All entries for Friday 21 December 2018

Christmas has finally arrived! I’m currently heading home writing this blog and I am very much looking forward to just sleeping. We have had a busy couple of weeks, so it’s been a final push towards the end of the term.

I had my final 2018 student seminar session where we played “Pin the ECG on Santa” and all wore matching Christmas jumpers which amazingly had not been co-ordinated. One of the people teaching me is my medic dad so I can guess you call it family intuition! They have both been amazing this term along with the ECG session the cardiac society put on for us, the physiology and anatomy days and the MOSCE prep day which have also been lifesavers. There is so much support here, no one wants anyone to fall behind, which builds a sense of camaraderie in the med school. We also had a Christmas-themed CBL where we exchanged secret Santa presents! I received a bumblebee notebook, someone knows me so well!

We had our final anatomy session of 2018 in the surgical training centre, which was incredible. We were privileged enough to experience fresh tissue which had been donated for medical teaching use. It was something I will never forget. We were able to hold hearts, kidneys and livers and identify structures that we had learnt over the two blocks. All the time I kept thinking about how these were once keeping someone alive and had done so for 80ish years (I don’t know details about the donors, so this is just an estimate). We were also shown a working chest with the lungs inflating. I got to feel the lungs expand and feel every alveolus open which felt like small bubbles under my fingers. It was an amazing opportunity. I got to inflate the lungs and I was surprised as to how much I needed to inflate the bag to get the lungs to initially expand. In all honesty, this really should not have been a surprise as we had learnt about the force needed to open the lungs in a lecture… so I guess I need to go back over that one!

In the evening my amazing flatmates had thrown a surprise birthday party to top off an incredible day for someone who wants to pursue surgery as a career. We had lots of food, and a game which got brutal between some of the more competitive ones. I felt really touched as it’s been a tough couple of weeks with block 2, as physiology is just something I’ve not got on well with, so to have this to end the term really brought my spirits up.

We only had one more thing to do. MOSCES. These were mocks of our OSCE exams in the summer which meant that for 12 solid hours in our kitchen we practised all our examinations. I now know my friends’ hands back to front and can finally pronounce “Leukonychia” and “Koilonychia” which I suppose is good considering I will be using these terms for the rest of my life. It was very odd for my non-medic flatmates to walk into the kitchen to see us tapping each other’s stomachs. Perks of living with medics I suppose….

I had my MOSCE on Tuesday and was nervous, especially as I was in the same corridor as I was for my interview back in January. I don’t know my result yet. I did run out of time on a station which I had practised repeatedly in our kitchen and was way undertime. This was frustrating as I know I would have dropped marks there but it’s a good indication for next year. I also keep second guessing myself over what I said and what I didn’t say, and I know I missed a few things out when it came to another one of the stations. However, if I did fail (and that’s perfectly fine) I get 1:1 with our head of Clinical Skills so its all win I guess!

I am going to try and have a break over Christmas, I have a list of things to do and some final lectures to note from block, 2 but I want to make sure I have a couple of days where I don’t think about medicine. If I have learnt anything this block, it’s that it’s important to forget about medicine for 24 hours.

I am really looking forward to the next block: Brains! This is where my undergraduate degree will hopefully help. I love everything to do with the neuro side of things, so I am hoping that I will get to grips a bit more easily with this block. I also want to be able to help others who might struggle with it as so many people have helped me this year… but only time will tell! Merry Christmas guys!

Hope you all have a brilliant Christmas and an amazing New Year !

Abbie