Its not PE

When I came to loughborough I wasn't quite sure what to expect from sports science, I had a vague idea that I might brush up on my anatomy which has been increasingly forgotten since my pre clinical years and learn a bit about sports injuries which would hopefully be helpful whatever future speciality I pick.

When I tell everyone Im intercalating in sports science everyone assumes that means I want to be a sports doctor, to be honest, I really don't. I want to do paediatrics but there is only one intercalated course really relevant for this at the moment and this year is the first year they are running it so sadly there was only 1/2 external places making it very competative and I didn't get on it. So I was left choosing from 3 other intercalated places - I could have stayed at my home university and studied psychology, gone to london and studied maternal/foetal health or come here to loughborough. I really wanted to experience somewhere different for a year so that ruled my own uni out. The london course looked interesting in aspects but contained a bit too much embryology for me which I'm not really a fan of. I was seriously tempted to go to london though because I thought it would be a really cool place to live and experience for a year plus a lot of my friends from medical school had got places to intercalate there so I would not be leaving everyone behind. In the end though the prospect of doing a course I prefered the look of (I thought it looked much less dry and dull) and the chance to not be a sheep and to do something completely different swayed me.

So here I am, in loughborough, the only student here from my medical school not only this year but ever - maybe I will be a trend setter ;). Despite my initial fears about living in Falk Egg it only took me a few days of freshers week to realise I was going to have fantastic year. And when I say freshers week, I mean freshers TWO weeks, they really don't call it the loughborough experience for nothing! I have to say it put my orginal freshers week to shame, for example my freshers ball was in a club with some allegedly famous dj who really I had never heard of...Loughborough freshers ball was held at the MASSIVE students union with free fair ground rides outside, Max and Ob from Hollyoaks (which used to be a guilty pleasure of mine during my first few years of med school) hosting it throughout, live music from the Vengaboys and Eliza dolittle, fire displays...and so much more! It was amazing!

My flatmates are all female and lovely so I feel I have been very lucky. By pure coincedence one of them is a third year sports science student which has certainly been useful as lecturers still aren't that used to intercalating students (the intercalating course has only been run a few years) and sometimes assume everyone knows how to do something (for example how to use SPSS - a statistics analysing programme) but we really don't. The rest are freshers on a wide variety of courses and I'm really enjoying being out of the med student bubble for a year (as much as I in many ways love it!)

I will talk more about what my actual course involves later (need to get back to dissertation now!) but I will just counter a common misconception by saying: Its not pe!

Halfadoc xx

A year off? Maybe not..

Well I haven't posted in almost a year now, and this isn't gonna be a very long one (as why I have decided to post when I have a wedding to pack for and a dissertation to write I have no idea!) but I will try and catch you up in small chunks. I finished my third year, it,was,hard. No doubt about it. The posts stopped because I was struggling to keep on top of both my ongoing rotation whilst at the same time trying to cram like crazy for the mass of exams at the end of the year that came rapidly one after the other. It was a shame because my very last rotation was paediatrics/ obgynae which was the rotation I had most been looking forward to all year. I really want to do paediatrics so it was a shame that I could not dedicate all of my time during this rotation to seeing as much as possible, however I had to find a balance because I needed to revise hard for my exams. I will try and retrospectively fill in on this rotation later... I made it through my exams somehow on first attempt which was a massive relief because I have no idea where I would have found the strength to do a retake after such an exhausting year. Those who had to and made it through have my absolute respect because I hate to imagine how stressful and exhausting that must have been. So where am I now? Well between my third and fourth medical years we have the option to do what is called an "intercalated degree" . This is effectively where you enter the 3rd year of a normal degree and end up with a BSc on the basis of just this year (your first two years are thought of as being your pre clinical medical year in order to make up the credits but these don't actually count to what grade you get). I choose to do this extra year as did a lot of the undergraduates in my year. However whilst most of my year went of to do (in my opinion) quite dry, very sciency subjects such as immunology or physiology and mostly stay at our home university or go to london, I decided to buck the trend and head to loughborough university to study Sports Science and test out this whole renowned "Loughborough Experience" .

So slightly daunted about leaving all my friends behind (I was literally the only medical student from my year heading to lufbra) last September I headed to a different area of the country to live back in halls with a bunch of 18 year olds. The halls I had picked were the cheapest (my debt is mounting up quite nicely by now, wasting money seems a tad silly) , but known as being the "council flats". Its fair to say that as I drove myself to lufbra, and unpacked my room by myself (whilst my fresher housemates parents ran about giving them roughly a years supply of food and even making their beds) I did wonder slightly what I had let myself in for.. But, thats a reasonable start on filling you in for now, more later!

<- My Halls. Doesn't look so bad right??

Thanks if you stuck with me despite my massive gap, I will try to fill in my intercalated year as quick as possible so that I will be up to date by the time I head out for a hospital placement in Tanzania come august :) . Half a doc xx

A catch up..

Well its been some time since I've posted so will try to feel in the gaps a bit...
Since I last posted I have finished vascular, had a week of urology experience and started + now finished paediatrics.

Vascular wasn't really my cup of tea - it was very gory with lots of leg ulcers and ischaemic legs with gangrenous toes. There is (fortunately) no smell quite like an infected leg ulcer. If you are a smoker perhaps paying a visit to a vascular ward might help you to quit - during my time there it was fair to say most of the patients were smokers/ex heavy smokers and/or diabetic. I only saw one surgery during vascular and that was a leg amputation due to ischaemia which had caused irreversible tissue damage.

This was quite a strange and brutal operation to watch, and literally involves the bones being sawn through. I found it quite surreal watching someones leg being taken off - I suppose this was because in medicine obviously normally you are doing everything you can to avoid long term damage to the patient but this was a situation where irreversible damage has occurred and now the surgeons job is really "damage limitation". There is sadly no point leaving a patient with a leg full of dead tissue that they cannot use and that will get infected causing damage to the remainder of the leg - it is much better to save as much of the leg as you can as this will improve the patients ability to late on walk with a prosthetic leg. I did feel very sorry for the patient though and I think even if (as in this case) you are aware you are going into an operation where your leg will be amputated it still must be a horrible shock when you wake up with only one leg. Of course it must be even more of a shock if you are in an accident and end up having your leg amputated as an emergency.

My week on urology also wasn't really my cup of tea - whilst its fair to say I'm unlikely to ever want to go into surgery, I found this a particularly dull area of surgery. Urology surgeries often involve camera going up into the bladder which (compared to the kind of views you get from cameras in GI surgeries) really isn't a very exciting organ to look at. I'm not saying surgeons who specialise in urology don't do great work because obviously they do but personally I can't see the appeal...
It was also a kind of rubbish week in general we were meant to have several teaching sessions on urology but all of them ended up being cancelled... Therefore I know very little about urology - hope not too much comes up in the end of year exams!

Paeds on the other hand has very much been my cup of tea! I had been looking forward to this rotation all year because Ive always thought it might be an area I would want to specialise in. My first week was in outpatients and this week was particularly interesting. One of the clinics I watched was a very specialised endocrinology clinic which was being overseen by one of the top endocrinologists in the country, as a result all of the patients in this clinic were individuals with really interesting conditions that needed to be seen once a year by a more specialised doctor as opposed to the local general paediatrician who normally sees them. There was no diabetes to be seen here! I saw patients with turners syndrome (where girls are missing one of their x chromosome), patients with growth problems due to various complicated causes such as pituitary tumours and patients with problems with their sex organs eg cliteromegaly. It was a really interesting clinic!! And too top it all of we got a free drug company marks and Spencer lunch afterwards :D.

My second week was in inpatients which was also interesting although certainly much quieter in general than the adult inpatients. Apparently during the winter it is a lot busier though because then lots of kids get respiratory problems. My on take in paediatrics was ridiculously quiet as only one kid came in during the whole evening so whilst we got to take his history and exam him we didn't really get much hands on experience unfortunately. During the week we did have a teaching session where we got to try examining kids - the doctor overseeing us got us to try and check a toddlers reflexes...this is very difficult! Firstly you have to try and distract the child in order to get them to relax their leg (or arm if it those reflexes you are testing) and then even once you have managed that, the space you need to tap in order to get the reflex is ridiculously small in a child!

Now I am just about to starts OBs and Gynae and I had my first session on the delivery suite yesterday and got to see my first birth :D. The birth wasn't natural but a caesarrean as the baby was showing sign of distress. Nonetheless it was so amazing seeing the baby being pulled out and then start crying and watching the dad walk over and see his little girl for the first time, and then once the baby was cleaned down he got to carry her over to the head end of the operating table so that the mum (who was awake during this c-section with a spinal anaesthetic as this is the preferred way for most caesarreans to be done now) could see and kiss her baby. It was magical! Certainly one of the plus sides to being a medical student is getting to watch moments like this :).