Ah, freshers!

I helped move a load of freshers in to halls over the weekend. They make me feel old! I know it's just that I'm older, but they look younger than last year. It was scary. I'm quite glad Uni is nearly finished now, after 6 years, but it did make me nostalgic for the days when my liver could handle drinking until 3am and still making a 9am lecture.

Are medics really that clever?

I worked at a posh reception this evening, as a waitress to supplement my measly student loan. I've done this for about 4 years now, and normally the guests completely ignore you. This is ok, as in a sense we get paid to be invisible service providers. When people are outright rude, as does happen, I still get cross. Luckily this is rare. Rarer still though is when people treat you as a human as happened today.

I was topping up champagne for the guests, the employees and clients of (I think) a property firm. Two separate groups engaged me in conversation, which made me feel like a person instead of a robot. Both asked what I did when not waitressing/if I was a student, and what I studied. When I told them, both said I must be terribly clever, despite one having studied engineering at the same university as I attend, and the other having been to another prestigious university. I was basically embarrassed! And it's not the first time it's been said either. People seem to assume medics are very clever, which I actually disagree with. So many other courses seem conceptually harder than ours. I don't doubt that intelligence is there (and needed) in most medical students and doctors, but I don't think they have extra brains compared with other students. Rather than sheer intelligence, I think what we have is tenacity and a facility to manage great quantities of information. I'm not sure this is the same as intelligence. Any thoughts?

Noah and The Whale

I'm always a bit nervous when I go to see a friend's band. I worry about what to say if they were awful, or just dull. Luckily, today's experience was a gem. I have seen Noah and The Whale before, but this time I took my flatmates. They were able to say they really liked the band, and the place was packed. Hooray for Noah and the Whale!

Dessert

I have just experienced something new. So far, boyfriend has cooked excellent savoury food, but in 3 years together he has never made dessert other than fruit salad. That is, until today. He made chocolate fondant bake things with truffle in the middle. It was death by chocolate and it was heaven. I think I might explode.

Business Visa

I felt very grown up today.  I went to Bond Street to get my visa for my elective.  It turns out I need a business visa, not just a tourist one.  Don't ask me why, but it's quite exciting. And I even got some work done.  I may not have learnt my eye anatomy properly but at least I have read it once.  

By the way,

My last post before going away was to complain about exams. I did recover things on the OSCE and I passed. I found out in Namche Bazaar at over 4000 metres above sea-level.

Traveller returns

There's a bit of a gap between now and my past post. Pretty much as soon as exams were over I hopped on a plane to Kathmandu. From there, 56 other students/junior docs and I hopped on other tiny propeller planes to Lukla. The airstrip there starts at the edge of a sheer drop and finishes up against the solid rock of a cliff-face. It was not my favourite flight ever, especially when I noticed that the windows were mostly held in by duct-tape.

From Lukla we walked for about 10 days up to Everest Base Camp, including stops to acclimatise and stare at the views. Then walked back again over 3 days. They were long days.

Our junior docs were in high demand. We had 2 of the team get AMS, and 2 of our guides get sick, one with a suspected perforated gastric ulcer, he was carried a day's walk to hospital. The docs were tracked down in tea-lodges by other trekkers, the locals, and by one woman who walked for hours to find us, as she had a wound infection and their village had not seen a doctor for years. It felt very very strange to get back to Kathmandu and the flushing sit-down toilets, let alone to get back to London on Saturday. It made the stresses of a London teaching hospital seem pretty tame.

Still, I'm glad to be back. Ophthalmology is suiting me very well. The instant-gratification aspect has a lot of appeal, especially since the results of cataract surgery are so good. I've not seen so many happy people in a clinic for a while.

So, back to the grind-stone and more updates on final-year medicine in London will no doubt follow.