A month's update of nothing much

So what have I been up to for the past.. one month? Let's see.. Ah, yes, my third and last SSC* before I start on my two periods of elective posting. Now the first SSC I did was O&G, which went well. It was in January and I had such a good time, due to the fact that my audit was simple and easy to do and I had so much free time that I practically went home before lunchtime everyday. Not that I did not study much during that time; I was professionally focused on my audit but in my defense I did practice my obstetric abdominal examination under the watchful eyes of Dato (when he was in PAC after morning pass-over) and later kept on practicing while helping the HOs here and there.

At that time I was inspired to be an O&G specialist. It looked so specialized and not as intimidating as a surgeon or a cardiologist. The doctors working there looked content enough and by the look at the nature of the job I could see a few perks of being one. Working hours are more or less the same once you became a MO, regardless of which department you'll be. You will still have to go OT for conditions like Caesareans, fibroids, and many other things surgical. Plus I think that it is relatively easy because O&G just focused on one section of the body of women. It's not like I have to think of all diseases and conditions that could happen on every organs in the body. That's what I thought initially.

Come six weeks later and I moved on to my second SSC which was surgical (Surgery, actually. But I like to call it 'Surgical' as in surgical rotation. Humor me). At my university, the first formal surgical rotation teaching is when we are in our final year. True, we learnt about diseases like appendicitis, Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, Grave's disease and thyroid cancers, etc. but the basics of surgical knowledge are not imparted to us yet. Seeing that the only scant period of surgical rotation I will be having next year is just for, what, 4, 6 weeks? so I decided to have a try during this second SSC.

For the first 3 weeks it felt like torture. I was new to all this. I have never set foot inside surgical wards before, and I never find any reason to do so in the past. I had blogged a few posts about my experience during my second SSC and as I am reading back these posts I thought boy, I was a pretty big disaster rolling down the hill of Mount Doom. The remaining 3 weeks, however, looked like I was being able to manage it reasonably. I guess with abundant bits of humiliation and a minuscule amount of determination plus a shovelful of efforts studying finally my supervisor deemed me as competent, but he said I am sorely in need of more work in the future.

That are the two clinical SSCs I have done so far. So for my third and last SSC, I chose a non-clinical SSC which is learning sign language or BIM (Bahasa Isyarat Malaysia). My last SSC started after the Easter break - 20th April to be exact which was a month ago, hence the true objective of this post. I am going to fill in the gap about what had happened to me since I last climbed and cursed Gunung Nuang up to this very day. So... what can I tell you about the four weeks of now learning the sign language? It was very








  .

...disappointing.



Why? Because for the past one month, we only had 3 freakin' classes. THREE.  3. FOR THE PAST 4 WEEKS. And the first class was on 5th May. After fruitful meetings and negotiations they had the gall to forget that they have the commitment to teach us? Just because there are only 3 of us they decided to take up seminars and conventions at other places? So dishonest. The university do pay them for teaching us you know. Ah, whatever. They completely shattered my dreams of becoming fluent in sign language in just six weeks. Now all they can offer us is maximum 10 days of teaching sessions. Well I hope kau kenyang la makan duit haram dasar orang tak amanah. Pissed me off.


Keep that aside, that means I have a lot of free time more than I liked to. So for a month during Easter break I spent my time wisely at home, eating good food and having loveable people for company (aka my family). Gunung Nuang had rendered me invalid for quite a long while (it is still ongoing, believe me) and so after I went back to Johor, I am left with pretty much nothing to do. Everyday I spent my time in bed, watching countless TV series and movies. We went for hiking at Gunung Panti, Kota Tinggi the other day but it ended up we couldn't even find the starting trail for the hike, yet alone climbing the mountain. It's a good thing actually because later we found out that a lot of people got lost while hiking Panti. My father said that a lot of soldiers from PULADA (Malaysian Army Combat Training Centre) did get lost while my brother recounted stories of people getting lost deep in the jungle, some of them were seasoned commandos and stuff. Getting more frustrated by the hours of searching we resolved to name calling it like Gunung Panties, Gunung Pantek (that was me, sorry) and we ended up at the waterfall, swimming happily until late afternoon.


I also just came back from my brother's place over the weekend. I had fun taking care of my nephew (he's very temperamental but he's so cute and handsome, so it is all forgiven). I haven't touched any of the academic books for a month now and it makes me so guilty. Right now I am at the campus' IT cluster with a Kumar & Clark propped open on the desk but here I am happily blogging away Not so happy, actually. I have a freakin' running nose and I'm pretty sure other people here are very much bothered with my loud sneezes. Ah well. Also, my friends are getting pretty mad at me for always not showing up for gyms, seeing that we all have to be fit for Kinabalu next month. Shit, I am so not ready for this. My plan for today is to study after lunch at the campus, then go to gym. Seeing that I failed my study plan very spectacularly, I think after I finish this post I am going to head on to the gym and do some gymming movement hahahahah. OK, I think that's it. There's nothing else to say for the moment. I think that I will write another post next week as we are going to Gunung Ledang this weekend. Alright, off I go.



*SSC - student selected component - which basically means we choose for ourselves what we want to study for the period of six weeks. Then we find ourselves a supervisor to assess us and we have assignments that are going to evaluate whether we do well on our SSC or not.