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

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

The Beginning

Everything starts tomorrow. I haven't done any pre-reading. I'm feeling pretty unprepared, academically and psychologically. Ah well; into the deep-end we dive with naught but our wits.

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

The Move

So today I finally made the move that was set in motion all those months ago when I put down that I would do medicine here at Melbourne. I write this on my familiar laptop at a desk that I don't know, in a room that I don't know, in an environment that I have no experience in (college), in a city that I barely know. The room is in that familiar state of 'unpacking', with things strewn across the floor and desk as they await my brain arbitrarily deciding where they should live for the next indeterminate time. My time here has been a whirlwind of meeting new people, trying to impress them despite them talking as if they speak essay. The tour was great but it's filled my head with names and locations that I can't quite reconnect. I have two keys, none of which look anything like keys -- one opens most doors but not all, the other opens some doors but not most, one will replace the other soon, but I can't remember which is which for any of that. On the topic of keys, my wallet will soon explode from them -- not only do I have the two keys from college, I also have a medicare card, HBF card, my red cross card, soon it will have my student card as well, and sometime soon I will get myself a concession card for the public transport here (a myki card, I think it's called). All of those cards are additional to ones that I already carried in perth (eftpos, mastercard, driver's license, etc)! Phew.

The good news I guess is that for the moment there's no undergrads here, which means I can settle myself in quite nicely. Being a graduate student I'm part of something called the Middle Common Room (MCR) here at the college (undergrads are in the junior common room, JCR; admin staff and others like the master and chaplain are in the senior common room, SCR). The orientation for MCR is in a week and a bit, so we're all going to arrive fairly soon. People apparently are arriving in a trickle though, which is great because it'll give me that chance to get to know people over time instead of in one great whack. Also, being no undergrads around there's no big parties happening and overall college isn't intimidating at all. Just a warm and welcoming place so far!

I've put the 5 medicine textbooks that I could bring with me on the bookcase, and they stare down at me even as I type. I fear for my safety when I sleep. Tomorrow is a day for shopping and handing in forms for medicine, but then I must study or I'll be left behind in the very first week of the course -- I promise you, books!

Meanwhile, quite a few tears are shed back home unfortunately =( it's so hard to leave behind your whole family, the missus, and all your friends, just to pursue your own dream. It feels selfish in some way! It's all part of the bigger picture though.

Step one into the future complete. A billion to come, all increasingly difficult. This blog will cover it all, so it's time to buckle in and tighten the suspenders!


Yours, from Melbourne,
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

HAPPY DAYS

I was offered a place! How crazy is that! At the University of Melbourne, no less -- Australia's premiere school of medicine! What an immense opportunity, one that I hope to draw the most benefit from as possible.


SO EXCITED.

PS, future me, if you're reading this and wondering why the hell I got you into the shit you're in -- it was all for you, so stop complaining!