A Dark Night

It was so dark that he couldn't see a thing, but he could hear the rain battering the edge of the cliff like hammers made from water. His hair was slick on his head, but with his head bent it didn't touch his face. Over the thunder and the rain there was just one sound - the hollow beat of the meat pump inside him. Beating away because that was its physiological imperitive, as dependable as the vagaries of life. It was unwavering in its dedication - beating through all the smiles, through the tears, through the summer days past and the nights laid awake. He looked around and saw nothing but black, the wind coming up from the cliff below and buffeting him, urging him to get further from the edge. It wasn't the first time he'd been here, but tonight was the time when the world, both inside him and out, was the darkest. The ship would come in soon, and he'd see its light illuminate a thin path through the water below. And he'd hear its horn, at this distance a physical force on his ears. If he stayed. And yet if he stayed, he would still feel nothing. As he came out of his crouch, and turned his back on the world, he remembered that there wasn't anyone out there waiting for him to come back, for his ship to come to dock. There wasn't a single person who would know that he had been there, or indeed that he'd been anywhere. Should he look to the future, dear reader? You would probably tell him that this is just the present, that the future holds as much for him as he wants it to. But he has walked this path before. His feet are tired, and there hasn't been a second set of footprints next to his for many years now. How long do you walk the path that ended long before, until you give up, and throw your hands in the air and admit to the world around you that you aren't its equal, and that despite your best play, it has won this time. Dear reader, his path has simply ended. There are no backward steps in this game, there are no take two moves back. When your feet find the end of the path, and all the world around is dark, all there is to do is take a moment to remember, truly remember all the things that you saw along the way, and then you must walk on. Into...anything. Something. Nothing.

Plodding along the increasingly tortuous road

Hey everyone

So I haven't posted much recently, and that's mainly been because of both things at home and things here (ie, the course). The title of this post probably seems a bit negative, but it absolutely captures the present completely. I'm currently having a bit of burn out with regards to lecture and home study style learning, and literally can't wait until we move into the hospitals next year. So in that respect, it's just one foot in front of the other until then (hence the 'plodding'). And the road continues to get more and more tortuous as we continue -- it might be smooth-ish right now, but as we get up to those dreaded end of year exams the shit is going to hit the fan in a major way. The end of year exams are on not only this semester, but the first semester as well. By then it's likely I'll have about 200000 words of notes in my onenote document. How are we meant to study all of that and retain any appreciable amount...it's just going to be very interesting. So at the moment, it's one foot in front of the other as the world around us and the path under our feet gets more and more treacherous.

Anyway! let's revive this post before it just becomes a general rant.

Probably a week ago now my laptop out of nowhere died. It would boot, but it would go to something called the 'aptio setup utility' or something like that, and wouldn't continue on to windows no matter what I did. I took all sorts of advice but to no avail, so the next day I went out with a friend and bought a new laptop. That may seem rash, but I simply don't have the time to spare to get the other one fixed. I have like 4 lectures a day on average! There's no way I want to catch up on that many lectures if the laptop would take like a month to come back. So I bought a laptop. And...an ipad mini. Why did I buy that?? It was a bit of an impulse purchase, but I've been thinking of getting a tablet for a while and there was just a better app store with the ipad. At the end of the day I want my phone to have excellent pre-installed applications because they're what I'm going to be using most of the time (eg, the keyboard), but on a tablet that's not as important. I'm going to be spending probably 95% of my tablet time in third party applications, and the argument is there that apple has better third party applications for some reason.

The ipad turned out to be one of my best impulse purchases ever! It's nice to have a big screen to enjoy everything on, but the main use for me has been facetime. Now, I know that's really lame. I scoffed at the facetime ads when they came out, and said to myself 'why didn't these people just use video calling'. But there's just something about it that makes it super easy to use...anyway, so my use of facetime has basically been exactly as apple portrayed in the ads -- facetiming my girlfriend (long distance relationships suck), and facetiming my family. I shudder to think that I've been so...predictable to an international corporation. But facetime is indeed cool, and I've greatly enjoyed using it.

The laptop I bought is a sony vaio pro 13, which it turns out is actually a very new laptop indeed. It's a pleasure to use, and is perfect (aside from the absence of an ethernet port. But, ethernet really needs to update the standard because the heads of the cables are now much too large for this day and age of measuring thickness of laptops in mm's).

Well this didn't end up being much of an interesting post, so I'm sorry about that. Just an update, I guess.

Catchas!

Circle

Update-yness!

Hello!

Long time no speaketh! I've been extremely busy just recently, not that that really surprised me. Ahh we have done so much, and in such a short period of time.

The lectures continue to come thick and fast. My OneNote system is working fantastically for me, allowing me to organise all of my notes and include helpful diagrams as well. OneNote doesn't do much tracking of the notes you write but you can export it as a PDF, then import that PDF into Word...anyway, so right now I have about 65000 words of notes, over more than 300 pages! We look at each other and wonder how on Earth we're going to study all of that for the final end of year exams, where everything that we've learnt in the year will be assessed. It's going to be intense I'm sure.

Speaking of assessment, I had one of those recently! It was our first one. Below is the very nice bell curve of results:

Guess where I was! Right smack bang on top of that curve. I got basically the average mark, which is far, far from where I want to be unfortunately. So it's time to knuckle down and get my groove on! The test was on only lecture content that we did between the start of the year and the day of that test, but we have a test coming up in I think about 4 weeks that will assess the lectures we've had since, PLUS the content of the labs from the whole year thus far! I have a few friends that are second year med students here, and they say that everyone sort of does ok in the first test, and then gets demolished in the second test. I intend to not be one of those people that gets demolished :P Things will be better for the next test!

Some exciting news! The QS World University Rankings just released their 2012/13 lists, and Medicine at the University of Melbourne is number 9 in the world! We're basically only behind big names like John Hopkins, Oxford, Harvard etc! That blew my mind, and I think I have told everyone I can about it. I am so proud to be here, and hope my cohort can be the one to take us higher!

We have been doing some pretty interesting things here recently. In our Principles of Clinical Practice subjects we sometimes get patients to come in so that we can practice interviewing them, in a fishbowl format so that the other people in the class sit there and watch you, so that you can get feedback on your interviewing afterwards. I did mine last week, and I stressed about it a lot beforehand. When he introduced himself he said he had shortness of breath, and that's fine, but then he said he also had a smoker's cough...well, basically I had to interview him not just about his shortness of breath, but his cough too, AND his smoking habits haha. It actually went extremely well though! The patient, when the interview was finished, basically as soon as our tutor asked him to give feedback he pretty much exploded with praise, he was so animated and it seemed like he was extremely impressed! He said that he felt extremely comfortable with my interview style, that there was a great flow and he felt like I had really given him a lot of sympathy and listened to what he had to say. I was stoked with that!! Then other people in the group were able to give me feedback, and it was all much the same. I was pretty happy with that!

I think the last time I posted I was still doing cardiovascular medicine? Well, we're actually up to gastrointestinal medicine now, having completed respiratory already. Basically, everything we do seems to revolve around diarrhoea. We have seen some not so pretty pictures, let me tell you that...the worst have been pictures of parasitic worms. My god. And someone had the idea of eating parasites so that they would eat all the extra food that we eat that we don't need, to stave off obesity...no thanks.

College is going great too. I probably aren't leaving my room as much as I should though, because it's so easy to stay in my room! The meals here seem to have become stuck in a rut of not being all that great...having said that, there was a curry tonight that was pretty good! They have a fondness for soggy brown rice, which is disgusting.

That's probably a big enough post now, I'll post again soon when I think of something interesting.

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

It's Snowing...

...snowing assignments.

In the free time that I've had in the past few weeks I've watched a program that I've taped called 'Living With the Amish', and it has been truly eye opening. There is a teenager on the progrom from England that I have felt I can partially relate to -- he is heavily educated at Eton and has enormous pressure on him to succeed, which is more my scenario than the others, who seem to have been chosen simply because they don't represent the best of English youth -- so it has been great to see them from his eyes as well.

Basically, the Amish for the most part live as though technology doesn't exist. They hand make all of their clothes, they work the farm by hand (not a hard and fast rule, but some of them do), and they drive around in horses and carts. They do use dollars, but I presume they don't need to apply complex economics to anything. And while on the face of it you might reel in horror at the thought of living without say, electricity, these people are the happiest group of people that I have ever seen. It may be that I have a hidden side where I actually love getting in the dirt and working a hard day, but it has made me think on numerous occasions that living with the Amish actually wouldn't be so bad.

It has been interesting to watch something like Living With the Amish at a time when my university workload has been dialled up to maximum. I yearn for that simple life, where you can take things on face value and the amount of money you bring home depends on how hard you work, not on the relative demand for your work (these things are intrinsically linked, but in reality they are far apart sometimes). I yearn for the simple life, but I'm propelling myself into certainly not an easy profession to either get into or stay in. In the name of passion? Passion may yet prove to be the most dangerous fuel.