(no subject)
First block of fourth year is finished. I’d been dreading it all summer, now it has whizzed by uneventfully in a mundane, time consuming rhythm. Each morning I’d get up somewhere in between 6:30 and 7:00 depending on how touch sensitive the snooze button on my mobile is feeling, scramble across the room until my lenseless eyes are inches from my computer screen, read my morning message from Lori, shower, make shirts and iron sandwiches while the porridge burns to the pan, dress and pack simultaneously then inspire the rush hour traffic to forsake four wheels for two by powering my mountain bike downhill full speed past queues, round roundabouts, through red lights and over pavements, jump off it at the ticket office, return to perth, £11 (remember to get a receipt), juggle it down neurotic stairs that remind you to hold their handrails every five seconds and through time wasting money saving turnstiles, then squeezing it on the train next to the skinny road bikes of shiny yellow like minded commuters. Sitting reading ‘God of Small Things’ eavesdropping on important world’s full of sales targets, self assured judgements of co-workers, managements conspiracies and office gossip and watching the Tay get prettier as Perth approached. A quick cycle at the other end took me to GP land, where I shadowed a hundred different moments in a hundred people’s health, from babies both unwanted and desperately wanted through their fevers and rashes, diabetes and car crashes to their demented arthritic dance on the brink of complete dependence. A four week whistle stop tour of the land of medicine I used to tread regularly but last year lost the map to. A quick dip in the Sea of Gynaecology, a daunting plod through the Dry Desert of Dermatology, a quick breath of fresh air in the Green and Breezy Plains of Respiration and a hike up clogged valleys in the Thundering Mountains of Cardiology. Six different guides showed me around these lands and I found myself as interested in their methods and attitudes in travelling it as I was in observing the pretty landscapes themselves. I'd escape to reality on my bike to the banks of the Tay to eat sandwiches and read God of Small Things then back to GP land to join a different guide for the afternoon. Get home at tea time to fry the shit out of some vegetables and spend the rest of the night battling my will to work against the intoxicating lure of weed smoke from the living room. Send Lori my good morning message then crawl into bed and repeat through to Friday until I'm too drained to do much of anything. After 4 years of university medicine has finally beaten and broken me down into a fully fledged medical student. Until now I have always contained it as a relatively small part of my life outside of exam time, but if I'm to achieve the consistent confident competence require of me to survive this year, I'm going to have to let it own my life, and that's not proving easy. The next four weeks will take me on more detailed trips to some of the less picturesque areas of medicine land, from the Festering Swamps of Infectious Diseases through the Unfathomable Forest of Neurology to the Dark and Scary Caves of Oncology. These be scary places without a map, so I best get studying.