It's sad to be leaving and heading back to Canada but at least my time here has been pretty awesome. Both the adventures in the clinic and the hospital as well as the adventures outside.
On my second to last day at the clinic, one of the nurses serendipitously asks me if I ever had a chance to go out cross country skiing in the area. 'Nah. I didn't get a chance unfortunately,' I say nonchalantly.
Hospital days are generally pretty fun. It's kind of like the walk-in clinic with a bit of randomness inter-dispersed. The long 16.5 hr shifts can sometimes be a bit full on but generally time flies by so fast if its busy that you don't really take notice until at about 11:00pm when you're barely functioning properly let alone functioning to determine the survival of the individual in front of you.
After taking what I thought was an amazingly smooth and uneventful ride in the twin otter. I was a little bit scared when I saw the little Cesna 140 that I was about to embark on.
My first day in clinic was fairly uneventful. The doctor I was following was pretty blasé but a good teacher nonetheless. Given my experience in Australia I think he was rather impressed with my knowledge and my ability to pick up how the electronic medical records worked so quickly.
Really though. As a child of gen y, is there any other expectation?
My first day in emergency at the hospital was a bit of a rude shock though.
So in my eagerness to be a super keen medical student. I arranged to do an elective in Canada in a small remote rural town in the middle of northern nowhere. My next few posts will be a retooling of my experiences there. The fascination. The anticipation. And the strenuous life of what our Canadian counterparts are expected to do.
Dear cyber travelers. Welcome back. I hope exams and assignments are all coming to a close and that the holiday season and air is about you. I do apologise for the lack of correspondence but assure you that I will be more frequently and timely with my posts. 2012 will be another year where I'll continue my retellings of adventures/misadventures in the life as a med student in a small rural town. I wish you all the best and a Merry Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukah. Crazy Kwanzaa and Festivus for the rest of us.
AKA the art of stealth. On my occasional visits to the hospital with a horde of eager beaver students following around a doctor, there are random thoughts that pop up into my head that momentarily amuses me in the moments were the group is idle and everyone else on the team is making themselves useful. While everyone else is doing something that is actually important and contributing to patient care, I find it an appropriate time to practice my art of acting like room furniture. I know that sounds bizarre, but hear me out.
It’s the end of November and for many in the student ‘profession’ it’s a time of immense stress, occasional prayer, sleepless nights and poor diet… in other words, examination time. I’m one of the lucky ones, my next major paper is in June, but I thought I might share a few thoughts about exams and my approach – perhaps a little late for those of you sitting them as I type, but then again perhaps not.
Talk about hitting the ground running. After an uneventful day at the hospital and a nice relaxing day to read and catch up on some much needed zz's, I made my way to my GP clinic for my first session. Not only was a thrown right into the deep, it was pretty much in a tank of sharks as well.
So it's the first day at the hospital and like most medical students who arrive on their first day bright eyed, bushy tailed, such days tend to bring only disappointment or worse, something that knocks you a few pegs down. Sometimes it’s the lack of anything remotely medical. Where you have these high hopes of seeing something exciting, like a resus call, or even a cannulae! Anything to satisfy your nerdy need to be intellectually stimulated.
"General practice is just coughs and colds."
"General practice is just people with sore knees and backs."
"General practice is just writing scripts and Workers’ Compensation forms."
"General practice is for the less smart students."
You've heard similar in your time, am I right? Or perhaps you’ve been told that GP-land is the easy way out, that it's there for doctors who want "the lifestyle" without the complications?
So I came into my new town at 5:30pm Sunday evening and there isn't a single car on the main street. It was a bit eerie given that I'll be spending at least six months of my life here in this town if not more. I swear I saw a ball of tumbleweed passing by car as I drove up to the driveway of my new abode.
Benjamin Thomas is a third year medical student at the University of Wollongong. After initially undertaking a science degree, he's now pursuing medicine. Ben says medicine provides him with the 'human element' of science.
Welcome followers, trespassers and lost digital souls. Welcome to my blog. Get a warm drink, grab a chair and pull up a seat. Regardless of how you stumbled upon this page I welcome you to listen to my story... a story, about a young, bright-eyed medical student lost somewhere in the vast rural areas of Australia.
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