chunk. This guy seemed to be much more positive, jsut a little bit of weeping(mostly homesick I’d guess). Really sporty guy before his diagnosis, sad that he’s loss all his muscles to fat.That’s what u get for resting in beds for 3 years man.

Yeah so that’s today’s hospital session, I didn’t do any of those interviews, figured was time let my group ppl do also. Anyways, just wanted to share with you guys a little something we’ve learnt from this patient relations thing. The technique is called the helicopter effect. It means for a person(doctor) to stay detached from the patients( helicopter detached from the ground) and yet still be able to observe the patients(unlike planes, u can still see the ground from a helicopter) It basically saying that we’ve gotta have concern for patients, but then if we had this sort of concern for every patient, we’re gonna start facing some serious depression issues, especially if ur dealing with terminal diseases. So the helicopter effect just means to always make sure you remain at some level detachment from the patients to avoid getting overemotional.

Okay moving on the the afternoon (damn I’m writing log again aren’t I?), well this afternoon started lab with microscopy!! yay!! why is this worth cheering, cause for once we’re seeing something real!! rememebr how we used to get to see paramecium and all that crap back in high school, yeah screw those fake slides. Now we’re loking at genuine horse blood!!The thing about real slides though, blood coagulates, so basically what we saw was like large large bundles of RBCs just packed together, can’t really see where 1 RBC starts and where 1 ends.heh. After that we got to play with some solutions to watch the blood either hemolyse or shrivel, I know that’s old school but looks so cool now……..

Oh yea and best part was…………when we were finishing!!! unexpected eh? after the experiemnts, u take ur gloves off and wash your hands. They’ve got this really cool hand washing thingy. Its about the size of a hand dryer, expect its got a big sink under it. Put your hand there, and it’ll spray ur hands iwth warm water, few seconds alter, water closes, soap get’s squirted out automatically, few seconds for u to wipe your hands around………..then water comes spraying out again. How neat is that?!! haha some of the other students purposely went to wash their hands over and over again just to play with the machine. Ha ha.

Lastly, really apologise for not blogging recently, apaprently some ppl getting impatient( u sendiri mia blog also not updating that often saja leh), But seriously nothing much happening recently, until today at least. haha. Tomorrow going to go off to melbourne to visit a bunch of friends, probably going to go pub that night, definitely’ll have something to blog about again.

So for now, deal with this one.