It’s 1.30pm and I just had my lunch after my attachment with a gynaecologist in the gynae clinic. I’ve to meet the chest specialist who is handling Dad’s case in the medical clinic at 2pm and in the meantime I’m not sure where to go so I made a trip to the computer lab. Going back to my room will take me about 5mins and in about 10mins time I gotta walk all the way to the hospital again so that seemed rather time and energy consuming. Waiting at the medical clinic means me taking an extra seat at the waiting area knowing that the place would have been sardine-packed with patients on appointment by this time of the day before the afternoon consultations start. So here I am deleting the hundreds of mails in my inbox and try to compose a post… which is basically full of NOTHING by now other than explainations as to why and how I ended up here. Crap. I think I’m losing too much brain activity to my Obstetric and Gynaecology posting nowadays I don’t seem to be able to do other things right, including activities of daily living (ADL) like eating, bathing, etc.

Jel and I have been super busy lately. Our day starts at 8am and ends at 5pm during the weekdays with morning tutorials and clinics, ward rounds, faculty lectures, department lectures, etc. We’re on-call (be on duty in the labour ward or gynaecology ward) lasting from 5pm to 8am the next day once in every 3 days and if it falls on weekends or public holidays, we gotta be in the labour ward from 8am to 8am the next day delivering babies and placentas, cutting open vaginas to facilitate passage of the baby’s head and then suturing/repairing the cut at the vaginal mucosal, muscular and skin layers. To add icing to this nice gigantic cake, we’ve to submit 4 case reports and 1 cytology report by the end of this posting.

Here’s what we need: We need sleep. We need rest. We need some time to go buy groceries. Jel’s feet are hurting after standing for many hours in a pair of old, hardened leather shoes so she needs to go shop for more comfortable ones lest her feet becomes deformed by the end of this posting. We’re not sure of what’s happening around the country or the world for 2 weeks coz we’ve absolutely no time to read the papers and even if we do, our eyelids can barely hold up. We need time to study and write case summaries.

We don’t need irrational scoldings from the nurses in the ward. We don’t need more lectures and workloads. We don’t want any more postponed classes or ward rounds by the consultants. We don’t need anyone to lecture us about “not trying hard enough”. We don’t need patients who look down on us and refuse to cooperate during history taking and physical examination as soon as they learned that we’re medical students. We don’t need patients’ relatives and friends to crowd around us, watching us like hawks and generating anxiety in us poor souls when we’re taking blood from the constricted blood vessels of a cancer patient who just underwent chemotherapy.

Final year is lovely. This whole lot of stuff that I’m learning and experiencing now are priceless and they truly make me feel blessed and lucky. Lots to see and learn. Many more to come. I can live with it. At least I’m willing to. I can trade my leisure time, sleep and mealtimes for medicine, patients and their concerned relatives. But we need more time. And we need chances.

God be with us

(Gambate Jel!)