All 176 entries tagged Warwick

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

Block 5 … Babies and hormones

So, we are officially back from Easter break and I can officially say that it felt like we had 4 seconds off rather than 4 weeks. I was worried about the atmosphere when everyone else returned but it has been really nice and everyone is building each other up and reminding everyone that making sure they have a break is just as important as learning pharmacology. I have also discovered I have grown rather attached to my spot in the MTC computer room as someone was sat in it the other day and I just ended up wandering around until they moved so I could work…. I wonder if a post-it note claiming my spot will work?

I am enjoying Block 5 so far which is our child development and pregnancy block. The physiology is actually going ok for once and I am enjoying my lectures. We have Jamie Roebuck back for anatomy this term and I think he has provided the most memorable moments such as the “abseiling testicle” and demonstrating what the lithotomy position was on the front bench of the lecture theatre. We have also had our block lead Dawn Cannon who has taken us through contraception meaning there was a line-up of 5 students holding condoms at the front of the lecture hall describing them to us. Block 5 is going to be eventful. I have also had the joy of being a mother for one lecture by holding a plastic doll whilst taking notes, much more difficult that you would first think.

My favourite lecture so far has been on development as we talked about the teenage brain which is one of the topics of Neuroscience I love more than anything. I first got interested in the world of Neuro by a book which detailed all the aspects of Teenage Neuroscience, so it’s a topic of which I am ridiculously passionate about and could talk about it all day (though I think everyone would hate me for that !!).

It’s a busy time as I have also applied for a WMS internship which will be developing a new peer teaching programme and a booklet for the new first years. I had my interview the other day so … fingers crossed! I have also applied to be a resident life tutor which is a live-in student who helps the first years with their time living in halls. The role looks incredible as I get to be the friendly face for the first years to come to with problems but it also means I have to deal with things like noise complaints and encouraging the freshers to not be typical freshers and keep the kitchen areas at least liveable! I am waiting to hear if I have got an interview but it does mean I currently have a lot of balls being juggled at the moment!

My scheme that I set up over the holiday has taken well. I get a little wave of excitement when I hear people taking mugs or using blankets. I am really happy that people have deemed it as useful and I hope to build on it in the future. I have also just taken on a role in Neuroscience Society working on the outreach and engagement which I am really looking forward to getting my teeth into.

The first open day went really well and I enjoyed meeting all the premeds. It felt so weird as I was in their position just over a year and a half ago. I still have my pen from my Warwick open day and the pack we were given. I was slightly nervous giving my talk but once we got rolling I was in my element. It reminded me just how much I love public speaking and I even got a couple of laughs on the day!

I am a bit stressed. I found that trying to get to sleep at night is proving to be a mission and I am struggling to completely switch off. I am worried how this will develop as we get closer to exams but I guess it’s something that is affecting everyone. However, the nights are drawing out and campus is looking as beautiful as ever which makes late night studying that much easier. Cycling past the lake means I have met the newest arrivals of some goose chicks. I wish I could show you a picture to show just how fluffy they are!

Anyway, back to work I suppose!

Abbie

Charlie Gallan : 23 Apr 2019 14:51 |  Tags: Abbie Easter Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A first taste of Psychiatry

This week I have had my Psychiatry placement. I haven’t had any previous experiences in psychiatry before, so I was really looking forward to spending a week learning more about the speciality. All of the students have different placements for ‘Psychiatry Week’ so our experiences will all be different. My placement was in community learning disability services, which was interesting as I had already encountered some patients with learning disabilities in my GP and hospital teaching, so the week would give me an opportunity to learn more about the specialised care these patients receive.

We arrived at our placement on Monday morning and spent the day meeting the team, which included more professionals than I expected! The team included doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, psychologists, social workers, speech and language therapists and many more. I had no idea about all of the different groups that were involved in learning disability services.

On Wednesday we had a chance to attend a meeting which was facilitated by the psychiatrist to which we were attached for the week. It was really fascinating to observe how the psychiatrist communicated to the service user, and will really make me think more about my own communication skills and how my approach is accessible to all patients. In the afternoon we spent time in a respite centre for individuals with learning disabilities, which gave us the chance to meet some service users and also chat to the carers about what they do. The centre was really well run and supportive in helping their service users when they needed to stay over to give their parents or carers a respite break.

We also attended a home visit with one of the trainee psychiatrists, this gave us the chance to meet a service user in their own environment and see how they are cared for at home. The psychiatrist also had to deal with physical health problems while they were there, and I hadn’t considered this before – I had thought psychiatrists only dealt with mental health issues which definitely isn’t the case! Overall, the week really made me think about how we help service users with learning disabilities; both how we communicate with them and also how they could receive substandard care in a standard hospital environment not tailored to their specific needs. Taking the time to understand someone’s needs in a busy hospital environment can be challenging but it can really help us to make a difference in improving their health and providing the best care we can.

I also found out this week that a poster that another medical student and I submitted to a medical education conference actually won best poster! I unfortunately wasn’t able to go to the conference because of other commitments, so it was a nice surprise. The poster was the result of a project I was involved with over the summer with other students and members of faculty and focused around how to teach professionalism to medical students. The ensuing poster was around a mnemonic that another student came up with to help students deal with tricky scenarios while on placement. As medical students, we can often find ourselves in difficult situations and haven’t been around the medical field for long so can struggle to decide what can be the most professional or appropriate action to take. The mnemonic offers a structure to aid thinking around these issues. It was lovely to hear that others who are often experienced in medical education found our work interesting!

Jordan

Charlie Gallan : 18 Apr 2019 12:37 |  Tags: Jordan Mbchb Psychiatry Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The dialysis unit and a new GP

This week we visited a dialysis unit with our current consultant who is a renal (kidney) doctor. We have already attended quite a few renal clinics and seen and spoken to patients who are being prepared to have renal replacement therapy (i.e. dialysis). Dialysis is designed to replace the function of your kidneys in cleaning waste materials out of your blood and so designed to keep patients with kidney failure both safe and healthy. On average, patients come in three times a week for dialysis, with each visit lasting around 3-4 hours. It was fascinating watching the dialysis machines being set up and talk to patients undergoing the procedure while they read books and sometimes slept, all while their blood was cleaned. I had always been unaware of what dialysis really involved and whether it hurt, but for the patients we met, it was very routine and almost straight forward for them. While on the dialysis unit, they also have access to a kidney doctor, which gives them the opportunity to ask questions about their condition and/or any changes to their medications needed. This is an amazing service, as I know many dialysis units don’t have the chance to have a kidney doctor on-site in this way, so they are very lucky as a unit to have this service on site.

On Tuesday, we had our first GP day of this block. Our allocated GP surgery is in a small village in rural Worcestershire. For GP, the medical school tries to allocate us GPs nearby, but most people get one GP practice which is further afield and is a great opportunity to see how medicine is practiced in a rural GP setting. We had a relatively uneventful journey down to the surgery and were surprised when the reception staff knew exactly who we were before we even said where we were from (we must look like students!). The surgery had organised a busy timetable for us, which included two clinical sessions a day with a GP (a morning and an afternoon), and also patient home visits and governance meetings.

In the morning we were in surgery with our GP mentor, who is our overall supervisor and makes sure we are really getting the most from our placement. The patients we saw included ear and throat infections and also some management of chronic diseases such as high blood pressure. I even got a chance to practice looking into ears with the otoscope! We then had a patient home visit, which was a great excuse to visit someone in their own home and ask them about their health issues while drinking plenty of cups of tea. At lunch, we had a meeting on frailty and how these patients are identified within the practice and was fascinating as it gave us an insight into how general practice is funded – via certain clinical targets which the practice must meet to receive funding. The day was nicely rounded off by another clinical session in the afternoon, this time with a different GP. This GP was really enthusiastic to teach and did some mini-assessments on our clinical history taking and examination skills, which I’m sure will be really useful practice for when our exams come around.

On the topic of exams, these are definitely on the radar for us, despite being 4 months away. From what we have been told, more is expected of us in our second-year exams in terms of diagnosis and management, both of which are still very new skills to us. I have been gradually working my way through the presentation list (which we are examined on) and am currently about 60% done. While I am on target, I need to slightly pick up the pace to leave myself a month or so to revise at the end, so am planning a couple of long weekends in the near future to get ahead. Next week we have a week-long placement in psychiatry, which I am very excited about!

Jordan

Charlie Gallan : 05 Apr 2019 13:35 |  Tags: Jordan Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Highlighters, Blue pens and Common Room Heaters

This is it. The big revision break is here. I am happy to say it is going well as far. I have got myself into a nice routine and even discovered I am a bit of an early bird starting at 8am every day. I have also found that I work well in the common room but it is freezing in here, so I have kidnapped a heater from the CBL rooms and I now am as toasty as …. Well … Toast? I am also finding (rather oddly) that moving round the common room day to day is helping me to revise and not procrastinate so I am making full use of have the entire room to myself.

It’s going ok and I am pleased with my progress for once! I have decided to hit three blocks over Easter as I wanted to take things a slowly rather than trying to cram four blocks in four weeks without a break, so I will tackle Block Three (my favourite block) with Block 5. I am hoping that will work, as I would rather get a good breadth of information rather than trying to work myself to the bare bones and burn out before exams. I am a lot calmer than I was last week, I think this is because I am finally able to review and learn the things that we didn't have time for when in the blocks. You have to get used to taking in content quickly as you are hit with new information every day, and I worked out that we have had 21 solid weeks of new content since September. It sounds scary, but it's all coming together, and I can finally see the connections between lectures so it's making it a lot easier to learn. You just need to keep in mind that the human body is an intricate puzzle and you have to see the bigger picture to understand how each part works.

Not much has gone on here apart from me walking into the MTC at 8am to start revision and leaving between 5pm and 8pm to go home and collapse on my bed. However, I did pop back up to Preston for a couple of days over the last week which is where I completed my undergraduate degree. It was nice to see my old lecturers and catch up with my old course mates and of course my best friends. It’s important to keep in touch with your non-medic friends during the course as it can get lonely when you're in week 7 out of 10 and the only people that you talk to are other medics. I got to go into my old SU bar and have a pizza of which I had been craving for a while, and in the evening, we headed to a “place of entertainment” of which I had missed a lot and sung every song that came on at the top of my lungs. It was amazing to catch up with them and even though I haven't seen them since July, it felt like I had never been away. It was good to get out of Coventry and away from my textbooks and now feel a little bit less like a walking textbook, albeit a rather blank textbook.

There has also been the introduction of a #MedStudentTwitter this week on Twitter so I have been following it as part of my revision/ procrastination breaks and people have been sharing tips on clinical learning and revision for exams. It is a nice way to be reminded that you are part of a wider community of future doctors and that we are all banding together to support each other through the intense world of medical school.

I'm looking forward to the open day next week as I am doing the student life talk for the incoming perspective med students. This feels a bit deja vu as I used to do the student life talks for my old university in front of more than 500 people so, it will be nice to do what I loved. I know the university are overtaking the common room for the open day so, I guess I am going to have to find somewhere else to make a revision nest in. I don't mind I guess these people will be in their first year when I'm in my third, which is quite a scary thought!

I have procrastinated enough writing this blog……. back to Gas Laws and Tubular Flow it is!

Abbie

Charlie Gallan : 29 Mar 2019 14:21 |  Tags: Abbie Mbchb Student Warwick Wms |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem