Defying Gravity

**sefkhet** · 05-05-2008, 10:08 PM

I'll be having a meltdown this time in four weeks.

Continued here.

**sefkhet** · 23-05-2008, 03:31 AM

I gather that Rangers won the Scottish Premiership tonight. It probably says a lot about how out of touch I’ve been that I didn’t even know it was the end of the season until I came out of the subway and had to pass fifty drunk football supporters, three green and white flags, a crew from STV, and six police officers on horseback just to get across George Square and into my flat.

So, eleven days and counting.

I’ve reached that point where I just want it to be here.

Continued here.

**sefkhet** · 03-06-2008, 01:19 AM

ARRRRRRRGH.

So. Tomorrow. I’m sitting here, at home because I had to get out of the SL before my brain really did explode, doing one final recap. It’s better than sitting around and getting twitchy, even though I have absolutely no idea how much I’m taking in at this point.

Continued here.

**sefkhet** · 28-06-2008, 06:38 PM

I passed!

It’s been a month since the exams and nearly two weeks since the results came out, but I’ve been spending the time in the middle getting myself a job and doing that thing that non-medics refer to as ‘having a life’, the latest part of which involved standing in a field in proper Scottish rain with Radiohead for five hours last night. Most of my time is being taken up with working five days a week as an NHS administrator in Renfrewshire, which probably doesn’t sound like much of a summer holiday. On some levels it’s probably not. But compared to my last job (not to mention the six weeks where I saw practically nothing but the inside of the medical school building) the whole concept of finishing work at 5pm and having weekends off is quite a novelty.

Continued here.

**sefkhet** · 12-09-2008, 04:37 PM

It feels like just the other day that I was trying not to think too hard about the many, many boxes that would soon be filled with my crap, or about the fact that I was the one who would need to do the filling.

That’s partly because it was just the other day, but moving from Merchant City to Kelvingrove was a little less daunting than moving from Newcastle to Glasgow. For one thing, at no point last weekend did my alarm go off at four in the morning. It’s been twelve months since I tried to separate my belongings from those of my parents’ after over two decades of more-or-less communal living, since I crept out of the house in the middle of the night to board the 5am bus , since I was waiting for my connection in Edinburgh Waverley and my mum called to tell me that they’d crossed the Tyne Bridge by mistake, gone south instead of north, and would as a result be just the tiniest bit later than planned.

How do you measure a year?

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**sefkhet** · 14-02-2009, 10:09 PM

Oops. Must do a better job of keeping this up-to-date.

25/01/09:

Yesterday, we had a mock exam that was oddly comforting. I know that’s a really odd thing to say, but I was expecting it to be utterly terrifying. I thought that I’d be walking out of the Bute Hall at the half-hour mark and leaving many, many blank sheets of paper on my desk — and that would have been okay, it was a mock, and one afternoon of getting scared shitless might have been a good motivator for the next four-and-a-bit months of studying for the real thing, but it turned out to be quite a friendly paper.

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27/01/09

I know of no other medical school that has anything remotely similar to the Medical Independent Learning Examination (MILE). It’s a bit like deep-fried Mars Bars and snow in July — nobody else wants it, and we don’t really blame them. So, a little background: it’s a first year assessment, it works like a really big PBL scenario, and it lasts for 24 hours. There are no prizes for guessing which part we all remember.

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13/02/09

I’m in a weird mood. If I were a cartoon, I would have a grumpy face and be standing underneath a tiny black storm cloud. It’s just been one of those weeks. I’m finding this SSM duller than a very dull thing, I’ve been spectacularly unproductive, I’ve got thoroughly pissed off with certain parts of the faculty, I’ve spent most of the last three days stuck at home, and I’ve found myself buying into (or at least being affected by) other peoples’ negative attitudes when usually I do a much better job of ignoring them.

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**sefkhet** · 16-02-2009, 09:51 PM

The run and the weekend did the trick, and I’m feeling much more like myself today. I still don’t like my SSM, but that’s the way that goes and at least I’m getting a decent amount of revision done. It’s only another two weeks, anyway, and I do have an essay that needs writing…

The highlight of last week was a half-day in clinical practice.

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**sefkhet** · 24-02-2009, 07:18 PM

These are the last couple of days of my SSM. In spite of how utterly crap the SSM itself has been (and I will elaborate on all of my vague grumbles once it’s actually over, I promise), I’m having quite good fun with the essay. It’s been a long time since I wrote a proper literature review that I could really get stuck into. But next week heralds the return of normality and PBL, and I’m ridiculously happy at the thought of being a medic again.

I’m going to take a minute now to use my blog as a platform for furthering my political agenda.

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**sefkhet** · 27-02-2009, 07:11 PM

My SSM is OVER!

Look, I was never expecting Drugs in Sport to be the thrill of a lifetime but it did look from the little blurb on the year website as though it would be reasonably busy while not being manic. I have had nothing to do. I’ve been in for perhaps an hour and a half a day, on the busy days. The assessment was based on a presentation and an essay, and for the first two weeks I hadn’t been given a title for either of them so couldn’t even do any reading. In the little blurb, it said that part of our assessment would be a lab report, but that was abolished and thank God for that — there were two labs, one that involved half an hour of being told how a flow cytometer works and one that involved watching a lab technician pipette some reagents into some test tubes and then put them into a centrifuge, and, bloody hell, I was a biomedical scientist, the value in me watching someone else use a pipette is so far non-existent that it begins to actually have a negative value.

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**sefkhet** · 05-03-2009, 03:57 AM

I’m taking an hour of downtime in a day that involves an awful lot of running back and forth across great swathes of Greater Glasgow and Clyde.

This morning was a visit to gastroenterology at the outlying hospital that my VS group is assigned to this year. It took a wee while to figure out where we were meant to be, as we hadn’t been given a ward number, just the name of the doctor we were supposed to report to (and it’s a big hospital!), but the teaching was good and it was nice to be getting a little bit of clinical practice again.

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