Exam prep

Heading up to exams next week -- WOOHOO! Wait a minute, I'm not excited about that...take that woohoo back!

I have two exams next week, and one of them I'm either going to ace or miserably fail utterly and wholeheartedly. That is, of course, the main FBS (foundations of biomedical science) test. Basically, it's all of gastro and renal block, plus all the labs from the whole semester. That's all the immunology labs, all the cardio labs, all the resp labs, all the gastro labs, all the renal labs, all the anatomy labs, all the microbiology labs, and there's one other set of labs that I've forgotten too. Oh, histology. Oh and the pathology labs for all those organ systems too. Sooo...since I'm really only just starting revising the lectures for gastro and renal, what do you think my chances are?

Well, that's actually an interesting question. See, everyone right now is stressing out about anatomy. BUT, I've already done heaps of anatomy! So if anatomy forms a large amount of the test, then I'll almost be able to wing the rest of it...don't you just hate it when you get to the point where you're thinking about how to minimise the amount of work you have to do simply because you're in a position where you can't possibly hope to do it all. Ahhh well.

After next week I'm heading back home for our two week mid-semester break (yeah we only get a 2 week break), and after that we have neuroscience which is universally stated as being the absolute hardest block of the whole year. It's six weeks long!! So I'm hoping to bring some of my pathology books home and study up some neuroscience over my break so that it doesn't hit me too hard .Knowing me though, I'll be posting here probably at the end of the first week of neuro that I wish I'd actually done that study over the break.

We talked to a vascular surgeon trainee yesterday, and he said that while he's training now to be a surgeon he actually knows that there aren't any jobs available for him. And that kicked off a massive discussion about our job prospects in medicine...basically, they suck. And the prevailing opinion is that some day technology will basically replace doctors. If not doctors, then certainly surgeons. For example, cardiothoracic surgeons -- drugs to treat heart conditions are getting pretty darn good now, and lots of people are saying that they're heading the way of the dodo. Hopefully neurosurg doesn't become obsolete for, hmm, at least 60 years :P

Anyway so that's me for the moment. This weekend's going to be a mad struggle to get enough sleep and cram a whole pile of stuff into my memory circuits (yes robotic overlords of the future, I am a robot and you should keep me alive). And when I say a whole pile I mean it: I exported my onenote notebook to word so I could see the wordcount. Here it is:

Like...what. Halfway through the year, people, and I'm almost up to 100000 words. Imagine being told to write 100000 words. I would laugh in your face and then do a little poo in my pants when I realised you're serious. Thank god I moved to dvorak, or I bet I would have been veeery familiar with the effects of carpal tunnel syndrome. Actually come to think of it...damn, knowing those effects would have been handy for this test (get it, handy. My mum thinks I'm funny ok).

Wish me luck!

Circle

Hospital Allocation

Today we received our allocations to the hospital that we'll be learning at for the rest of our courses after this year. I wanted to be at a major metropolitan hospital but before even entering the course I didn't get that luxury. I was down to a choice between two hospitals, and I preferenced one over the other because I really only liked one of them, the other one seemed like a bit of a dump...anyway, so of course I've been allocated to the hospital that I didn't really want. Hooray, right? Ah, me. I just can't shake the idea that not being at a major hospital is going to affect my internship chances somehow, and by extension my ability to get into whatever training course I want later (I say that rather than 'my ability to get into neurosurgery', as a hat tip to the fact that I will probably change my mind in the future -- everyone does, multiple times). If I'm going back to Perth after my MD course then I guess it doesn't matter as much...but what if I don't go back to Perth? There's actually a lot of unknown in my future at the moment.

They only let you change clinical schools in very specific circumstances, and I don't meet any of those circumstances, but just in case I sent them an email tonight saying that if anyone happens to want to move out of the school that I wanted, and has to move to the one I'm to go to at the moment, then I really wouldn't mind being someone they think of to swap with that person. I guess that's the best I can do!

Having said all of this, I know that I am still going to get a good education. I'm still going to go to my hospital and get as involved as I can without annoying everyone. I guess I was just hoping to get involved in that 'big hospital' feel, with all the important consultants and surgeons (I'm thinking neurosurgeons of course) around. Not that they'd have any time for me, but still. Also, the facilities at the metro hospitals are a bit nicer.

Adios,

Circle

Taking the steps

We had a practical lab today, and we learnt how to take blood pressure in a number of ways, both manually and with machines of various size and ability. It sounds mundane, and plenty of people in all walks of life can do it, but it sure was exciting for me at least to get out my stethoscope and use it on someone else for the first time! It was fairly hard to find the brachial pulse on most people, but I'm sure that with practice that'll become second nature. As part of the lab we are able to take part in a research project organised by the medicine faculty, investigating blood pressure. It's the largest study of it's kind in the world, so it's no small thing. Part of it is to do with changes in how long it takes for our heart to readjust itself after we go from laying down to standing. My blood pressure went below 25mmHg when I stood up...that's really not good. Then I took an anti angina drug and repeated the experiment, and the blood pressure stayed lower for longer, which was what we expected. It gave me a thumping good headache too, because it worked by vasodilation.

On another note, the pharmacology lecturer made us watch this video, because...here's the scary part...it summarises most of the drugs we're going to have to be very familiar with by the end of the year. Fantastic.

Regards,

Circle

Anticipation

Why hello!


It's been quite a while since my last post. I blame that on several things -- an amazing road trip with some amazing people, spending time with family after study has taken away all the rest of my time this year, and I've just generally been catching up on a bit of life. Enjoying the calm before the impending storm!

The 19th of January. The date creeps ever closer...I think that it's a long way off and I let it drift from my mind, which grants me some reprieve but then the next time I think about it it's taken great leaps forward. At the moment it's both my best friend and my worst enemy. I can't wait for it to come, but if I could stop time I would. I have so much more anchoring me here now than I did however many months ago when I filled out my preferences for medicine schools...it seems like everyone has waited until the very last second to tell me what I mean to them.

At the same time that I'm enjoying being here probably too much, things over in Melbourne are already coming together pretty well. Thanks to the wonder of social networking a bunch of us from the course are already mates despite the fact we come from all corners of the world. We've already organised to meet up on the 20th of jan to study some of the material we need to know before starting the course -- that's something that really shouldn't excite me as much as it does. The medicine camp is on from the 1st to the 3rd of February and it promises to be a weekend of fun games and drinking, and a fantastic opportunity to meet the people who will be my colleagues in the future. The only problem with that is that there's only 150 spots on the camp...versus the 300+ people in the course. But the college accommodation is organised and the deposit is paid, so as long as I actually get my final offer for medicine I have accommodation sorted!

On an aside, I've been thinking a lot recently about whether this really is the best path for me to take. Not because I am afraid of the workload or afraid of leaving home, but because I'm concerned about whether or not I will actually be able to get a job at the end of it. There may be a shortage of doctors in Australia but there is by no means a shortage of medical school graduates. I was talking to my best friend's parents about this today -- there is an over-abundance of medical school graduates but a vast undersupply of speciality training places to make them into actual doctors. In Queensland it's gotten to the point where there are 300-400 graduates without anywhere to go to be employed. It's shocking. I'm also struggling with my materialism...I yearn for the simple life, but if I can't have that then I want the most extravagantly expensive and stylish life possible. Hmm.


Anyway, back to living life for the next 25 odd days. And then POOF it's gone in a flurry of stethoscopes, late nights with pathology books, and incredible opportunities and people =)

By the way, I am out of my mind with excitement for ARMA III. And GTA V. They will be responsible for me failing med school ;)


Circle

Waiting Game

This may be All Hallow's Eve, but for me it's also the eve, perhaps, of finding out if I have been successful in gaining a place in an MD course. It was meant to be today, but the admissions people couldn't finalise the national student allocations in time. Thankfully they're getting up early tomorrow, so hopefully there will be some news to wake up to!

I'm not stressed. I'm not even particularly excited. I know that getting in will mean I've signed up for years of stress, and very little time for friends and relationships. It might mean leaving my family behind, as I move interstate. I am looking forwards to finding out though, but not in the fanatical way that other people are. It's important to not just want something because it's difficult to attain. There seems to be a philosophy in med applicants, that getting an offer means that you've 'won'. Better to always remember the real reasons why you're there, so that you can stay objective about whether it's for you or not.

In other news, we were given free pizza today in a unit, so life's pretty great! Aside from a splitting headache, and quickly worsening vision in my left eye, and all the assignments I still have to do (I really need to give my eye a rest, but there's no chance if that any time soon).

Wish me luck!

Cheers,

Circle

The Really Inconvenient Truth

I was reading through wikipedia the other day, as I love to do. I somehow started reading the article 'what wikipedia is not' for some reason or another. That got me onto something else, which got me onto something else, etc etc, which got me onto the articles about Malthusian theory and the Malthusian catastrophe. Of course these sorts of theories have been around for a while and can't be claimed to be the thoughts of a single person, but they serve as a nice succinct theory to refer to here.

In a nutshell, these theories predict that when unchecked population growth outgrows our agricultural capabilities, a number of inevitable processes will work to reduce the population in various horrible ways, not the least of which is famine on apocalyptic levels. It makes sense -- reports have found that the population of the world will likely exceed our abilities to feed by 2030. That's 18 years, not meaning to be sensationalistic about it.

Now think about it in a different way. Running out of food in 2030 relies on levels of famine and poverty remaining what they are today or increasing proportionally. Read that sentence again, and let it sink in. If we were to attempt to give ever undernourished person in the world a typical day's food intake of a modern western urban family, as is the ideal scenario, we would likely already be past our ability to supply the world with food. Right now there are more overweight people in the world than there are undernourished -- with both groups likely now at or above 1,000,000,000 people -- so there is some slack that we can take away from Western cultures to feed the poor. And if we somehow reduce the immense amounts of waste in the world then we could survive a few more years of continued growth. But the truth of the matter, the hard cold inevitable truth is that the world, as it is, relies on a seventh of the world's population going hungry. Is the malthusian crisis something that will happen in 2030, or are we simply in its birthing throes now?

So, assuming that we are utterly unsuccessful in solving the poverty crisis, and assuming that population growth doesn't increase any more, we have 18 years before we can't feed ourselves. 18 years to before you, reader, having a good meal might mean that my family doesn't eat tonight. Given enough nights of that, I might think about taking some of your food no matter what it takes. And that will play out on a global scale as major food producers such as the United States and Australia will seek to reduce exports to improve standard of living. Other countries will flex their muscle because food is a basic human necessity that, when it's in short supply, is more valuable than anything else that can be traded, and so other exports are worth nothing. And thus we will find ourselves stuck in a Malthusian catastrophe, where through famine or plague or war, our population will reduce back to the point where we can feed ourselves. It is not something that is immoral, or unethical, it is simply something that will happen.

Unless something changes. And that, my friends, will be the subject of a post hopefully in the next few days. Or I might make a series of posts about this whole issue, because I have a few things to say about it. We'll see.

Stay Circular,

Circle

Sanctity

Ciao my friends,


When you do something enough it becomes normal, and that's the case whether it's driving a car, or a plane, or a spaceship, or whether you're washing the windows of a skyscraper, jumping out planes, performing lifesaving operations. This is the main argument used by those who argue against violence in our tv programs and video games -- we don't want our children to grow up thinking it's better to shoot people in the head than in the body, because that devalues the choice of whether to shoot someone at all. That is a different matter, but it leads in to what I want to discuss in this post.

I do anatomy at university. I love it. For the past few years I have looked forwards with eagerness to third year because that is when we can do a dissection unit. With scalpel and forceps in hand, for 8 weeks of this semester we have taken apart a human being. Actually, because the class was so large we took apart 7 humans. We named our man Walter, and felt rather proud of him because he was young and had much larger muscles than the other people which made our work much easier. Was that hard for us? Not really, because since first year we've seen body parts. The only thing that was new about this was to see the whole body before any work had been done to it.

The thing is, when I tell people about what we've been doing they almost invariably can't stand to hear much beyond "I've been doing a bit of dissection on this man". That has made me look back on myself numerous times recently, trying to find where that part of me has gone. Is this normal to me now? When I look at my own arms and wish I could see what's in my arm, is that normal?

After our mid semester break we finished our human dissections, and started the part of the unit that I was most apprehensive about -- animal dissections. We have learnt a lot about human anatomy now, so it was time to correlate that with other species. We walked into the room and were hit by a wall of air, so thickly hung with formaldehyde that it made our eyes sting and stream. There was a tub, filled with monkeys and gibbons and chimps. Spreading them out across a few tables, we tentatively began. In exactly the same manner as it had happened with humans though, it wasn't long before what had been a monkey was, to our eyes, muscle and nerves and bones. My mum had told me that she didn't want to know when I did anything on monkeys, Where had that part of me gone?

And then this week has been about dogs and quokkas. I love dogs, but I didn't mind dissecting into one's body. My mum on the other hand would have baulked at the idea, had I told her. We all made jokes to try to take some people's minds off it -- a pretty standard thing in dissection rooms the world over.

Recently I had my interview for medicine, and one of the questions was: "what will be some of the difficulties you face when in medicine". I responded with some things they've probably heard a thousand times, but I also told them something that has been on my mind for a number of years -- It doesn't matter how hard it is to learn how to save patients, it is going to be harder for me to learn how to lose one. I have been through a semester of dissection, and I have learnt a lot but I feel like I have lost something as well. If I head into medicine, I am going to do everything in my power to retain that sense of my patient being a real human being -- not simply a bag of muscles and nerves and bones that are acting up.

Thank you Walter. Somewhere out there I hope you have a family that think of you always. I will try to use what I learnt from you to save at least one person's life.


Regards,
Circle