Spring Break is Here!
Finally! Going to New York for a day tomorrow. I won't come back until I find the three-quarters legendary egg tarts from Chinatown :DThis break is more for me to clear existing work (e.g. organic chem problem sets (carbonyls with all kinds of weird reactions), anthropology paper (on suffering), book review (on History of Molecular Biology by Michel Morange) and mock research proposal (for History of Science class)), and get started with upcoming work (article for The Triple Helix, and my research project, on which my B.S. (Hons) depends upon).
I am so glad that I cannot find anywhere to go :P If my spring break coincides with GCS and tk's I would have gone to Bahamas (to lie on the beach, stare at the Atlantic ocean, or maybe pick up a bottle and put a note into it and see whether it will eventually float to the other side) and left me with that heap of nonsense to clear in, like, 2 DAYS?! I cannot imagine that.
Yesterday was reading this article by Arthur Kleinman about the issues surrounding patients suffering from chronic pain. He, in 1988, introduced the idea of 'somatization', which is basically a phenomenon in which a patient suffering from chronic ailments subconsciously exaggerates his symptoms, and very often the patient incorporates his other problems into the symptoms which serve to amplify the problem even more. Sometimes there can be no physical cause attributable to these symptoms, and very often these people do not respond to any form of treatment, causing great stress to the patient, his family, and the attending physician.
Why am I talking about this? Haha because it echoes with my experiences! I have seen too many patients that keep complaining of backache but physical examinations, X-ray and MRI, shows no attributable cause other than muscle spasm or otherwise known as PVS. These people will always walk into the consultation room with a miserable look on their faces, talk to the doctor as if they are going to break into pieces any moment, and sometimes demand things to be done for them (e.g. DOWNGRADE). Well, with negative findings using all kinds of diagnostic tools we can find, there is no way we can downgrade them, so they keep coming back and of course, the doctor will get sick of seeing their faces and will start to lecture them everytime they come. And I will have an interesting time listening to him scolding people :D
Hahaha I have encountered quite a bit of interesting stuff as a medic :D Go and work in A&E (or ED or ER or whatever you call it) for a week and I can guarantee that you will have more than enough stories to tell for the rest of the year :P
And the PVS thing really made me lament that my power has really dwindled :P I took at least 15 minutes to recall that PVS = Paravertebral Spasm :P
More things that I have forgotten, so any medics reading this please enlighten me:
1. There are 2 common kinds of medicine for easing stomach pain due to ulcer or excess acid, other than antacid tablets. One is Famotidine... What is the other?
2. What is the drug used to correct SVT (I can't remember exactly, but definitely some kind of tachycardia...) by putting the patient's heart to asystole, hence allowing the SA node to reset (cool huh)? And it has to be pushed through a 20G plug through the proximal cephalic vein (I set the plug that time :P) because it has a REALLY short half-life?
3. The three kinds of standard cough syrup: Codeine, DME and ___? And what does DME and ___ stand for?
Yeah and it is a myth that SAF doesn't give strong medicine. They might be generic non-branded medicine but no doubt they are sufficiently effective (as hospitals give out the same things too). And the SAF stock is improving (we used to have to write prescriptions for Augmentin... Now every medical centre should have some stock more or less).
Haha my medic days. Interesting and useful. I just hated the management (like getting people to do duty!), and S3 forcing us to do IPPT/SOC...
Yeah I'll watch more House M.D. over spring break, and continue to get confused by what Loh Gehrig's disease, which is actually ALS, or a form of MND. Haha fun though :P
(In addition, Hugh Laurie is cool and Jennifer Morrison is hot. What else can I ask for :P)
