Defying Gravity

**sefkhet** · 14-03-2009, 09:33 PM

Aaaaaaagh.

I’ve managed to thoroughly confuse myself with this PBL. It’s not that it’s conceptually difficult, and it’s not even this PBL so much as it’s how this one relates to the last one. My facilitator wouldn’t like that — she’s the kind who starts turning interesting colours every time we try to bring something from ‘outside the room’ into the brainstorm, which led to a deafening silence on Tuesday when she didn’t want us talking about the Helicobacter pylori lecture in the brainstorm about Helicobacter pylori.

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There must be something that medics recognise in each other.

(I spent a good chunk of a recent Sunday morning trying to convince my priest that we do not wear sandwich boards and are not identifiable on sight, but it turns out that I may be wrong.)

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**sefkhet** · 24-03-2009, 05:40 AM

Well, I’ve been wanting to do a week in my life and I realised this morning that this would be the last time I’d be able to do a normal week for my ‘preclinical’ years (if we can call them that). It’s the end of term on Friday, and I’ll come back after Easter to panic and lots of coffee and crazy crazy revision, which is inevitable but not quite normal, and if everything goes as I hope it does, my timetable will look very, very different by the time I next have the chance to do this.

I’m at my least productive on a Monday, and it shows…

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**sefkhet** · 02-04-2009, 05:23 AM

I've now finished blogging the rest of my Week in the Life posts and thought I'd gather them all together rather than spam the forum:

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

**sefkhet** · 19-04-2009, 05:26 PM

I’m sitting at home, having a cup of tea and checking email after a morning of sleep and church and wandering along Dumbarton Road in the sunshine.

This last week has been intense. I do the bulk of my exam revision with two friends, and we’ve been saying for the whole year that we were planning to start our revision period on Easter Monday, but I don’t think any of us believed that we would actually do it until Monday morning when we sat down with large folders that needed to be put into small brains.

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**sefkhet** · 05-05-2009, 04:58 AM

I’m a person who enjoys the simple pleasures in life — clean sheets, good cups of coffee, the smell of a new book, hot showers, a big bowl of rice and daal, the occasional morning off… And at this time of year, I appreciate those things even more. I take an extra five minutes to brew the real coffee. I wait for the moment when my muscles unknot underneath glorious hot running water. I think my bed is the best place in the whole world. I love my Sunday mornings off and I cherish them the way some people cherish diamonds.

So, you can imagine that I was deeply unimpressed on Sunday when I was walking towards the subway and, without bothering with little things like asking permission, my brain started to recite the signs and symptoms of pulmonary thromboembolism.

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**sefkhet** · 14-05-2009, 03:31 AM

The good news is that our final piece of coursework came back and I don’t have any coursework resits, which means that I will be DONE as soon as my final OSCE is over. In fact, my aggregate coursework result will be an A or a B (never been too sure how the calculations work, and it depends on how well the critical appraisal grade is balanced out by the rest of them) so I’m very very pleased with that.

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**sefkhet** · 31-05-2009, 12:27 AM

This week, I had the worst day I’ve had since I started revision.

I’ve had rubbish days and I’ve had unproductive days. There was the day when I tried to work in a study room in the QM, but that turns out to be a lot like working in a prison cell and it doesn’t really do much for someone who goes slightly crazy if she can’t see the sky from time to time. And the day when I had a complete meltdown over the conus medullaris, of all things. And the day when my study partners and I were sitting at the kitchen table, stressed out and stressing each other out and trying to learn things and really getting not a whole lot done. And the day of iron deficiency anaemia, when I came so very close to setting fire to Berne and Levy. Do you see where I’m going with this? The last five and a half weeks have not exactly been shiny and fluffy.

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I’m tired and stressed.

I’ve reached the point where there’s stuff that I really do need to cover (cholesterol and muscle contraction, for two), and then there is other stuff that I have gone over twice or three times and really should know and probably *do* know but am not actually convinced that I know it, and that is making me freak out.

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**sefkhet** · 04-06-2009, 12:51 PM

In a little bit, I’m heading off to North Lanarkshire for my first OSCE.

I’m not nearly as nervous about this one as I was about the written papers (in spite of having sat perhaps a hundred written exams in my life and having never, ever sat an OSCE that counted for anything before today). I know what I’m doing, mostly, it’s just a question of remembering to do it in the right order, faking some sort of confidence, and keeping the shaking under enough control at least that I won’t drop my tendon hammer.

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**sefkhet** · 15-06-2009, 03:31 AM

I’ve spent this week with my parents, sleeping and reading novels and cooking the odd meal and then sleeping some more. It’s been a good week and a much needed break, but I’m looking forward to sleeping in my own bed tonight.

In spite of warnings from the faculty that results might not be published until Tuesday, we’re all expecting them tomorrow and we’ve already had the obligatory This Is What You Must Do If You Fail email from our head of year. This is doing nothing for my blood pressure. I’d wanted to write about the exams and I’d wanted to do it before my memories became contaminated by the elation or the devastation of the results, but I couldn’t face doing it straight away. So, here we go.

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**sefkhet** · 27-07-2009, 02:42 AM

After getting my exam results, I needed to take some time to do something other than eat, sleep, live, breathe, and blog medicine. I might have insisted that this year I wasn’t going to neglect my life for the sake of my exams, but, as the hazy memories of a lovely Easter weekend faded and the days between it and the beginning of June started to race by, it still happened. I’d known for months that I would be missing a performance of Rossini’s Petite Messe Solenelle that was scheduled to take place on the night before Paper 1, so, because I wouldn’t be singing anyway, there were a few evenings when revision ended up taking precedence over choir practice, and then other things started to drop off the radar… In the end, the only non-academic commitment that I was keeping was on Sunday mornings, and even with that, on the last couple of weekends I was going into the library at the crack of dawn on a Sunday so that I could get an hour or two in before heading up to the cathedral.

So that’s where I’ve been for the last six weeks or so — recharging my batteries.

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