lunar.soliloquy

Guess what i'm having for dinner? #dinnerforone

Oh how time goes by so fast these days. Looking back at my last post, I think I was worried about passing my long case and making some comparisons between living in Rotorua and in Auckland (something that seems to be a common train of thought every time I come back here). Well the good news is that I passed my long case! YAY. Seems so long ago it may as well have been a dream. But its a good feeling even now, knowing that its out of the way for the year.

I've just come off doing a 4 week rotation in general surgery and a 1 week rotation in ED, which have been much less stressful in terms of assessments compared with gen med. I don't see myself being a surgeon but working under the surgical team was really fun. I know some of my classmates take the opportunity of the short 30min ward rounds in gen surg to go home early (a real perk especially now we're getting paid) - and I could have done the same if I wanted to, but there was so much happening in surgery that it would seem like a shame to waste the opportunities. There was always something to do after the mandatory ward round - minor surgery clinics, gen surg clinics, ED admissions, house officer jobs, theatre...I even had the opportunity to attend a rural GP skin flap course which was surprisingly fun. I've always been rubbish at suturing (before I couldn't even hold the instruments properly, lol) but now I feel I could close up after a minor op if the consultant walked out on me for whatever reason. Feels good to be a little bit useful. Holding the camera for laparoscopy is fun, too. I'm also sucking less at clerking patients and actually getting their proper meds on the drug chart these days.

ED was fun, too. Probably the most exciting thing was getting to watch some defibrillator action live for the first time. And doing bedside ultrasounds on patients with abscesses or acute abdomen. I guess it wasn't particularly exciting seeing triage 4 or 5 patients (most of the cases I saw alone) but it was still good to get that GP-like experience since that's the direction I'm likely to be heading in. Looking after the worried well probably isn't the most satisfying medicine, but hey, if it's all I can get I'm going to take it. Also realised my orthopaedic knowledge is severely lacking since at the moment I'm just like "X-ray all the things!" xD. Oh well, it's not like we TI's can prescribe or order tests anyway. The only thing I've prescribed so far is water, lol. Can't even give paracetamol without a countersign. So annoying. At least we're able to order ECG's since that's usually just verbal, and it provides quite a lot of information.

On another note, I recently got myself a brand new Samsung solid state drive (SSD) to install windows 8 on. Basically SSD's are a kind of hard drive that have no moving parts and run much faster read and write speeds compared to traditional hard drives. However they're accordingly more expensive and smaller in capacity so you have to be selective of what you choose to put on them. Typically, the operating system, resource-intensive programs and high specs games are good choices. Unfortunately I ran into quite a bit of trouble getting windows 8 on mine since there was an annoying intermittent freezing glitch which I could not find the reason for at all. This went on for a week before I found out that it was a crappy windows wireless network driver that was causing it (this took many, many re-installs, tests, updates and much misery in general to diagnose). I then went to uninstall the said driver and it kept re-installing itself without my permission ><". Windows likes to be annoying like that. Solution was to disable it then install the correct one. Problem was that I installed the wrong driver because I forgot I had my network card replaced for a faulty product, and the replacement wasn't the same as the original. So wrong driver = crash. With that said, let's just say I'm grateful to have my good ol' desktop back to heath. Sometimes I think computers can be almost as difficult to diagnose as people, though I'm no expert on either subject.

Got a week of ophthalmology between now and Easter weekend. I plan to read up on eyes this weekend so I can go into a rotation actually knowing something for a change. Then going up to Auckland hopefully on Friday to visit friends and pick up parents from the airport (they're out of the country at the moment). So a few things to look forward to. I really should keep this more updated.