medicine

I've been doing a lot of revision lately. (hence the lack of blogging).

I am still doing paediatrics and am still away from home, but in 5 weeks (AARGH! ONLY 5 WEEKS!!) I have these big huge super enormous massively scary exams.

They aren't my proper medical finals (which I will do in June 08), but we have to pass these upcoming exams in order to be able to do our medical finals
Also, the mark we get on these upcoming exams will be used to RANK us when we apply for our proper medical jobs later on in the year.

basically the government has this "great" idea that medical students should all be ranked compared to everyone else in their year at their medical school, so that when they apply for jobs as doctors they have to put down what quartile they were in in their year .

(why we have to do this, noone is quite sure. Seems like a ridiculously competitive idea to everyone, except for the random politicians who decide these things.)

So yeh, the results for the exams I am about to do will determine what rank I get when applying for jobs.

So you can imagine the level of stress that is going on right now with my medical student peers!
People are spending 10 hours a day revising their butts off.

But to be fair our syllabus is HUGE. Seriously, I'm not exaggerating.

It's 80 pages of size 10 font bullet-points listing what we have to know.

and each bullet point comprises quite a lot of info

e.g.

"-know the aetiology, causes, pathogenesis, clinical features, complications, treatment and natural history of XYZ disease"

80 pages worth

I could probably type 500 pages of size 10 notes on what we have to know

and then our exam also consits of looking at pictures of diseased tissues and trying to detrmine what the disease process is.

We will then also have to do some practical skills stuff (examining sick children, doing baby checks, doing cervical smears) and then we have about 6 communication skills stations.

So yeh...lots of work!

So although it kinda sucks to be away from home, it is certainly useful in terms of having NO distractions and so being able to basically live & breath medicine.

Also, the library here is really awesome:

they give free toffee sweets out!

This is the amount I have accumulated in my bag over the last 2 weeks!!

hehe! well...they do give 'em out! and so I take them!

anyway, better go cos library is closing and they will probably throw me out in a sec...