Dangerously in Medicine

Day-trip to the Japanese Alps : Soaking up in an onsen amidst the snow...

2007-12-14T22:45:00.000+08:00

The Japanese Alps

Can I just say today was just uber good !! I awoke in my yukata strewn open hahah (somehow it dislodged over night ..) and saw snow falling outside my hotel window.. it is snowing in Takayama ! After a quick breakfast of Japanese porridge and salmon and the likes, I caught a local Nohi bus to Hirayu-Onsen (actually I did plan to go to the Shin-Hotaka Ropeway but was advised against it by the tourist information centre - stating it was still in operation but the view would be hopeless with the cloudy conditions ) .

Now most of the pictures were taken around the onsen itself ... of course no pictures within the onsen !!

Hirayu-no-mori : or the "forest of Hirayu" is this lovely onsen resort where you can choose between like 2 indoor onsens and multiple outdoor onsen baths. I was like walking around stark naked in the snow ; immersing myself in the bubbling sulphurous hotsprings with snow falling gently on my hair,cheeks .. around me was endless scenery of snow-covered pine-trees .. surreal .... it was very fun going from one outdoor hot-spring to another.. the temperature was like MINUS 5 deg C yet it never felt that cold although i was stark naked...

Onsen etiquette (very important !!! Japanese people respect you if you follow rules well )
(i) Go into the changing room
(ii) Strip naked. No need for yukata larh. Just bare balls. Keep clothes in locker.
(iii) Then go into the shower facility. Grab a stool and sit on it. Shower yourself with water at least > 40 deg C (adjust the markings accordingly on the faucet ) - shampoo/conditioner/body soap will be provided. Rinse yourself well with the hot water to acclimatise. Make sure no soap in armpits or genital areas !!
(iv) Then my personal favourite is to soak up a small towel with cold cold water ( usually can be found in a separate tub or just from the tap ) and put it on ur head - cools you down.
(v) Go feet first into onsen bath. Wait - acclimatise --then immerse your lower half + private parts into the onsen bath --> tahan , tahan --> then immerse until shoulders. Try not to plunge in directly coz you will feel giddy (excessive vasodilatation)

DON'T drink before you go for an onsen. i learnt it the hard way when i went for my hotel's onsen after a good dinner of beef steak with lots of Asahi beer - you will feel like your head is in this Malboro spin !
Up to you to shower after the onsen - i prefer not to.

WOOHOOO!! that was an awesome experience.

Soulful day at Nara

2007-12-12T23:19:00.001+08:00

Nara - a city just out of Kyoto (approximately 55 minutes by JR train again ) : now today was a horribly rainy and blistery day so it wasn't good for sightseeing at all.. anyhow the key features of this place were the spiritual temple grounds , and the deer roaming around in the Nara park. In fact, most of the city is covered within the park grounds methinks .. most of the city's attractions are centred within the park grounds. so the deer literally roam everywhere - they are like the mascot of the city.

The magical Bamboo Groove of Saga-Arashiyama

2007-12-11T23:09:00.000+08:00

I was so lucky that there was this special winter campaign for Saga-Arashiyama - for the period in which i was travelling in kyoto, a significant portion of Saga-Arashiyama would be illuminated during the nightfall. now most people go to Saga-Arashiyama - which is just a little out of kyoto by JR train - for the famous temples and of course the famed bamboo grove which is supposedly a dead ringer for the one in crouching tiger hidden dragon...

The bamboo grove became resplendid with sheer BRILLIANCE of colours..

Day 5 : Kyoto - Chasing the Geisha

2007-12-10T22:40:00.000+08:00

Walking alone along a quiet labyrinth-like alley of traditional Japanese houses when suddenly i heard the familiar sound of wooden clogs melodiously clicking along the cobbled path. I came face to face with ..

G...E...I..S.H..A
and there were a lot more geishas who suddenly sprang out of nowhere. very very intriguing.

Day 3 Saturday - Yasukuni Shrine -> Ichigaya --> Ueno Ameyoko --> Harajuku --> Tokyo Bay/Odaiba

2007-12-08T22:33:00.000+08:00

Yay ! I got the Tokyo Metro card.. which means for just like 1000 yen , i can zig-zag around the entire metro network as much as i want. exactly what i need. so i started off the morning by heading straight into the heart of controversy .. the Yasukuni Shrine , which everyone makes so much hoo-ha about the Japanese prime minister visiting. it was just one stop away from jimbocho so it was quite convenient. the weather was a little nippy but ok.

Yasukuni Shrine

the first entrance into the shrine.. i bumped into this over-enthusiastic man (not that one above) who was trying to sell the idea that the japanese troops in nanjing were actually doing people good and improving the people's living standards ( he actually had on display rows of pictures of happy chinese kids and civilians receiving the japanese troops with much enthusiasm ). in my mind, i am like ,the war is so over - and there's no need to pull all that merino lamb wool over my eyes because the world can see the invisible rifles and bayonets behind these poor chinese kids' backs if they dun smile like a geisha for the soldiers.
if not for the controversy(which i didn't bother going into) , the shrine is a lovely place as you can see above. pleasant place to stroll...
now this is also another character.. holding a tape-recorder chanting Japanese military anthems .. sigh .

Ueno - Ameyoko
Ueno is like next to Asakusa, and it offers a lot of great cheap eats and good funky stuff to buy. i bought like a billabong fur-jacket and an OP body-hugger which all looked pretty funky. price was ok .. about 200 bucks each i figure. haha who cares ? i am on holiday! and i freakin' didn't do like 7-8 calls per month for nothing!

Above is the eatery where i just threw in my coins and got a nice bowl of uberlicious tempura udon. there wasn't any place to sit , but it's ok. i gave my meal ticket , i got my bowl , i stood at the counter and slurped slurped slurped - like the way you slurp ******* hehe - (the louder you slurp , the better apparently in japan haha ) ... and i am done! return your tray and everyone in the eatery will start screaming "arigato gozaimashita"! and you are supposed to giggle back "gochisoosamadeshita (it was a feast!)".

Harajuku
Ok i wasn't so much into harajuku because of the funky hairstyles and clothes - anyway most of those dress-sense maniacs had already left for a funkier part of town when i came in the late evening (you can walk up from ginza ) . I stumbled upon - another of lonely planet's recommendations - Marion's crepes ! WOnderful wonderful - thin crepes encasing a delicious prism of thick , rich cream with a dash of chocolate chip and fresh strawberries - again along with the line of japanese convenience, you don't need to sit down and eat it with a knife/fork - they just wrap it up and you eat it the same way you eat a wrap at taco bell's ..
Harajuku - and featuring a branch of Murasaki Sports - the place where i purchased my winter garb at Ueno -

Tokyo Odaiba

Day 2 : Loving Tokyo bit by bit.

2007-12-07T22:21:00.000+08:00

Ohaiyogozaimasu!
Akihabara - the Funan Centre/Sim Lim Square of Tokyo -
A pleasant stroll down to Yasukuni-dori from Jimbocho brought me to Akihabara where there are like Shinjuku-like and Shibuya-like buildings that advertise video game characters,cartoon figures instead of fashion brands. I would have really loved this place when i was a kid playing my 16-bit sega megadrive. As usual stores were all screaming about the latest Nintendo Wii ..

Prices in Akihabara were competitive but nowhere to be compared to Singapore. A Nikon D40X kit costs like 1100 in LAOX (the major superstore), but i figure Harvey Norman/Courts were of course selling their cameras at a slightly marked up price.

Lunch at Akihabara - tempura don with hot ramen -
Ok tummy growls. Got another ticket from the vending machine for a tempura don with a bowl of hot steaming ramen. The tempura was sooooo thinly fried , crisp to perfection. And once it is soaked in the tare, it just melts in your mouth. All this for like ?500 yen (<10>Asakusa
after all that megalomaniac kind of buildings-skyscraper galore, i was just happy to be in Asakusa. it was by no means a quiet neighbourhood -there were throngs of tourists here in fact. it's just that the buildings were a lot more old-school japanese - and the nearby sensouji temple made things a lot more placid. it was a pleasant stroll by the shops - 1000s of them in fact selling all-so-nicely packaged okashii (sweets) and omiyage (souvenir snacks). this looks like the most attractive district so far. fairly charming and not so much glitz.

one of the alleys in Asakusa ... now this is kinda of japan that i like. quieter and sedate. yes there are tourists and etc, but not the thronging screaming crowd that you experience in shibuya or shinjuku.

Sensouji temple by early evening .. sun sets really early in Tokyo during winter. nothing really much .. just a touch of spiritualism in midst of the urban chaos. good idea actually.

One of the many quaint alleys and shopping streets in Asakusa as evening beckons.

I had a great meal at this restaurant. don't you love the fact that they all have such gorgeous displays .. i had the colourful "matsume" (the one in the black bowl) .. yanni would love the red beans (i ain't such a big fan but apparently red bean/green bean is like a sine qua non of Japanese dessert making.
I had the wonderful Negitoro (upper row ; inner most in maroon bowl) ; which is like mashed raw fatty tuna over a deep bowl of rice.

Tokyo Tower
Well if you have been to the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building (now especially that Empire State building), what you are gonna experience would be pretty disappointing. not that worth the 700+ yen.
The view is just okay.. nothing really compared to the Empire State Building or even that Shanghai tower (what name was that tower ? sheesh i just went in March )

Day 1 : Lost in Tokyo !

2007-12-06T21:51:00.000+08:00

The day started with again a uneventful Malaysia Airlines flight to Narita Airport, transferring at Kuala Lumpur of course. Well sort of eventful despite the fact i got a real F.O.N. queen who sat next to me for both the SIN-KUL and KUL-NRT sectors. God! He was like "i dun like the taste of this guava juice. i want the orange juice." , (moments prior to landing)"i need some peanuts.. now" , (after a few bites of his OWN special meal)"i dun like the taste of this.. i want that beef". Thank god we had 3 japanese flight attendants onboard the NRT sector to pander to his needs.

Arrival in Tokyo-Narita Airport
I was just so tired these few days after all those calls that i just slept thru the red-eye flight without touching the IFE system. Landed in Narita Terminal 2 in the bright early morning. Sailed through customs/immigration - noted new fingerprinting system and photo-taking system at immigration. No problems.

Ok. So far so good. Went over to the Keisei Line counter to get a ticket on the Keisei Line to Oshiage --> Aoto, as recommended by the hotel. At first, i didn't want to speak my dead japanese (probably died in the closet after 5 yrs of medical school), but somehow the counter staff were just terribly uncomfortable in English. Oh god.. managed to get my point across somehow in japanese somehow.

One thing reminded me though.. everyone , i mean everyone from train attendant, ticketing agent and even the convenience store girl was just terribly polite and sweet to me. gosh, i have been working in nuh too long :-P

Getting lost in the train system
Okay for the uninitiated, the train system looks confusing so i asked and asked in my dead-but-now-awakening japanese. missd 1 or 2 stops but that's ok. all the good training in europe in carrying 30kg backpacks across amsterdam made this <10kg>Sakura Hotel , Jimbocho
Found my way amidst heavy human-traffic to Jimbocho, the bookshop district located sort of in central Tokyo. Very quiet and unremarkable hotel, with mini-sized rooms.. thank god for the free LAN line in the room (you have to set up the modem, phone jack and VDSL (not VDRL) line yourself though. 6000 yen a night ? Counter-staff were friendly enough.

Finding lunch from a vending machine
Ok finding lunch in Jimbocho. After roaming and roaming, there was this constant fear of entering a Japanese restaurant and struggling with the menu and my dead-but-now-slowly-awakening japanese. curiously i entered this little ramen shop with this vending machine thingy. apparently all you need to do is to choose the food item you want, and pop in the appropriate amount of cash , voila you get a meal ticket , give the ticket to the cook and within 1-2 mins, you have a bowl of fresh ramen/tempura. you still gotta noe how to read japanese coz' the illustrations are quite miserable. i found this really unique and convenient.

Shinjuku
Total chaos , i mean total chaos - this place was just teeming with people and wild-styled teenagers. quite unremarkable coz i am quite used to this kinda scene in new york.

Shibuya
UTTER chaos! i was just screaming to find a place to hide from the throngs of harajuku princesses and yakuza boys .. found refuge in a slightly more upmarket restaurant serving OMU rice (hehe) - they even had a french waitress that could speak english. so i let my japanese take a rest for the night haha.

TOKYU Shibuya
in front of Tokyo Shibuya was this amazing intersection where if the pedestrian lights turn green, a good number - say like >1000s ? of pedestrians crisscross an entire intersection at a particular instance. i was like a little termite scurrying back.

Summary of HOship so far..

2007-10-26T22:05:00.000+08:00

Oops neglected my blog for nearly a century now.. settling quite ok into NUH paediatrics by now .. flying off to Japan for 10 days during my December leave to revisit those miserable days of memorising kanji over lunch and rushing from Chinese High to MOELC for hours of Japanese grammar zzz..

Lemme see where my life has been :
May : first month in TTSH - bad bad memories of being accused of missing an NSTEMI (horrible) ..
June : settling in nicely .. meeting great melancholic MOs like Joanne Kua heehee.. crazy ward though in Ward 5A .. great nurses
July : Commencement 2007 !! Ward 7B : a little less hectic than Ward 5A nevertheless.. great working with Dr. Jackie Tan ..
August : WOW i am the inaugural Renal Medicine HO .. first ever in TTSH .. wat honour, but what a sucky ward !! The staff just aren't capablefor managing the complexities of renal patients and the phelbotomist is really a &*(&(*(&)+ ! really really enjoyable time working with the renal MOs and the bubbly renal team -- saw a lot , did a lot this time, but things got really routine after some time .. infected perm caths --> pestering cardio for 2DEs --> pestering radiology to insert a new one --> assisting with femoral lines --> culturing and culturing .. IV cloxacillin .. vancomycin .. zz.. ordering dialysis regimens .. malfunctioning AVFs .. A and V ports going bust .. zz .. resuscitating patients that go boom* into pulmonary edema .. managing DKA patients by myself in the middle of the night *(^(*(&&).. and my god .. doing the summaries for these patients..

- hiatus : went Perth for a week and got stalked by some aborigines there -

September : started in NUH paediatrics with renal medicine again .. felt like a chapter 2 of my renal training, namely peritoneal dialysis 101. basically spending morning after morning chasing UFs , inching and inching up the fill volume (zzz..) getting inspired by certain patients who jump, perform somersaults and calisthetics to improve their UF .. if seeing millions of infected PCs in TTSH wasn't suffice, there were equally troublesome cases of peritonitis here with PD cell counts swinging up and down like the dow jones index.

Haem-Onco next 2 weeks : VERY hectic, but had some great rapport with the families .. quite touched that only some of them would let me take the bloods from. great team as well. definitely learnt a lot here too.

October : back to general ward 48 .. had a great time working with martha and c.ho .. work was hectic yeah occasionally but there was just excellent camaderie amongst us and there was always laughter every morning about some of the weird antics of certain patients/parents.

WHEW. and on top of all of that, by some strange force of nature, in a place i never never ever expected to happen, i fell in love with someone. haha i myself have no idea how it happened .. but it just subtly happened day by day .. haven't had this kinda good feeling in a long time.. hope things work out for us ! girls~ so sorry but my heart is sold ! :-P be happy for me ya ?

Cambodia 26-30 July 2007

2007-07-30T23:07:00.000+08:00

Singapore-Siem Reap-Phnom Penh-Singapore

26th July 2007 : realli sianz thing to be post-call (TTSH gen med call at that too..) and to wake up in the early morning for a flight to Siem Reap .. thank god i insisted on silkair rather than jetstar asia where i heard from tianrong that we would need to have our balls under continous positive pressure for 4 hours to taipei. flight to siem reap was uneventful .. was given some unedible scrambled eggs that tasted like fluimucil powder in Hartmann's solution.

the taxi-ride out of siem reap airport was just simply audacious. the driver just wouldn't pushing his stupid tour guide services even though we said we weren't interested. in the end when we chose another tour guide to start our tour, he called us 'stupid idiots'. welcome to cambodia.

The enigmatic faces of Bayon, of whom the half-smiles are almost similar to a certain respi. consultant in KK..

Half-way up the horrendous stairs of Angkor wat ..
The horrenous stairs of Angkor Wat up close.. definitely not for the osteoarthritic or the faint-hearted.
The trail leading into the Bayon complex and a thousand indistinguishable shrines/temples/etc.

Still orientating myself within the faces of Bayon .. thank god for Lonely Planet.

Ok I must admit i was really tired at this point .. 50% point of temple overload.

Street-kids pestering kossie to buy everything from apsaras to bayon relics to cambodian undies..
the mysterious temple of ta-phrom.. really love this place.. the perfect place to diurese your temple overload. it's distinctly different from all the other sites in siem reap. great place to explore if you have the time , which we did.
bad move i did - unless you fancy red ants on your ding-dong.
since we all LOOOOVED the concept of jungle in a temple like in ta-phrom, we decided to follow our lonely planet's gospel advice to go to this lesser known site : Bang Melea .. it's more like a temple in a jungle. as kossie shows, survival is only possible with a can of DEET.
it wasn't easy getting this shot. carefully treading through those treacheous blocks does it.

the abandoned library of bang melea...
ok the start of a reallllllllllllllly horrenous boat trip from siem reap to phnom penh .. on top of the fast craft with little to prevent you from rolling over into the mekong and far less to protect you from the elements..
yes, we were lying like refugees for 5-6 yrs exposed to every ray of light.
crazy ang-mohs awaiting their melanomas to grow. it was like 5 hrs when i decided enough was enough. when we entered the cabin, the sudden still air made us realise we were THOROUGHLY burnt through and through.
me being in a state of depression.
at phnom penh tuol sleng genocide museum : a very gruesome and chilling peek into one of cambodia's darkest moments.. minimal photos taken here, needless to say.
i felt that this picture could be photostated and given to some of my patients on my night-calls.

My M5 Experience ..

2007-07-20T22:44:00.000+08:00

I was asked to write my M5 experience in the capacity of the final year class representative, with my photo in the class yearbook.. better keep a copy here just in case my computer explodes again ..

"Hihi=) I am James Huang the class representative for the final year. It is indeed my pleasure to ink out what my experience for the final year has been like.

All in all this year went past helter-skelter, with postings flying past us like flower-pots in a maelstrom. Like our seniors promised, the final year was indeed a mentally exhausting and challenging time for all of us. It was a very sharp contrast from the generally relaxing pace of Year 4 (save the O&G posting but that’s another story :P) and the wonderful elective period. Even as much of Year 5 decayed by, there was still this perpetual feeling of insecurity surrounding me – somehow there seemed to be no humanly possible way to engulf all that knowledge tutors expected us to know. For instance, from knowing the colours of different asthmatic inhalers and INR/lipid/blood pressure targets in Medicine, to the crazy myriad of developmental age markers and Greek labyrinthine-like flowcharts on the management of vesicoureteric reflux; to the billions of classification systems in Orthopaedics, it was just this gigantic snowball of latin names/dosages/landmarks/figures rolling after your behind.

The road had always been somewhat long and tough, especially in the clinical years. Unlike the pre-clinicals where lectures and lecture-notes were neatly placed in front of you, the clinical years were a lot more unpredictable. Roaming throughout the wards aimlessly like wandering spirits looking for the elusive patient with Eisenmenger’s syndrome who had sought permanent asylum in the dayroom ; begging and assuring patients that the physical examination would be “very fast one” or “just one time then no more ok?” when there were 10 other students cleverly camouflaging themselves behind the curtains. Such were the pains of clinical work. While tutors were incessantly urging us to maximize our time in the wards, we, as seasoned clinical year students, knew that it was more of striking a fine balance between ward-work and mugging.

As SIP interns, we were either very heavily involved in ensuring the patients had their daily hematomas on their arms and their beds fashionably spotted with an ecletic mix of blood/chlorhexidine/povidone-iodine ; or on the other extreme, acting as phantoms of the surgical ward that somehow made the curtains draw and temperature charts/IMR magically appear. I also remember the elderly lady (and her banshee scream of course) who dug her Wolverine-like nails into my arm, as I struggled with my ABG at 3 am in the morning. I also remember another delirous patient who clawed and cussed at me while I tried to hold her into a fetal postion for a lumbar puncture. Athletics were also part of the curriculum – a compulsory fast march ahead of the consultants/registrars in the ward round to reach the next patient before they do; a 4 x 10m shuttle run to and from the nurse’s station to fetch peak flow meters, X-rays, swab sticks or whatever your team fancies. Last but not least, coaxing nurses, who were clutching onto the IMRs/temperature charts a la Gollum and his “precious”, to allow us to conduct our mini-ward round before the consultants arrived. All in all, it was a sheer tiring experience, but a lot of us indeed came out much more oriented to the expectations of housemanship ( at least for the Medicine SIP hehe=) )

Yet, it is heartening to see that all of us had matured together as a batch, from naive students fresh out of army/junior college in year 1 , to aspiring physicians and surgeons. The future seems even more exciting as we branch off into our various specialities come housemanship. I really cannot imagine how funny it will be to see which one of us will become the next terror of medical students during end-of-posting tests or say, the next top cosmetic surgeon . Come the last paper of our MBBS, only the sky’s the limit for us and a universe of possibilities await. Cliched yeah.. but that’s all I can think of haha.. "

Commencement 2007!!

2007-07-05T22:36:00.000+08:00

My mentor Dr. Lee Kim En !!
Makan buddies : Val and Henry!!
(from L-->R) CheeKwang , Guanhao , me , Kunda , Shengyong
Tianrong ...
Guanhao , me , Peiling , Alvin ...

Money shot with the voluptious peiling..
With my dearest sister ..
The monster twins ..
Last but not least , with my dearest parents ..

Getting ready for Lasik...

2007-04-28T18:47:00.000+08:00

The pre-Lasik evaluation went fine, but the intra-ocular pressure test was horrible!! Without warning, a shot of high-flow air was shot at my eye, and I nearly jumped out of the seat. Needless to say, the reading was horrendously high. I tried and tried to do the test again TEN times, and I just couldn't control my reflex blinking and my head bobbing. Getting air shot into your eye isn't funny..

Anyway I just found out this horrible horrible Japanese name generator, which mutiliates proper names with slanderous proportions.

My japanese name is 猿渡 Saruwatari (monkey on a crossing bridge) 大輝 Taiki (large radiance).
Take your real japanese name generator! today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.

TTSH Medicine : HO orientation

2007-04-24T22:33:00.000+08:00

Firstly, I found out that I am running the ward as a solo house officer, when the ward was previously run by TWO house officers.

Secondly, I also happened to find out that I am also slotted as the only local graduate house officer on the VERY first day of work 2nd May , with 3 other foreign-graduated house officers (they started work in February I presume, and May is their last month).

JUST GREAT DON'T YOU THINK.

Tashkorgan-China/Pakistan Border Part 2

2007-04-23T23:36:00.000+08:00

The next morning, we continued on from Tashkorgan towards the Khunjerab Pass ( elevated at a breath-taking ( literally ) 4500m above sea-level ), which marks the China-Pakistan border.

Kashgar-Tashkorgan-China/Pakistani border Part 1

2007-04-23T23:26:00.000+08:00

En-route to Tashkorgan, the last Chinese frontier town before entering the China-Pakistan highway, we came across some amazing landscapes... simply breathtaking..

The background of Muztagh Aga

The sleepy Tashkorgan Fort.

Taken en-route to Tashkorgan along the precipitous mountain roads.

The mysterious Sand Mountains..
A close-up of the mysterious Sand Mountains en-route to Tashkorgan.

Kashgar

2007-04-23T23:14:00.000+08:00

Landing at the foggy Kashgar Airport on 9th April 2007 (release of our MBBS results )... and Guanhao releasing the good news that Shengyong did really well for the MBBS and entered TTSH Medicine. I am happy for him.. unfortunately our moment of happiness was marred when I exploded another bout of stool in the toilet at Kashgar Airport ( yes there were doors but they couldn't be closed for f****ing sake and I had to beg for toilet paper from Tianrong )

Cannot 'tahan' liao .. here I was celebrating my MBBS Honours and arrival in Kashgar with a glucose/potassium/bicarbonate + high dose Unasyn and ciprofloxacin and intravenous Traditional Chinese Medication drip. Many thanks to Huakang Hospital.
Downtown Kashgar , at the bazaar near the Mosque.
Self-explanatory.

Food bazaar.. beware, E-coli awaits..
Local Uighur children.
Note the left-over stickers from Paediatrics being used to spread goodwill even in the remotest regions of the world..

Urumqi - Heavenly Lake ( Tian Chi )

2007-04-23T23:00:00.000+08:00

Well the scenery around Urumqi was really fantastic (not as fantastic of course as Tashkorgan) but I was really having very severe diarrhea ( passing like 16-17 times a day and almost continously through the night ), and I couldn't really take much water. I don't know how much I mustered the strength to continue walking through the mountains..

Me at the 'baby' Tian Chi - a smaller version of its parent at the midpoint of the mountain.

The semi-frozen, nevertheless spectacular Tian Chi
Lovely Alpine-like views of the surrounding Tian Shan range.

Definitely a picturesque shot.

I must be amazing in order to stay so poised.. I had not had a decent hour of sleep as I was having diarrhea throughout the day and night for the past 2 days.

Dehydrated me nevertheless managed to climb to the top of this miserable temple, with the mocking and jeering of my wonderfully understanding group-mates.

Flying away to Kashgar from Urumqi Airport at the crack of dawn.. yes I did pass a horrible explosive stool on the plane, something that even Al-Qaeda would be proud of.
Jetting away from Urumqi on a Hainan Airlines B737-800 towards Kashgar.

Turpan - our entry point into Xinjiang

2007-04-23T22:42:00.000+08:00

Leaving Dunhuang, we caught a horrible horrible 7-8 seater bus which took a bumpy dirt road to the train station Liuyuan 2 hours away. tianrong was already not feeling, and it was made worse with the constant sensation of his full bladder slamming against his pubic bones. From Liyuan, we caught an overnight hard sleeper train to Turpan, arriving in Turpan at 6am in the early morning.

Emin Minaret in Turpan

The fascinating Jiaohe Ruins of a lost city .. remarkably well-preserved, and it stands as an UNESCO world heritage site.
Sunset at the Jiaohe Ruins
The lush valley beneath the treacherous Flaming Mountains...
The flaming mountains of Turpan.. supposedly the reddish colour will be accentuated by the summer heat, so it doesn't quite show up this early in spring.

The legendary figures of Journey to the West in relation to the Flaming Mountains.

Tuyoq - the lush valley housing an entire community
A local mosque within the community in Tuyoq
A pleasant Uighur (the predominant ethnic group in Xinjiang) girl - very photogenic.
Our favourite past-times in Xinjiang.. at least before I came down with acute infectious colitis- munching on gazillions "rou chuan" or meat-kebabs. Yummy.. E-coli galore.

The Sand Dunes of Dunhuang...

2007-04-23T22:38:00.000+08:00

The wonderfully FUN with the capital F, sand mobile !!

Western Great Wall At Jiayuguan

2007-04-23T22:26:00.000+08:00

A group picture of us in front of the moat right in front of the Jiayuguan fort. We were the only visitors to the fort that day. Don't let our kiasu winter getups fool you.. it was a lot warmer than Xiahe. We took this picture out of one of the gates of the fort...
Walking along the walls of the fort looking into the courtyard.

The looooooooong and steeeeeeep overhanging Great Wall of China (Western End ) : before we ascended.
A model shot of a composed me , before i go into status asthmaticus while climbing.
Sats definitely dropping here ... (midpoint of climb)

Look at that snakey path leading us back to the bottom ..

Crawling like Evanescence on steroids..
"My preeeeccciiiiooooooouuuusss"
The legendary figures egging us onwards ho, on the beginning of our Silk Road adventure.

More on Xiahe ...

2007-04-20T01:50:00.000+08:00

Xiahe : the Magical Sangke/Gangjia Grasslands

2007-04-20T01:39:00.000+08:00

Labrang Monastery in Xiahe with innocent monks

2007-04-20T01:32:00.000+08:00

Tibetan Cuisine in Xiahe

2007-04-20T01:26:00.000+08:00

Xiahe : A Tibetan Village in Gansu Province

2007-04-20T01:10:00.000+08:00

Day 4 : Xian sightseeing + night train to Lanzhou

2007-04-18T16:37:00.000+08:00

Day 3 : Sianess in Xian

2007-04-18T12:59:00.000+08:00

Day 1-2 Singapore-Kuala Lumpur-Shanghai Pudong

2007-04-18T07:11:00.000+08:00

Well the silk road adventure begins hereforth... after a few days of hectic Paediatrics clinical examinations and the vivas, i cl gh tr finally boarded the malaysia airines flight that will bring us to shanghai with a transfer at kuala lumpur. flight was pretty uneventful except for the fact we met wendy, minghui and zhentang at singapore changi (they were connecting to london..), and guanhao was so distracted that he followed wendy to the london-bound gate. the shanghai flight was pretty uneventful. we were of course stuck in the middle 5 seats, much to my chagrin.. the much-talked about malaysia airlines' cabin service wasn't at all outstanding... the china-based stewardesses aren't exactly friendly but she lightened up after seeing that we were all young and fluent in mandarin. watched "A Night at the Museum" on the PTV, and felt my brain cells degenerate slightly..

touching down at pudong international airport.. sailing through a pretty slow but fairly ok immigration/customs, we took the super fast maglev train that would bring us within 8 minutes to the city centre longyang metro station. it was a pretty fast train but nothing really tHAt special.. anyhow we got onto a metro that brought us to henan road station (nanjing road east).. here's when i really got a rude reminder of the type of personalities china has to offer ... one rude ass just simply butted in between the queue to purchase metro tickets.. god , and to think shenzhen was the last of that kind of experience..

my experience of shanghai wasn't at all positive.. shanghai is basically divided into the newer pudong (dong as in east , pu as in the huangpu river ) and the older, somewhat more rustic pussy er.. i mean puxi. while pudong was all cosmopolitan and all, shanghai was essentially just another city landscape fortified with rude and inconsiderate individuals and one hell of a traffic situation. the air was polluted, and the lack of real tourist attractions besides the crazy Bund sightseeing tunnel (where the only highlight was seeing funeral dolls wave at us amidst glitzy lights) and the overrated jinmao tower (where we only got to see a huge cloud of ash over the city no thanks to the billion of shanghainese smokers).. the cruise along the huangpu jiang was just another ripoff.. you probably can't see much except for ships/tankers which is akin to a cruise along tanjong pagar psa harbour.. the day just ended up so tiring and exhausting coz' we endeavoured to walk from place to place, but after reaffiriming from lonely planet ( I so LOVE that book!) that walking in shanghai is a total nightmare, we decided that the cab was a much better option .. it was so cheap anyway.. we soon learnt of services like the 114 telephone service through which we can seek advice for almost any matter under the sun i.e. train tickets, number of your favourite condom dealer etc...
the food was cheap and pretty good , however the flavour tended to be overpowering at times.. stuff like duck's tongue, duck's chin, kidney brewed with essence of urea... cl didn't seem too happy about our eclectic choice of meals that night, while tr was munching away on the duck's chin like nobody's business.

5 Years of hard work finally comes to an end...

2007-04-18T06:48:00.000+08:00

yeap 5 years of long hard work has paid off, and i managed to graduate with MBBS honours.. although i was a little disappointed with my surgery grade.. :-( oh well lesson is don't keep your expectations too high, especially since my surgery wasn't that good to begin with :-P ( oh gosh horrible nightmares of PC wong throwing that laparoscope which i said was a hysteroscope during the viva .. )

that said, couldn't have done this without the help of all my friends, both in and out of medicine and their constant encouragement of course, parents for their fullest support and of course seniors like dr. tay tunn ren, dr. kenneth tan, dr tammy moey and all the HOs/MOs who have helped me along the well. really big thanks to them man.. definitely DEFINITELy must thank doctors like dr. tan thai lian , dr. koh nien yue, dr. lee kim en, dr. loh ngai kun, dr lee sze haur, dr. constance lo, and my surgery private tutor dr. chan cy for inspiring me all these years..

therein begins a new chapter of my life !

Medicine Long Case disaster..

2007-03-17T16:55:00.000+08:00

Pretty much sums up the whole thing. Medicine Long Case was a complete death-trap. And I fell right straight to the very bottom. :-(

Medicine Paper 2A

2007-03-06T13:41:00.000+08:00

Okay the paper was very broad, very rushed like (&()*())(_^_* and I got my percentage of Beta Thal carriers wrong.. i remembered the beta-thal carrier rate as the HbE percentage rate .. SIGH i dunno WHY i keep encountering beta-thal and HbE .. first it killed me in Obstetrics clinicals and now this... i must have ruptured someone's spleen in my previous life. *((_*()_*_)()_(++_)++*(_*()_()_()()_(

Medicine Paper 3

2007-03-02T22:51:00.000+08:00

Today's paper was quite ok .. i dun really like those shocking revelations like "appendicitis becomes meningitis becomes SIADH" or "infectious mononucleosis becomes Guillain Barre becomes reactive arthritis" experienced in Medicine Paper 2B. But all in all, both papers were very manageable and nothing shocking.. i wonder if that means we will be in for a shock for the subsequent papers and clinicals... all the Charcot-Marie-Tooths, Lawrence-Moons, Fanconis, Alagilles and Holt-Orams start emerging from their hiding places ... shudder* don't remind me of my HbE in Pregnancy case during my Obstetrics exam.. it was so unfair.

Anyway my classmates are really great.. everyone helped contribute some answers and questions so we can compile a set of beautiful questions for our juniors. hey i think our compilation looks so much better than the previous years lor... got proper heading, some pictures, and quite complete so more. Hah!

Onwards ho!

Medicine Paper 2B

2007-03-01T16:15:00.000+08:00

Ok lor.. the paper was quite straightforward ( except maybe the paeds questions which tended to be a little funky just like the setters ).. although it got pretty nerve-wracking with that timer ticking away, and the waiting and all that... i tend to feel like peeing during exams , but that feeling goes away once i am doing the paper itself..

GOD.. there are like a gazillion more papers to go.. save me.

Day 0 of the MBBS

2007-02-28T21:21:00.000+08:00

Alriteyz everybody.. it's my first paper (Paper 2B Modified Essay Questions) tomorrow.. it's impossible to finish reading through everything but i have to give it my best shot...

Counting down to last day of exam on 24th March 2007 ... hope i will still be alive then ..

My life as a medical student draws to an end..

2007-02-11T22:06:00.000+08:00

The situation is getting from bad to dismal ... i have to cover Medicine, Paediatrics, General Surgery, Orthopaedics and Ob and Gyn plus Psychiatry and bits of Ophthalmo in 3 WEEKS. Please please send some divine help ...

Anyhow i guess it has been a long hard 5 years of medical school, and it has definitely been an eye-opener for me ... there are probably a lot of different kinds of medical students out there, and that probably translates into an eclectic mix of doctors of various personalities..

Firstly, we have students who value stale and cheap leftover durian puffs in hospital conference rooms...

Secondly, we have students who value the importance of good geriatric care programmes..
Thirdly, we have students who know how to bend it like a geisha to get what they need..
Fourthly, we have students who always know the good value of free outgoing phone calls..

Last but not least, we have students who always know how to keep abreast of current medical affairs..

Selling my soul to NHG..

2007-02-06T20:47:00.000+08:00

After being so touched that the NHG admin officer went all out to get free parking coupons for me (hey AH parking coupons are worth their weight in gold because they are usually guarded by a lady Sauron in baju kurung), and that he personally brought a packet of food for me to my chair during Saturday's revision lecture...

I got out my liquid paper and shifted down all my Singhealth choices lower down my priority scale in my HO application scale. I feel a bit bad coz I did have a free dinner at Mount Faber and a free movie at the expense of Singhealth.. but whenever i think of Singhealth, i think of SGH .. and SGH just feels like a very cold and distant place to me. Although SIP there wasn't too bad, but it just didn't feel right.. the doctors there felt very distant. It's like SGH is Isengard while TTSH is the Shire for me ... moreover, i am sick of eating mee hoon with egg at SGH houseman canteen...

Something in me is frightened of going into NUH Paeds with all its reputation to humiliate anyone who dares not know the 10 signs of Alagille's syndrome and the enzymes of the Kreb's cycle. Then again a part of me wants to push and abuse myself in NUH Paeds.. knowing that I will be threatened/slammed/mutiliated during the grand ward rounds ...

Anyway, I have sealed my fate and officially submitted my forms to Medical Manpower today.

Gosh..

2007-01-23T20:54:00.000+08:00

I really have a message for two of my "good" colleagues:

GET OFF YOUR MORAL HIGH HORSE

I almost puked when the Vice-Dean asked me to decide what "tokens of appreciation" are suitable for them. In retrospect, two fully-sized hot-air balloons for them to inflate , sufficient for Richard Branson to spin around the universe, would be rightfully appropriate.

Going to the Silk Road!

2007-01-21T11:51:00.000+08:00

Sigh my SGH medicine posting has come and gone by ... well yeah apart from the grilling sessions by a certain crater-faced medical oncologist, it was fairly pleasant and the end-of-posting test went quite well, much better than those experienced in O&G and Ortho(shudders)

I am still very much undecided as to my choice of HO posting ... SGH is familiar ground but I don't particularly like the working environment v.s. TTSH -- probably I was bred in the cosy and gentle environment of Geriatric Medicine of TTSH, which gave me a superb impression of the doctors and their mild-mannered ways. My initial impression of SGH was from its surgical side, where I witnessed surgeons shouting at students right in front of patients in the clinic rooms. But oh oh caveat .. Prof London Ooi is such a nice guy.. can't generalise i guess=) Anyhow, I just hope that the MBBS will sail past smoothly (although i do know that's wishful thinking based on previous exams' experience) and I can go to the Silk Road to seek nirvana =)

My first time flying Malaysia Airlines long-haul besides the usual Singapore-Kuala Lumpur rigmarole every Chinese New Year/Qing Ming... it was the next best and cheapest option besides Royal Brunei and (urgh)China Eastern Airlines, and reviews of MAS have been raving..

Updates for the past 1 month ?

2006-12-10T01:00:00.000+08:00

The MBBS is drawing really close.. my study table is in this complete mess .. i do not know where or when to begin ... i guess it will be all over in just 3 months' time..

now in case you guys didn't know.. my old computer was a victim of a huge thunderstorm that struck my entire CPU/Mobo , my brother laser printer and my motorola modem. since my computer is somewhat like a dialysis machine to me, i trooped down to fuwell to get a new rig using some of my old parts :
My new rig :
Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 w Gigabyte 965P DS3 ( 3 "S"es stand for speed,stability,silence)
NVidia Geforce 7900 GS (no point getting such a exp GFX card larh.. last time got that blardee ATI radeon 9800xt at nearly 800 bucks and gave me nothing but display problems.. )
1 GB DDR2 667 ram - (wah lau cost me a bomb.. bought it at the time of the peak ram price... ram prices are as unpredictable as cao cao's hormones)

Oops what is this ? OH Starhub offered me a free laptop (added 329 to upgrade to a core 2 duo system) with the catch of having to upgrade to MaxOffline 12000 at a price of 71bucks per month for TWENTY-EIGHT months. oh well fools like me always fall for such gimmicks ..

A Tribute to the Great Lee K.E.

2006-12-10T00:44:00.000+08:00

My life-saviour in neurology ... a tribute to the most dedicated tutor i have seen.. all hail the great , dr lee k.e. .. i shall never forget you man for resuscitating my neuro ..

Summary of Surgery SIP

2006-12-09T21:49:00.000+08:00

WHEW that was a long time since i last posted. all i can say is that during the one month + , i effectively wasted a month of my youth doing this damned programme termed the surgery sip. obviously a foul and lame "keep up with the jones" attempt to equalise the importance of surgery with medicine.. well all i can say is that if you want to institute a programme, you do it whole-heartedly rather than throw 3 CGs at random into any hospital with a surgical department in singapore, and expect the art of being a surgical HO to slowly diffuse into us somehow. it really shows how LAZY the surgery dept of "the centre of excellence" is, v.s. the dept of medicine whom i recognise as really trying to revolutionise the current medical education system.

i mean the very fact the medicine sip programme was rather well-conducted and enforced, plus the changes in the medicine exam format reflect that the dept of medicine is really out to provide a better system for us. granted it may not please every one of us , but you certainly know that they are trying. the surgery SIP programme itself is just a surrogate marker of the profound laziness and slothiness of the dept.

all i can summarise of surgery sip at TTSH is:
scramble from bed to bed
(i) find case notes
(ii) find temperature chart
(iii) find IMR

(i) usually no problem, (ii) usually in the vicinity, (iii) can be miles away in the pharmacy or in the toilet or even in the ceiling .. i never manage to find it by myself and i strongly suspect the nurses sequester the IMRs in the storeroom of each ward to slow down the wardrounds.

Must keep a stack of (i) Radiological request forms (ii) Endoscopy request forms such that you can whip out a form as soon as your consultant says "we should repeat a..." .. or "the tummy looks distended .. Mr. Lim! pang sai pang bue chut ah??! Let's do a ..."

If you are in the Vascular team, (a la diabetic foots galore), must keep stacks of dressing sets on hand and learn to dress a diabetic foot like a chee ba0 kai.

No matter wat must must make sure you are writing for the correct patient! I have written on the wrong case-file once in the hurry of things .. so paiseh!! (Aiyarh but in the end all of the POD patients look the same, feel the same , (diabetic foot)smell the same ..)

Curtain drawing is also an acquired skill.. there are two curtains in TTSH.. the one where you just pull straight across is no-brainer. the one where you need to pull straight and then horizontally left/right requires you delicately do it such that you don't drag the curtain over the hair/bodies of the consultants/registrars ...

The Grudge 2

2006-11-02T22:46:00.000+08:00

It's like just 4 months to the finals, and i am starting to see the darker side of our fellow classmates slowly creep out like Kayako under the King Coil mattress (or Sadako from the sembawang hotsprings for that matter)... shall not elaborate further.
thank heavens my CG isn't like this.

Shocking!!

2006-10-23T22:36:00.000+08:00

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.

2006-10-23T22:21:00.000+08:00

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!

2006-10-21T00:46:00.000+08:00

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 !!

2006-10-20T23:22:00.000+08:00

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

2006-10-15T22:29:00.000+08:00

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 ...

2006-10-10T17:58:00.000+08:00

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..

2006-10-08T17:10:00.000+08:00

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

2006-10-01T23:48:00.000+08:00

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...

2006-10-01T23:41:00.000+08:00

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

Happy Birthday to Klunton~

2006-09-29T23:13:00.000+08:00

After a terrifying lunch of bah kut teh at Balestier with the 3 stooges (where tea-bags were flung at our faces and where i was forced to wash 10 Cyclospora/Isospora-laden tea-cups and pay 10 over bucks for cyanide-laden tea-coloured urine and you zha kueythat tasted like soggy Triumph panties , i went home to rest while gooanhao meditated in school.

in the evening, gh , klinton met up again to celebrate klinton's 23rd birthday. after finding out our dear birthday boy doesn't take too well to seafood (soooo unlike henry and val sigh), we bypassed our initial option of pasir panjang see hum for a classier option of Jack's Place.

Ok larh Jack's alright though I always felt the set lunches were more worth it. i always had very fond memories of jack's coz' we always had rather top-notch steaks there since young. maybe coz i was full from the bah kut lunch, but i felt the steak was so tough despite being made to medium-rare. dunno lehz but the standard of the steaks seemed to have plunged lower than jessica simpson's IQ score.

At Island Cremery where i was giving the teh tarik ice-cream a go ... not bad larh, tr got taste (caveat: i still say the cempedak goreng pisang at Old Airport Rd is terrible - vouched by val as well :-P)

goonhao trying to stick his cone into klinton's oral orifice...:P

yay... aiyarh economic crisis so we bought the Baked Alaska.. the staff quite nice larh , turned off the fan so we could light up the candle (very pantang if the candle blow out for reasons other than the bdae boy's breath - like Elton John's Candle in the Wind for Princess Diana).

AnYway, klinton seemed very happy and we were all quite happy that we got to gossip so much hehehe. thanks for the Jack's Place treat klinton, but you shouldn't have larhzzz ~~ paiseh:)

sighz wonder when we will get to get together like this in this miserable final year of medicine :-( Clinton is rite, i should have listened to my instincts and became a flight attendant for JAL and put my Japanese to better use.

LyCheeB Martini

2006-09-27T21:39:00.000+08:00

After CDC lecture at Daily Scoop ...

damn sian .. no butterscotch again.

A grim reminder..

2006-09-26T21:05:00.000+08:00

OMG i saw a male actor (well ex-celebrity i guess)at cdc today. he looked like a carcass of his former self - pale, cachexic, dishevelled. he was there with his boyfriend or partner i guess. gone were the days when he was still a fresh face in star search and pretty popular in supporting roles acting aside a very much younger (and much less scandalous: no thank you, we don't swallow)zoe tay in those teeny-boppish channel 8 dramas.

a grim reminder to some of ya to really think thrice or quadruplice before your gonadocerebral reflex overrules your higher centres.

The old ghost of 2SO3H RJC

2006-09-25T22:48:00.000+08:00

Okie this 2 weeks are goin' to be dreadful .. first we have to study for the notorious ID posting test on friday PLUS a bonus PAEDS OSCE session on saturday. SIGH when this kind of situation arises, looks like the old ghost of JC2SO3H-RJC will have to be resurrected. Now where did i put that coffin key ...

Ahhh yess.. good friends like WAIPENG will remember when i took an unofficial 2 WEEK leave in the midst of the JC2 prelim period due to a severe bout of "malaria (read: bad air)". it turned out a bit ugly when my CT in charge ms eva hor had to call me up and sort of threaten to call my parents on me. sighz.. but not fair lorz i never took a SINGLE blue slip in mi life while some other girls in my class would have multiple attacks of headaches in a single WEEK lorz. I am surprised noone had died of a brain tumour yet if their complaints were realli genuine :PPP

One thing i dun like about CDC is that it is such open-grounds with not much trees that ppl can see you zao-ing very easily. I miss those dark corners and big white pillars of RJC .. where my disappearance could be as subtle as prof. quak sh's humour:PP

A good way to end a week!

2006-09-24T01:55:00.000+08:00

Oh no i am beginning to feel that i am neglecting this blog with such a long gap between my posts. But bo pianz lor... doing a revision posting at NUH paeds is like debating about a case of nephrotic syndrome with Prof Yap HK i.e. a LOSING battle... the patients are overclerked, the tutorial groups are huge and there is a stingy assignment of tutors. Well i can go on bitchin' abt it for ages, but i guess it will come to naught. So i shall shut~

Anyway there were many good things that happened:

This is how i marked the end of paeds, with a generous buffet at marina mandarin: the sashimi is freshly sliced (i so dig the swordfish! -the pale coloured one) and the oysters are freshly shucked in front of ya (of course there are dumb blonde wives of IMF delegates who simply run off with an entire plate of unshucked oysters). There were some unusual offerings like suckling pig and ginseng soup (as in actual ginseng with the man-looking root and all!)

Again a BIG THANKS to CT for his discount card that allows me to get this buffet for
just 33 dollars~ for the ambience and offerings, it's a steal compared to most lower-scale buffets in town like Dragon Gate and etc.

Sad thing to note is that I am getting an intolerance to oysters -- it's my number 1 love but i seem to be getting a very strange greenish-yellow diarrhea from it. and it's quite unstoppable unless i take charcoal. plenty of peri-anal excoriations for me that night since my mum always buys those "No Frills" toilet paper from NTUC. sigh.

2. My DVD writer FINALLY works, and i won't have to start scurrying to friends' houses to burn stuff. thank god for nero express , and of course the website from which i downloaded it from hehe.

14th September 2006 : A day that will live in infamy

2006-09-16T20:36:00.000+08:00

There are seldom times where I break down: the only times when I broke down was when my parents get into fights or some crisis in my family.

But i would never imagine that a guy in my Medicine yr 5 batch would be able to bring me down with just his nasty and caustic words alone.
It started when I was conducting this feedback session about the class' anxieties about the MBBS exam. It was done in a rushed and hurried manner I must say:- the earlier CTS session had overran by half an hour!! and i lost my 15 minutes pocket of time. but lan lan , prof t. was pushing for me to get it done asap..

Nevertheless i did manage to get 10 over opinions from the class about the issue. I thought it was not too bad considering we only had 10 minutes. When I ended the session on the insistence of this grouchy prof from NUH conducting the electives symposium, YC just strutted down and told me in the face "That was a TOTAL waste of time".

I was like aghast with shock. Anyhow I later shot him an email that he can choose to contact Prof. T if he wishes to clarify the issue. He replied with a fiery email filled with harshy-worded comments and personal attacks stating that i had "demanded" feedback from a resistant class when they had no experience whatsoever about the MBBS et al. It was apparent to me that he did not understand what I had set out to do, and it was precisely Prof. T's intention to get feedback BEFORE the actual exam format was being released. Prof T was nice enough to reply YC with an email to defend me.

Later, when YC challenged me to a verbal war over the phone, he said he had already spoken to Prof. T and had no problems with my content, but was critical of my style. He said that sitting in the audience, he said I was "patronising", "dismissive of the class' comments", "presenting a biased, skewed view of what Prof. T had originally intended for me to deliver. In addition, he also said I was "using Prof. T's name to crush him" because I "didn't want my authority to be questioned". To top me off, at the end of the 20 hateful and hurting conversation on the phone, he had to say he "understands perfectly what i am saying, but i DON't understand a word what he's saying". He's right - amidst all the personal attacks and harsh words, I couldn't understand what his aim was. He first started off firing at my content in the email, and later changed his tone over the phone and said he was now vehemently against the style in which I presented the feedback session.

He even said this really hateful statement: "Normally, they say don't shoot the messenger, blame the content. But yesterday i felt the messenger (i.e. me) should be shot." I was like aghast.. how can a person , a human being be so hateful ? I just broke down after that .. i think i cried for like half an hour and lamented my feelings to several of my friends. I also found out that he had done similar antics to the previous class reps, and some told me that this wasn't going to be the first or last time he will do this to me.

I was so upset and miserable that I just went to bed and slept through the entire friday evening. missing my shows and etc. I just never understood how a person can be so hateful, when i am only his peer , a classmate. i just feel i dun deserve this when me and guanhao dun get aNYthing out of typing out long-winded emails , and organising such feedback sessions esp in my final year. while others did warn me about his arrogance and condescending ways, i never realised i would get so affected by just his words alone.

Anyway a big shout to TR , GH , joline , clinton and choonta for reassuring me and consoling me. it was just such a horrible day.

A well-spent (?) recess

2006-09-07T23:06:00.000+08:00

Well i guess this recess was a well-earnt break from the dreariness of SIP.. but staying at home and watching re-runs of B- horror flicks on HBO/Cinemax/Star Movies isn't exactly the best way to spend it i guess..

Watched . Thought that Miranda Priestly was rather over-hyped as a uber-boss.. i have DEFInitely met worse characters than that especially back in my alma mater secondary school. Just that the ones I met don't dump mink coats and Ferragamo accessories on desks, but stacks of comprehension worksheets. Lurrve the slutty humour though, especially the montage of scenes where Andy sashays down NY 7th Avenue in a eye-boggling spin of outfits. I really do miss new york city , especially with this new academic year proving dreary and tiring.

I can't believe on the other hand that I spent HALF a day reading through the LiveJournals of some local theatre actor/model Edric (always featured in our local ads). I say, the social circle of these ppl in theatre is just eNormous, and their daily exploits is filled with so much vibrance and glamour. One minute they can be jet-setting to India for a shoot, a 3 day sojourn to Bangkok, and their incredible network of friends have really eclectic tastes/habits too as reflected by their own LJs. From SQ stewards to models to what-have-you.. i certainly was really in awe reading about their various exploits (i won't elaborate).

Which brings me back to reality that in Medicine, especially as a house officer, the whole world out there, is just like literally shut off. Your life just runs like a mechanical Soviet-era clockwork: wake,hospital duties,eat(+/-),sleep. Sure a lot of ppl would treasure this predictability and stability of a career, but it always awes me to see what glamorous and chic lifestyles the ppl lead in the other professions (especially of the artsy-fartsy kind). I definitely know some of the stuff that these guys do would be a strict NO-NO in our medical circle, so it's kind of like a forbidden fruit thing i guess. Nice to look, maybe can touch but cannot eat. Sigh.

My 2 ringgits' worth on SIP

2006-08-30T21:39:00.000+08:00

All in all, SIP has sparked off a series of discussive emails from the class - i frankly never have seen the class this strongly opinionated. Well as usual we get the usual emails with lofty ideals - the kind you read and wonder whether the composer has ever experienced life back down on earth. well thankfully for most of us humans, the emails were very real -- no altruistic or idealistic borderline bull, but just a very sincere , balanced opinion on SIP.

While I did enjoy the rush of excitement of carrying out my own duties during SIP, and being respected as a member of the team, that feeling has long died out and the bothersome worry of the MBBS has started to trickle in. After all, SIP was chiefly meant as a "orientation to HO" life, and certainly we can't learn everything a HO is required to know within these 6 weeks. The lack of a MCR number often makes us disadvantaged when performing certain duties with medico-legal implications -- like inking out prescriptions and accompanying DIL patients. It's like this is meant to be a "junior HO" thingy but we definitely can't experience the "full thing" as yet.

As such, it's meant to be a taste of HO life and to prep us physically and mentally for the life that beckons next year. But of all things, because of the demands of the curriculum, I question the need to have 6 weeks of Medicine SIP PLUS 4 weeks of Surgery SIP, while cramming the revision periods of Orthopedics and Paediatrics into 2 short weeks. Emergency medicine is mentioned again and again as a critical aspect of Medicine, and yet it's allocated just 2 weeks.

I think ppl should just wake up to the idea that lengthening postings doesn't necessarily increase your knowledge or exposure proportionately. Take Psycho Medicine - it's a dreary horrid 4 week 3rd year posting + a even more terrifyingly weary 2 week 5th year posting. I cannot deny PsychoMed is a very important discipline but what could have been done in 3 weeks has been unnecessarily stretched to 6 weeks. I think they should taken a leaf from O&G's book and realise that a revision M5 posting isn't always necessary depending on the context. .. Unless there's a lot of pride/ego in exerting the importance of one's own specialty.

Granted, life isn't just about academia but let us get 2 feet flat on the ground. YOU need a license to practise "practical medicine aka HOship and above", and the only way to do it is to pass your MBBS competently. Since the MBBS is still being entrenched in our old British colonial roots, there's still a lot of rote-learning and hypocritical examination drills that have to be drummed into us a la "I would like to examine for this and that to rule out".

These kinda examination drills aren't often experienced in practical medicine, because it's tedious, time-consuming and often unnecessary with hi-tech radiological equipment. It's ideal to continue being thorough during HOship, but this drive often falters under the pressure of time.

Oh well just my two ringgit's worth opinion on this.

An awful week ...

2006-08-24T21:40:00.000+08:00

This was just a BAD week.

(i) i got told off by one nurse just because i accidentally mistook her for a very senior nurse and called her 'auntie'.

(ii) Isn't it ridiculous that some patients (and their relatives) expect the entire world to spin around their whims and fancies? Isn't it ridiculously inconsiderate that you demand your relative receive dialysis at a public hospital following the exact time-slot as in a private dialysis centre? And it's not as if they back down on repeated bouts of explanation that there are probably other patients who need dialysis more so than the patient does, and waiting a few hours more will not make any difference. it's so sad that in singapore, the most unreasonable or the one who makes the most noise gets the upper hand, while those quiet/silent/relenting ones just get the shorter end of the stick.

(iii) the minister's address was just full of fluff , worse than fann wong's interview with BBC. and the worst thing was that everyone was just patronising him. goodness.

SIP boredom

2006-08-20T21:23:00.000+08:00

the new SIP rotation to endocrine simply sucks. there are 4 MOs , 1 HO , 2 registrar and 1 consultant + 4 SIP students = 12 people rounding at any one time. that's a ridiculous figure, and it's far far from the usual SIP student-HO-MO-registrar-consultant team i am so used to in Resp. It is that kind of time when you feel you are sometimes just wasting your time, but you have no choice but to stay. I seriously feel 6 weeks of SIP is way over the top when 4 weeks was suffice -- no doubt it provides students a very good learning experience, but i believe a 4 week intro was more than suffice to initiate us. moreover, it's not as if as SIP interns get to see everything a HO does -- because we are still unlicensed, we still don't get to see the full picture: we don't prescribe, we aren't allowed to run our own ABGs etc

anyway good food awaits.. had a bursting good meal at Orient Ocean restaurant at Miramar Hotel, where the buffet was a tad cheaper than Dragon Gate. unfortunately there's a point at which when you overeat till your overdistended stomach presses on your diaphragm and makes you feel breathless. and that's needless to say after plates of baked crab, soft shell crab, crispy duck, thai jelly-fish, seabasses, "soon hock" and 3 plates of mango pudding, gui ling gao and sago and etc etc.. i was nearly crawling my way into kossie's car like christy chung on aphrodisiacs.

sunday was horrid. boring and pointless ward-round in the morning, with the usual boring miserly changes to be done. at least we ate in peach garden at thomson plaza (very exp !!! but the wasabi prawns was reallly worth its status as the signature dish). topped it off with island cremery..(inferior to daily scoop.. mud pie, eskimo pie and baked alaska so-so.. i felt baked alaska was slightly better than the others)

drats.. monday blues sinking in .. the usual 12-person ward round beckons again tomorrow.. the word meaningless knows no boundaries.

A change of life..

2006-08-16T22:05:00.000+08:00

Whenever I get lost, especially in this new endocrine ward, i reminsce about annie lennox's >Little Bird Me thinks the endocrine team is way too big for SIP students, but we'll see how the next 3 weeks pass.

I wish that I could be that bird
And fly away from here
I wish I had the wings to fly away from here, yeah.
But Mamma I feel so low
Mamma where do I go?
Mamma what do I know?
Mamma we reap what we sow
They always said that you knew best
But this little bird's fallen out of that nest now

Last week's dim sum at Min Jiang at ACJC rochester park was semi-exquisite dining, above average quality of dim sum and reasonable prices. Kossie dented his car there doh~!!

Hell had no fury like a woman scorned

2006-08-10T22:45:00.000+08:00

Wah i tell you. today was an affirmation why i would never wanna enter a relationship with a woman anytime soon.

My registrar is this petite , sweet looking pretty dainty lady. But today was just a wayyyyy bad day for her.. there's this patient who's medically resolved but just awaiting placement in AMKCH. obviously the latter has taken a few years to correspond with us, and in SGH, every single bed is worth its weight in gold.. even platinum. Zero tolerance for patients who overstay their 3-5 day maximum stay.

It first started with her throwing barbs at the nurse over the phone in AMKCH. Next, she brusquely demanded to look at the case-file of the patient. Next, 2 rounds of interrogations: first directed at our hapless MO who was new to the team, and subsequently HO who was fibrillating like an atrium in a thyroid storm. To my horror, marilyn overheard my name being mentioned as one of the ppl who called up AMKCH to negotiate. (YEAK)

i find it ridiculous contextually even in this age of equality that a woman can make 3 overgrown men ( especially our sumo king HO ) fibrillate like tofu in a Kushinbo buffet-plate. i dunno larh but i find it very difficult to handle the mood swings of some women.. the worst thing about some women is that when they're gloomed, they will make the wHOLE world gloomed with her.

Yummy queen..

2006-08-10T22:31:00.000+08:00

Gosh neglected this blog for a week now.. can't blame larh all the long working hours and the calls.. things have definitely eased up a bit with the new consultant(s) .. not so many Cks,aldolases and gazillion changes to be done for just a single complaint of muscle ache. Call on pre-National Day with Tunn was quite well-spread out... quite a even flow of cases throughout the night.. even got some time to spread my legs out on the MO room to get some 20 minutes of shut-eye in the ward 45 MO room. Cases-wise, i am just getting the impression that the A&E physicians are just admitting every single case of abdominal pain just to cover their own asses.

Well significant non-medical events... for once Kossie drove!! thank god, i need a break from the stinky traffic. went out first for indian rojak at Middle Road .. really small eatery snuck between buildings, but the prawns were realli grilled to perfection that you can crunch on them whole like those crazy japanese geishas on Japan Hour. next stop was to this Dragon City restaurant at Harbourfront on xhua's excellent recommendation, where they had this fAntastic spread of seafood and 1000 other items at a-la-carte buffet style. I was quite impressed by the black pepper crab and the way they do the fish like back in KL. lots of garlic ... but like most buffets, they add some kind of starchy powder to the soft shell crabs dishes to make us feel fluid-overloaded and thus lose appetite. looks like we have to use kossie's new vacuum cleaner to do a manual evac on ourselves before we use it on suin's unwanted lovechild.

somehow i didn't feel too good larh even b4 the buffet.. i was bleeding quite bad down there when i went to the toilet one too many times.. sometimes i wonder if these toilets recycle glass shards as toilet paper..

SGH SIP continues on and on..

2006-08-02T22:24:00.000+08:00

OK week 1 passed.. sort of settled into the pretty stressful team environment. I guess the only way you can survive in this kinda stressful environment is to be steady and assert your competency, which i am struggling to do.. Saturday was like a normal day except we get to go off earlier at 1pm after finishing the changes.

Sunday was call day for me , where I was posted to Renal ward. Fwah.. some of the veins are finer than a thread but i find that giving them a hot milo drink or taking bloods after lunch has better yield. Of course i usually try my luck before lunch, and if cannot after 1 poke, i will flash them a "i'll be back..." smile much to their chagrin.. i generally find the renal patients more tolerant to the pain larh though.. probably because the dialysis needles aren't any smaller.

whatsmore, some of the team physicians demand for massive quantities of blood (like 3 culture bottles and tubes of every colour of the rainbow).. pls lor the renal patients usually have one arm gone to an AVF , the other arm veins are usually iffy.. leg veins look like they can only support enough for a hypocount reading. my HO was only too glad to suggest a femoral ABG for the 25ml needed.

the new consultant for my team is much more relaxed and less gungho about putting 10001 changes during rounds, which means much less to do. the registrar is given a lot more freehand to manage the patients in a sense coz' his rounds are quite perfunctory. Well today was a bad day. my only change was doing a ABG for a patient in my cubicle. Bad mistake manz. She screamed so loud and dug her fingernails into my arm as i was barely inserting the needle into her wrist. What's this? Newton's 1st law.. when someone's in pain, he or she will inflict an equal and opposite pain on others..

Obviously i was too unnerved to get much blood from the elusive radial artery .. i never was very good with radial ABGs in the first place. what's more the patient put on this stinky Axe Brand medicated oil which triggered a massive rhinitis of mine. it was especially bad since all the oil vapours were re-circulating in the enclosed space within the drawn curtains around her bed. my eyes were tearing and my nose running as i was doing my last few changes like updating patient's familes over the phone. there's this friendly elective student from australia who noticed i had a runny nose , and offered me this super potent Australian flu tablets (which contained a cocktail of decongestants). Took one tablet .. tasted like rotten semen , and i felt a bit better.

Bad mistake #2: i started feeling really really woozy driving back along the shitty traffic-congested AYE (chlorpheniramine in those tablets plus the fact i hadn't much sleep for the past 7 days). As I neared my exit from AYE, i nearly wanted to peng san liaoz .. when i finally reached home, I CRASHED.

Woke up and screamed. I was supposed to have watched this movie with Kossie and Xhua at 1930. Drats. This hospital life is really causing me to die a slow death...

End of Week 1 in SIP (not quite)

2006-07-29T20:04:00.000+08:00

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...

2006-07-25T18:29:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-23T22:56:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-23T22:42:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-20T22:36:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-18T22:13:00.000+08:00

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!

2006-07-17T22:46:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-16T21:22:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-15T17:54:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-11T22:36:00.000+08:00

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 ...

2006-07-10T20:10:00.000+08:00

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!

2006-07-09T16:52:00.000+08:00

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!!

2006-07-06T19:29:00.000+08:00

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

At the departure hall at Changi Airport

2006-04-06T23:23:00.000+08:00

Yes , this week has gone really well for me I suppose : the Patho viva was like the smoothest interview I have done , and I can shamelessly say they were quite impressed by my limited knowledge. ( Thanks lord I knew all the intricacies of crescenteric GN and mycobacteria ).

I packed up my stuff these 2 days , and headed for the airport. The Emirates counters were almost empty although it's like less than 2 hrs to departure. Weaving my way through the inconsiderate aunties who were blocking the entire airport departure hall at Row 1/2 while waiting for their Korean Air flight on a futile search for Bae Yong Jun. At the counter, I asked "can i have a labellll pls ? ( i was having a bit of an ulcer so i slurred my speech )

The girl at the counter : "HAH ? you want a mango ?"

I gave her a Finnair stewardess stare : "A LABEL." ( ouch the ulcer hurts )

Anyway , she was very very particular about my handcarry luggage , and said i was like 5 over kg over the limit , and said this restriction was particularly enforced for Sri Lankan flights. So she got me to open up my luggage and manually titrate out one by one ( my textbooks , my underwear , my toiletries ) till she got that "7 kg" she wanted. And her colleague was like cheering me on .. "GO For it ! Just 1 kg more .." GEEZ

Anyway , I looked around , and realised I am one of the only Chinese passengers on this late night to Colombo. YEEEK. God save me.

A Joyous Return from KL

2006-04-03T23:16:00.000+08:00

After a reallly really long weekend at Qing Ming at Bentong , yes , I had to sleep on the dusty mattress on the floor again , and arose at 2 am in the middle of the night bitten all over looking like a flea-bitten kidney from malignant hypertension. And of course having to wake up at 6 am for the visit to the graves of our ancestors .. there was this calm mist that swept over the graves on the hill , and the cool air was really refreshing somewhat despite the early timing. Sounds of firecrackers were like exploding through the early morning silence ... good heavens ... at first, i was really disturbed , but later i kinda liked them coz' they really added to the atmosphere.

Anyway , the nights in Malaysia were really sleepless coz' my naughty nephews and nieces were like virtually screaming my name every single minute to fix their Toy Story jigsaw puzzle ( which they promptly smashed into smithereens the minute I managed to solve the puzzle of Buzz's missing leg ) , to screams of helping them with their homework and toys and et al et al. I was like barely rested after Patho. so it was really quite disturbing..

On Monday, I decided to head back to Singapore to rest before my trip to Sri Lanka. It was on the bus back that i received good news from all you guys about my pathology distinction viva, which i swear is due to the divine intervention of my 'gong gong' from above. anyway, i was really touched by all my friends' efforts to congratulate me and inform me about the good news. Thanks CT , Lil , my beloved CG mates and more more !!!

Pathologic Disaster

2006-03-29T14:22:00.000+08:00

First , let me say this : Pathology was nothing short of a disaster. The MCQ was a rushed -*_*_)(_)*()__()*^*))*_*+ , and out-of-the-world questions only fit for an alien to answer. It was just an ultimate disaster , and the 30 mins limit with the booming invigilator's voice was more like a scene of 233 convicts filling in the last meal orders before death row. The essay questions were more manageable , but somewhat had this "odd" air swirling around it. I pray for a good outcome of this disaster.

Anyway, moodless as I am , I have a hell lot of errands to do :

(i) University Health Service : I am sooo pleased with the delightful staff there. They were like on the brink of closing , and at first told me i had to sign my immunisation forms at 1.30 pm after lunch hours. I of course gave me my well-trained pout ( and hey , i was really feeling a bit globally hypoxic-ischemic after the frightful paper ) , and the nurse was really nice. She came running after me a short while later , and said she would try to squeeze me in before they went for lunch. Dr Victor Loh was also very nice and got all the forms signed , and arranged for my vaccinations. The nurse giving the 2 jabs did it so painlessly and effortlessly .. i did remember my Hep A jab in Chinese High .. 8_*)(*_+_+ my arm was in rigor mortis for a week , and still no mercy from PE lessons..

(ii) Arrange for dental appointment : again receptionist very polite over the phone. Done.

(iii) Check on wait-list for my New York flight.

(iv) Confirm with Sri Lanka on my Colombo hotel / flights next week ...

(v) Buy a bag of ampicillin tablets and anti-gonococcal elixirs so I can enjoy my trip without cramps and Reiter's syndrome.

(vi) Get a new suitcase.

(vii) Get everything in place before Friday morning, when I need to rush to KL for Qing Ming this Sunday !!!

ARGHZZ...

Coming soon ...

2006-03-22T18:46:00.000+08:00

K.I.S.S. Me ....

Coming back to life this 29th March 2006 at 12 pm ! Divas to the dance floor !

Burning out ..

2006-03-12T23:23:00.000+08:00

Studying for patho is both mentally exhausting and zzzz.... I mean sometimes it's quite fun to see those beautiful pictures of pots and slides, but that 'sometimes' come rarely .. it's the first time i am expected to digest so much information for a single examination , both pots/slides and theory together in 2 days .. killing ..

Anyway , this is like a major recap of what I have done so far
(1) Patho .. patho .. patho ...zzzzz ... morphologies morphologies ..

(2) Went out with kossie to get his brand new Casio Z600 from Alan photo .. Haha i must have made so many purchases at Alan photo that the guys there instantly recognised me. The Casio Z600 is soooooooo nice ... makes me feel a bit tempted , but i must first to stick to my principles this year not be such a (i) spendthrift and (ii) that my newly-purchased F11 may not look as sleek , but sure beats the hell of it when it comes to night shots. As i was telling kossie , you win some and lose some , but the Casio Z600 sure offers excellent picture quality for such a ultra-compact camera. Heard there's even a slimmer ones like the Z60 which is thinner than a tampon !! Goodness , what will Mariah say ??

(3) Essentially , was pushed and pulled by SQ agents in KL and Singapore over whether I can connect on my current itinerary to New York , routing Colombo-Singapore-Kuala Lumpur-Singapore-New York JFK ( via Frankfurt ). I believed they were sincerely concerned about me missing my connection in Singapore when I do the turnaround at Kuala Lumpur , especially the nice agent Ivy Lim from SQ Johor Bahru office who called me early in the morning to advise me to re-time my inbound flight from Colombo. Looks like I have to disturb my agent Frieda from Emirates again , not to mention tolerate her creamy thick Hong Kong accent.

(4) Looked at some Samsonite luggage that I could bring to the States.. I don't know why I am following this race to get Samsonite when the luggage honestly doesn't really look that nice. But superficial me is going to get Samsonite all the same just for the brand ... Goodness , what will Valerie say .. it just proves her theory that I am just a branded bitch , buying branded goods with no substance. Who cares, I AM a branded bitch anyway haha. Aiyarh .. after all , a good luggage is something that I can keep for life .. then again ,this reasoning doesn't work with all the cameras I have purchased hehe.. :-P

(5) I purchased a set of 20 kg weights and a new barbell bar from Gallen sports .. Since I don't go out much these days , I can afford to make a bit more purchases.. sigh I don't understand why cast iron stuff like these ( ugly like anything ) must cost a whooping hundred over dollars for just 40 kg of black iron ?? Anyway , I am moving up my weights regime so these weights are sort of like necessities ... I am also amazed how I managed to carry the weights home , and later tricked my maid into carrying the weights , bluffing her that it were 'pizza boxes'. Hehe ..

A Day of Solo Cycling ..

2006-03-05T23:56:00.000+08:00

It was like a nice and sunny day today , and instead of watching the usual string of CSI episodes , I decided to pack my bike into my car and speed down to Changi Coast Road for a solo cycling session. I also wanted to get some nice views of aircraft movements in Changi on my new Fuji F11.

The weather was like superb for cycling -- the wind was strong and the breeze was ultimately refreshing. As I cycled through a forested area in the remote part of Changi Beach , there was this coolness in the air despite the heavy loads of sunshine pouring in through the trees.

I then cycled off the Changi Beach park , and onto the road ( my father is sure to nag at me for this ) .. My aim was to cycle straight down Changi Coast Road , parallel to the runway , right to the end of the runway and to the Tanah Merah ferry terminal. No big deal .. I have seen many cyclists cycling this stretch , though they look like they were those pro' kind , decked in all sorts of Star Wars droid-like gear. One thing that freaked me once about this place , was the occasional sight of joss-sticks along the road , when I was driving past this stretch. Thankfully I didn't see any ominous things.

There were a lot of ang mohs who were also cycling too , so I didn't feel too out of place cycling amidst the steam of heavy trucks and lorries speeding just inches away from me. Nevertheless , I wondered why cyclists cycled with the flow of traffic , when it seemed better that I cycle straight on against the flow of traffic. Maybe it is because rumour has it that at night , there were motorists who were freaked out when they spotted a faceless cyclist cycling past their cars. So maybe the logic has it that , if you don't have face, then don't bother showing it.

Of course being a cyclist has its pros. The police won't bug you about you stopping by the runway fence because it is understandable you may need to stop for a rest or a drink. Whereas those families with kids in tow , who came in their cars for a little outing to the airport , were quickly unceremoniously shoo-ed away by the police cars. Ahh .. but of course you must make sure you don't reveal that you have a camera ( phone cam included ) otherwise you can expect questions aplenty from Constable Mohd Izwan et al ..

Cycled at least 4 legs up and down the runway .. by the time I got back to the car,my legs felt really whacked out but surprisingly I felt pretty good . Sticky but good. At last, another activity to do during the weekend besides watching Inspector Nick Stokes acting pretty on CSI.

It's Good to be Back !!

2006-02-26T02:50:00.000+08:00

After a really long hiatus ( 4 months ) of not blogging , I must say that I have to start blogging with a veangence !!

The last 4 weeks of Paeds went ok .. as usual , like any other posting , the second half of the posting usually goes a lot faster because the learning curve is more or less plateau-ing off , and we spent less and less time in the wards , and following ppl like Grant Hao into the KK library ( i still never understood why he would faithfully wake up in the death of the morning just to go straight to the KK library without even stepping into the wards )

One of the biggest lows of this posting was getting a really bad throat and a flu, which I believed i got from Chui Ming while in KL. Yes , and I got the exact same version of her throat - totally hoarse and raspy. Usually my bad throats meant endless odynophagia but never a total loss of voice. This time , possibly because of Pei Ling's wonderful recommendation of oral prednisolone feat. diclofenac remix that caused whatever pathogen it was to erode into my vocal cords. Although it is always said that you should let your immunity ward off the infection slowly, all I can say is LABBISH ( a la Prof Yap HK ) -- I succumbed to my temptation to take antibiotics and finally after 1 week + of endless coughing and hoarseness, I popped my wonderful Amoxycillin. WONDERFUL -- my throat cleared within days, and all the phlegm stuck there ( resistant to acetylcysteine ) started pouring out like seminal fluids rushing out of a pubertal male at Carmen Elektra's henparty.

Other than that, KK Hospital was really run-of-the-mill kinda stuff .. nothing too academic like NUH , and the tutors were all nicey-lovely-nice. Of course I was lucky to be taught by the very nice and genial Prof Phua Kong Boo.

Another highlight of the posting was the two Japanese medical misfits , Tomoya aka "Yukiko" and Yoshi aka "Sakura Masako". They look like your average Japanese schoolboy with the hair somewhat like Lion King's. It was the first time that I heard that Japanese girls gave chocolates to guys on Valentine's Day , and guys would have to reciprocate by giving their bodies to the girls. Of course, if you know me well enough, I of course asked how many times "Yukiko" received chocolates. I shall not specify their responses, but goodness all I can say is that Japanese guys definitely keep their equipment well-greased. The only thing I was disgusted with "yukiko" was his weakness for Ah Nao -- it was so freaking obvious that his eyes were all over her , and when he got hold of her name tag , he was virtually smelling it like that creepy Willard guy smelling hair in Charlie's Angels. Other than that , they were very usual Japanese guys -- nothing too foreign for me coz' I have had played host to Japanese ppl many times.

Some pictures from Chinese New Year in Malaysia

2006-01-29T21:45:00.000+08:00

As with any good medical student , I must learn to list out the things that happened on my trip like the way Denise Goh lists out the 350 differentials to Cyclospora diarrhea.

1. Knowing I have a new nephew and he's a 40 day old vaccum delivery infant. Mother is my cousin , and father is a Malay. I call him a word that vaguely sounds like "Anas" ( goodness Anus? goood boy -- niiicee and bigg) coz' I can't really pronounce his Malay name. The baby is lovely but he always needs someone to carry.

2. Waiting like a dog for 4-5 hours at Kuala Lumpur International Airport where you get the usual bad service from Malaysia Airlines counter staff and the all the wonderful service of Andrew and the rest of the SQ staff who assured me that I will get a flight home. Well I did eventually , after waiting for like 5 hrs on SQ 119 which was at 10pm ( I arrived at 5 pm ). of course the lovely geishas on the flight were all too happy to relieve me of my tension.

3. Bringing back all the chocolate biscuits , cheap freshly-baked Famous Amos butterscotch cookies which were like 7-8 dollars cheaper than Singapore , and the lovely oh so lovely cheese cookies which was baked by a nice Indonesian lady and given to my cousin.

4. Being forced to measure the blood pressures of all my relatives , and to snatch away a tin of love letters from my uncle who is running a BP of 150/110 on combination medications.

5. Receiving 1/3 of my usual hong pao coz' the entire Ow family didn't come down to the ancestral home in Bentong because Uncle Ow was just recovering from the gastrectomy. It was good to see him as good as normal although the operation was like so major.

6. Meeting all my cousins , nephews and nieces one more time !!!!!

HAPPY LUNAR NEW YEAR EVERYBODY !!

Back From Kuala Lumpur

2006-01-27T21:25:00.000+08:00

Back from 4 hot , sweaty sticky days at Bentong Pahang , and I must say that more than ever , taking the SQ/MH shuttle flight service to KL is more of a pain than a convenience. Long gone were the days where they had flights every hour or even half hour to KL ; now I had to be at the mercy of those passengers holding the more expensive confirmed tickets , as there were at most 20 seats open to stand-by passengers like me. Thankfully that Prof Prabha cancelled his Paeds Surg lecture that Friday ( that was like the best news I had heard in WEEKS ) , and I could rush straight down to the airport.

I was quite sad actually to leave NUH coz I had made a really nice young friend in whom I call "Wisely". She is a patient who has to spend her New Year hols in hospital because a really nasty steroid-dependent nephrotic syndrome. Incidentally , it happened to be cao cao's ward assessment cum professorial case presentation. It was quite ironic that she got kind of ticked off by the Prof about not taking initiative to explore deeper in the history as she simply ascribed it as a "girl who wouldn't talk to anyone". It was just so clear that "Wisely" wasn't a girl that would talk to anyone simply , and language was clearly not a factor when she was happily talking in English to the friendly Malay ward clerk. It was a matter of who she wanted to talk to , coz' she even snubbed Prof Yap in the face hehe.

There was so much about her that one could learn : at her age of 8 , she has learnt to be so much more mature and strong a girl because of her disease. It saddens me a bit to know that after all, despite her strong front and cool nature , she is after all a young child who is valiantly fighting a life-long battle with a chronic ailment.

Was still a bit sad for "Wisely" while waiting for my queue number to be called at the SQ counter. I dropped off at around 3.30 pm at Terminal 2 hoping to catch the SQ 116 flight. It was apparent that the number system had failed , and they were only calling standby ticket holders like me ONLY after booked ticket holders were cleared. This was financially more viable as booked tickets were a lot more expensive. I hoped for the best ; smiled a winsome smile at the SIA counter staff , and *ding dong* I was one of the lucky 20 passengers on stand-by to get the SQ 116 flight.

I must have been really tired coz' I settled in the wrong seat. A SIA stewardess , in a geisha-like manner, sashayed to me and purred "Seerrr .. 57A is over there ..." I sheepishly changed my seats like a raped geisha in shame. The Boeing 777 took off with a full load of passengers for the short 30 min hop to KL.

Finally got to KL - took KLIA express at the ridiculous price of 35 ringgit one way to KL Sentral. Weaved through a sea of sweaty Malaysians all gelleking around the station with nothing much to do. The station was impossibly crowded - all the taxis were full and there were none available for the next half hour. The queue for the LRT counter snaked across the main hall. A Malay girl tried to cut my queue in the ticket counter for the LRT. I used my precocious ass and luggage to edge her mannerless presence out of the queue.

I AM SO TIRED ! I finally got to meet my grandma , cousins and family for some light dinner of fish , cereal prawns at the usual Gombak restaurant. Then I went to my cousins' house to watch some old flick "Bring it On" on their computer. Then I went to zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz because today had been a freakin' long day.

REALLY long day at Ward 45

2006-01-24T23:13:00.000+08:00

Ok I must say this was a really crazy day full of unexpected surprises...

1. The seductive and almost hyper-sexual SMS Moth showed me in the morning , which Cao Cao sent to him ( supposedly by mistake hurh hurh ) last night before bed . ( Goodness - first dyspneic breath in the morning )

2. Discovering who my mystery neurology tutor was , when a patient immobilised with SMA was teasing me about not knowing who Dr. Chong SC was , and WORST , teasing me about taking a liking for older women just because I raved a bit about how good Prof Low was. ( GOODNESS - second dyspneic breath )

3. Getting a surprise call from the secretary that our ward assessment was suddenly tomorrow with the famous Netball Queen. ( OH MI GAWD -- pulmonary hypertension )

4. Seeing Dr. T Lim walk past and giving us the knowing "Please clerk as many patients and hopefully we will discuss 10x that many , even if it takes us until 12 am and the next Chinese New Year weekend" smile. ... ( ARGGGHHH .. SVT )

5. Getting a child patient with nephrotic syndrome challenge me to stop behaving like a kindergarten kid in front of her , or else risk getting my kidneys being transplanted out by Prof Yap. ( YEEEEEEEEEEKZZ ... Zonghan approaching with a lumbar puncture kit .. )

ECG flat ........ I just died of cardiac failure. Oh will the wonderful Dr. Blue Fern please revive me with a lovely digoxin kiss ?

Long drawn day at the new Renal Ward

2006-01-23T19:15:00.000+08:00

First , we were like warned umpteen times by Jodie and Vanessa to attend the ward-rounds at Ward 45 ( Renal Ward ) otherwise face the death penalty. When I received the SMS to be punctual , I could swear my feet stepped a tad harder on the accelerator. SIAN .. I just don't know why I always have this sian feeling when I am in Paeds. It's probably because I have been so used to the pace of life in Surgical postings like O and G , when you always had weird things to do , from delivering babies in the Labour Ward to assisting with Caesareans in the OT to witnessing Vanaja winking her way through a myomectomy. For medical postings, it was just clerkship after clerkship.

And of course we had a tutorial by the very youthful and energetic Dr. A Yeoh , followed by the hyper-enthusiastic Dr. T Lim who kindly invited us to the Paeds Emergency. The thing about Dr. Lim is that he's very enthusiastic about teaching him , but I am a little fearful about his mood swings.

I found a new way how to get even with enemies the next time they irritate me in the Paeds ward. I will just crush them with the sliding shelves in the drug store. A kind nurse had kindly demonstrated this brilliant technique to me on her Filipina colleague today.

Memoirs of a Geisha ...

2006-01-20T23:33:00.000+08:00

Geisha on steroids.

The day had come for the inaugural viewing of , my most long-awaited film. So after a long and hectic day at Paediatrics , after getting poked in the ribs by a father of a girl with Henoch Scholein purpura and worst being volunteered by the former to be a guinea pig for his daughter to play with ( goodness ), after a thankfully very beneficial but late interactive session with Dr. Quek , I quickly had dinner with our CG's very own two male geishas , Dien Rong and Gooanhao before speeding off to the MRT to pick up Kossie. At that time of the evening , the auntie always had only one or two chicken chops or fish and chips to offer. Haii .. but what to do , kossie had already eaten at home.

Two questions arose : which geisha would I like ? And the further question we asked was , was Cunli really like the geisha Sayuri , wilful and free-spirited ?

The show had splendid and colourful atmospheres and backdrops. It started off with a poignant introduction to Sayuri's past as a fisherman's daughter Chiko being sold to a geisha-house in Kyoto. Here there's this pervasive element of pathos as the directory elaborated quite a fair bit on the separation of Chiko aka Sayuri from her sister "Satsu". Then the sensualness and exotic tale of the geisha started : enters Queen Hatsumomo ( aka Hatsu-Yap Mo Mo ) , cunning , scheming , evil geisha . Unfortunately for her , she gets slapped by the geisha-house owner after developing a bleeding PV after having illicit sex with a hunky Japanese lover.

The highlight of the movie for me was to see Sayuri mature into a elegant and graceful geisha in her own right. The dance sequences and exotic performances by Sayuri was spectacular , and especially the particular dance sequence in which she was enshrounded in this blue eerie light in a theatre and was prancing around in a rain of rice like a case of untreated Tourette's syndrome. Frankly , it was testimony to the fact that it was not the dance itself that was fantastic but the whole get-up of the geisha , the lightings and the music that made the sequence spectacular. On a good day , some patients in sporadic locations of IMH on haloperidol withdrawal can pull off similar antics ....

The fan dances were also fantastic by Sayuri. What we found puzzling was why the act of passing a rice cake or an apple to a guy was a signal by the geisha to the man that she wanted "his eel to visit her unexplored cave". Goodness you got to be really careful who you pass food to nowadays.

The theory of Hatsu - Yap Mo Mo came from my recollection of a strange incident in Nepal when I remembered visiting the 4E bunk to look for my headmistress Miss Koe. When I entered the bunk, I was shocked to see everyone gathered solemnly like in prayer and the entire bunk was lit with the eerie glow of candles. There , I saw Yap Mo Mo lying still on a table surrounded by candles. I was instantly asked by the 4E guys to leave as Yap Mo Mo "needed rest". We were instantly jolted back to a recollection of this , when we saw a shrine lit with candles in the movie where Hatsu-Yap Mo Mo , Queen Geisha rests in peace.

To top it off , this MADTV spoof of
http://www.youtube.com/w/Memoirs-of-a-Geisha--Mad-TV?v=_AQvqsZFgDY&search=Memoirs%20Geisha%20MadTV
is simply hilarious with Connie Chung making a repeat performance. I totally dig the moment when 'she' aka Bobby Lee from MadTV ( aka Su Chin Park ) is asked to make a man stop with one look ... "IT HARD" ..

Feeling Happier through Paediatrics

2006-01-19T21:43:00.000+08:00

Ok it has been a really tiring time for the past 2 weeks .. I cannot remember which is the day where I had a good night's rest with all the interactive sessions ending at like 7.00 pm plus. What's more the tutorials cover topics so broad and far-flung that it is really difficult to concentrate and lend focus to any discipline in Paediatrics in particular. It's like one minute you are clerking a case with all the florid signs of thalassemia , and next you are scrambling down to ICU to auscultate some cardiac murmur with Dr. Terence Lim and in an hour , Prof Low is expecting me to discuss all I can about asthma and angioedema.

The plus side is that you get to meet all the wonderful kids , and it was such a joy to play with all of them. The one thing great about kids was their eternal innocence, and it was certainly much more fulfilling to play with them than to see all the glorious signs.

This week's low was making Dr. T Lim pissed off with us , and it could have been really avoided. We ended our tutorial with Prof Low at 12.30 pm and we had a tutorial with him at 1pm. We bumped into him while in the ward , and he asked us to get our lunch first. I was worried we won't make it back , and just like our previous encounter with Dr. Jeanette Lee at the Family Medicine tutorial , I sort of had a hunch that he would be veeeeeerrry pissed if we were late. To my surprise , the rest didn't really seem to bother that we were going to be late. That said , it is very very difficult to get food within half an hour in NUH, but I knew excuses like this almost never work especially when you are dealing with time-pressed clinicians. It's like there's this assumption that he would be nice , and just happily wait for us since we needed our lunch. I mean what kind of freaking assumption is that ?? True enough , we got ticked off by him, and the most horrible thing was that Dr Lim called me directly and I was the first to have to explain things. DAMN. Thankfully I have some experience from , and just kept apologising and keeping my head low , like a geisha who had spilt a nano-ounce of tea on the tatami mat.

Some highlights were eating with Henry and Val at Chinatown on Friday evening .. As usual, we ordered the Big Prawn mee ( which we always faithfully patronise at Old Airport Road ) , and even paid 10 bucks for the largest bowl. It was to my horror that the soup was bland , the prawns not even comparable to the size of the prawns offered for the medium , cheaper bowls at Old Airport Rd , and the mee was tasteless. I was so disgusted that I ordered another bowl of porridge to wash away my disappointment. We were joined by a family of loud-mouthed ( but amicable thankfully ) members who were all interrogating me for the location of the porridge stall so they can buy their "ji zha" porridge.

Another highlight is when I went out with family + Robert/Ling for a buffet at Sakura Restaurant. This was a Japanese / Western buffet for just 26 bucks , and I had really my doubts when I heard this place was at the Singapore Science Centre. I mean who the f***_*_)_() eats at the Singapore Science Centre ??! We all drove there in two cars, and I was pleasantly surprised that there was free parking at least. True enough, there were a lot of yao gwees who were swarming around the buffet counters. No orderliness or decorum like that observed at Meritus Mandarin Buffet I had with Lil' and CT during the post-Xmas period. Just mad crowds of obese , Diabetic Idol-wannabes. I was pleasantly surprised to know there was oysters and a spread of sashimi available like in Mandarin , but to my horror , when the woman brought out the oysters , a swarm of Diabetic Idols started a prong-fight with one another , jabbing wildly with the metal prongs just to get the best oysters. The suckiest thing was that the oysters were all those huge kind , and the bigger the oyster , the yuckier and more vomit-inducing it tastes. Of course, i ate all the oysers anyway , and soon went to the toilet 12 times after that , passing out pea-soup meconium.

I hope the rest of the Paeds posting will go smoothly , and the dreariness of having to wake up early in the morning just to know I will be on my feet for 12+ hours , will soon fade. As Kossie says , there's no easy road to becoming a doctor. Hurh hurh.

Dragging My Feet Through Paediatrics

2006-01-08T02:11:00.000+08:00

It was like of a super "chau sian" feeling to have to go back for the last posting of the M4 academic year before Pathology exam. Even more sian was the fact that the break we had after the posting was meant for a continuous non-stop mugging session for the humongous Pathology exam we had ahead of us. Not to mention after the wonderful holidays , it was time to work with 'Ah Nao' again . urgh. So it was of course with a lot of dreariness that I had to wake up early on a Monday morning to go for the Paeds briefing.

I have never felt so long in a posting before .. it was like a couple of cursory lectures which didn't really teach much , and we were like plunged into the wards. There was no objective and structured teaching programme implemented in the first week unlike Ortho and O&G. I love playing with kids a lot , especially my nephew , but it was like super weary having to force out differential diagnoses from these young ones .. 4 CGs were cramming into the little Ward 47 , and the new house officers didn't look pleased either. So basically I have no idea what to do , but I guess the previous batch's advice was just to let your survival instincts step in. What a way to start the new year.

PLUS the fact I was like having this perpetual tummy upset since the HK Trip and the oyster buffet I had with CT and Lil' on 30th December 2005. It was like this constant feeling of bloatedness with like a mega degree of flatulence (I reckon the amount of gas I passed is suffice to inflate Richard Branson's hot air balloon for his next RTW trip .. ) and loose stools. I even got up in the middle of the night at 3 am ( when I had to wake up at 7 am the next morning for some crummy X ray Round , thanks a lot ) just to go to the loo. I do not know what struck me , but somehow I feel that I am not the same James I used to be. The same James which could easily phagocytose the most exotic of meals like goose intestines or ox tongue. Somehow I still have a tremendous craving for food , but my gut seems to have gone awry.

What made me even more super-pissed was this bitch of an auntie who actually taunted me and called me a liar in the NUH canteen in front of god knows how many professors and staff there. I had ordered a lamb chop with my NUH Kopitiam card, attempted to charge it but the value was insufficient. I promptly topped it up ,and returned to pay for the lamb chop. Moments later, Zonghan came over to ask me to get a chicken wing for him .. at that point, I was actually feeling not too good -- kinda nauseous and my tummy was rumbling. So I reckon eating a chicken wing myself might help ( what kind of logic is this ???! God save me ). So I asked the auntie to charge an extra 2 bucks for the 2 chicken wings. To my horror, she inputted the cost of a lamb chop = 5 bucks + 2 bucks for the chicken wings. I told her that she had already charged me for the lamb chop just 2-3 minutes earlier. She insisted that I had not paid , as my card didn't have value in it. She started to accuse me of telling a lie and as I was ransacking my wallet for the receipt , she started to taunt me. I suddenly remembered I had thrown the receipt into Henry's tray and rushed back. Henry , being in an absence seizure as usual, muttered Cunli cleared the tray. Thankfully Cunli did not empty the trash on the tray for I found my receipt and marched back to the Western food stall.

I sternly told the lady off not to accuse people without any evidence, and her apology was this totally unsincere "Sorry lor !". I nearly lost it but as Cunli always reminded me from my O and G times to "relax ... don't worry" Zen-master style.

ARGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Plus the fact I spent 285 bucks on a new Emporio Armani specs . I am BROKE !

This was definitely a bad week.

Pulau Ubin : Manic Mangrove Madness

2005-12-30T00:09:00.000+08:00

Today's Mangrove Madness trip started off with my long drive down the PIE towards Changi Point amidst cloudy ominous skies. Henry called me this morning just to confirm the time , and informed me that the rest of the adventurers weren't going to be early for the 11am meeting at Pasir Ris MRT. Thank god .. I wasn't intending to be early in the first place haha ..

After a brief lunch at Changi Village , we took the ferry which cost S$2 , which departed from a spanking new terminal which I had not seen before since my last trip to Ubin in the beginning of M1. Very nice..

Cun li , Henry and Tianrong ( "Dien Rong" ) onboard the ferry ..

Guanhao ( "Gooanhao" ) and the very lovely James Huang of course ready for departure.
Upon arrival, we quickly proceeded to meet this very nice Auntie at the bicycle who promised us a bargain rate of $8 per pax since we were in a group of 5. Obviously my Vanaja wink didn't convince her to lower the price down to $7 , but she was really nice. She offered to check the tide times as I intended to go to Chek Jawa , and provided baskets to be attached to our bikes. Of course Gooanhao took the biggest basket since he brought half of his bedroom to Ubin.

This is Henry in his manic state trying to crash his bicycle into me, while we await Gooanhao in the toilet.

As you can see, Gooanhao loves to visit the toilet and get everything prim and proper before departure. After much coercing , he finally agreed to leave the toilet , as seen here.
We wasted no time in our search for Chek Jawa , but we ended up in this densely forested area after Jalan Durian. There didn't appear to be any path in sight , so we reckon we took a few shots in case we got lost a la Blair Bitch Project.

These sexy shots of me were courtesy of Dien Rong.
This is my favourite butt pic.
Then the ominous skies morphed into a heavy downpour , and it was real heavy. Like geishas on amphetamines withdrawal, we scampered into a hut that was at the junction of Jalan Durian and Jalan Sam Heng. We had cycled all the way back because we got stuck at the forested area in Jalan Durian. We packed all our stuff meticulously into plastic bags in case they got wet. As usual, I started blaming Dien Rong for not buying ponchos.
The rain started to die down a wee bit , so we tried an alternative route into Chek Jawa via the coastal route. I suggested that we go down to this huge mangrove beach ( below ) which I assumed was continuous with Chek Jawa.

Several of us , without the knowledge of Hana Gwee's Physical Geography lessions, foolishly attempted to cycle on the aerated mangrove soil ...
Then disaster struck.. we realised the aerated foamy soil was wayyyyy too soft to support our bicycles , and worse , our weights as well. Dien Rong found himself sinking slowly .. Henry was still valiantly trying.
Cunli decided to play safe and wanted a photo of this "stream of crystal clear" water leading from the island out to sea. This was before we revealed that most of the effluent was most likely saijui from the auntie who rented us the bicycles.
By this time, we realised the situation was quite dire. The mangrove beach just could not support our weight, and Gooanhao was starting to feel his entire bike and feet literally sink into the beach, the same way Lilleen's jaws sank into the meat pie in Guangzhou.
Gooanhao asking for help , but forget it -- The photography diva moves only when there's a photo moment. Note his feet are stuck in the black thick mud of the swamp.

I wasn't spared from the swamp either.. Me and my bicycle got deeply stuck into the swamp. It was the most horrible and helpless feeling you had , because no matter how much strength you exerted, there was no way you can extricate ( I learnt this word from Gooanhao today ) your legs from the mud. Dien Rong's theory was that the pressure of the feet created a negative pressure under the feet just like those bathroom sucker bungs stick on the wall. It made a lot of sense coz' I didn't feel the mud was pushing my feet down , but more like some incredible force was sucking my feet in. I cried for help , but Henry thought I was joking at first. Dien Rong asked me in the "Ah Seng cum Constance Tham way" to "just pluck it out". It was only when I started gesticulating wildly and insist that I was being held down, that Dien Rong brought a snail-laden stick ( held by me and Dien Rong ) over to pull me off the mud trap to break the suction. The suction ripped my sandal off my feet , but thankfully it's Adidas sandals not Li Ning brand from Guangzhou.

This stick saved my life ( + / - Dien Rong's help )

Dien Rong's and my sandals after the mangrove madness.
That was the seemingly innocuous beach which looked nice and flat and solid , perfect for cycling. But DON'T be fooled. It is actually a HUGE slab of soft , aerated soil waiting to pull you in.
Group at the Deadly Mangrove Swamp.

Gooanhao by this time had broken his P.R.C. brand sandals due to the suction of the mangrove mud.
Some lovely fungus which Cun Li claimed was ling zhi , but didn't dare try.
CHEK JAWA
For the record, we finally found Chek Jawa when we discovered that a barricaded path was the actual path we were looking for. It's so stupid .. why make a path to such a wonderful place like some kind of elusive trail ?

Mangrove roots looking really beautiful in the mosaic of green , just like a Biore Pore Pack peeled off a pimply nose.

CunLi and Henry on a rock.
4 of the goons on the rock trying to be so Hulk Hogan-not.

Beautiful me and the vast Chek Jawa swamp behind.
I wanted this shot to be like the F.I.R album shot in the desert , with Henry being the girl in red.
Dien Rong behaving like the Lion King gone mad. Me and Henry staying as poised as usual.
Sweet shot courtesy of Cun Li.
Gazing into the far blue skies amidst the fresh breeze cleansed by the earlier downpour, we couldn't help by looking past the dissipating grey clouds and see our bright future shine upon us.

Appreciate the vastness of Chek Jawa behind the characters in the photos. Of course appreciate the beauty of the characters as well.

Friends of mine would know I always always always LOVED to see Starfish. So it was a huge delight to see not one , but many many starfishes flitting around in the rockpools.
So many starfishes !!! and they made cute star patterns in the sand , which Gooanhao pointed out. Note the very nice pattern this star-fish made.
This is the green sea cheebye which you can find plenty of on the mudflat. I reckon it is a kind of anemone as it has a lot of little suckers on it.
Close up of the sea cheebye.
Cun Li likes putting things into the sea cheebye , and it would just happily swallow up rocks , pebbles or anything that can fit within its grip. Works the same way for the human version right I guess ? :-)

Cun Li was very brave and volunteered to carry this pretty crab on his hand. The eyes popped up like those green aliens in Toy Story ( the ones who kept saying "We are Eternally Grateful" in the Fengyuan tone )

Another very pretty orange crab which Dien Rong pointed out.
I could have spent the whole day looking for more beautiful things to capture on my cam, but the ever-conscientious Gooanhao rushed us back as the tide was coming and the time for our last ferry at 7pm was drawing near.

Since we knew the exact way back, it took a mere 20 minutes to get back to the main ferry town and we quickly returned the mud-soaked bicycles. My bicycle was making such a racket with the rickety gears, and moreover my perineal region felt as if I just had multiple episiotomies done with a car key , so I was more than thankful to get off the bicycle.

We settled down to a feast of Drunken Prawns , Wild Boar Hotplate , Chai Poh Omelette and "Lap Sap" Vegetables. I LOVED the drunken prawns , but they weren't anything special from those in Singapore.
The prawn head should never be spared with its fresh and rich taste, and this is the fashionable way to eat it , SIA girl style.
Me against the setting sun in Ubin ...

My parting shot of Ubin in the sunset before Dien Rong and Gooanhao chided me for taking so many photos and risk missing the last ferry.
On the boat back ...
Cunli out in the ledge of the ferry enjoying the last rays of the setting sun with the sea breeze stroking his hair.
Henry looking longingly at the shadows of the island whom we had met and conquered many nasty dangers of the mangrove , as we approached Singapore mainland.

Day of Errands

2005-12-27T16:37:00.000+08:00

It was a cold , rainy and miserable day .. and "Tong Lei" by Sun Yan Zi was the most appropriate song playing on my speakers right now. I hate doing errands !!

I drove all the way to Paya Ubi Industrial Park , a drab and massive industrial building tucked away from humanity together with some Maha Bodhi School in the inner bowels of Eunos. After spiralling inside the building, I finally found Lozon Inc. , where I spent 15 bucks on the new diaphragm to convert my stethoscope bell-side to a paediatric 'scope. The man at the counter was all so genial, and told me that "this was the clinic for my stethoscope". He also gave some strange tips about pressing the diaphragm harder to get the effect of the bell to hear low-pitched murmurs. But the thing is that I can't even hear low-pitched murmurs with the bell ho ho...

Since I was in the far east of Singapore, I drove ahead to the Metro Warehouse Sale in Expo. It was full of really drab stuff a la those found in Shenzhen, nothing trendy or catchy to the eye. This is the first time I have heard of Gioven Klein or some weird pseudo-branded stuff. But I did pick up some cheap baby clothing for my 7-month old nephew waiting at home. I particularly liked this orange hooded jacket which was just going for 10 bucks ! WHEW !

I went to town to do my usual inspection of the sales going on. I picked up a Sun Yan Zi "To Be Continued" CD at HMV because I loved the song "Shen Qi" so much.. I was excited that there was a VCD inside as well so I could practise the Shen Qi dance moves. I popped over to G2000 in Raffles City, where I just couldn't resist buying some fancy striped pants which was marked down 50% from the original price of 120 bucks. Oh no .. i am really broke now...

I compared some prices between Hong Kong and Singapore, and as I expected, Singapore was still the number 1 shopping hub for most things in general. E.g. G2000 , despite being a HK brand, was retailing with massive discounts in Singapore, while the HK/China were just having some humble 20-30% discounts off their pants. E.g. ESPRIT - the noticeable difference was that they didn't have as much winterwear v.s. Hong Kong presumably because of the differences in climate. In fact the orange jacket in ESPRIT was selling about 10 dollars more expensive in Singapore, but the rest of the office clothes were still very much cheaper in Singapore. Perfumes and cosmetics in general were either the same price or slightly cheaper v.s. the perfumes in Hong Kong airport. The moral of the story is ? KNOW YOUR PRICES before you buy overseas .. sometimes happiness can be found in your own backyard...
I was a bit disappointed that the VCD in the Sun Yan Zi package was only that of her concert tour when I wanted the original MVs.. I spent like 3-4 hours finding the original "Shen Qi" MV on the net , and was so glad that I finally managed to rip off a copy from one of the video streams on the China sites. Just LOVE Sun Yan Zi man ! The "Shen Qi" video was so cool as well ..

New Hong Kong Photos from Choon Ta ..

2005-12-27T12:42:00.000+08:00

Hong Kong Disneyland outside Sleeping Beauty's castle , taken by a Chinese tourist whom thankfully semed to be the only one who wasn't interested in stealing our camera ( paranoid delusions haha )

Me laughing at one of the many candid shots I took during the trip

I always loved using the timer function on my camera, but I always never brought my tripod along. So ledges , rubbish bins or any tall elevated structure with a flat top will do fine as a tripod. Here I am in Disneyland trying to get a picture of Lilleen and CT flirting in front of Sleeping Beauty's castle.

Lilleen sinking her jaws into a spicy meat pancake for which we spent half an hour queueing up for in Lao Jie in downtown Shenzhen. It was here that we also met a nasty Chinese man who just blatantly cut queue after she refused his request ( more like demand ) to buy a pancake with her. That's mainland Chinese for you ...

Colourful Lao Jie in Shenzhen , but all the shops practically sell very drab stuff that isn't really in sync with any of our local fashion trends. Definitely just worth a walk, but not worth buying any thing. The food here is pretty good .. i loved the octopus threaded on stick , and the ultra-cheap bubble pearl milk tea at just 50 cents each ( salmonella sold separately ) !!

Us at a group shot at the Peak. The Peak was freezing that night .. this shot was taken by placing CT's camera on a ledge , and me running all the way to the pavillion to join CT and Lil for the group shot. A lot of nice Korean and British tourists tried to help us , but we refused .. I am the diva when it comes to taking night shots, remember ?

A wonderful shot of Hong Kong from the Peak on the first day of our trip ......

Lilleen trying to get out of her skin in the avenue of stars in Tsim Sha Tsui ...

Letting my photos undergo a mandatory Customs check ..

Lilleen moaning like Mariah Carey that she did not want too many pictures of her taken in the Matyrs' Memorial Park in Guangzhou. Of course her moans went unheard by our in-house candid photographer cum dieting queen Choon Ta.

Me and Choonie at the same place where Lilleen was previously moaning. A very tranquil lake in the heart of the city , with ducks and local Chinese people doing some form of tai chi. What I noticed was that they did their tai-chi moves within a yellow circle on the ground drawn by chalk. Not sure what that meant...

Us at the expensive dessert-cum-eatery at Canton Road where we paid like 150 Sing Dollars in a total for a dinner that left me with acute pancreatitis after that.

Me wishing everyone in the hotel a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year on the last night of our trip at the City Garden Hotel , Hong Kong ...

Boxing Day with DVDs at Queen Swinemadala

2005-12-26T23:05:00.000+08:00

It was the usual post-trip blues , which I whiled away by waking up extra late today. Went to Swine's house to watch DVDs with Kossie ... thankfully 2 Canadian pizzas were served for the price of 8 bucks per person. There was the usual heated exchanges between Suin's sister and Suin over the use of the DVD player , in which heated Korean swear words could be heard muttering over the background. It's no surprise that being guests in the house, Suin's parents finally intervened and the Korean princess stormed into her room like a geisha on steroid withdrawal.

Suin screened a Brothers Grimm DVD, which seemed so what odd and macabre , especially with all the distorted and convoluted allusions of classic fairy tales of Snow White and Hansel/Gretel. I was nearly falling asleep when I saw the scene of a giant gingerbread man ingesting a virgin female , and another scene of a horse spewing spider-webs and swallowing toddlers. What a weird way to end the Christmas season.

We settled down through half-way of Bram Stoker's Dracula .. I just so love Francis Ford Coppola's version. I have practically watched this show in its entirety like 10-11 times , and every time I am so bowled over the gothic romance and macabre atmosphere by this show. It stays almost true to the original Dracula tale, albeit a slightly more romantic aspect of the Count. The soundtrack Annie Lennox - Love Song by a Vampire is also very sensual and moving , and it's a song to hear in the quiet of the evening...

Goodbye Hong Kong ...

2005-12-25T16:48:00.000+08:00

On the fully packed Airport Express train to Chep Lap Kok ...At the departure hall of Chep Lap Kok ... At the airside of the departure hall ...

Choonie smiling before boarding his SQ flight back to Singapore ... must be gleefully anticipating more technical faults onboard and the accompanying compensation vouchers ..

Choonie's Megatop that will bring him home an hour and half earlier than us :-( ...

Christmas Day in Hong Kong..

2005-12-25T11:40:00.000+08:00

Me and CT together in bed at the City Garden Hotel Hong Kong , while Lil' was drowning her sorrows in SK-II facial treatment essence in the bathroom.
This is not meant to be an ass shot , but I didn't want my shoes to dirty the bed ...

Choonie flashing the only piece of pigeon he is willing to eat , while Lil nonchalantly helps herself to the rest.

Dinner at Canton Road on X'mas Eve

2005-12-24T23:34:00.000+08:00

Downtown Guangzhou

2005-12-24T16:14:00.000+08:00

This picture was in a restaurant in an alley leading from the mainroad to Garden Hotel. It served excellent Hunan cuisine.. CT as usual looking very worried that the ravenous Lilleen will over-order again ... "Lilleen , I already told you that I just want to eat dessert. Look at how much you ordered .."
A very nice native boy who was willing to pose with Uncle James after a bribe of several "The Incredibles" stickers ..

Walking through the Matyrs' Memorial Park towards Garden Hotel from Lieshixingyuan Station.