You know you are a Medical Student when…

I found thins list in the FB page of one of my friends..It may seem  funny to some..But  as a medico I think these are mostly correct:))  I’ve edited a few points which I thought were not so applicable and added some of my own..

1. You wake up at 6am on a weekend although you don't have   work.

2. You feel there is something wrong if you don't have an exam coming up.

3. Can’t relax

4. Can wiz through a 500 page book in a day

5. Are expected to know everything.

6. You know the size of a RBC.

7. You are always tired.

8. Watch scrubs and laugh at yourself.

9. When you write more than a thousand words a day.

10. When you look at a person on the beach and the first thing you notice is their appendectomy scar.

11. If you thought you have a disease you are studying about.

12. Right before exams, you have a hard time remembering why you want to be a doctor

13. You contemplate anything between dropping out and suicide after you finish each exam, even before knowing the results.

14. Your eyesight has worsened by 10 pts or more in the last year

15. You find yourself always carrying a pen even if you're on a night out.

16. You don’t understand why summer vacation is only one month, although summer itself is three months. 

17. If people call you doctor.

18. If you can't remember what you ate they day before! but still manage to remember the blood results of every single patient you have.

19. Don't understand what people mean when they talk about the "hospital smell".

20. You count the days till your next more-than-two-days-weekend-break, which is at least 4 months away.

21. You are always thinking about the next job.

22. Are expected to be in two places at the same time.

23. Use the phrase "I am a doctor" to get away with something

24. You are more familiar with last names such as Netter, Moore, Grant, Guyton, Robbins, etc than the last names of your classmates

25.  Have no sense of time, place, or matter!

Back to Blogsville..!

I’m back at last!! Just finished my phase 1 life sucking examinations. I did the exams very badly..Anyway, I hope to scrape at least a  ‘pass’ in every module.

Thanks to everyone who visited my blog even in my absence..even though I wasn't  visiting your blogs and Thanks a lot for allll your comments :) . Will reply to all of them soon. I’ll be catching up with all your posts from now on..

Have a nice Week end everyone! :)

The time when I least like myself..

My semi exams are looming so close. Exams will start on 5th. They put up the exam schedule this Friday. I feel lost. I feel like as if I'm in the middle of nowhere. I haven't finished studying. I don't think I can finish revising all before the exams. On top of this, we have lectures until 4th..Not a single damn day of study leave. This time we are having all the Neuro modules and..ohhh..I don't know what I'm going to do.

This is the thing about med school I think.. you can never know everything. Maybe It's planned to prevent that. You can only hope you know enough of the right things and have the balls to go in and take the test anyway..Or maybe its just me feeling this way!

I've been bit confident about some modules ..But now when I tried to go through them quickly..I feel like I don't remember anything...My self esteem is very low now..Its going down with every time I try to remember something and I couldn't ...and It'll be lowest just before the exam..and that's the time I least like myself - those 24 hours preceding the exams!

I wont be around here much till my exams are over. So everyone please excuse me for not being regular with posts or comments on your blogs...I'll catch up with ya all soon after the exams.

A month at hospital..

This post was long overdue. I drafted this post days ago but haven't published it . Just now had the time to read, edit and publish it.

Well..I can hardly believe that a month has already elapsed since I started my basic clinical training at Teaching hospital, Batticaloa. Phew..it had been a really busy month. The best thing about last month is that we didn't have any lectures apart from the hospital appointments. The worst thing is that only our batch had any work to do , while others enjoyed their holidays.

Okay, let me first fill you up with what I had been up to over the last month...

I'm starting my 2nd year MBBS , next week. Before that I had to complete initial clinical training at our teaching hospital. Whole point of the hospital programme was to give us some exposure of the hospital environment, and make us realise the team work involved in managing a patient. We were supposed to learn basic clinical skills and patient -physician communication skills as well.We had to work under 4 consultant physicians in 4 specialities - Medicine, Surgery, Gyn&Obs and Pediatrics.

The teaching hospital I had in my mind and the one I saw were quite different. It doesn't mean that I had never been there before. Of course I had been there. All those times I just kept to the lecture theatre and clinics and all. Never spent much time in the wards. Now that I had spent many weeks throughout the hospital, I realised how much it has changed. Something which caught my attention instantly was the cleanliness and odor-free environment of the hospital.. and trust me, it's something very uncommon for the Srilankan government hospitals to be clean! I soon found out the reason behind this unfamiliar cleanliness. There were numerous sanitary workers with red-black uniform , working all over the hospital. They belonged to some private company called "Will-shine"[ I liked that name ;)]. Thanks to them, my hospital days were odorless and headache free :)

More than anything else, it made me realise the importance of team work in patient management. Even though those 'will shine' people don't have any medical knowledge they are an ineluctable part of the health care system. Every where i went and everything I saw in the hospital emphasized teamwork. Doctors cant work alone. They need nurses, ward attendants, labourers, laboratory technicians and even sanitary workers.

"Less 'me' - More 'We' ; this is what team work is all about" One of the surgeons told me this. Now I know how very true it is.. Now I know what it takes to be a good physician..