Climbed most of the way up a 22 (5.11a) climb yesterday which is a good 4 grades above what I can usually muster. Great fun. However I strained almost every muscle in my upper body and currently have trouble showering and getting dressed. (rest assured I did manage to shower and get dressed lest you think I’m running around more or less neked and filthy)
Warning : Med nerdiness
So coming from non science background, medicine is like a whole new language - it sounds like english, but it clearly is not.
So, stupid things that I have been caught out on
the Null Hypothesis
everyone kept going on about it, but I kept thinking that it was clearly stupid to create an experiment where your hypothesis was where nothing happened. Turns out that Null does not mean your zeroth proposition, but that it is generated AFTER your hypothesis for statistical pruposes.
Anti Human AntibodiesToilet doors.
Which clearly has far too many ‘anti’s in it to be healthy. I was all confused as I thought that ‘anti human’ obviously meant that they dont like humans and so would stay the hell away. For example, if I am anti football, you wouldn’t ever see me anywhere near a football. But it turns out that they really do like Human Antibodies.
They swing the wrong way. Clearly they should be pull to enter, and push to leave so that after one has theoretically washed one’s hands one doesn’t need to grip a festering door handle coated with the flora left by those less hygenic.
Its not even going to cost extra money, just put the stupid hinges the other freaking way
Being holidays, I thought I’d try and eat proper real food before launching back into the student staple of insta noodles
So
1.
Lamb Ragout with Pasta
diced lamb
dill, parsely
garlic
tomato paste
red wine
broccoli
carrot
zucchini
mushrooms
beef stock
pasta
Coat the lamb with cornflower and quickly seal in a pan. (do some garlic while you’re at it) and then whack into a big pot of tomato paste and carrots and red wine and beef stock. Let it go simmer for 1.5hrs or so, add in brocolli, zucchini, mushrooms and simmer for another 10 minutes
meanwhile, cook up your pasta - I used some lovely hand rolled thingys.
Chuck it all together and enjoy with some red wine.
It means nothing, but its one of the little things that, silly as it is keeps me going.
We had our first formal assessment today, a ’standard’ patient, who is an actor pretending to be a patient and we have to take a history from them ; you know, whats wrong with them, how they feel about it, etc etc.
I managed to get most of the information I needed in 12 minutes and she liked me enough to give me an empathy score of 7/7 (huggy-feely score) and said that she felt really comfortable talking to me.
It is of course entirely arbitrary, and the last SP I saw was less than impressed with me. But still, little things like that reassure me that I made the right choice, and its all going along ok.
Medicine
- revise
- write up drugs as I come across them
- write up diseases as I come accross them
- look at clinical reasoning/diagnostics/histo/path
- find ways to get onto rounds
- revise clinical skillz and life support skillz
Life
- clean my house more often
- go to gym
- eat real food
Arty Stuff
- make up new dance classes.
- do (dance) classes
- work on interactive extraveganza
- animate Mon Pere
- blog more (thanks yay!)
Hmmm..
Ok, time for a rant.
I went to a meeting. It was a meeting and discussion on Close the Gap Day. We had a great speaker who was very down to earth and gave simple, practical things we could do to when we dealt with indigenous patients. She had a sense of purpose, of hope that it could be done better through co-operation.
So then we went onto discuss how come there were, out of nearly 300 students, less than 20 showed up, and how we could try to improve the teaching of cultural awareness. And this is where it gets annoying. As in almost all semi politcal ideological groups I’ve found myself in, most everyone there was more concerned with slapping each other on the back for being enlightened and slamming the establishment, and the others for not.
What annoyed the bollocks out of me was that a friend of mine and I proposed some changes to how it could be taught - simple things like a more positive, co-operative tone; as opposed to the ‘us-them’ dichotomy that we were hit with and the very confrontational ‘blaming’. and about half the group pounced as if we were anti-aboriginals. They threw up totally spurious straw man arguements like - well I was all inspired so you obviously must be wrong. But what they in their blinkered chuckleheadedness fail to realise is that I’m not saying that no-one got something out of it, just that many did not and perhaps that we could reshape it so that more people were eager to do something. I mean come on, I came in, on my holidays to attend a meeting on close the gap day, as if I’m anti. Face it, those who got something out of it as it was, probably would have gotten something out of it regardless.
Not everyone is going to be a cardcarrying idealogue, not everyone will be inspired to be a champion of these issues. Some of the people at the meeting will be and great for them. But what I’m eager to see is that people, us as potential future doctors, are sensitive to the issues and know how to access help to ease the process of getting healthcare to indigenous Australians. It’s progress if, in the future, we have an indigenous patient and we have the thought to contact the liason officers to help ease the process a bit, if we take a bit more time to listen and explain.
If we could stop congratulating ourselves on being teh awesome and actually think about what we can do to make a difference that would be great.
