lunar.soliloquy

Whoah where did all the time go? I've obviously subconsciously made the decision that my life was too busy to bother updating this thing even once between now and March last year. I meant to write something yesterday when it was pouring down outside and I was indoors all day but instead ended up playing around with the formatting and got lazy again. Where to start? So much to say. I guess reading over my past few posts helped refresh my memory.

21 months ago I was a clueless little TI running around Rotorua Hospital pretending I knew stuff. Now? I'm still a clueless little TI, wearing a House Officer name tag, pretending I know stuff.

... ...

Okay, okay, perhaps I should give myself a little more credit. Jeff, you've been a doctor for over a year now, shouldn't you know a thing or two about what you're doing? Maybe. Maybe yes, maybe not. That much is debatable, and the jury is probably still out there. Maybe that's why it's taking so long for my general registration to come through! =.=;. Well that was a depressing thought...

On a more serious note, I seem to have managed to survive medical school as well as my first four 3-month rotations as a newly graduated doctor, and I don't think there has been a period of my life that has ever gone so quickly. Here's photographic proof that I survived medical school:

... Now there's about a 10 minute delay from the uploading of the above image and the typing of this text. Why? Because Google decided to crash on me and wouldn't re-load until I restarted my computer. Luckily the draft was saved but my train of thought was severely derailed. Now where was I? Ah, yes.

I suppose my first jobs as a junior doctor were fairly good rotations. General surgery, general medicine, respiratory and plastics. Surg was pretty traumatic to do as a first job though, particularly at the hospital and team I was working in. I remember getting home at 7pm and thinking it was a good day. Finishing at 8:30pm at night wasn't much fun, especially since you weren't compensated for overtime. It's really a case of the DHB using us as cheap labour by understaffing the wards. But I'm told it's worse in other countries (and it probably is) so I'll comment no further.

I definitely learned most of the little medical knowledge I do know in those 6 months of medicine and respiratory, since in surg I was too clueless and overworked to learn anything, and in plastics I just learned, well plastics. So that's something I guess. I recently volunteered to do an extra long day in the acute medical unit last Friday (cos that's how you spend you Friday nights when you're single *cough*, and yeah, for a variety of reasons, I no longer have a girlfriend) and I realised how much medicine I have yet to learn. Seems enough to get by on the psychiatry wards, though (which is where I currently am). I find it amusing when I make a medical assessment and the consultant and registrar actually go out of their way to make sure your plan gets done! Fortunately, I seem to be keeping the crazy people in a reasonable state of alive-ness so far.

I planned to make this post longer, but it's almost 8pm already and I need to eat! Stupid time. And google blogger wasting it. I actually went out for a run after work and got home a little later so that's why it's so late. If you stalk me on facebook you can see I did 5.4km today. Yay, go me! However there are cynics who say those running apps don't work properly and I'm overestimating my distance. Well, what else am I supposed to do, bring a tape measure with me running? Yeah, right. Here's a badly taken photo of me after one of my runs (apologies for the quality, I'm extremely self conscious of myself while taking selfies).