Hi again!

This has been probably THE busiest and most tiring week i've had for like a long, long time. So I apologize if the writing is more random than usual. If that is possible, I mean.

Firstly, one of my bestest friends returned from sheep country, UK, and when we first met up 2 weeks ago it was over a surprise class dinner. That's right, I actually managed to orchestrate A SURPRISE CLASS DINNER! And people actually turned up too! Who knew I was capable of such wonders?? Anyway, my fave walker (although soon to be dethroned by the Brothers & Sisters clan, which incidentally returns THIS SUNDAY, whoohoo) seemed much the same, even with her spanking new accessory, ie The Scottish Boyfriend. It was great catching up and bonding over some good old retail therapy, and of course our Shokudo dinner on Wednesday with the dala lala. Good friends are hard to come by, and I will certainly miss the walker now that she's halfway across the world. Sigh ;(

In other news, our luxurious 1.5 week post m2 break ended on monday, with the beginning of this curious thing called a Clinical Skills Foundation Course. Initially the whole hospital thing with its geriatric wards and marathon speedwalking ward rounds was a bit of a shock, and I was totally blur about everything. This was especially so at 730 am in the morning, which is the time we have to REPORT DAILY for ward rounds. How sucky is that??? I mean, when was the last time you had to turn up at 730 for anything??? What is this anyway, flag raising??? That's like so primary school!

Then, there was the language barrier, which is kinda a huge problem, especially when like my first totally Chinese patient found my spoken Chinese to be so ridiculously shit that she gave up and started conversing in MALAY to my groupmate. 'Twas not good. I don't even know how to say simple stuff like 'i'm a medical student' and 'thank you for your time' and hence I suspect that my vocab has shrunk to like 50 words, although this might still be a rather optimistic estimate. I definitely need to do something about this, and the fact that I don't speak a single word of dialect. I may even be forced to resort to watching some of my sister's taiwan dramas! Desperate times require desperate measures, so I guess we shall have to see if I indeed must sink to such new depths. I thought gossip girl was bad enough aldready! Who knows what a whole new universe of TV shows will do to my airy brain, hurhurr.

There were also many gruesome moments, including the one where our urology tutor made us practice performing rectal exams on a sedated 70-something year old man. I was so not one of the volunteers for palpating the prostate gland in 'quick sweeping movements of the finger.' And I am definitely not looking forward to the day when I simply cannot avoid such hands-on experience. Or should I say hands-in. The bad punning continues!

Also, I have discovered that browsing through pages of Browse's (haha, and another one =x) surgical textbook is the perfect way to kill your appetite. If you ever wanna go on a diet or have an eating disorder or something, this seems like the perfect thing. Surgeons are sick people. Patients are sick people too. I never want to become elderly!

On a brighter side though, today things actually picked up. We had to go back to nus for this communication skills workshop, and one of our tutors was this uber cool american gynae who made us role play history taking. I think we learnt more from 1 hour of her than from 1 entire week at CGH. Oh and we had our tut in the OG wards, and there was this little baby in the nursery. She was so tiny that she almost fit into the palm of the hand, and could be lifted just like that! INCREDIBLY cute! I guess it's the little things like this which make all the rest more bearable, and suddenly worth the while.

So that was basically my week. Tiring, but interesting, and definitely WAY more fun than mugging shitloads of bloody bacteria. Sadly, the mugging is piling up though and I have quite a bit of reading to do over the weekend. I also need to find out how to work my stethoscope, as it appears to be a much more complex instrument than one would imagine.

But none of this before some quality TV watching though :D Have a great weekend y'all!