taste of clinical year

it took just 3 hours for me to stumble over my block of will power.

i realised i cant study continuously for 1 whole day.

hmmm... shouldnt i have known that by now? like by at least 5 years ago??

what a naive idealist. -_-

a little drop of ink on how i fared the 1st week of clinical year.

thr is certainly no doubt, No doubt at all that clinical year is 100x more interesting than preclinical years. real life situations at last!

however, u get swamped with the ugliness of reality. interesting, but a little tough.

problems i am currently facing:

1. i have not finished reading the basics of surgery related diseases, so am perpetually blur when a patient tells me she has err.. lets say an enlarged thyroid. questions that pop up in my head were: main symptoms of thyroid disease, differential diagnosis for that chief complaint, questions to ask to exclude the differentials and come up w a provisional. then, physical examination to confirm the provisional. then what investigations to be done to further confirm and what management should be done.

n then b4 i finish reading up on how to answer all the questions above, the next day i clerk another patient, and its a totally different scope of disease, say.. hernia. n i go back n put hernia on my list of 'things to be read' and still stuck reading on thyroid bcz i was too tired the last night n fell asleep instead of studying.

so the aim now is to faster finish studying all those stuffs! easier said than done. argh. takes me hours n hours to finish 1 topic. n thr're at least 15 topics to cover.

2. if the supervisor says we should focus on a certain topic this week, so its another different topic to cover altogether.

3. n if i'm scheduled to enter clinic for say.. hepatobiliary that week, then its different again. (diff type of clinics everyday)

i tink the baseline for now is to finish studying the basics as soon as possible.

n finding out how to stay awake at nights to study instead of perpetually collapsing/fainting on my book at my study table. hehz.

ok gotta hit the books!

*on top of everything is finding out how to be nice to patients so that they let u interview them even tho u might be like the 5th person who has interviewed him for that day. n for them to let u examine them even tho u're like the 10th person to ask.

poor patients. imagine staying in the wards for 2 weeks.

1 day = minimum 5 interviews/examination by medical students.

multiply this with 14 days.

the patient would have repeated his history of illness and was examined at least 70 times by the time he gets discharged from the hospital. hehe. got 2 really thank them. some patients are reli nice. some pretend to be asleep when they see u walking twds them from far. i dun blame them. heh.