End of Week 1 in SIP (not quite)

Last time my week would end sometime on a glorious Friday afternoon but now with my 7 day work week, my week never ends .. every morning at the crack of dawn, ( no wait even BEFORE the crack of dawn ) i have to struggle out of bed as if i have duchenne's muscular dystrophy, waddle to the toilet and grudgingly wash up. reach SGH target by 0730, and start grabbing the IMRs and case notes from the ultra-possessive nurses (haha no larh most of them are super nice especially mi good friends staff meihui "xiao jie", zenghui, mageesh...) ... Start pre-rounding as many patients in the cubicle as possible before the team starts marching in..

once the team starts marching in, it's a flurry of new orders, new instructions, new questions.. sigh sometimes i think that it's already a great achievement that i am even having a quantifiable GCS score when you are up and awake, probbing patients on saturday and sunday mornings...

it's really a thankless job in some ways, but then again most of them are pretty understanding and often give grateful smiles that make your life a bit easier to live. Not that you should be expecting gratitude in anyway. i think it's just sad that some patients don't have insight into their own illness such that they think we are just ordering all these 1001 lab tests out of our own whim and fancy.

SIP blues...

Dunno why i feel so tired and drained and exhausted after a day of SIP.. i am like super depressed that my blood-taking skills are like so rusty after like a year plus of absolutely no procedures done... (last time we were like taking bloods like gusto during our M3 electives) .. it's like super inconsistent and like nabisco chicken-in-a-biscuit, the veins are like "now you see it , now you don't".

SIGH i feel this burst of lack of confidence.. and i always have to smile graciously like a well-trained SIA girl to the patients' relatives that everything is alright. well there's plenty of time, and it er.. probably helps that my consultant is supppppppeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr particular about our conduct, work attitude, clerking skills right down to our handwashing..

sigh can someone give me a confidence boost?

Tribute to Mr. Bean's Soyabean ice-cream

Sob... we are leaving TTSH for SGH for six freaking weeks... what will I do without my daily infusion of soya bean ice-cream ?

BTW from left.. priscilla (armed with ice-cream), yanni (red-spectacled one) , marie (smiling one) , james(the charismatic one)=)

Free Makan by Singhealth at Mount Faber

Don't we all look absolutely fabulous in the breeze atop Mount Faber's The Jewel Box-Viewing Deck? Missed the Camphor Tea flavoured duck..

Orthopaedics Examination Techniques

When you want to have a free massage, you pretend to graciously offer yourself as an examination subject for an orthopaedics examination...

Priscilla attempting to take a "live" tibial graft from me..


Me in pseudo-bliss, getting all comfy on this plush bed of the Ortho HO on-call room


Me breaking some female bones...

A Day of Embarrassing incidents

First, we were just getting this guy to walk like a model by the bed-side so we can do a gait assessment. It was really difficult because the patient was on an IV drip and poor pris had to hold the drip-set like controlling a dog on leash... and ooops after some nasty Trendelenburg maneuvers gone wrong, we got the patient collapsing back into bed and aghast , the drip set came out! PaNic.. we scampered off to get a new plug set and somehow Marie failed to get the plug in despite 2 attempts.. well I luckily managed to get it in but not before gushing blood on the bedsheet and the patient moaning like a Moana Lisa. It has been like over a year since i last set plugs during med electives, so i DeFinitely was like fumbling.. the patient even claimed my hand was trembling..

Second, thanks to Fiona Xie being shamelessly plastered on almost every single SBS bus, we got distracted into talking about cup sizes and walked back to TTSH WITHOUT paying for our meal at wee nam kee chicken rice. i nearly died of shock when yanni suddenly asked in front of mr. bean ice cream stall, if i had somehow paid for our meal. images of like crimewatch .. crime doesn't pay et al were floating through my mind.. plus the nagging concern the horizontally striped jail costume, which we would be forced to wear, would resemble one of those disgusting giordano shirts a few seasons ago.

STRESS!

WTF! I was like totally in a blur with all the OSCEs flung mercilessly at me today... everything seemed so foreign .. i can't believe i even forgot what a gunstock deformity was, although i vaguely remember it as some cubitus thingy. ok i never did like orthopaedics but it is those kind of things you want to do well coz it's such a major part of surgery.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Jessica Simpson's chest

Went out with xhua and kossie to watch the much awaited Pirates of the Caribbean. Actually I dun really seem to be having much luck with movies nowadays.. i didn't exactly enjoy Superman at the IMAX, where the durian-shaped screens gave me more of a cervical spondylitis than a wholesome 3D experience. Now for the long awaited Pirates, the opening was pretty fun action with Jack Sparrow running from a tribe of man-eating Asian natives. Later, it just got super draggy with the trio of Jack, William and Elizabeth in this constant swush-buckling battle with squid tentacles, shell-heads, hammer-head and shuma-goraths. the worst part was seeing the second sequel come to an abrupt end, with Captain Jack Sparrow disappearing into the giant octopus cheebye????? Obviously a futile attempt to lure us into the third instalment.

Went to old airport road, the makeshift premises. it was pretty stuffy and hot, so definitely not worth coming for the time being. Worth mentioning is the red-wine chicken (very tender and wholesome, especially suitable for gravid uteruses) and the
ham dandumpling. I have never seen rice dumplings with ham dan, and i really lurrrve ham dan. A bit expensive though at 1.80 per dumpling. Xhua discovered his bulimic Hokkien tendencies with a gigantic platter of mixed grilled items. Next stop was the Rochor beancurd at Short Street.. i was so sad for the rochor guys that the adjacent stall is like poaching all their customers just after today's innocuous article in the newspaper. As we all noe from clinton's email to sabo into class-repship, propaganda is dangerous.

Was having a real bad throbbing headache, so i was glad in the sense to send the guys home, and get some tylenol at home. Monday blues are hitting realll fast... oh a tribute to clinton for putting a disgusting picture of me and guanhao on his blog..

End of Week 1 in Orthopaedics

Ok this was a damn tiring week waking up at the crack of dawn looking all puffy eyed, for a silly M&M round where i am like totally lost in the doctors' own personal insults/jibes at one another. I dun realli think i have learnt tremendously much during this past week either. It's just finding a lot of gaps in my knowledge coz i dun realli like ortho anyway.

Well i can't help it also that I sleep pretty late coz i spend my afternoon sleeping, my evening watching the 9.00pm 爱情零度C (i noe many ppl will slam this show as lame and unintellectual, but hey Rui En is really one spunky cheap Amah "CEO" and i like watching the way she slams those rich bitches in the show)... i am just surprised Michelle Saram wasn't casted as one of the cheap Amahs after the way the Hong Kong media slammed her as a Filipina maid breaking up F4 and Barbie Hsu.

Hmmm highlights
(i) went to tiong bahru market on Thursday with the girls and Marie, to find the Crystal bun stall gone! the food was so-so with plenty of pesky drag queens pestering us for donations.

(ii)got sabo-ed for class rep (probably not fair vote either lah coz half of the class not there), but Gooanhao also kena assistant class rep... oooo, it's time for some fun. Maybe we can destroy the surgical dept of AH one day?

Watching Pirates tmrw.. the first instalment was quite good but nothing AWESOME i.e. nothing like Lords of the Ring with that disgusting flaming introitus. it's those kind of thing that you j-u-s-t have to watch coz' it's a classic.

Draggy draggy day in Orthopaedics

This is the usual boring day in TTSH Ortho. Morning lectures. Break. Eat soya bean ice cream and meet up with other fellow meddies coming to the now-famous Mr. Bean stall in TTSH... realised that a lot of people are now talking about what hospitals and postings they are gunning for in the HO years, a reminder that HOship and the dreadful MBBS is drawing near ... OMG dr. lai is really funny .. he has this sense of quirky humour that's a bit eccentric but is just so totally my style. not to say his lecture was all crass, it was actually very systematic.

afternoon. change up to meet a dr. oh in the OT. tutorial about NOF (hm..zzz.) only highlight was seeing the girls wearing oversized OT scrubs making them look like Victorian maids in drag.

well at least i got my ethics case writeup case from dr. tan tl. dreadfully long case but at least it's really worth discussing.

yawn. so tired .. how to study? and marie france suggests we meet at 0730 tmrw at DSOT to see all those volar ganglions, carpal tunnels ... (ok lor although i will be really zzz haha) i get this impression he's a bit worried our CG is way too slack.

Controversies and Orthopaedics and Victoria Beckham ...

Wooo.. too tired to even follow through the entire World Cup finals with extra time and its penalty shootout. Now obviously although I am not a football fan (since Singapore got unceremoniously kicked out of the Malaysian Cup like more than a decade ago where football was much simpler(read: less media hype/less WAG-sluts/no Wendy Jacobs) and rooting for your country was like an instinctive thing to do),a major international event like this should be followed through because of the immense gossip and speculation that is fired from it. it was a burning question what the hell did that Italian dog mutter to Zizou to trigger that response? Well heard Zizou is a baseline fiery character (read: like some NUH characters), so it probably didn't take much...

Another marvel of the World Cup was seeing the slutty WAGs of the England team holding Baden-Baden under siege, and even more frightening was to see Victoria Beckham stroll around the street with her children in tow .. she could even pass off as one of the skeleton characters in The Nightmare Before Christmas or Corpse Bride with a figure like that. Heard it's recommendation of the English manager now to ban WAGs(..and of course Corpse Bride) from future matches.

First day of orthopaedics (obviously not at all my favourite posting) really shocked me into realising how much I have forgotten.. and prof lim beng hai seemed to be aghast with the vacuum of knowledge of anatomy.. (hello? i think more people prefer exploring the depths of a department store during GSS than the fascial compartments of the arm). it got as bad as to him having to tell us what is a hand , what is an arm et al.. anatomy is one of the most boring things to study for me, and right now my only visual knowledge of a skeleton in my head is from Victoria Beckham( or Nicole Richie ).

Happy to be at TTSH again (but the girls aren't too thrilled about it), but the food court was just disgusting: the ramen tasted like bundles of Cao Cao's hair and it's my recommendation to the auntie that she might as well just use Hartmann's solution in place of the soup because it simply didn't make any difference. THE SOYA BEAN ICE CREAM from Mr. Bean simply ROCKS!!!!!!!! It was love at first sight... (and guilt-free somemore)

The weekend was a blast!

Ok where do I start .. Friday marked the end of the Psych. med posting (thank goodness) and as usual I headed out to town with Kossie and Xhua ... obviously City Hall is a bad bad place as a meeting point because it's just teeming with people. I was appalled to hear xhua's sudden suggestion to turn around to Thomson Plaza for dinner after I spent like a good 45 minutes weaving through traffic to get to City Hall. Thankfully we settled for somewhere reasonable like the teppanyaki buffet at Sakae Sushi, Funan Centre.

Now from the previous bad experiences at Sakae Sushi buffets where we ended up feeling bloated (like Connie Chung) with salmon skin and soft shell crab makis, I recommended buying a bottle of enzyplex before we commenced the buffet. I really felt the buffet was like a waste of the extra $$ coz' the teppanyaki orders took like over an hour to come , and when they did come, they came in a one vooooom meaning all our backdated orders and re-orders came together. The mochi dumplings given at the end were so refreshing though.. ah simple pleasures.

Now Saturday was the usual K-box gathering led by Gooanhao, this time with the presence of Clinton,Joline and (surprise) 2 girls who were meant as matchmaking gifts.. i was obviously nervous the night before ( well i told TR this ) because the k-box sessions were usually an all-guy thing and our behaviour during k-box isn't exactly appropriate sometimes hahahahz. anyway it turned out fine because the girls were more keen in boogieing rather than being matchmaking gifts .. somewhat the room was too small compared to last time with the Japanese slut students , so the movement was kinda restricted... felt quite embarrassed that the manager actually had to come personally to drive us off.. anyway although it was much tamer than the previous sessions, it was still good fun and the mango cream with multiple spermheads at the end made for good dessert to soothe the throats.

Spent some time with GH and clinton in Orchard, as GH wanted to buy a Poh Kim jeweller salesman shirt from G2000. He looked really good in it though seriously.. told ya that stripes bring out the freshness and vibrance in you. Had a simple dinner with GH , and our conversation eventually drifted onto relationships and the usual barrage of personal questions a la Xiao S style on . Sigh are girls really so important to us? Mebbe I have always been getting the shorter end of the stick.

Back from such a freaking long hiatus!!

I have really neglected this blog for a trillion years and i really need to apologise to it.. it recorded some of my best memories with my previous CG2 especially in its final moments during the Paeds posting...

After a whirlwind elective in Sri Lanka and Johns Hopkins, all I have to say is that it was a BLAST of an experience and i never ever regret this decision to make this round-the-world escapade. the people i met and the intense elective experience was something that i will always treasure, and i would never fathom why one would choose to stay in Singapore apart from financial reasons.

Anyhow I am kinda settled in my new CG , and i must say i feel like a new man ! Free from the reins of a certain ultra-competitive individual who will take no mercy in trampling upon others in the race to get to the top... The new cg definitely is a bipolar disorder itself .. we have the trio of guys and another trio of girls , and unlike my previous CG, there was definitely an issue of gelling together.. well at least there's Marie France who joined us from our senior batch, and he seems to gel with both trios. well at least the girls love good food so that's a major major plus for me :-) . the psycho. med revision posting must really take the Razzie award of being the most uninspiring and morgue-like posting in my life-- i have never felt so drained and anergic with all those draggy clerking sessions and the follow-through tutorials. whatsmore, i have this magical ability to attract schizophrenic patients to myself, particularly the middle-aged female prototype ..i certainly dun think it's a good thing.

other major issues of course .. i did some facial surgery to remove some chickenpox scars and some warts (dun ask).. there are like red-spots on my cheeks that make me look like Archie , but that's fine i guess =) just that i usually have to run so fast between the CGH carpark and the OPD to avoid being spotted by some kaypoh medical colleague.

about the mavis hee thingy.. well i am sad for her because her songs however melancholic do bring back memories of my secondary school times.. she's like the chinese version of evanescence (gothic hairdo and all, sort of like Ivy Lee's hairdo on that cop show) and her lyrics do tell sometimes a hauntingly depressed state of mind, especially Tie Chuang ( you can actually pick out most of DSM-IV criteria for depression in that song )


Me seated by the lake of one ancient city in Sri Lanka