The Queen's Surprise Visit

It was just a typical morning for me. Getting up in the morning, though a bit late, had my breakfast, put on my clothes and head off to the hospital. The different thing that happened today was that when I got there, there was already a huge crowd gathering in front of the St. Mary's Children Hospital and Manchester Eye Hospital.

People were rushing and pushing each other as they lined up the shoulder of the road. Great Britain flags with the Royal crest on it was put up all over the place. And everyone was ready with their huge and super-fast DSLR cameras in their hands. I honestly do not have a single clue about what was going on at that time! But from the atmosphere, my mind was thinking that someone special and popular might be in the hospital area right now.

Then there it was! After about 15 minutes wandering around outside the hospital, out of no where, a pack of police officers on their huge BMW motorbike queued up and paraded the small road outside MRI. Following them from behind were few bunch of Mercedes and BMWs. And there was this one special car (it was a Rolls-Royce!) that I noticed a distance away from where I was standing. When this car approaced closer to me, I finally got to see who the special visitor was - it was the Queen!

She was in a pink suit, with the traditional royal pink hat, waving and smiling back to the crowd who cheered for her. At that time she was actually on her way to attend other ceremonies held in Manchester and had to leave the hospital. I quickly took out my phone that was held in my pocket, firmly placed it in my agile hands and snapped few pictures of the queen as her car drove slowly passed me. Now, I have proof that I have seen the Queen after nearly 4 years in the UK.

In all, it was absolutely a great experience to finally met the Queen up close in real life. And definitely a surprising one, though brief! Opportunity like this comes once in a life time, plus you need a bit of luck to along  the way. ;-)

p/s: the pictures are in my phone. i am just being lazy to upload it right now. maybe later!

Life goes on..

OSCEs have already finished last week. And with a short break of 4 days only, it's time to continue on the module with 3-weeks of SSC. I'll be doing an audit in a GP this time. Hope everything goes well!

Testing

This is just a test. Not a real post. Trying to figure out how to blog using a blogspot app that I have just installed in my phone.

posted from Bloggeroid

Enjoy this lovely and breath-taking cover of 'Hold It Against Me' by one of the famous YouTube Sensation duo - Sam Tsui & Kurt Schneider!

I just love this song! Err... I mean their version of this song of course. Not the original one by Britney Spears. :D

SSC and OSCE

Next week is the final week of my SSC module. I'm doing my SSC on rheumatology and the deadline of submission for the case study is next week!

Here's an insight of how the specialty like - being a rheumatologist, your work comprised of clinics (about 3 times a week), ward rounds (seeing only about 3 patients at most) and mostly research and meetings. Plus, the only invasive procedure that you will perform on a patient is injecting steroids or other anti-rheumatic drugs for people who have joint problems. That's all!

People might say that the training to be a specialist in rheumatology would be difficult and demanding, but if you would like only a 9 to 5 job in a medical setting, not to mention the huge amount of pay when you're a consultant, this specialty is one of your best shots!

Some people might argue back to me that it is a boring specialty. Well, it entirely depends on you really. If you want to be a surgeon and working continuously from 8 am till 9 pm (depends on the complication of the surgery) for the rest of your medical career, and on top of that, conducting a really busy clinic the next day, then be my guest. No one is going to stop you. It's the interest that is of importance in choosing your career pathway.

And after the SSC has finished, it's OSCE come dawning at me. I will be having my OSCE on the 24th February, which means I have approximately 2 weeks to prepare. For those of you guys who do not know what OSCE is, it actually stands for Objective Structured Clinical Exams. In other words, it's actually a practical exam which will test the clinical skills that I have learned in hospital. It consists of various tasks such as physical examination, drugs prescription, consultation and even breaking bad news.

In essence, in the next 2 weeks, I'll have to finish writing up my SSC and then keep practice for my OSCE. So, yeah, it' s gonna be a whole lot practice and revision to do for me in the next two weeks!

Egypt & Exams

I have definitely lost my momentum to continue with my studies and resume my routine bus trip to and from Wythenshawe Hospital after the holidays. Don't get me wrong. I still love medicine. It's just that, as an average student, being lazy and doing everything half-heartedly after a long holiday is just normal, I guess. Anyhow, I keep telling myself that I will surely get over this lazy attitude and gain back my momentum after the first week of school (hopefully).

Oh yeah! About my egypt trip. The trip to egypt was awesome! The weather was great, the foods were delicious, and the company was cool! Honestly, the experience that I had in Egypt has exceeded beyond my expectations. I thought it was gonna be a normal and a little bit dull trip. The only reason that I agree to join was that I am going there with my bestest buddies - Ili, Yas & Mayura. But, I have to admit, I was proved wrong by everything that I have gone through. Some of the highlights of the trip include the enourmous pyramids, breath-taking scenery at the beaches and definitely the 'shoe tragedy' at the peak of Mount Sinai.

After 8 days of exhilaration and fun in Egypt, with a heavy heart, we departed back home to Manchester and had to snap back to reality and slam our face back into our books! And of course that include FaceBOOK! :D

Memories in Egypt with my bestest friends and humouros guide will embed forever in my memory.

Being Proactive!

I just had my very first meeting with my academic advisor today. It was just a get-to-know session between us and her and she did ask about how's everything going on in our firm and wards.

As soon as she posed that question to us, I had expected that all of my groupmates will voice out their unsatisfactoriness towards the teaching from our consultant. Let me just name him as Dr. X to keep his identity anonymous for obvious reasons.

Basically, we had a limited amount of proper teaching from our consultant. He is always occupied with his work and we rarely had the time to meet him in the ward. Undoubtedly, being a cardiologist is a hectic work but he should bear in mind that he also has the responsibility on our teaching. Even if he really do not have the time to meet and teach us, he should assign any registrars, SHOs, or FYs under him to teach us. Plus, his clinic is conducted at the same time as our PBL session. Therefore, we never had the chance to be in the cardiology clinic even though we are about to swap firms!

I felt jealous when I heard some other groups bragging about the proper teaching that they had in their firms with their consultants. They would always compare with each other what kind of skills, examinations and procedure that they have done. For instance, a guy would say they have performed a venepuncture on a patient. Then, there would be a girl claiming that she had done an ABG. And the list continues on and on. It seems to me as if all of this is some kind of a huge competition!

Going back to the meeting that I had with my academic advisor, she told us to be more proactive in gaining our teaching. Well, that was what we actually did for the past 6 weeks! All of the teaching in the wards that we had was like a ad hoc session. We would turn up and grab any consultants or doctors in sight to teach us something related to our case for that week.

When we get ourselves to the wards, we would always meet the nurses first and ask them if there are any patients that we could talk to and practice our history-taking on them. In terms of skills teaching, we could say that we lack a bit on that part because all the doctors in our ward rarely had a huge time to go through all the examinations that we did on the patients. Luckily, we have a clinical debrief session once a week to compensate on that! And of course, there would be certain time which all the doctors are really busy and they do not even have time to teach us and turn down our request.

In all, we have been very proactive in getting our teaching since we started our placement in the cardiology ward. We would always try to get our hands on every single teaching opportunity that is available. If not, how would we have even survived the past few weeks!