All 1 entries tagged Neurosurgery

Harnesses, friends and cups of tea

I feel like it was three seconds ago I was writing my last blog. Exam fever really has set in now and I am trying my best not to get too wound up but it is hard! However, I have discovered a new outlet. Warwick have just opened a new sports centre which has an incredible climbing wall. A lot of people here enjoy climbing so I thought I would give it a go. It was fantastic. I was out of the MTC and had two hours where all I thought about was where my feet and hands were going to go. I am having to learn the ropes (literally) as I need to learn how to tie the knots to climb but the auto-belays are just as good, and I am enjoying pushing myself up the walls and letting off a bit of steam. However, the new sports hub means that the wall has moved from 30 seconds outside my door to a 10-minute bike ride. I guess it just means I can have a few extra biscuits!

Outside of medicine and climbing, I didn’t get the internship. I was slightly disappointed, but you win some and lose some, I guess! I have found another opportunity that I managed to apply to over the weekend thanks to one of my neuro tutors who wrote a reference for me over the weekend! Thank you Dawn! I am excited about it but I am not going to pin my hopes up as I know its competitive, but I guess so is medicine in general! I am also still waiting for the results of my application to become a resident tutor but I won’t find out till June so it is going to be a long wait.

Revision has been the majority of every single one of my days but thankfully, I have an amazing group of friends around me to get through it all. This weekend we have been laughing together about insignificant things such as the inability to work for 20 minutes without talking to each other. We have our own spots, make each other cups of tea (Sam has re-named me his tea wife) and share resources around including yesterday when I was slightly on the manic side and I decided my new technique to remember the basal ganglia pathway was so good, it needed to be shared with everyone. I was basically wandering around the MTC repeating this mnemonic over and over again to everyone I saw which was a surprising amount for the weekends! I am not mad. Yet. We ended up heading to the dirty duck after a hard day studying to have a bit of light relief in the form of burgers and a couple of drinks.

One of the second years Ollie has also been giving me small glimpses of next year. We both are interested in Neurosurgery and Ollie is getting to watch a lot of neurosurgery, so I get updates about “open craniotomies” and “optical canal meningiomas” whilst I am sitting here doing Anki, growing slowly mad. It is nice though, as it makes these exams seem a little less like an impossible mountain to climb and more of a marathon. Hard but not impossible. I can’t wait to be full time in hospital and being able to go down to the Neurosurgery ward to experience these surgeries for myself and hopefully experience some Neuroradiology which is also growing as an interest of mine. Henry Marsh is also in Stratford this Friday, so I am hoping to go and see him as he has been such a big influence in my medical career.

One of my friends from my undergraduate days also recently got an offer to study here next year and I am not sure who was more excited, her or me! It will be nice to have a fellow UCLan grad here and even more importantly, a fellow Neuro! It’s becoming real now that we will soon be taking this exam and hopefully passing into second year, I can’t wait to see patients. I just need to get through these next few weeks! Someone send coffee ... A lot of it .... Please.

Abbie

Charlie Gallan : 30 Apr 2019 09:55 |  Tags: Abbie Mbchb Neurosurgery Revision Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem