end of Paediatrics

Today is the last day of my paediatric rotation. After 9 weeks of fun with the children and adolescents, it is over.

Personally, I think the paediatric rotation is interesting but not as organised compared to my previous rotation, Obstetrics and Gynaecology. I'm still not sure how much I should know and what should I prepare for the coming exam. Paediatric rotation is similar to the general medicine and surgery rotation that I had last year, except instead of learning it in one whole year; this time I learned it in 9 weeks and this time the patient is smaller than adult and wear nappies .

I will list down the conditions/diseases that I have seen in my tutorials and outpatient clinics. It is totally varied from one medical student to another depending on how enthusiastic you are in getting involved in managing patients.

• Allgrove (AAA) Syndrome
• Osteogenesis Imperfecta
• Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy
• Turner Syndrome
• Tourette syndrome
• Kawasaki disease
• Undescended testes
• Hypospadia
• Apnoea episodes
• Ambiguous genitalia
• Bronchiolitis
• Asthma
• Orbital Cellulitis
• Non-accidental injury
• Febrile Convulsion
• Global Brain Ischaemia
• Meningitis (Herpes virus and Enterovirus)
• Failure to thrive
• Congenital deafness
• Cerebral palsy
• Pyloric stenosis
• Malrotation with volvulus
• Necrotizing enterocolitis
• Fractures
• Appendicitis
  

Few of the diseases are extremely rare and many of these diseases are common. I'm glad I had the opportunity to see wide range of diseases which will widened my clinical experience.

I might consider paediatric as one option of my future career but first, I need to pass the exam.

Wallpaper

This is my current desktop wallpaper.

two specialty rotations

The exam is getting nearer. I have lots to be covered. Obstetrics, Gynaecology and Paediatrics. Each of them has lots of concept to be revised.

I might not be blogging as often as I would be. The exam start on 5th December and end on 12th December. Hopefully this time around, I will pass the exam...

Living with a disabled child

I first spotted this article at Aliya's blog. I would to like to post it here since it is inspirational.

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WELCOME TO HOLLAND

by Emily Perl Kingsley.

c1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

---

Taken from here.

Signatures

There are several tasks that I need to do in my paediatric rotation.

1. presenting a case in front of doctors
2. writing a report on a chosen elective
3. maternal child health nurse visit
4. taking and recording a child's vital sign
5. infant feeding
6. changing an infant's nappy
7. administer medication via MDI and spacer
8. shadowing a triage nurse
9. clinical skill ward assessment ie following a general medical team and clerk patients

The only thing that I have not done are no 1, 2, 6, 7 and 8. I have about 2 weeks to go to get all of these tasks signed. It is a bit annoying to get all of the signatures but I have to do it in order to pass the semester. Hopefully I can get the signatures by the end of next week.

No longer a parasite

After two weeks of following the general medical team, it is now over . It was a tiring job to follow the doctors all over the hospital doing their ward round and this also includes the on-call. If we are are on-call, we usually finished around 9pm. Please note that we usually started our morning with the handover meeting at 8.30 am, followed by registrar's ward round and consultant's ward round after that.

What do we do when we are on-call? Basically, during that day, the team will be the one receiving any patients that is admitted to the ward and as a medical students we are expected to clerk the patients and presented to the consultant on the following day.

In retrospect, I did not learn a lot but it was an interesting experience to follow the team. It gave me a glimpse of my own future career and which aspect that I need to improve as a future intern. It also taught me different ways of managing paediatric patients and their families.

Being a parasite when the exam is around the corner is not a good thing to do, especially when you have not covered a lot of things yet. I'm glad it is over now. Now, I can concentrate on stuff that matters the most, that is the exam .

leech

We are allocated two weeks to follow a medical team. Basically, we are required to follow them from morning till late evening. In the morning, there are few tasks that we need to attend. Starting from the handover meeting to the registrar's ward round and finally consultant ward round in the afternoon.

It is really a tiring job to follow the medical team around the hospital. We hardly ever sit down and by the end of consultant's ward round; I usually get so tired that I need to find a chair for me to sit down.

You will never appreciate the value of something until you lose it. That is true in my case here but the value that I really learn to appreciate is the opportunity to sit down on a chair :)

Another observation that I has gained in this week are that doctors need to have lots of stamina to work continuously. Imagine that during ward round, the doctors run up down the stairs and never sat down for 3-4 hours. We are used to climb up from the first floor to the 8th floor and then went down to 5th floor and up again. Despite I am cycling to the hospital every day, at the end of the day, my stamina just ran out of me. Fortunately I do not experience any symptoms of breathlessness climbing up and down the stairs.

I have another week with the medical team and I hope that by the end of next week, my stamina has improved a lot :)

new laptop

After more than two months having a laptop with worsening problems, I have decided to buy a new one. The main problem in the old laptop is most likely to be hardware in which the laptop continues to experience random shut downs and sometimes it could not be started at all.

Thus, I was forced to buy a new laptop since it has caused lots of problem and somehow, disturbed me from studying.

I bought the new laptop few days ago and it took me few hours to reconfigure all the softwares and computer setting :)

Hopefully I will be able to blog more frequently after this ;)