adelaidemedblog

The last few days right up to the day after i came back from medcamp (monday) i have had not very much sleep at all. two hours monday night, four hours tuesday night, three hours wednesday night. And tonight i doubt it will be any better, considering the time is now almost 2am.

Why was I up so late? This thing called a “clinical skills portfolio” - which is new this year for not only me but everyone else in the MBBS course here. so the website says “We expect to review your portfolio of guidelines as the tutorial proceeds.” So, not knowing what exactly constitutes a sufficient amount of work, and possibly also wanting to suck up to the teaching staff a bit, i wrote twelve pages worth of stuff over the last few nights on that (plus a title page with a silly photo of me with one big eye.) Guess what happens today in clinical? not checked at all. Though some people who did see my portfolio kind of got a little scared (who wouldn’t be scared by the prospect of having on average three hours sleep per night?) oh well i guess it means less work later.

I also had a reminder of how nerdy i am. during first year representative elections today i was nominated as educational rep by some random person down the front of the lecture hall (who i have no idea about because they were down the front of the lecture hall). I still have not found out who it was but thankfully i did not get elected (as i didn’t want the position because i am nerdy enough as is.) I spent about five minutes asking people around me whether there was actually another tony in the grade. turns out there wasnt.

we had our first real pbl today. it was good apart from the fact that i felt really really stupid in it (though i understood everything that was being said) - there was not much contribution from me; possibly due to my sleep routine.

i guess it really shows when at the end of the day i realised i had lost my keys and i spent a full half hour retracing my steps to find them. ended up to be at a restaurant. far out. i really do need sleep here…

in clinical we learnt (again) how to take a blood pressure (repeating what happened on medcamp.) it was a reminder to some of how small they are (though strangely enough, not to me - the normal sized cuff was too large for them and we had to make do with it; i would seriously use a pediatric one for them).

oh and last tuesday i went out and bought a spirit cardiology. i am currently very happy with it and i hope it comes in handy (more handy than all the littmann se 2’s and equivalent spirit deluxes that have been floating around on people’s necks) for the pregnant lady placement. or as i found out today, for taking someone’s pulse when they require a pediatric sized cuff.

as of now i am finishing the questions that we needed to do for this week’s biology tutorial (which is tomorrow.) i am still sleepy. I heard that the president of the AMSS gets by with four hours sleep each night. i wonder if i could pull that off.