good news and bad news

remember when I told you previously that I would be going to children’s hospital this term? yeah sadly that ain’t true. Apparently that special activity was only meant for second years, us first years still have to settle with regular patients. Yeah Its not all bad but I kinda felt talking to kids probably would be easier than adults, after all its more likely that u’ll understand stuff the child says than what the adults have to say. speaking of the stuff adults would say. Such a surprising patient today. Old lady in her 80s, suffered from a fractured hip when falling, had multiple toncils removed, gallbladder removed. Basically she’s losing quite a few organs over the years. Accent was a little rather country style so u can tell she’s sorta the cowboy-ish type people. So we were just taking down some medical history……then came to the part where we discussed about alcohol and smoking.what would u expect from a 85 year old lady right? the lady smokes like 25 cigs a day!!! she even claims that she sometimes buys 50 packs and by the end of the day she has 1 pack left!!! like what the toot!!!! Surprisingly you’ll notice that all her previous surgeries, including this one, has nothing to do with her smoking. Makes you think “thrice” about smoking. then we moved on to the alcohol, beer for lunch, brandy for dinner.what the toot!!!! she’s 85 and she’s living her life like that? what the hell?!! Either way was a really nice lady, altho accent very heavy which made it hard to hear what she said. for some reason when i told her my name was Jie, she started saying stuff about having an old neighbour named Jie as well, then she goes on to talk about how the guy had Spanish parents and asked me if I was Spanish!! What in the world would make u think I’m Spanish lady?!!

Ok so that was the bad news…….sorta. So good news. today our regular tutor wasn’t supervising us, some other guy came to take her place instead. This new dude, damn expects us to be like final year med students, keep asking us all sorts of stuff about what’s that bone’s name, telling us how to read radiographs(yeah they’re called radiographs, X-rays are “rays” not sheets of dyed plastic, that’d be a radiograph, Now you know). I wouldn’t say I hated it actually, it was quite interesting learning from him, I actually like to think that I learn better in small groups (small as in 15 or less, just like those old ext 2 days ya guys?). Anyways getting to the good news part, this guy……….for some reason seems to be so happy to be teaching us, altho he’s just replacing for 1 day,  and the guy doesn’t even workin the hospital we went to, his hospital is downtown, he just came up here to help with some procedure thingy. Anyways the guy gave us his number, told us we could call him anytime starting next week, then he”ll check and see if he’s got any operations going on, then we’d be allowed to go observe the operation, probably from a observations deck lah(we’re not “scrubbing in” yet like in TV lah). Of course all things come with a condition, he made us promise him that if we went, we wouldn’t faint, haha.

Object Permanence

I’m putting this under the medical experience catergory because I feel its really something that got me thinking. Just a mild reminder for u guys, this post is probably gonna be quite “theory based” so most likely it’ll bore u out

as I have mentioned befre we’ll be working on babaies this term so most of the stuff we leart will be related to babies. One of the things I found interesting so far was about how babies learn object permanence.

Object permanence simply means to understand that a particular object, although you don’t see it, you know its there.for babies object permanence is quite a new thing. If you show a newborn baby a ball in your hand and then drop it, the baby will be looking aroud your hand to look for the ball. if the baby doesn’t see the ball, it’ll assume that the ball hasjust dissapeared. A baby that has understood object permanence would instead have looked around the floor to look for the ball when the ball was dropped, because the baby knows that the object is still in existance, its just not in the hand.

As grown ups, object permanence comes almost natural to us, and very often we don’t find it very difficult to accept. But then again, even we as adults can be affected by object permanence more than we thought.

when we are born till where we are now, how often do you not see your parents and friends(I am sorry if I’m offending anybody out there who has lost any of their parents)? we see our parents and friends so often that our minds have linked them as permanent objects as well. That is like after a party with your friends and u all go home. you can’t see ur friends anymore back at home, but you know they still exist and you’ll still see each other soon enough. But then object permanence comes into a disturbing role when this is not so. examples include when you left your friends or your friends have left you for a long period of time. You keep on reminding yourself that your friend is far away and u won’t be seeing them for quite a long time, but object permanence tells you otherwise, and that’s why u miss them( u guys better be missing me…………)

But this is hardly anything compared to the main disturbance—-death. Why there is so much grief in a family when someone dies, is because they have to set their mind to erase the person that died from their minds, to tell themselves that that person no longer exists, again this contradicts with object permanence and thus we grieve and mourn and all that.

That’s all about object permanence, just felt it was a really interesting thing, thought I might just share it with you all. for those that managed to finish reading this. hope it didn’t bore/confuse you.

Dinner Party

Today the ppl at college organised a dinner aprty at a classy restaurant in darling harbour. Yeah i know the first thing that comes to your mind and yea it costs us each around 70AUD so yea its definitely classy.

so basically we just sat there makan classy food lah. then gave out a few weird awards like drama queen, tough guy and comedian stuff lidat. lots of red and white wine as well as beer going about. yeah everyone had pretty much quite a nice time eating lah. Then later dance floor open dee and everyone jsut rushed for the dance floor like mad. Geesh its just dancing lah. not like u get more points if u got the middle of the floor or something lidat.

Anyways things were fine until ppls tarted getting drunk. This jewish guy, apaprently in jewish tradition in good celebrations u can let go of urself and go drunk. and yea he had jsut far too much wine I guess. was shouting about and lifting ppl up for no reason. well guess he wasn’t so bad lah. This other girl, Velda dressed up so nice for the party. looked really nice lah. anyways dunno what went wrong with her, so sane throughout the whole party then out of nowhere took 5 glassess full of red wine. yeah getting drunk wasn’t in her schedule, she skipped straight to the vomiting part. u could see there was like 3 bursts of vomit fountains coming out of her, you wouldn’t even be able to smell the vomit cause there was so much wine mixed in it, so yea you’d smell just as if she vomited wine…………together with the main course I suppose.

but all was fun, drunk ppl were taken care of, party moved back to college mia common room. in fact they probably still partying now while i’m typing my blog. Why I’m not joining in, well u guys no me, not that crazy about alchohol and loud music lah.

祸不单行

with reference to the title above, u can probably guess that i’m having a bad day. for those of you who can’ts read chinese, it means “trouble jsut keeps coming”.

I start off the day waking up at 8 10 in the morning. Now normally I’d wake up at 7 40 for breakfast so to wake up at 8 10 was a little shocking for me. so my whole routine was screwed that day, showered first before having breakfast. Right after that darted off for class dee.

Class was scheduled for 9 am. because of all the rushing I did, managed to actually get to class in a more tired but earlier manner. Managed to even find a good seat consdering not many ppl were there yet. By 9 05 more or less all 500+ of us med students have entered the lecture hall. Sat there waiting for the lecturer while society reps used the spare time to make a few announcements.

By 9 20, lecturer was still not here. Then out of nowhere this guy comes in the hall and goes up to the mic. ” Sorry to tell you this but the lecture scheduled for today at 9 am has been changed to next week”. TOOT!!!!! I rushed like hell jsut to come to a lecture that didn’t happen?I could have just slacked and even slept on for about an hour more. Now I have another lecture at 10 and I’ve got nowhere near enough to go and no time to go anywhere far enough. TOOT!!!

10am came at last. Lecturer did come in this time. but reading off the lecture slides like she was rapping a song or something, could hardly make out what the heck she is saying. Normally if I make a great effort to try listen to this, I normally end up using so much brain power to listen that in the end I fall sleepy again. 10 minutes into the lecture and that’s what happened. even woke up about 3 times in between the lecture. haihz….. but that can ahrdly be considered trouble really.

closing to the end of the lecture at about 10 55, I just realised that I have anatomy practical right after this lecture. and becasue I was in such a rush this morning, forgot to pack labcoat. SHIT!!! seeing as how I keep falling asleep in this lecture, plus a recording will be available online, plus she’s jsut reading it off her slides and I can get those stuff online as well. decided to leave the lecture hall right away and rush back to get my labcoat.

walked walked walked finally got home and packed the stuff and walked all the way back up the hill to anatomy class. by then I was so tired out by the walking (I’m so definitely out of shape) fell as if there wasn’t enough oxygen going into my head or smth. felt so faint during the class. and the disgusting internal organs we were seeing weren’t really helping. This term we were doing gastrointestinal tract. so Imagine seeing a whole bunch of intestines lying about while u’re light headed.haihz…….

after anatomy had 2 hours break before the next class. Went back to college to catch up on my sleep, so tired today and summore so much sleep time was wasted dee. Went to sleep for about half an hour before the phone rang like”RING!!!!!!!!” instead of its regular “ring ring!!…..ring ring!!”. I answered it, only to hear weird rough noises. Damn phone line’s being repaired. have to disconnect the wire from the phone to make the phone shut up. then continued with more sleep. another half an hour, knock on the door. “can we just come in an do some repairs to your fire alarm?”. “oh sure ,come on in”. Another half an hour spent watching the guys replace the fire alarm with sleeping eyes.

By the time they were done almost time for class dee, packed my stuff and went to class , all the way……….up the hill………again……………..sheesh……….

Well that’s all for today. Also u noticed I added a longer list on the blogroll recently?yeah dun really bother about that for now, apparently I’e been checking them out everyday, and nothing new ever comes, especially yours lah Eric………..

First Day Back

Well its been 2 weeks of holiday since I finished the first term for the medical course in UNSW. So now we’re moving into some more serious stuff liao. Have to say, after 2 weeks of waking up late, wasn’t easy getting adjusted back to waking up this early again, but either way still managed to get on my feet and get to class on time.

This term we’ll be learning about embryo thingys. What’s different this term is that now we’ll be studying with the 2nd year med students. We’ll be learning the exact same stuff as them, and we’ll be taking the exact same exam as them, sounds unfair right? Anyways I guess we’ll be doing that next year to the new first years as well anyways. So since we’ll be having lectures with the 2nd years now, little  law building lecture halls wun hold all 500+ of us anymore, so we’ve moved to a bigger hall even further away than the law building to have lectures. In the past if I only had lectures for the day, didn’t have to walk all the way up the hill, now no matter what class I have, I’ll still have to make the trip up that damn hill.

Today’s class was welcoming, since it was only 2 hours. First hour was basically just giving us an introduction, so nothing to learn there, so happy again. They mentioned that in this term, since we’ll be learning about “baby stuff”, we wun be visiting te regular hospital that much anymore, instead we’ll be visiting children’s hospital this time. And the school’s been so nice summore, they sent out flyers to kindergartens,”We need your children to help our medical students learn”, the kindergarten ppl will be having visits from medical students like us, they’ll get to meet real doctors as well, and they get a free “hospital themed decoration kit” for the classrooms in the kindergarten, not only that, they even got a clown doctor to perform, sadly we were told we wun be able to stay there long enough to see the clown. Damn!! Anyways having heard all that, the coming terms promises to be quite fun too.

Somehow when good things come, bad things normally need to follow too, next hour of lecture, we’re starting to learn “gastrointestinal tract developement in embryos”, title wasn’t the thing that scared the crap out of me, was the 48 slides the guy was going through in the 1 hour, wtf that’s like less than 2 minutes per slide, and his slides were all so complicated and he was just moving through like it was 2+2……….haihz in fact I’m still reading on that 1 hour lecture’s notes right now, got so sick of it so decided to write down a few thoughts for now.

Holidays were quite a waste lah, basically I stay home to watch Lost season after season, actually wasn’t such a bad show. Then jsut yesterday managed to watch heroes episode 20!! damn it was a nice episode. those of u who don’t watch it, its only 20 episodes, u should catch up now while u still can, you don’t wanna end up like me chasing Lost like mad.Between the last season of Lost that I’ve seen and heroes episode 20, there were like 2 or 3 days of seriously nothing to do, actually got so bored and actually planned to get even “boreder” that I went to read hean’s blog again, and even wrote comments lagi!!………damn that was 1 of my most unproductive holidays ever. Hope the july holidays wun be like that.

Speaking of july holidays, I’m coming back to penang on 1st july till 21st july, so I can celebrate birthday back home!! what’s nicer, just found out harry potter releasing at july 13(hope I got my sources right). At least there’s a show I could watch back in Penang. Oh and by the way, if anybody whose reading this hasn’t seen spiderman, go watch that too, really nice, full of action all the way, no room for lovey dovey drama.

That’s all for now.