Has your beard grown today?

Today was a good day - and I can actually say that I have enjoyed the course for the first time, this week. I think this second semester has been very different to the last one and we seemed to have moved on to more clinically related stuff.

Our exam results are out next Wednesday and I think things could come crashing down. I worked hard before the exams but don't seem to have done enough during last semester. As explained in an earlier post, you can only fail one exam in the first year. If you fail more than one, you have to sit "THE QUALIFIER" which is the exam from hell, which is sat (I think) at the end of July. If you fail this, you have to sit a viva and if you fail this, things are grim. I think that if you have extenuating circumstances you may be allowed to resit the year, otherwise it is curtains.

Anyway, today we had reproduction which is taught by this amazing professor. He doesn't even look at the PowerPoint slides as he teaches and really is brilliant. He was telling us that in men, beard growth is directly in relation to testosterone levels and he mentioned an experiment that an anonymous chap did some time ago. This chap had a job where he spent a few weeks collecting specimens on an island and then came home to his missus and then went back to the island again. He must have been really bored because he decided to start measuring his beard clippings for growth every day, to see what his testosterone levels were doing.

He found that when he was on the island, his beard clippings got shorter over the first week and then (As he was preparing to come home to his wife) they got longer. Thinking about his missus raised his Testosterone levels and made his beard grow! I thought this was great! I don't live with my husband at the moment (Only at the weekends), but after eight years of marriage, I should think his beard shrivels back into his face towards the end of the week.




What's he been thinking about then!





I have been reading a brilliant blog by the Angry Medic. His posts are spot on and much easier going than mine! I sometimes hear a funeral march playing in my head when I am writing these posts so seeing a happy, young man who is also a first year medical student puts things into perspective for me. I keep going back to this point, but I would so love to have done this course at 18. I think I would have had a ball.

More good things - I dreamt about Patrick Dempsey last night. We were on holiday in Tenerife (As you do) and he was walking around in little shorts (I'm surprised I didn't wake up a bearded lady). The funniest thing was that, being the married old bugger I am, I even felt guilty in my dream. It was a very clean dream though! He just seemed to be keeping me company and bringing me cups of tea by the pool. I watched four hours of Greys anatomy last night, which must have been the culprit.











Last bit of news for today - Snoop and P Diddy are in Manchester on March 29th and I have managed to get great seats. Nice one!

Struggling to be selfish (Not me, some of my course mates)

For the first time this week, I have spoken to four people who are thinking of thowing the towel in and leaving the medical course - I am really gutted for them. They seemed to me to be flying through and looked like they would be brilliant doctors.

In my previous post, I said that I thought that you had to be extremely selfish to do my course and i think that this might be the problem for some of them - they are struggling to be selfish. I think they are finding being an older student (With responsibilities) impossible and just don't feel like they can become as selfish as they need to. It's so difficult when you are an older person with a partner, house, children etc. You need to ignore your responsibilites a lot of the time, just to keep up with the work and I understand their problem 100%. In my past life, I spent 100's of hours educating staff on achieving work life balance and can now see that it is easier said than done when the only way of keeping up with what you have done that day is to sit down for hours and hours.

The tough reality is that my family could do with me back in Wales so that I could help sort out my dads' situation and help my mum with the dogs. Being two hours away means that my mum is having to sort out a lot more of my dad's problems than she should have to (She has been divorced from him for 18 years!) and without her doing this, I wouldn't be able to stay on the course. What makes life so much easier for me is that my husband has given me the freedom to do the course. He would have been well within his rights to kick up a massive stink, but instead, he got a job down the road and went with the flow. We are still not living together but meet up in Tescos every Wednesday night (Hilarious I know)and then see each other all weekend.

Speaking to the people who are thinking of leaving has hit a nerve with me, because I am managing to be very selfish. I feel a bit guilty tonight because although I winge like a bugger most of the time, I have not thought of leaving the course - I just live with being selfish, which perhaps doesn't make me a terribly nice person.

Hmmmmm.

All about the Benjamins?

This week has been enough to blow my head off and splatter my frazzled brain over the ceiling.

It's our new semester and the seven new modules (Listed in last post), have already lost me. The membranes module on Monday was about "Flip Flop" (WTF?) and I learnt that lipids in a bilayer can flip flop, but proteins cannot (Please correct me if I am wrong). On Tuesday, I learnt that the chest has four pectoral muscles:

Pectoralis Major
Pectoralis Minor
Serratus Anterior
Subclavius

We have to learn the origins, insertions, blood supply, nerve supply and function for each one.

Today we have started on histology of the heart muscle and tomorrow we start reproduction (In the PowerPoint sense) On Friday we are doing something about disease mechanisms and today we went on to a ward for the first time and took a history off a patient.

That's the bugger you see - you learn so much in a week that remembering it all two weeks later is a massive problem. I am going to look for a memory textbook at the weekend to see if I can work out a strategy for learning all this stuff. I think there is a proven way of building long-term memory and I need some help. If any of you have some suggestions on how I can try to expand my brain power (Please don't suggest getting a bigger head) I would be very grateful.

I was thinking again today of why I really came into Medicine. Is it all about the Benjamin's? I have found that no one really speaks about coming into medicine for the money - it seems to be distasteful. I have to admit that, come graduation day, this is going to be me:



SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!

Yeah right - a junior doctor here is not on big bucks ( See here for our UK salary scale) but they do qualify on more money than many of my experienced nursing mates are now earning. What does cheer me up is that GPs are earning brilliant salaries, but if the Daily Mail has their way, they will have taken massive pay cuts by the time I get there.

The one thing I totally agree with is that there are easier professions to enter if money is your only goal. Even three months into the course, I can see how horrendous it can get and just doing it for the money wouldn't get you through. I have to be completely honest though - future earning potential is a large part of why I am putting myself through this purgatory.

OK, OK I might annoy people saying that and get emails saying that I should want to be a doctor so I can care for sick people and make them well. My reply to this is that if this were my only goal, I would carry on being a nurse. I would also argue that my old nursing job allowed to me to care for my patients to a far, far higher standard than I will be able to do as a doctor in the NHS. I worked as an Occupational health manager for a multi national American company, looking after 800 employees and I was fortunate enough to have the budget and time to be able to ensure that whatever they needed, they received. My patients were ruined!

I do daydream about being rich someday - on the way to Uni, I walk past some amazing houses (Oadby has some of the best I have ever seen) and they often have "MollyMaid" (Cleaning company) cars outside. I want a house and a cleaner - so shoot me! I have been in the health game for ten years and know many consultants who live in AMAZING houses, but work such long hours that they never get to see them in the light. At least their wives feel the benefit though. My husband will be more than happy to live in the executive house (With my mother, father and ten dogs in the attic) Perhaps I will become the family cash cow. I can live with that!

As a nurse, salary wise the ceiling was low and I hit it at the age of 27. At least as a doctor, there is scope for higher earnings.... I am rambling now. My last word is that there are now many nurses and physios going into medicine, but have you ever heard of a doctor coming into nursing or physio? I haven't and I am 100% sure that money plays a part in this.

I am a selfish git

Me after my genetics exam, (On finding out we were starting the Introductory clinical course three hours later)





OMG - I am SO tired.
After two weeks and seven exams, they finally finished at 1030 yesterday with the genetics module, which was absolutely horrible. The genetics module, for me, was a murky blott on the landscape, where the module leader decided that we were not to have any proper teaching or help during the group work sessions. This led to us sitting there going around and around in circles and when someone had the cheek to complain, they were told that these complaints are the same every year and we should trust the way the module was run. This resulted in a demoralised group of students and very little learning. Why does a little voice in my head cry out "If you have had the same pissing complaints, year after year, is it not time to start bloody listening to them? What do we know eh - we are only students.

Anyway - the exam was awful, with a big Hardy Weinberg claculation at the end. Don't ask me about Hardy Weinberg (Another group session where not only did the group tutor not help, but actually told us that he did not know the answers.....GREAT! All I do know about hardy Weinberg is that it's two blokes who were kind enough to create a maths calculation so that we can work out frequency of genetic disease - really handy thing to be able to do..... Not)

I think Leicester must want blood from us as we then started the introductory clinical course at 1330! We were like a big field of cabbages sitting there reeling. The five year course don't have to do it until next year so we joined the second year and although I moaned like a bugger, I am actually quite chuffed as we are doing a course that the five year cohort will have to wait a year for - and it brings it home that this course is so much faster.

I really had my worries about the GEP. I heard some horror stories about it from other students and got worried enough to also apply for the five year course. If anyone is thinking of doing this (Applying to two courses at the same uni) get in touch as I have some views on it!

Having done three months of the course I would have to say that I think that the GEP is well worth doing. I live with three students on the five year course and there hasn't been a massive difference between the two courses so far. Basically you have no life regardless of whether you are doing it for five years or four, so why not work a little harder and get it over with! The only real difference in semester one was that we did an extra module during the week (Health Psychology) and an extra add-on module called "Health in the Community" (Not exactly an inspiring way of spending time, especially if you are over 25)

This semester, we are doing 6 modules:

Membranes and receptors
Musculo skeletal system
Reproduction
Cardiovascular
Health and society
Mechanisms of disease
There is also a clinical course (The one we stared yesterday) where we go on the ward every week and do history taking, system examination, problem solving etc.

I am SO glad that the exams are finished - the last three weeks have probably been the toughest I have ever known. What has become really clear to me is that you have to be a selfish git to study medicine. I really mean that. You have to put yourself first and blank out friends and family needs because at exam time, there is so much work that the only way of getting through is sitting in a room studying from when you get up until when you go to bed. A few people have commented that they have even felt guilty sleeping during the past few weeks. The Good news is that this only seems to happen around exams and the rest of the time, we get away with not having too much to do.

Anyway, back to being a selfish git - this has been hard for me and I am sure other mature students must feel the same way. If you are 18 with no husband, animals or homes to run, perhaps things would be easier, as you can get away with just sorting yourself out. When you have commitments, it really is hard ignoring them, but as I said, I found the only way was to blank everyone out and just be ....a selfish git!

So here I am at the end of exams with three dogs that stink (No time to clean their teeth) A deserted dad, a moaninh mum, a smelly husband (No time to remind him to wash and his knickers are all dirty because I just haven't had the time to wash them)a dirty house and an ironing basket that reaches the ceiling. In all this disarray, the new course starts Monday and the workload looks MASSIVE.

Here we go again.

Breakthrough!

So it's Monday and we are half way through exams. I have not left my room for three weeks and have no life or thoughts other than revision, panic, revision, panic.

The good news is that I had a breakthrough at the beginning of 2007. When I look back, I realise that I felt like I have been playing at being a medical student. I have never actually felt like I deserve to be here, and have felt unlikely to make it through the first year.

My reasons for this that my dad had a massive stroke on May 17th which left him unable to speak or look after himself. He was still in hospital when I started at medical school and it was horrendously hard to concentrate and learn, when he was faced with not having anywhere to go or anyone to look after him. He moved into a rehab flat in Mid November and then the fun really started because he decided he would get regular taxis to his bungalow. I would then get phone calls to say the rehab flat workers didn't know where he was and I would end up coming home from Leicester (Two hour drive) to find him and persuade him to go back. The stress of this has been indescribable and things got worse when, on December 23rd, social services decided he had been in the rehab flat for long enough and give him 48hrs notice that he was going into a care home. Nice Christmas present.

Christmas was awful - just a constant round of trying to keep his spirits up and travelling to and from his care home.

When I visit my dad, there doesn't seem to be any sense of him being glad to see me or that he is grateful for the effort I have made. I think he is gutted that I have not dumped medical school and looked after him full time and bitter as hell that this has happened to him in the first place. My guilt of having him in a care home is constant and my only way of coping is to block it out and not think about it.

Part of me is angry at him because he has abused himself into this stroke by drinking, smoking and eating crap for the past twenty years and has let his house get into such a state that social services have now deemed it unfit for living in. The other part of me knows that his dad also had a stoke at the age of 60 and so perhaps he would have had one without the extra risk factors.

I have been dragged down by all of this - I wouldn't be human if I hadn't.

My breakthrough occurred straight after New Year when I really started hammering the revision. I realised that I could do the work and that that more than anything, I really want to do the course. All I can do is hope for the best with these exams and then start afresh next week when we start semester two.