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Sunday, 08 November 2009

  • 'Busy' is an excuse.

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    I did say to myself once upon a time that I won't be like one of 'them'.

    By 'them' I mean people who have started work.  Who are all so 'busy' every day that they become rubbish at replying mails and message, and gradually you find yourself losing touch with them.  Then you start wondering whether they remember or see you as a friend still.  Unfortunately, I've come to realise that I've become one of these people.  And I hate myself becoming so.

    I look at my phone - I have unreplied texts, or texts that took me way longer than 'a reasonable length of time' to reply. (A guy friend told me he felt disheartened and thought I lost interest in him cos I took so long to reply each text.  Which made me feel very bad, given that I had no intention of making him feel that way.)
    I look at my email - I have mails unreplied for over a month.
    I look at my facebook (yes I do still go on occasionally) - I have tens of unreplied messages in my inbox, and unreplied messages on my wall.

    Let me set this straight.  'Busy' is an excuse.  My life is probably the epitome of busy, but I know fair well that that is not to the extent of stopping me from replying to messages.  You make time.  So do I have time to reply?  Yes.

    I feel bad for my poor effort, but worse still I cannot come up with a reasonable excuse for it.  The longer I don't reply, the more reluctant I am to reply.  Because I can't bring myself to reply to a message I've failed to reply to this long.  Perhaps there are times when I'm too headstrong to maintain a friendship with fancy technology and just want to be able to have some proper human contact, ie. chat on the phone or chill out in each others' presence.

    I do think about my friends a lot, sometimes even dream about them (in the most peculiar of contexts!).  In whatever form they're sent in, each one of your messages bring a smile to my face.  So for those who still bother visiting regularly to read this, I just want to let you know -
    I am thinking of you.  And I miss your presence.  Even if I don't tell you.

Monday, 02 November 2009

Friday, 23 October 2009

Thursday, 22 October 2009

  • Asking for help

    So I was on-call over the weekend.  You see, normally I'm just an F1, but when I'm on call I get upgraded to an 'SHO (senior house officer)' because strictly speaking paeds surgery ought to be an SHO job.

    Bleeeeeep.... bleeeep... 

    I pick up the phone to find out who bleeped me.

    Me: 'Hi it's the Paeds Surgery SHO on call here, did you just bleep me?'  It was an ENT (ear nose throat) SHO on the other side of the phone.

    ENT SHO: 'Hi... I'm sorry, I think I need a bit of help.  I know it's quite a big favour to ask.  But we have this 3-year-old patient here who needs bloods taken.  Well you see, I've never taken blood for a child before so I don't really know how to do it.  I was wondering if you'd be able to help...'

    Me: 'Yeah I don't mind giving it a go.  There's no guarantee that I'm going to get it, but yeah I mean I'm happy to try.'

    ENT SHO: 'Yeah I'm really sorry to have to bother you with this.  It's just that I've called the paeds medics and they said if it's a child going for surgery it's nothing to do with them, so they told me to call you.'

    Me: 'Yeah that's alright, don't worry.'

    ENT SHO sounding very helpless indeed: 'But seriously, HOW on earth do you take blood from a 3-year-old??'

    Me: (didn't quite know how to answer that) 'Umm... uh... I don't know.  It's just kinda like adults, but... smaller?  Haha.'

    ENT SHO: 'Oh and also... he's black.' (people with dark skin are much harder to see veins on)

    Me: 'Haha yeah, I'm sure the dark skin doesn't help.  But anyway, I'll come as soon as I'm free and I'll try.'

    My registrar happened to be standing next to me during this conversation and as nice as she normally would be, she muttered to me: 'No, don't help them.  It's fine, they ought to do it themselves.  If not they can ask the paeds medics, but you don't have to help them.  Unless if you want to.'  Which I thought was a bit harsh... so I went on to help them anyway, since I was sitting around not doing very much with myself.

    So luckily I managed to get the blood that was needed and had them sent off.  I phoned the ENT SHO back to tell him I'd done it for him. 

    And I had never heard an SHO be so thankful to me: 'Oh thank you SO much.  No really.  You don't understand...'

    From his tone over the phone, I could tell he's been sh*tting himself when he was landed with this task by his reg/consultant.  Obviously he hadn't had much experience with kids either by the sounds of it.  And having already been declined help by the paeds medics, he was pretty desperate.  While my reg did have a point, I didn't see what was so wrong about helping someone else who's struggling.  Look - doctors don't come bleeping you to piss you off; frantically phoning around for help is not their idea of fun either (and certainly not for guys).  In modern medicine and in hospitals where the blame culture is ever so strong, people are so defensive and unwilling to take a step out of their own 'job description' that they forget why they choose this profession in the first place.  And maybe it's the juniors that still remember it, so I thought I ought to help before I progress to higher ranks and forget.  If you ask me, I think doctors should make an effort to be nice to one another because no one else in the hospital does.  And one day - just wait for it - it will be you on the other side of the phone.

    What I should've done though (which my registrar later told me), was to ask the ENT SHO to watch me while I'm doing the bloods so he'd know how to do it next time.  But while 'see one, do one, teach one' is the way medicine goes, I just thought that at my stage of training it would be a little big-headed.  =p  Plus I'm sure that's probably when I'll fail to get the blood.

    What I didn't tell the ENT SHO (who's likely to be an F2) on the other side of the phone though, is that fact that while I'm the 'paeds surgery SHO on call'... I'm really only an F1.

    But I think I'll spare him the embarrassment.  =p

Monday, 19 October 2009

  • Dancers and pain threshold

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    In one study, researchers measured pain threshold and tolerance levels in 52 dancers from a British ballet company and 53 university students using a standard method called the cold-pressor test.  The test is ingeniously simple.  After immersing your hand in body-temperature water for 2 minutes to establish a baseline condition, you dunk your hand in a bowl of ice water and start a clock running.  You mark the time when it hurts too much to keep your hand in the water: that is your pain tolerance.  The test is always stopped at 120 seconds, to prevent injury. 

    The results were striking.  On average, female students reported pain at 16 seconds and pulled their hands out of the ice water at 37 seconds.  Female dancers went almost 3 times as long on both counts.  Men in both groups had a higher threshold and tolerance for pain - as expected, since studies show women to be more sensitive to pain, except during the last few weeks of pregnancy - but the difference between male dancers and male nondancers was nearly as large.  What explains the difference?

    Probably it has something to do with the psychology of ballet dancers - a group of distinguished by self-discipline, physical fitness, and competitiveness, as well as by a high rate of chronic injury.  Their driven personalities and competitive culture evidently inure them to pain: that's why they are able to perform through sprains and injuries.

    - 'Complications: A surgeon's notes on an imperfect science', Atul Gawande

Iriskwok

  • Visit Iriskwok's Xanga Site
    • Name: Iris
    • Birthday: 9/10/1985
    • Gender: Female
    • Member Since: 4/14/2003

About Me

  • A 5th year medical student at the bottom rung of the NHS hierarchy - just trying to keep her head above the water. I dance (ballet, jazz, tap, modern, lyrical jazz etc), I play the piano and violin, I jump (high and long), I hike, I dive, I play netball and squash. I like green, mocha frapp, photography, islands, maps, languages, Ludwig II King of Bavaria, generally being outdoors, omelettes, useless did-you-know facts and my bed.

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