The interview
“So you must belong to at least the top 15% of academic achievers in your country, yes? I mean, all of us here are pretty much the top 10% in Queensland”
I sometimes wonder which hole medical students crawl out from, a place where EQ, diplomacy and graciousness cease to exist.
I wonder if it is because I am currently in a medical programme which admits students solely on the basis of merit, without the need for an interview (apparently the school conducted a large cohort study and determined that interviews had little bearing on the successful outcomes of medical graduates).
Sure, interviews are extremely flawed, as is with any jury panel, easily swayed, biased and subject to so many variables at any given point in time. Not to mention students are able to prepare themselves to deftly field questions, putting forth a persona of whoever the interview panel wants them to be. I think back to my first medical school interview with a University in London. I was 17, ill prepared and very miserably cold (winter!). They skipped the typical questions like “So why do you want to do medicine?” and instead, chatted with me about life, yes life, a life outside of academia. They asked me who my favourite piano composer was, as they saw from my CV that I was at the time pursuing a performer’s certificate, asked about my life in England, being in a boarding school, was it difficult being so far away from home, what I did for fun and then as an after thought, asked me a medical-ish question right at the end. They were trying to get an essence of who I was, I suspect.
I wonder if all these brilliant but emotionally apathetic individuals would have been here if they interview system was still in place. And at the end of the day, the most important question is what benefits the patient most? An emotionally detached and cold but extremely gifted doctor, or an adequate doctor with great compassion and care for his/her patients.
Musings while procrastinating
I can’t believe that I have spent three years in Graduate Medical School, 3/4 almost doctor and still none the wiser.
I remember hugging my father at the airport before I embarked on this roller coaster of a journey. Tears streaming down my face (and maybe snot as well, not a good look), he whispered in my ear “The years will fly by my love.” “Yea right, buddy.” I thought. I think a more accurate thing to say would have been “The years would have flown by in retrospect, my love.” I won’t deny how I thought the days would never end in first and second year, second year especially, where we were like frightened geese being fattened, being force fed stacks and stacks of pathology and clinical knowledge on top of all we had to digest in year one, sometimes against will. My 30 odd year old brain begged for mercy. Second year… my heart still races and palms get sweaty thinking about it. It was also the year where I had my first major meltdown after the final OSCE exam. I cried from the time I exited the exam, drove, got home, where the crying continued as I did the dishes. It was comic, in retrospect.
Now with graduation being a year away, and impending recruitment drives I can actually participate in, not just help organise, I find myself thinking a lot more about what specialty I might like to train in.
With the new residency programme in place, medical graduates now have the option of selecting what they would like to do for the rest of their lives from the time they graduate, subject of course to the elusive selection process- first choice, not guaranteed- endless days as an eventual MO waiting to enter a specialty training, most guaranteed.
It is a scary thought.
I embarked on this journey so sure I wanted to be an obstetrician, fuelled further by the excellent first year elective experience I had where I spent 2 weeks out of 4 in the O&G dept of New Delhi’s largest referral hospital. I was so certain.
Now? I am not so sure.
As graduate medical students, we have to throw another factor into the mix, age. My peers and I all have previous degrees and a couple of years of work experience under our belts. The reality is a lot more stark for the females, I mean let’s face it we are all roughly at the age where we start to worry about practical things like starting a family, settling down and the viability of our eggs. Advice from well meaning, senior doctors always advise us to consider lifestyle when we choose a speciality. There’s a common saying here in Australia; Women handle tears and (pap)smears, ie: most women end up in General Practice. A very senior, no doubt sexist doctor, who during a recruitment drive early in the year ruffled many female feathers when he made the comment, “Women, you should all just consider the family medicine track, you have the option of becoming a hospital resident physician, where your greatest contribution would have been that you’ve been there a long time”.
I started employing the process of elimination, trying to figure out what I enjoyed less of and hence started crossing things out as I went along. Then wise words from yet another senior doctor, “Don’t start eliminating what you think you don’t like. Your experience as an intern will be very different from your experience as a medical student.”
How like that?
Sweeping under carpet for now.
Back to short term immediate goals, like the exams in 3 weeks.
The mythical dark arts
X-Rays… still eludes us.
The Final Quarter
1) Tomorrow heralds the start of a 6 week stint in the Australian outback, a town west of Brisbane, population 5000. After which, the requisite end of rotation exams, before the start of summer holidays.
2) The countdown to the year end holiday begins. Hello Muntri Mews Penang, long lazy lunches, and the joy of getting lost and discovering.
GP
Ok, so today marks the day I officially administered an intramuscular injection into a patient’s deltoid muscle, for real! Not on Paul/Nicholas/thomas the dummies (yes, I named them all) or on synthetic foam. I can only imagine the trepidation the sweet ‘ol war veteran felt when the clinic nurse asked “is it ok if one of our senior medical students give you your flu shot?”. Bless him and his lovely relaxed deltoid muscle.
And! As an added bonus, my GP let me freeze a seborrheic keratosis with liquid nitrogen on the forearm of another lovely old male patient.
Med student cheap thrills.
Halfway
Post exams we indulge in our first proper drink the entire year, and it was cider.
5 glasses of cider on an empty stomach later, I remember why I stopped drinking for the sake of getting drunk. The ill effects of acetaldehyde far outweighs the (small and diminishing) joy drunken revelry brings. Still! It was good fun hopping, skipping and talking loudly before the retching in the loo and stupor set in.
Unflattering photo with eye bags of samsonite proportions, but one for posterity, eh? It is the halfway mark after all 
I see the light…
Golly! Can it really be?
The finish line is in sight, in exactly 17hours 15mins.
It is surreal, when the day that you have been fantasizing about is almost nigh.
Sleeping in. The smell of a cafe brewed flat white. Reading in bed. Going to the video store. Organizing the mess in my room. Little things I take for granted.
Two things that made my day
Thank you squirrel!
And mom booking a table at Yan Ting for a lazy public holiday Dim Sum lunch with the family next week, after my lament about missing har gaus and braised chicken feet. Nuclear family. I love thee.
Home in T-minus 6 days.
But before that, getting pissed/smashed/sloshed/wasted/drunk as a skunk in 17hours and 30mins.
Freedom. There is no other smell quite like it.
Back to basics
According to Kath, we should always employ first principles to work through a problem.
Big picture Jo, big picture.
10 What it takes…
…to produce a Singaporean medical graduate from a foreign University
1) A quarter of a million Singapore dollars for fees, living expenses, books and equipment.
2) Dollars from relatives and friends who often generously pay for meals during said student’s trips home in light of ‘poor medical student’ status.
3) Priceless parental support in the form of e-mails, calls, packages, cards, errand running on student’s behalf.
4) Ditto point 3 priceless support from boyfriend/girlfriend/friends
5) Emotional support in the form housemates/schoolmates as student contemplates carbicide/dessertcide after numerous esteem bashing days by snarky consultants/fellow course mates at the hospital
6) 10 Stabilo Boss original highlighters in luminous yellow, 10 black printer ink cartridges, 2 coloured, 4 reams of A4 paper, 10 Uni Laknock rollerball pens (fine tip), 2 A4 notepads, 2 pocket sized notebooks, annually.
7) 6 large jars of Moccona freeze dried coffee, 100 tea bags, annually.
8.) 3 shirts, 2 blouses, 2 pants, 2 skirts, 2 dresses, 1 pair pearl earrings/2 ties, 1 black shoulder bag, 1 pair proper black shoes as hospital attire. More if student desires variety.
9) Medical kit containing: multivitamins, ginseng/ginko biloba or other brain boosting what-have-yous, 5 packs medicinal patches for stiff shoulders/lower back pain from prolonged sitting, plasters for domestic accidents, zit cream, antidiarrhoeal, panadol extra
10) Cookbook of mother’s recipes
Biopsychosocial
Biophycosocial learning my behind.
I have had it with Kant, Hippocrates, Aristotle and eminent bioethicist Veatch this weekend.
Evolution of the Doctor-Patient relationship, informed consent and patient’s best interest. All extremely interesting, but like the lump said, “it would be nice to be able to learn it in your own time”, as opposed to trying to digest Kantian theory at breakneck speed as fodder for the 2000 words required in two weeks.
Will revisit said theories over the holidays, right now, enough!
