We're all learning

I'll try a bigger font for this one, I think...

Anyway, time for another clinical session, this time on skin lesions. A familiar clinical tutor appeared, this time he's a resident rather than an intern. He had lined up some excellent, and very helpful, patients for us to see which must have taken considerable time on his behalf. Each patient was well prepared for our visit so rather than the usual shocked / surprised individuals we saw cooperative people.

Interesting to see how he's progressed: his bedside manner was excellent and he seemed to have much more patience with us this time, stressing less about the small things. Perhaps before, he was in the middle of his intern blues, perhaps like us he's developing and improving.

Either way, I was impressed with his approach. Best we've had so far.

Lessons in irony

The most stilted and uncomfortable part of the MBBS are the communications skills classes. Worse even than the ethics classes.

The twenty-odd students sit around for a three hour session, looking unhappy and uncommunicative and annoyed that it's Friday afternoon and they're learning to be empathetic. Of all classes, you need some kind of dialogue or contribution for the session to have any kind of meaning.

Some of the approaches taken by the facilitators doesn't help. Having had a consistently sympathetic discussion around the social situation of a facially disfigured person, he was keen for us to come up with some less kind judgments to make. It was clearly against the nature of everyone in the group to say unpleasant things... I'm not sure that by stimulating this kind of response the guy was raising an awareness of its inappropriateness. From what I saw, no one would have dreamed of being so insensitive... until the facilitator had egged them on.

He then said: "Please don't react like this when you see a patient like this".

Not a chance of that happening.

Great days

A friend of mine (oldest friend when I think about it) sent me a link yesterday to some digitised photos from a holiday we had together a long time ago. I never saw myself as the kind of person who had a photocollage noticeboard in their living room showing me with a bunch of great mates doing great mates things, but blow me down if there isn't a photo of a skinny teenage me jumping into the Mediterranean from a pier accompanied by five or six school friends. Perhaps I wasn't always such as curmudgeon.

Anyway, the photos also showed a very long haired me and my (now) wife looking young. It's quite confronting seeing a photo from ~20 years ago all of a sudden, particularly when you were a few kilos lighter and with hair to your shoulders. Can't say it was such a bad look actually... I thought I'd show my young colleagues a couple of snaps (particularly one guy who is looking to grow some length before the hard core clinical years) and the response was quite reassuring!
Anyway, cue plenty of reflection and introspection, mulling over the person I was then, the person I was now and how the years between have affected and changed me. The young fellow in the picture probably would have been surprised to have seen his older self make a decent fist of I Banking... although whenever I was at my desk my music tastes would have been recognisable. As is not uncommon, tastes tend to ossify around the 17 - 25 years which is the case with me.

One album I was listening to for the first time in a long time, before even the photos appeared, it the Ultra Vivid Scene album Joy: 1967-1990. This was released in 1990 and was very popular amongst the hip young things of the time. Even though I was more of a SubPop fan (probably the more listenable stuff I was into), for some reason Kurt Ralske's poppy- noise(ish) music fitted my mould, and that of my friends too. Probably due to his being a New Yorker (I was very keen on Shimmy Disc at that point), the fuzz on his guitar, the odd lyrics and a song with the same title as a very popular Nick Cave song (Mercy Seat).

I never subscribed to Ralske being 100% derivative of MBV, JAMC and the rest despite him confessing to similar VU roots on a SNUBTV clip I saw. He's pretty original and the mix and the production are so layered you can listen to each track numerous times and spot a different instrument that you've been listening to passively for 20 years suddenly come to the fore.

Back in the jug agane

So - the start of my second year. Finally, some uncharted territory.

Except not. The way this course is structured, save content my second year is a carbon copy of my first year. This isn't the most inspiring thought at the moment. Group projects and assignments have already become routine, formulaic and rather a bore as I think I've mentioned before.

The question is, how can I maintain my own motivation and what will the university be doing to maintain the engagement of the second years? From conversations with and observations of the second years when I was a first year, the answer to the second question is "not a lot". Looks like I'll have to dig deep and find myself some intrinsic motivators from somewhere.

It'll be interesting to look back on this year in 12 months time: ha I been a bit pessimistic, or was it indeed the slog I anticipated?