dry spell

in terms of blogging, in terms of creativity, in terms of mapling, in terms of socializing... heck, in terms of life in general i say.. i've hit a dry spell! exam stress is beginning to seep through the glass ceiling floating over my head. obviously, it wasn't as glassy as i thought it to be if it's permeable. that in itself is not a bad thing, no? nobody wants to walk around with something floating over their heads... some people can barely tolerate having hair up there!

i do sincerely apologize for the lack of blog strolls i've failed to go on lately... the pace i'm feeling is much too fast to allow strolls anymore. it'll wind down once the exams are over. speaking of exams... we had one today. unplanned, outta the blue. in-your-face. nggaarrgh!

it's been one of those days today. woke up late, promptly dismissed my plans of seeing a patient before class (so that i could present that patient to the tutor at the aforementioned class) and ran so late i left without picking up A. i was up to the nearest traffic light when i realized that i was missing my passenger and had to call her up and apologize. d'oh! cleared that up, found parking at the furthest possible spot in the furthest possible lot and headed straight up to gum gallery for the session. ran into that certain registrar that i have a soft spot for *grins* but ARGHHhh it's so wrong. *bangs head against the wall* it's so Grey's Anatomy-ish. i would like to be friends with the guy... i think there's potential. it's not like we can't carry a conversation or have nothing in common. we stood around for more than an hour just chatting after one of the clinics... bleah. but but everytime i see him, he's around with consultants or in some conversation with someone else higher up the ladder of hierarchy. the last thing i need is to have rumors floating around, especially after that one about the phantom doctor boyfriend of mine... or even just the teasing. i already get that from L about him. she's dying to pass him my number as it is... actually, she's been dying to set me up with any asian doctor that says hi to her for the past year. very sweet of her, but geez woman, i'm not that desperate! eeeesh!

anyway, i'm digressing. all 3 of us showed up for class and the tutor sprung an assessment on us. we had to do our practice long case.. the one that didn't count where we could redo as many times as we wanted until we passed but was graded on with a criteria marking sheet and had pass to pass the course. that one. good news is that i passed.. we all did. not bad for something so impromptu, i must say! hehe =) bad news is that i now have a confidence boost meaning that i feel justified enough with passing to take it easy with the studying. this would also explain why i'm here typing up this latest blog entry rather than bury my head in foul-smelling thick volumes of wonderful obs/gyn books with lovely gory pictures of bloody cervixes and such.

two more weeks, i tell myself... just two more weeks. =)

all hallows eve cometh

and the tradition lives on *grins* hehe.. for the uninitiated, i've established a tradition ever since i came here to carve pumpkins every halloween and give 'em out to friends to adopt =) half a decade and counting! blame my inner child for this -.-

'tis always a challenge over here in oz.. no pumpkin patches to scour for the perfect pumpkin over here! i even had to make do with apples one particular year due to the lack of pumpkins! ...and then there was mr. eggplant another year. this year, we've got mr. zucchini screaming his head off... keep an eye out for him. he's pretty traumatized by the rest of the butternuts towering over him, especially mr skelly! he's my fav... the tallest one of them all. the one that looks sagely, if you could call a pumpkin that...

here's this year's group of pumpkins with a hawaiian thrown in and the honorary other veggie...


*flicks lights off*



Happy Halloween!

a fortnight and a day

'tis been that long since i've had the urge to write.. even now, i don't have much of any sorta inspiration to wax lyrical here but i thought it'd be nice to pay this old haunt of mine a visit. you might blame the geekette in me seeking refuge in a virtual world...



my NGRARGGH!!!! weeks have come and gone... much calmer for some reason. bought myself a mini herb garden thingamajig and i'm hoping i don't kill it with my "green thumbs" before harvesting 'em yummy leaves. now that i've also done my presentation on the menstrual cycle and pms, i can safely say that none of my NGRARGGHness has anything to do with hormonal changes hee =) lol, shuey... constipation isn't one of the reasons either!

speaking of constipation.. eesh. childbirth. birthing stool. natural births. EEEeeesh. as much as a natural process it may be, it's a really uncomfy thought to push poo out along with your baby. especially when one doesn't realize one's got poo dangling from one's behind. squatting there in front of the birthing stool, waiting for the baby's head to push through.. all i could do was keep myself from grabbing some tissue and help the lady urm... wipe. twasn't the greatest sight in the world and i guess it helped that being on call at the delivery suite all week meant erratic meal times.. or none at all.


now that it's all over and the fat lady's warming up her voice, 'tis my cue to get my act together too. be warned about upcoming antisocial depressive and mebbe a bit more NGRARGGH!!!!ish behavior... i'm sure you're all used to the erratic quirkiness already so i won't bother warning you about that bit. exams are in less than a month, let's hope things go well for everyone's sake hee. amy throwing hissy fits isn't the best side to see...

my new favorite word

NGRARGGH!!!!

it's the perfect word for everything that's been happening these past few weeks. thanks ceekay, for enlightening me =P

stabbing at a parody

this would make a lot more sense if you sang it to the tune of Colors of the Wind from Disney's Pocahontas... now guess who this is directed to? *grins*

You think you own whatever room you room in
The dorms are just another place to stay
But I've been here for more years than you have been
And I know every nook and cranny here

You think the only people who still live here
Are your girlfriend, her sister and her boy
But if you walk the footsteps of your neighbor
You'll learn things you never knew you never knew.

Have you ever heard a banshee wail til half past one
Or asked your neighbor why she always calls?
Can you learn to think of other people's feelings?
Can you place yourself in other people's shoes?
Can you place yourself in other people's shoes?

Come have a listen through my concrete room walls
Come have a feel of shaking concrete ground
Come have a taste of being rudely woken
With loud thuds, and some screaming and a yell.

The RAs and the Manager can't help me
All they do is to tell me to be nice
They ask me to talk to you like an adult
But alas, I think I need to dumb it down

How dense can a full grown man be?
Can you understand English or plain NO?

Though it seems like you're just selfish and you plain don't care
For whether you are being quite the jerk
We need to pray for your poor girlfriend so she'll wake up
We need to steer her far from bastards like yourself
We need to steer us all from bastards like yourself

roadblocks and babies

it must've been the lack of food or the odd hour, but seeing a stuck bus at the hospital entrance brought out the best guffaws in both of us. L and I were sick of this "not doing work" business so we forced ourselves to go back to the hospital at 6pm last night and see a patient or two.. or just one. we also tried this thing called studying but i managed to only devour a page and half. all we wanted to do was go home and sleep... until we encounted the stuck bus. (substitute bus with pig, a big blue one and that's the gist of the scenario). on hindsight, it wasn't hilarious at all. -.-

being the grouch that i recently am, i sniggered at the traffic piling up in the other direction because the bus was effectively a roadblock in its awkward angle, sprawled across the two lanes of the road and half of the intersection. "they got rid of the roundabout to ease traffic and look what's happened now? LOL" i devilishly laughed. i know. i think i become mean when i get grouchy and i'm sure i wouldn't be laughing at all if i was part of that traffic piling up. i wasn't though, was i? *grins*

besides the bus-block, i've been encountering mental blocks and writers' blocks and even baby corduroy blocks (for C's new little baby boy)! Ooo, writers' block vanished, whee ~

guess what, guess what??
my lady had her baby last friday! a wee little baby boy, he was. a wee little stubborn baby boy, mind you, but still very cute and chubby. *gurgles* he decided to come out without turning from his posterior position, leaving him with a squashed nose as a reminder of his stubborness. both his parents found it hilarious and kept playing with the lopsided nose lol. baby D couldn't care less and slept away his first daylight hours of his life, only deciding to wake up once the sun went down from being famished. oh, he'd also sneak a peek at you with one sleepy eye opened whenever he farted or pooped (which was quite often actually) and maaaaaan was he a big pooper. at least we know he's got no bowel obstruction!

so there we go... i've witnessed both caesarean sections and a natural birth without an epidural. i don't see how one is better than the other. i wish storks really brought your babies to your doorstep, preferably in a wicker baby basket but a cloth bundle will do just fine too!

it's just not my thing

you know how everyone has their thing, the one that makes them cringe and recoil in utter shock, horror or disgust? some med students have a thing with seeing blood... others have a thing with needles and faint on sight of one. now, i pride myself in not being squeamish about a lot of things although i can't stand girly girls.. the ones with squeaky high pitched sugar-coated voices who giggle demurely. the type most guys my age seem to fancy actually. anyway... i guess you could say that's one of my pet peeves. i've just discovered another one tonight that usurps the girly girl peeve by a million leaps and bounds.

there is no way in hell i'm going be an obstetrician or a gynecologist. people tell you to never say never, but trust me when i tell you that i mean never. i went for my pelvic examination session today. i came home after 3+ hours of it feeling very sick in the pit of my stomach. i have no problem with the actual procedure, but it's very confronting when you don't know what the hell you're feeling for and the person who's been explaining things to you grabs ur hand as she guides your fingers into her vagina. why couldn't this have been explained with a dummy torso before we had to do the exam on real people?!

i would've preferred to know exactly what i was doing, what position to place my fingers and where to place them.. and how to and all the stuff they were teaching us today as we basically shoved the speculum and later, our fingers, into these ladies and wiggled around telling them "i can't find it" or "i can't see anything"

t.r.a.u.m.a.t.i.z.e.d. and scarred for life. the only thing i got out of that session was a huge amount of respect for those women who volunteered to teach us and let us poke and prod them. respect, a LOT of respect. that aside, there's no way am i gonna be a gp unless someone else in the practice is avaliable to do pelvic exams. no way am i gonna get pap smears done, even if im acting like a stubborn cow. hey, i'm a taurus... welcome to my stubborn bullish world.

what the hell is wrong

it's like that episode of 4400 where one of the returnees ups everyone's testosterone levels in the NTAC compound. i've been feeling decidedly grouchy for the past week and it's definitely not pms. it's prolly the stress. i'm excited and there's so many interesting things to learn, yet i know that the weeks are slipping by all too fast and there's nothing i can do to stop it. thus, i stress. in my viscious cycle of stressing, i turn to non-activity... and then i get even more stressed as i realize that even more time has slipped by. grr

what set it off today wasn't the 90min pathology lecture on congenital deformities. think of the alien fetuses on sci-fi shows. i didn't really need 73 powerpoint slides of that. pink, shiny gooey and grossly abnormal "creatures" as the lecturer put it. i was ready to puke.. i was feeling so frustrated and sick. what added to it was the media i saw that was staked outside the hospital entrance pissed me off. LEAVE THE FRIGGING BALI VICTIMS ALONE for goodness sakes. my gawd.. they're just being transferred here to newcastle to be closer to their families. yes, i know you need to go to where the news is but what's the big deal about the injured people being transferred to another hospital?! if they were staked out at the wards to interview them, then mebbe it wouldn't seem so much like vultures descending on lambs... but to stake out the frickin' main entrance of the hospital just so they can get a shot of the people arriving... what good does that do?! what kind of news is that?! one line in the newspaper can tell you that: Victims of the Bali bombings have been transferred to the John Hunter Hospital today from [insert wherever they were transferred from].

i dunno.. i wish i had more time. i wish i had more time for me. i think i've turned cynical and jaded. what's so interesting about staying back to watch the doctors triage the injured ppl? it's all textbook for goodness sakes. "oh, but it'd be cool to see what they do with the burns victims" my friend clarifies as she justifies her youthful enthusiasm. "well, you determine what the burn degree is and treat accordingly. give them fluids if they need it, make sure they're not in shock and heal up their burn sites with grafts or bandages. why do you need to stand around watching the docs work... it's not like you've never been in the emergency dept before and there's way more uncertainty there, if anything." i grumble in my head. i think i shot her one of my death stares by accident out of sheer frustration at that eager fresh attitude where every. fricking. thing. is interesting.. even watching the nurse change someone's bedpan.

what the hell is wrong with everyone?! what the hell is wrong with me?!
*fumes* i think imma implode if this keeps up =(

a flurry of non-activity

after 2 weeks of reproductive medicine, the only thing i would be interested in seeing more of would prolly be a certain goofy registrar *winks* really though, it was a sort of initiation by fire to be thrown into the clinics and operating theaters from day 1. to see women hop onto the examination table and basically spread their legs. it sounds awful when you put it that way i suppose, but it is as awful as it sounds in reality ~ for the student that is.

i mean, sure... you get to see pap smears being done and the occassional examination when people get rashes and other things but that's not the same as having to see all sorts of natural variances in well.. butt bits patient after patient for hours on end. it kinda goes against every private line and boundary i've drawn for myself over the years with some influence from society.

it's not the week in the operating theaters, nor is it delivery week (where you're basically at the delivery suite from like 7am til however long you can last through the day for a whole week) that takes the cake in this rotation. apparently, i should be looking foward to the pelvic examination session i'll be expected to attend in a few weeks' time. no, im not getting anything poked or prodded.. that's what i'll be doing to some unfortunate lady who volunteered for the session.

i know that there's 2 ways to look at this and i chose to be incredulous rather than commend them for aiding our learning. there's a bunch of ladies, as the department calls them (that makes it all the more... wrong! ladies are y'know.. prim and proper!) that routinely volunteer their pelvis and its contents every rotation so that all four groups of 15-odd students can learn to do a pelvic examination in little groups every week through the year. a noble cause indeed...

why?!?! oh dear gawd, why on earth...!?! i scream... why would anyone want to sit there from 5 - 7pm once a week with no undies on so that random medical students can poke their finger(s) up one's vagina and "have a feel" of one's cervix?! i guess that's where professionalism on both our parts kick in, but it sure doesn't help to have the instructor talk to you about the examination and explain the principles and techniques for an hour... and then basically "get her gear off" as Chards put it in his very aussie twang so you can "have a feel" of her bits. she apparently instructs you as you're doing it.. "a little to the right... nono, push it in more. yes that feels good" and comments on other ladies' while they're having their pelvic exams done. "do see that? it's a frowny cervix" she enlightens the traumatized students as she acts as the tour guide to her 17-yr old daughter's cervix (now what do you see wrong about the last statement...). yes, this obviously became a family affair somewhere along the way if she's getting her teenage daughter to be one of the ladies having to be examined. i wonder how good the pay is....

there are plenty more stories that are much much worse, stemming from the 2 groups of us that have had the session but i'll spare you the cringing and the mental trauma. let's just say that to have this conversation over a farewell dinner last nite with a couple bottles of wine was not the best conversation... or was it? hmmm.. anyway, it's just so so so wrong.. o.0

can't you detect the sarcasm when i tell you i can't wait for my session? joy oh joy!