The Pensieve

While walking the long long corridor in a certain hospital…

Dopey: I think I need more osce notes!

Boss: Huh?

Dopey: As in… for examiner identification?

Boss & EW: HAHAHA…

Dopey: Like show a photo and questions go… Name three conditions commonly seen in the clinics of this professor.

Boss: No need la, just ask you to name this professor, you already fail liao. Oh, actually no need, just ask you which department you also cannot make it lah…

Dopey: *fumes*

EW: You still dunno who ABC is!!!

This year, I’m wishing for a lot of things that I probably can’t get anyway…

1. A prophylactic brain transplant with greater capacity and of better calibre in preparation for the exams.

2. More time. To study. (how sad is this…)

3. An all expenses-paid trip around the world! *drool*

4. To stop falling asleep whenever a lecturer starts to talk.

5. For boss to start paying me…

Disclaimer

Edna: You all are the creme de la creme de la creme de la creme! But, haiz, I don’t want to say that but… Please, I know the knowledge is somewhere in the vestiges of your brain, please, try to drag it out ok? That’s the problem of your this google generation. Type in a condition to google and it generates out a hundred and one differentials… We don’t want a houseman to give us twenty differentials during rounds and then we stand there to decide, ah, not this one, not that one… Please…

Us: Yes, ‘Edna’, sorry… We understand…

Edna: Google somemore lah! I google with my brain! Better than your google!

***

The bottom line, after so many years of medical education, we have to make use of yr 5 to put all the pieces of the puzzle together, let everything fall into place. Everything we’ve learnt these 5 yrs are inter-related, we just have to put the pieces of the jigsaw together! Alas, it’s a daunting task for some of us!

Disclaimer

We were discussing a case where a patient did a health screen overseas which included a 2D echocardiogram. The 2DE suggested some mild abnormalities, and the patient was given the choice of doing a coronary angiogram. Eventually a PTCA was done, where two vessels (40-50% stenosed) were stented. (!!!)

Edna: Aiyo! Next time when I see anyone of you driving a Mercedes ah, make sure your conscience is CLEAR! If not clear, then makes motion of sweeping hand away from herself donate to charity ah! Better make sure your conscience is clear…

Later, at the lounge…

Boss: Eh, why Mercedes leh? I want a (insert any car name…)

Kandy: Eh, where else can I sell my soul to?

At home, when my mum heard about the incident…

Mother: Why Mercedes? These days people drive other kinds of cars liao loh… What BMW, Ferrari? Waaa, that one, better make sure your conscience is super clear!

medical round
the usual rounds where a group of docs fly from bed to bed in the wee hours of the morning, pulling this trolley of files with them. at surgical/ortho rounds, the most senior usually barks out orders at top speed while the poor plankton aka HO scribbles them down… common questions heard are: any pain? no pain? can go home? what antibiotic is the patient on? in medical rounds, a smaller group of docs shuffle from bed to bed, carrying thicker files, the entire group scrutinises the endless list of medical problems. common questions heard include: what antibiotic is the patient on? what is his potassium? trace blood culture!

screening round
a new term coined specially for this (medical) posting. it involves a group of frantic shifting dullness touring the wards, hounding HOs and colleagues for cases that can be used for tutorial with ‘edna mode’. cases must satisfy the following criteria:
1. pt agreeable to being examined for tutorial
2. pt will be in bed at the time of examination
3. at least one student must have examined him/her already and signs should be present, and preferably correlate well with each other.

food round
applies more to the guys in my group. no food means that kandy will need 40mls D50%, sue-anne will moan about being hungry… it’s also fondly known as the ‘nutrition round’ (first time i heard it, i thought they were going to round with the TPN team!). Irene is the overall in-charge.

kopi round
this is very commonly seen and heard. i din use to do that until i started medicine sip. haha… my HO, whose name incidentally sounds a lot like mine, loves her kopi rounds. :) it’s this 15min break where we run down to get some kopi to keep ourselves awake for the rest of the day!

corridor round
one consultant in a certain hospital is well-known for this sentence:
“What are you all doing? Is this a corridor round?”
When you hear this, please pretend to look extremely busy, like you’re trying to find your tendon tapper or else pretend you haven’t really heard him and head towards the nearest patient to clerk/examine, or else you’ll really get it from that consultant. i had a narrow escape. phew!

eye exercise
most guys do this. it’s like usually at work they all got only one-track mind, but in the wards or library, they suddenly develop a heightened peripheral vision, and their extraocular muscles work OT trying to take in the sights of all the girls around them. some even appear to have ‘eyes at the back of their head’. others, like Boss, are more tech-savvy and have long installed a radar for this purpose. Well, detecting is one thing, but targetting with success is another. ;)

Some photos fr my dad’s stash during his short stint back in Sg… Something to tantalise myself

This is where he lives… so shiok. I love living in hotels! haha… This one’s called Vivere Suites, quite the posh hotel I heard… It’s in Alabang, a rather big town about 1-2hours drive from Manila. It’s half an hour by car from Cabayao, that’s where the light industry park is… A bit like our science park here.

ROOFTOP POOL!!! So nice rite! Can’t wait to go check it out!

That’s one of the eating/bar places downtown… It has a rather Spanish feel around the place, afterall, the Philippines was once a Spanish colony rite? (I hope I didn’t screw up history.)

On one of the side trips my father took to the countryside… This was one of the grocery shopping areas there… It’s like pineapple heaven there!

Some of the typical countryside… I’m looking forward to lots of wonderful, nice trekking to be done! Looking for people who love to trek/walk to go too!

Apparently, my father claims this is Marcos’ house, I think it’s more like his ’summer’/'winter’ house… sort of a respite in the countryside…

I’ve got far nicer pictures than this one, but most of them have got my father’s corny poses in there, so he forbade me from posting them up here. :( Anyway, that lump in the middle is supposed to be one of the many extinct volcanoes there… We could make a day trip to those ‘volcano-islands’, I hope to check out one of those dormant ones… Go see the crater. I shall invite my enemies along with me. Muahahaha…

Another day trip to a town… More like a dead town, cuz it’s filled with places like these… and guess who lives within? DEAD PEOPLE! CORPSES! These are mausoleums belonging to the really rich people. Their tomb far surpasses the size and state of the commonfolk.

Yay….

and now back to mugging. SIGH!

Rating: ****
Genre: Evil comedy, really evil.

Starring Sacha Baron Cohen as… Borat Sagdiyev!

Official site

As it is, this is also a long-outdated post… lolz… I seem to be blogging only a few sentences daily. Hah. That’s how sad my life is…

Well ok, this Borat movie… wasn’t intending to watch it… But finally gave in to my fren and went to watch during that long break we had for the New Year. Think I went on the Tuesday… yea… and where else to watch but at Vivocity? haha… really like the huge screen and leg room there… No evil people can trip me down over there!

This movie is not for the faint-hearted, the non-humourous, and those who walk on the too-straight-to-be-true road. Seriously, it’s anti-Jew, anti-gay, it’s just soooo wrong that it’s sooo funny! Haha… Actually I think underneath all this crass-ness, it was trying to poke fun at Big Bro and erm, their erm, xenophobic tendencies at times… and their um… I-am-a-big-and-powerful-nation mentality. (I tell ya, it’s so true… I’ve experienced it first hand, it was so true that I found it funny…)

It’s done in a documentary manner. Borat is a reporter from the great nation of K, who journeys to this land of America to learn more about their culture, so that he can make his own country greater! (like the US and A, which is what he calls it) Along the way, he takes lessons in humour, dining etiquette and interviews various people. I think that some of those people he interviewed (like some ex-senator and those etiquette teachers, the people in some Federation campaigning for women’s rights and so on) actually really believed that he was from Khazakstan and was really interviewing them for a documentary. I can’t imagine how scandalised they must have been by his behaviour and remarks! Midway during his journey, Borat catches sight of a Baywatch programme and sees Pamela Anderson (ok, my blog hit rate is going to shoot up just cuz I typed her name here…) and decides that he must make her his wife! hahaha… Of course Pamela Anderson had to be let in on this or else Borat wouldn’t be able to get even within an arm’s length of her, let alone try to stuff her in a gunny sack and carry her off (because he thought she was the perfect wife for him… ) You dunno how wrong that sounds to the rest of the world…

In summary (haha, Edna doesn’t seem to like this a lot), this is a movie where we laugh at ourselves as much as we laugh at others. The loathing feeling we get towards Borat at some points reminds us that we have once behaved like him, and how our behaviour would have been bilious to others… So the next time you make fun of someone else, or say something insensitive, or simply do something not too nice to another person, try to think how the other person would feel first, eh?

I pride myself at usually being extremely blur but still able to pick up clues in time to avoid being sabo-ed by friends. But alas, I am no match for these two evil gays (oops, I meant guys) in my CG and this one persistent irritant. ;)

‘Oio, why must you persistently irritate me huh?’ Stamps foot a la Edna Mode

***

Dopey, Boss, Irene, and ‘irritant’ were walking along the level 3 corridor in XYZ hospital when a distinguished gentleman walks past…

Boss + Irene: Afternoon Prof!

Dopey: (stage whisper to Boss) Hey, that was Prof AN rite?

Boss: (eyes wide open, almost exomphalmic) Hey, you very lousy leh! That one who you also dunno?! That’s WHK you know! You want to die ah…

‘Irritant’: (in his usual pose of exaggerated disbelief - neck extended, shoulders pulled back, eye brows shot up into the hair, and eyes popping out so that one could see the lower limbus) You dunno who that is?!?!?!

Irene: (adds in his four cents worth) blah blah blah blah blah!?!?!

Me: (very paiseh) But erm, this guy looks very non-Chinese leh!

Boss: Cannot meh? You cannot differentiate ah?

Later in the lift…

Irene: Eh Dopey, you can’t tell the difference between Chinese and non?

Me: Apparently so…

Irene: Actually that was Prof AN!

Irene + Boss + ‘the most irritating irritant’: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…

***

Sei lor, I cannot differentiate the different profs… That day mistook a LPS for a YHK… But Boss says that’s like mistaking a lion for a tiger, so nevermind la, sure sei either way. I think might as well apply Risk Stratification since I need any spare memory space to remember more ‘Causes of …’ and ‘Complications of …’, just stratify the profs to: ‘High Risk Failure’, ‘Intermediate Risk Failure’ and ‘Low Risk Failure’ categories…

Disclaimer

This examiner is one of a kind. He’s truly worried about the state of future doctors that the university is churning out, and how inept we could be… He only wants the best and in medicine, it’s true, the best is never enough. After all, it’s a human life we’re talking about here!

Examiner: Asks a basic question, but one you would not be able to answer if you weren’t familiar with the wards…
Student: produces a lot of smoke
Examiner: Not in the wards long enough… you fail! Next question…
Student: Erm… But I…
Examiner: No excuses, you fail too!
More arrows…
Examiner: This is basic respiratory medicine… who taught you basic respiratory medicine in yr 3? You fail!
… and the final straw…
Examiner: I am going to DIE with this standard of care in the hospital. There is simply NO pride in doctors nowadays. No pride at all in your work these days. You all better buck up.

GOOOOONG!!! (bell saying time’s up!)

Recommended approach: Study really hard and really smart from year one. Be in the wards, follow your patients to their investigations, work hard during SIP. Know your basics, use your brain. Pray really hard that you don’t get this type of examiner for your finals!

Credits: Boss, for sharing his harrowing experience.

another ultra-back dated entry… if i’m getting too lame, just tell me ‘tolong!’ and i promise i’ll stop.

Genre: Manga, comic
Rating: ***/*****

‘Death Note’ is a film adapted from a series of highly successful manga. It features the theme of ‘vagrant justice’. An initially well-meaning teenage high achiever chances upon a note book. ‘Whomever who’s name is written in it will die’. Plus a whole host of instructions detailing time and nature of death. It even allows scheduled deaths (just like my blog!) It bestows upon it’s owner, the power to govern another’s life and death. Islandwide, criminals start dropping like flies, dividing the nation into a state of panic (the police department) and unadulterated pure adolation of this ‘Kira’ (impressionable kids and the general law-abiding public). Enter L, another weirdo, who pits his wits against Kira, in a battle to see who would win ultimately. It’s not so much a race to weed out this self-proclaimed hangman, but a race to see who is the smartest.

Manga? Comic? Movie? It’s hard to tell. The human characters act as though they walked right out of the pages of the comic. Perhaps it’s the Japanese style of filming, as I’ve noticed similar exaggerated cool stances (designed to make little teenage girls swoon) and that artificial glint in the eyes, in a Jap drama featuring a teacher with revolutionary teaching methods. The manga character, serves oddly, as a form of comic relief. I would have expected an evil character to allow humans free reign of their newly-given godly powers; and yet have hidden cards up their sleeve. Apparently not for this devil. It’s cute as can be, and seems to care for nothing except his apples.

Do not expect passionate romances, heart-wrenching plots because this is, after all, adapted from a comic. Expect however, an exciting, breath-taking trip down a world of fantasies, of brilliant twists in the plot and surprises.