I have been tagged!

Thank you!

Charlie Brown from http://thatmedschoolguy.blogspot.com/ has tagged me.

I have to admit, I really didn't have a clue what this meant but I had a look around and it seems that I have to write down 20 things about me. I will post ten now and finish the rest off when I can. Great stuff!

1. I love hip hop music - especially Jay-Z. I am a real nerd (You can only guess how naff a white housewife from Wales looks trying to rap) and know the lyrics of most of his songs. The best thing I have heard lately was on the Radio One Westwood show on Tuesday night. It is a live piece where Tupac joined Notorious B.I.G on stage and it blew me away! I got to meet Tim Westwood last night and probably bored him senseless talking about it. All the other girls were hanging around him, trying to latch on to the aftershow party, and I just wanted to bend his ear about the music!

2. I am missing the "I want a baby" gene It has been replaced with the "I want a King Charles Spaniel" gene

3. I am developing claustrophobia and a bit of OCD. I never had this but now I do and I can't sit in the middle of rows. I have to sit on the end (Seems to work for me) I also have to keep my curtains open so I can see out of the window and make sure that my pens always have their tops on (Shit - I am scaring myself, admitting this stuff) I must be lots of fun to live with.

4. I used to be a classical ballet dancer. I danced in a group who toured around Amsterdam and when I got back home the Chinese whispers had gone around my town and I was now a stripper in the sex clubs of Amsterdam. I love this rumour!

5. I am passionate about animal welfare. I despise modern farming methods and seeing animals carted around the roads when they are being transported makes me cry.

6. I have no life since September 20th this year when I started medical school. I am drowning - the work just keeps coming and I can't get on top of it.

7. I have been married for seven years to a very nice man. He used to be a footballer and played for Wales! I am now living 140 miles apart from him which is interesting. He didn't like dogs when we met but is now as bad as me and sleeps with our dogs between his legs, on his head and on his pillow.

8. I am a terrible cynic.

9. I despise bad manners, like when you hold a door open and they don't say thanks, or when you let a car pull out in front of you and they don't acknowledge it.

10. This is getting hard!

Studying at medical school

Hells Bells.

There really is a lot of work to get through and to learn. Where does one begin?!

I think for UK students, having A levels in Biology and Chemistry is a great (Perhaps vital) starting point for my course. My graduate group have mostly worked for the past few years and so although we have covered these subjects, the details can be rusty. I am quite lucky because I have spent the past three years studying chemistry to A level and I had the best teacher in the world (Brian Jones, I salute you!)

Each day, the five year students do one module in the morning, and the four year group do that, and an extra one in the afternoon. I have had an email off a fellow nurse asking about my timetable, so here it is:

Monday a.m Biological Molecules
Tuesday a.m Genetics and the basis of disease
p.m Health Psychology
Wed a.m Health and disease in populations (Epidemiology)
Thurs a.m Tissues of the body (Histology)
Friday a.m Metabolism

As well as this the four year course (GEP) have a clinical skills module. We started this last week (On our first day!) when a SHO came to show us how to do cardiovascular examination. This will be built on during the next four years. We also have other things like communication skills and multi-disciplinary team (MDT) skills. The latter went down like a lead balloon with many of us on the GEP. Having spent the last eleven years working in a MDT I would rather not have to do this, and could use the time trying to get my head around genetics. But there you go - I can't complain too loudly because this is the only problem I have with my course and I can't exactly roll up to the tutors’ door and say, "You can bugger orf. I am not coming to your MDT skills lectures because I am ahem......an expert" I am not an expert at MDT working, but I have done it to death and don't feel that this module will make me any more of an expert than I currently am. So there!

So that's basically what we have to do over the next eleven weeks. We then have four weeks off at Christmas, which will be taken up with revision, as our exams are first week back. We have exams on all the listed modules and have to pass the lots of them. Nice!

With all these modules, my innate worry is where do I bloody start? The uni boffins have told us that we can't learn it all and so have to form "structures" in our minds which we can "hang" our knowledge on. They mean that we have to understand what we are doing (Too much to learn, parrot fashion) and try to keep relating things to the bigger picture. Clear as mud then. I have read an excellent posting from "The haversian canal" on learning at medical school:

http://nielsolson.us/archives/2006/03/recent_thoughts_on_medical_education.php

This nice chap writes really well about learning at medical school and also wears a Navy lieutenant uniform, which is never a bad thing.

I have also taken heed of poor Charlie Brown at
http://thatmedschoolguy.blogspot.com/

He is a little further into his first months at medical school than me and is very stressed. His advice is to revise, revise, revise. Not sitting here writing my blog then!

This post is a bit long so I will go. I have to end by telling you about my Jay-Z experience. I LOVE Jay-Z and have seen every live show he has done in the UK over the past five years. I paid ....a.....fortune....on ebay for front row seats at Wembley. Like a weeks wages (In the good old days, when I worked for a living) All I can bear to say is that I got stuck in a 5 hour traffic jam (At the M5 at 1900 on a Sunday night - where the hell where you all going?) and got there for the last 10 minutes. This brings tears to my eyes. See how close we were:

I just about had time to take this photo and then he went. I can't put into words how gutted I am.

Half way though first week at medical school

Today was a good day! We had histology this morning followed by dissection and then cardio vascular examination this afternoon.

The histology was great - we looked at epithelial cells and the way the day was laid out was really well planned. We had a lecture first on the basics of simple and stratified epithelia. We then went into the dissection room (DR) and looked at bodily structures and epithelial linings.

I haven't mentioned the DR in my last two posts because I am a bit worried about how much I can say without causing trouble. I have to mention it though, because it is so integral to what we are doing. These words obviously represent my thoughts and not those of the university (Sorry about the formalities, but I know this is a sensitive area)

The dissection room is a strange place to be. Ours is superbly set up and in a big hall with around 40 Cadavers in there. We were introduced to it last week and despite eleven years of nursing, the shock factor for me was big.

It just seems so strange to walk into a room where there are so many dead people. We were in groups of around 15 people and our demonstrator peeled back the sheet.... and there was our body. I am not sure if ours was a man or a women because we could only see from the chest up. I didn't pass out or anything like that but just felt very odd and a bit sad. We had been given an intro to the DR during intro week and apparently, dissection is becoming less and less common in UK medical schools because of the huge cost associated with it and also because less people are donating their bodies. I wander whether Gunther von Hagens has a lot to do with this.

We Will Cut you up in front of a live studio audience!

For me personally, I think it will be of massive value to be able to see structures and where everything fits in. One of the speakers last week (A professor of surgery) said that he has found anatomy to be lacking in many junior doctors and my medical school seem very focused on ensuring we know our stuff. Once I get over the queasy feeling in my stomach, I will love it!

During histology today, we looked at a human head and I was very, very unnerved. I tried to concentrate on the tissues we were supposed to be looking at, but I couldn't help looking around to see if anyone else was thinking "Shit - This is someone's head!" I couldn't help thinking that this was someone (Again, not sure if was a male or a female head - I am going to make a fantastic doctor) who had perhaps been speaking to their family a few weeks or months ago, or walking down the street. Very strange experience.

Phase One - week one! Thought of the day.....90% of our DNA matches that of a banana!

Bloody hell! It is day two of the course and there is so much work to do already.

Yesterday we had two modules: Biological molecules in the morning and clinical skills in the afternoon. Both were very good and I am SO glad that I have just done the years of chemistry, because I would absolutely have a real struggle on my hands without it. We never did any chemistry as a student nurse and in one three hour session yesterday, we touched on loads of principles from the AS chemistry course.

First note to any nurses thinking of doing medicine = go and do a chemistry course - I would recommend AS level at least .

The clinical skills session was on examination of the cardio vascular system and was an introduction to basic clinical skills - all good stuff. My nursing covered perhaps 50% of it but there was plenty of new stuff such as listening to the apex beat and other heart sounds that will be completely new to me.

Day two, we had genetics all morning and Health Psychology all afternoon. The genetics is going to be, erm.. challenging to me because it is all new, but the psychology was pretty much what I have spent the past ten years doing.

I am living in a really nice hall which is 100% improvement on last week. It is small but clean and now i have my internet and TV set up, I am fine. It is costing me around £3700 per year which includes food.

I am not as homesick this week but still feel like I have wandered in to an 18-30 holiday and am waiting to go back home and get back to normal. It is only today that I am starting to feel like a medical student - last week I felt like an intruder who had crept in to the back of class. It is a massive, massive change for me and I am giving myself time to settle down. The one thing that is crystal clear is that the pace of work is so fast that I need to work for a good few hours each night, right from the beginning. I remember starting my nurse course and having to give a 2,000 word essay in after three months on the course. With this course, I have at least 6 exams in 12 weeks time and need to pass all (They only allow you to fail one module in the whole year in order to go to year two. If you fail more than one module, you have to sit a qualifying exam in the summer which looks horrendously stressful)

Induction week at medical school

Many apologies for the lack of posts but I have not had an internet connection until now. I haven't spent the whole week sozzled - honest!

Well - I am finally here. I really never thought that I would make it, but I did and here I am in D halls on my induction week. The medical students arrived on Sunday and are all staying in halls so we can "Bond" .There are around 270 five year students and 60 of us older, graduate students. The week has been very well organised with daily "Welcome" lectures, uni familiarisation and nightly organised socials in the town centre.

I have found this week very, very hard. As an older student, I suppose that I am stuck in my ways and I have given up an awful lot to come here.

When I arrived in my room in D Hall on Sunday, my heart sank. What a dive! My room had disgusting brown dirty carpet tiles which had lots of silverfish crawling in them and squashed mosquitoes on the walls. I could see the mattress springs though the sheets and when I got in bed, the mattress was so saggy that I had to sleep in a boomerang shape. The others on my corridor thought it was fine to come in at 1,2 and 3 am and shout as loud as they could.....Ok you get the idea - I hated the place!

I wanna go HOME!!!

As well as the accommodation, I found it very overwhelming being around so many new people, although they all seem a nice bunch. I have never, in my life, been homesick and thought that I was much too old for that kind of thing now, but I have missed my old life and just wanted to come home, put my uniform on and go to my nice normal job with people I know and then come home to my nice house and eat nice food with my nice husband!
I suppose the good thing with being a bit older is that I know I am likely to be much happier next week when I move into my proper accommodation and get started on the course. What I can safely say is that the medical school seems excellent and the four years are likely to be quite a slog!