Shocking!!

Spotted this terrible accident en route to my hair-salon.. i was reAlly puzzled how did the car end up on the pavement proper .. it jus did not make sense from the way the roads were oriented.

The beginning of boredom.

Ok this is day 1 of Surgery SIP at TTSH: now surgery SIP at TTSH is verrrrrrry different from the well-structured surgery posting TTSH offers to medical students. It is obvious, at least to me, that the surgery sip was just a souless, half-hearted effort by the Surgery Dept. to match the well-structured Medicine SIP programme.

So me and kelvin followed the vascular team, mainly being curtain-openers/closers ( i usually do the one that pulls straight and curves inward such that you have to drag it across the bodies of the consultants/registrars : the difficult one, while kelvin does the curtain that pulls just straight across: the easier one hehe)

we do get some cursory input from the medical officer but that's about it. it wasn't any different from innocent M3 medical students following a surgery ward round, desperately hoping for some kind MO or registrar to spit back some tiny drop of information/fact/surgery pearl that we would lap up like hungry dogs.

we did get quite a bit of teaching by mr. chia kh but that's about it. after the ward round, everyone dispersed. me and kelvin found ourselves totally LOST : it's so horrible to be stuck in a hospital without any aim. at least in medicine SIP, tiring yeah and all, at least we had some role to play and an aim to fulfill.

the only excitement was when one of the patients we were reviewing suddenly threw a seizure, and of course larh all the excitement starts (reg/ac starts pointing north-south-east-west for bloods-stat/ABG/forms/ECG which poor us would be scurrying around like mice on a kwali.

Bye to the 3 stooges!

Oh this post is a farewell post to my good friends the 3 stooges whom i have worked with since Ortho M3 .. it has been nearly 2 full years! With the end of Derm, i probably won't see them in a loooong looong time with the slurry of Med/Surg posting coming up next..


I dedicate this new refreshing and bubbly clip from Jessica Simpson "A Public Affair" to them because like Jessica and the rest of the ice-skating gals in the MTV, the 3 of them +/- me (haha) sure do fantasise about a lot of naughty things about our classmates/registrars/consultants (e.g how to treat a tension pneumothorax? Just stick it in! :P )whenever we go.. but as the MTV goes, it was nothing but just an innocent "public affair" !! esp to TR and CL, work your tongue the same way jessica does with the soyabean ice-cream!! hehe

Dermatology over !!

dermatology posting just ended, and i must say it was a lot more fun than the preceding ID posting. the variety of skin cases was really interesting, and the variety of personalities at NSC was also fascinating :

you have the :
(i) ferragamo-shoe + dior watch + che che tote bag SIA girl doll-like registrar
(ii) motherly senior consultant who nags you not to be late for her 8am clinics
(iii)grand dame "koh chieng mun"-spinoffs speaking in Queen's English about her life-long fetish with mindmaps and fraudulent motivational speakers
(iv) charismatic, well-heeled male consultants
(v) the male divas who sashay into clinics a la Linda Evangelistas strutting in Prada boots in Milan.

not forgetting the always-so politically correct HR manager and his long suffering dorky assistant who prowls the NSC grounds for missing medical students...

and of course the librarian who reminds me of a younger , albeit much tamer incarnate of attendant Gopal of Chinese High fame...

End of Dermato Week 1

Well well my blog tagboard had some weird problems so that stopped me from posting for a while anyway. Anyway just a sum-up what happened this week.

Tuesday: Sent my sister's maid Mary Jane off to Manila on this new carrier Cebu Pacific that operates from the budget terminal. I personally booked all my tickets myself via the internet, so i was keen to see how this budget carrier operates. Well the flight was at 0040 hrs, and i had to stand in a treacherously long long line of filipinos/filipinas in the freezing cold terminal. it took me 1 hr to get her checked in beat that! and those stingy goons charge for every single kilo excess~


Wednesday: Watched WORLD TRADE CENTER with goonhao at the singhealth private screening. despite all the not-so-good reviews, i felt that the director portrayed what he could - knowing that he couldn't depict the entire scale of the WTC attacks competently, he chose to focus on a much smaller aspect of the attack, which i felt was a credible effort. i mean it's just not tactful to do this sensitive event as a typical Hollywood CGI-infested event e.g. showing people falling off the towers like Evanescence a la Bring Me To Life. I definitely left the cinema with a very heavy heart, and it's not from the greasy char kway teow i had at the Banquet foodcourt downstairs.

I was really not feeling too good for this week.. had this really persistent URTI which wasn't too bad actually. The haze was kinda making it feel quite chronic.

Friday: went out with Lil' and CT .. was actually having quite a bad flu liaoz so wasn't thhAt keen to go anyway far .. i was feelin' kinda myalgic since the morning .. aniwayz we ended up spinning around in CT's BMW from hotel miramar to changi airport and back in accordance to lil's "crazy paving" demands.. hahaha it really amuses me that we drove all the way to changi airport just to have Jollibean Ginger Tea and to hear Lil' rave about Jetstar Asia .. by 1am, i was like zzzzz.... i was so sorry that i seemed so "off" but i must have caught some nasty bug between CDC and NSC.

Sunday: ate like a queen at Raffles Town Club. the BBQ crayfish was quite good but was like murder for my throat.

Sigh my throat still feels like crap -- i am taking a ginger tea infusion and a stat lemon-lime-honey intralesional.

Itchy itchy panties on fire ...

Okay Day 2 Dermatology: simply not my day. period.

1. Woke up feeling a bit strange. My throat felt very dry and throaty like a URTI thingy. Must be one of those nastyChlamydiastrains going around.. My legs were beginning to itch like hell.. scratch,scratch.

2. Went to NNI for our impromptu Neuro tutorial with Dr. Lee SH. He's really a very nice examiner when he took us for cases. But wah lau it was really a wake-up call for me to buck up or f*** up -- instead of making a case of simple 7th nerve palsy, i started adding stuff like a left facial nerve palsy + 3rd nerve palsy larh + hypoglossal nerve palsy larh ... and dr. lee sh said , MINUS 5 marks for "making up signs"!! lesson learnt: don't think too cheeem. My neuro really needs URGENT resuscitation, along with paeds neuro and ortho!! Still scratching at this point.

3. After the neuro tut, i pulled up my pants in the MO room and to my horror -

Right "normal" leg


Left knee


Multiple annular angry looking lesions coalescing over my knee and thigh, and it was itching like nobody's business...
History taking time...
Any urethral discharge? Nothing except physiological discharges. And thanks, that was realllly reassuring to my dignity.

3. Returned to NSC for clinics -- besides the fact it was d-e-a-d-b-o-r-i-n-g, i managed to steal a sample of topical Elomet. I rushed back up to the library and started rubbing it furiously into my thighs and knees under the table-- and i think some ppl there were of this impression that i was doing something dirrrrty. Now logically why on earth would I be furiously rubbing steroids onto my willy-wonka -- this is mometasone 0.1% ointment, not Dermabust cream which Fiona Xie probably took an intravenous infusion of.

The Case of Disappearing Weekends..

I dunno but the weekends seem to evaporate a lot faster in year 5 , than it did in the previous years.

1.Little Miss Sunshine

caught this film at the newly-opened yet highly over-rated Vivocity stadium cineplex.
this is one indie film that had earned for itself rave reviews from both critics and the audience alike, earning like 93% on the rotten tomatoes' tomatometer. and if you guys noe what kind of bitches they have at rotten tomatoes, you noe it ain't easy to get a rating that high.

The Hoover family is one endearing lot, though highly dysfunctional. and i am sure you know familes like that out there, so it was indeed very real. especially seeing angst-ridden teens like Dwayne - sequestering himself in the room with his lofty ideals and all, very VERY much like a lot of the teenage boys out there in singapore; interesting to see that his nervous breakdown sort of resembled Bjork's in Bangkok http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n-f0wyhMvI. Olive is sooooo loveable as a 7-year old girl; she's really the uniting force in the family and her innocence really steals the show. toni collete (of Connie and Carla(not white chicks for heavens' sake!)plays a resilient, probably long-suffering mum. Now pack in an entire family of misfits into a creaky old mini-van and the roadtrip non-stop to California becomes really fun. Touching to know that in spite of all that dysfunctionality and ooky personality-traits, the family still bunches up as a family at the very end, which is a veryyyyy reassuring message to the dysfunctional ones amongst us :P

2.

Crab XO beehoon .. yummY!!

TV shows

My all-time favourites:

1. Supernatural (just ended its first season on AXN )

2. Ghost Whisperer ( watching it on channel 5 10pm on fridays , but i do have the entire season 1 on my computer )
- i so dig the semi-chilly yet heartwarming series.. jennifer love hewitt really rocks as this endearing spirit communicator. somehow her hair vaguely reminds me of dr. anne goh , of course minus that mona lisa smile which is used to great effect to scare patients into complying with their asthma medications. lolz.


3. the AMAZING RACE
- been 10 seasons and still ain't sick of it yet. loved watching the bitchiness between the teams amidst spectacular backdrops.

4. House .. used to love it , but reminded me too much of work. Moreover dr. greg house is such an asshole that's it's almost unbelievable sometimes. and catching African trypansomiasisfrom a tryst with your hunky male neighbour and making your registrars burglarise your patients' homes to validate a differential diagnosis???Get out of here...

Bored bored bored...

Well ID posting is probably as interesting as admiring a pack of amoxycillin capsules. so i guess i will just spend more time on my lovely bed, while i anticipate more headachey moments arising from the upcoming Surgery SIP.



GH trying to be genuinely surprised. :P