Well, that was certainly an eventful week.
I’ve just spent my first week in a hospital as part of my degree course and was allocated the breat cancer clinic. Needless to say, outpatients isn’t very exciting and there is little going on. Not to mention the fact that obviously in this sort of clinic intimate exposure is required, so patients aren’t exactly thrilled about having medical students staring at them! And then there are obviously the patients recieving a bad diagnosis or other bad news, situations in which it would not be appropriate to have first years standing around.
So the majority of the days were spend sitting at the nurses station reading through leaflets and patient notes. The first time we went to the ward was on our last day! Saw a couple of pre-op patients and then it was off to theatre to watch some real life breast surgery.
The most strange and annoying thing happened in surgery. I was standing watching the procedure when my head went all fuzzy and my vision started to blacken at the edges. This happens to me quite a lot, I have low blood pressure. But it normally happens with a large temperature change like getting out of the bath or posture change like standing up too quickly. It was annoying, because I had to sit down and everyone thought I couldn’t “deal” with the surgery. Seeing as I’d been in over 10 previous surgeries, I thought this unlikely. And those were certainly a lot more bloody and foul smelling than a tiny incision in a breast. Since then I’ve been kinda worried why it happened. And that wasn’t the only time either, it happened several times throughout the day, both during and after the surgery.
I guess I’ll have to ask the doctor about it, something else to add to my never ending list of medical problems. But I have a blood test for vitamin D levels in a week or so, could organise it around the same time as I’ll already be there.
After this week all I can say is thank god it’s the weekend! Most days, I was expected to arrive at the clinic by 8am. Considering the extensive distance and multiple transport changes required to actually get there, this entailed getting up at 5:30am. Let’s just say I’m not a morning person! Most days we finished around 5pm which meant getting home at around 7-8pm depending on how lucky I was between changes. Sometimes you get to the bus stop just as the bus arrives and others time you get there jsut as its leaving so you have to wait 20min!
It was quite an annoying schedule merely because I am a nighttime person. It didn’t matter that I’d only had four hours sleep the night before, at 9-10pm, I tend to wake up and become really active. This makes it quite hard to actually go to bed, considering I need to be asleep by 9:30pm to actually get my full eight hours. So needless to say, I never went to bed in time and suffered the consequences.
This week has been a really good experience for me, and even though there was a lot of sitting around, I loved every second of it. Looking forward to next week now!
Current weight: 8 st 11.5 (123.5 pounds)
Weight lost so far: 12.5 pounds
BMI: 24.1
Weight still to lose: 4.5 pounds by April
Patient Reflections 