Microsoft OneNote

So, I figure it's a good time for an update! Lots has been going on and it's all very exciting.

Yesterday was my first day of actual proper medicine, as in learning things. It was an extremely full on day as well, starting at 9am and ending at 6pm. That was an ordeal, but thankfully we had an hour break in the middle of it all. So during the day we had 5 lectures and 1 case supported learning (CSL) tutorial. The lectures were pretty interesting, but were mostly introductory in nature. For example, we had general introductions to pathology, physiology and histology. It was a great chance for me to trial a new note taking system -- using Microsoft OneNote.

To put it briefly, it promises to change everything. No more do I look at a densely packed lecture screen and despair, because now I can just bang out everything on the keyboard. You can either organise all your subjects with separate notebooks, or, as I do, have a single notebook for the course and have tabs for each subject. Each tab in each notebook can then have pages...and its on each page that I write the lecture content. I don't use any of the fancy templates to structure a page -- they have too much frill for me. I even organised a few sub-pages in one of my pages -- blood, bone and cartilage are sub-pages to the page 'connective tissue'.

So already there is a vast amount of granular organisation available, but it gets better with a couple of tricks. Firstly, it has an almost instantaneous search function, so if I want to find out where I have previously been taught about something I can just quickly type the string into the search and have listed the page it's in, and when you then press enter on one it takes you straight to the instance it's mentioned. Secondly, having found an interconnection between two separate pages...you can then actually produce a link that will take you straight there to be placed in your other, current, note. So in the example I've just searched for something and it's come up in this other page before, clicking on that result takes me straight to where I've mentioned it, and right clicking on that mention and pressing 'copy link to paragraph' will give me a text link to place in my current page that will take me straight to the previous mention of the thing. It boggles my mind, and is probably going to be the biggest thing that keeps me now doing electronic notes. Thirdly though, I keep a wonderful little program open called 'snipping tool'. If you're unfamiliar with it, get familiar with it quick -- it basically lets you copy exactly what you want from the screen to your clipboard to be pasted anywhere. So for example, I'll have my lecture notes open as a PDF while I'm at the lecture, and if the lecturer has used a particularly good picture or table to illustrate an example then I can quickly pop into the snipping tool, crop around the picture or table, and paste it straight into my notes. WOW.

Aside from lectures -- which are a breeze now with my new system -- we've had a few tutorials as well. The CSL this week is about a patient with headache, photophobia, general malaise (what a favourite term), lethargy, cerebral disturbance and a bad temperature. It only took him 3 hours to get much worse, so his friends took him to hospital. We decided it was probably an infection, and more specifically probably a meningitis. We discussed things like what sort of history we would take, what tests we would order, etc. For the record, we'd start him on prophylactic antibiotics (types that cross the blood brain barrier, too) order a lumbar puncture and test the CSF for a number of things -- protein and glucose levels (will rise and fall respectively in the case of bacterial meningitis), cell count (PMN's will be high in bacterial infection, whereas lymphocytes will be high in viral infection), and you can do tests to detect bacteria in the CSF as well. It was a much better CSL session than last week's ones, because we'd all prepared a bit for this topic so we all had something to contribute.

We also learnt a bit about how to show patients that we're listening to them in our principles of clinical practice (PCP) tutorial. Things like when to use open questions, when to use closed questions, non-verbal techniques to use, etc. It was fun! This morning I had a lab where we tested the patient's CSF for the presence of bacteria, except the test was inconclusive...which sounds lame but it's still a result, and could point to the bacteria being Neisseria group B because apparently they don't get picked up by the test we did very often.

It seriously feels like a whole week has gone by already. This year is going to be crazy...crazy, but fantastic.

Regards,

Circle

Settling in?

So I've been here more than a week now, and not a single page of medical textbook has been read. Thought I'd get that sad admission out of the way right at the beginning of this post!

So most of last week was me going to and from the city getting clothes and supplies. I bought two suits -- the first is a business suit for the first week of semester (we're visiting a hospital, and they told us to wear stuff we'd wear to an interview), and the second is a tuxedo for the black tie event at college that's happening on the 29th of January. Suffice to say the bank account is losing weight! I also caved to popular culture and bought two pairs of vans (a type of hipster footwear). They're surprisingly comfortable, and I think I can justify them as long as I don't go full hipster and get funky coloured ones (not that I'll be getting many more at all -- they're damn expensive)(my current ones are black and white, and just white).

From friday onwards it has all been 'orientation weekend' here at college. It's all about going from just knowing people's names and what they study, to actually knowing the person I guess. I have to admire the social abilities of people -- no matter who they're speaking to and no matter how conversant the other person is, they can just whip something up to talk about out of nowhere, and they perform this trick countless times and for hours on end. I'm not incapable socially, but I can't keep it up this long. Anyway. I've come to just saying that I'm an MD student, because it sounds somehow less pretentious. Some people luckily don't know what an MD is as well, and sometimes they don't ask which avoids the whole issue. Like other people I've spoken to, I'm sure that at some point I'll just start saying I study architecture or politics or something.

So, what else is there to say? I did my first ever load of washing (can you believe it). It was a front loader machine as well, so all my prior training on top loaders came to naught. I put a white sock in with the blacks and it came out still white, so the colour didn't run on the warm wash. This is very good news because it means that I can put everything into the one load and not feel like I'm overly risking the whites, while at the same time saving $2 by not having separate washes for the colours. #washingmachinetactics I'm also going to need to purchase some pegs because I had so much to wash that I basically took up all the free pegs that were on the lines.

Hmm...

I bought a stethoscope, and worked out how it worked. You're meant to be able to put it on different places on your chest and hear different aspects of the heart as it beats, and to my highly trained ear...everything sounds exactly the same all over the chest. So there you go.

I'll leave it there, it was my bed time 2 hours ago.

Night!

Circle