Missing pregnant women and broken hands

It’s very rarely good news when you pick up the phone and the first thing you hear is “can you direct me to A&E?” Last time I wrote, I said my friends had made just the one trip to Manchester’s beloved accident and emergency department. Unfortunately, 2 days after that, another one was in after breaking his hand. On the phone he made it sound like a bad sprain, and refused to let me leave the SU to accompany him. I felt sort of bad when I received a text at midnight which can be summarised: “bone coming through skin, gonna have to stay overnight and have surgery tomorrow. Oh, and will miss lectures” Painful.

So we’re in November now, which only really means one thing – the next month is December, which really only means two things – Christmas and my birthday. All I seem to see on Facebook these days is “omg just seen the Coca Cola advert” This is obviously the pivotal moment at which you really know Christmas is coming (no sarcasm intended) and I haven’t even seen it yet! I can’t help but feel that University is crippling my potential Christmas spirit. Fortunately the Christmas markets are in Manchester on Friday, which should begin to make up for it.

Another week brought another medicine related visit, this time to the GP. The general opinion of the GP is that it’s full of old people and all you do is send them somewhere else. Even though there was no playing around on wheelchairs involved this time, my visit was actually really interesting (and fun, despite the lack of wheelchair activity). We were meant to be interviewing a pregnant woman, but for reasons unknown, she didn’t turn up. Instead, we got to go into reception, the pharmacy and some appointments with the doctor. We ended up seeing a ridiculously interesting case. I’m not allowed to say what happened (something to do with confidentiality...?), but if you imagine an episode of Scrubs that you don’t think would ever actually happen, it was sort of like that.

For now, I’m going to try and stop watching the squirrel that’s playing in the tree outside my window, and learn the mechanism of the adaptive immune system – student life at its finest?

P.S. its breakfast, dinner and tea, not breakfast, lunch, dinner. And there’s nothing wrong with a bit of toast for supper, either.

The life of Wally

Since writing my first blog, it feels like I’ve spent most of my time either looking at medical textbooks or dressed as Wally. Sometimes both. Credit where it’s due to Primark for providing the perfect set of clothes for the fancy dress job, even though I ended up wearing a womens top and leggings.

It’s been a pretty productive, and eventful, few weeks. The work’s building up, as is the amount of things to do in Manchester. Bonfire Night at Platt Fields was impressive - the music accompanying the fireworks, though, was very questionable. Top tip: don’t go to a muddy wet field in pumps that have a hole in the back of them. I definitely should’ve brought my wellies to Manchester. Elsewhere, there’s been just the one visit to A&E for my friends, as a result of some overly enthusiastic piggybacking and a very hard pavement. Both piggybacker and piggybackee are fine now though, so all is well.

Fortunately, since last writing, we’ve moved on from the pelvic girdle (to do the male and female reproductive system). Unfortunately, both those topics meant that we had to go back over the pelvic girdle all over again, so much so that soon enough I should know it like the back of my hand. Slightly more interesting is that I got to dissect an arm this week, and not one person fainted in the Dissection Room this week! (apparently someone did last week, and I somehow missed it) 

In other medicine-related issues, I had my first hospital visit on Friday. It was a quarter past 6 get-up to begin the long journey from Manchester to Salford that included a stop off at the McDonalds drive through. When we got there we interviewed patients about their time in hospital, and pushed each other around in wheelchairs (which we’d been told to as part of a task). Other people in the hospital obviously didn’t know this, though, and so when we hopped out of the chairs, clearly able to walk, we got some very disapproving looks.

I’ve been told that my blogs aren’t often enough, so next time I’ll try and make it shorter - i.e. less boring - and more frequent. 
In the meantime, Where’s Wally?

The start of the rest of my life

After my refusal to add my mum on Facebook, and starting my 5 years at uni, I figured now would be a good time to start writing a blog. Having done 3 hours of anatomy revision today (and accidentally falling asleep for 3 hours in the middle of that time) I thought I should write something that didn’t involve the 19 different sections of the human pelvic girdle. How such a small piece of the body has so much detail is beyond me, but apparently it’s all relative.

 I’m really enjoying uni so far. I’ve ended up in decent accommodation with some good people, and somehow made friends that will cook a Sunday roast for £2.20 (as well as being really nice, that is), so I’m definitely doing something right. My friends do have the weirdest laughs ever though, including snorting, making the same noise as a seal, and laughing like a little girl. It gets a lot of strange looks, as you'd expect.  Flat 7 does have a fairly severe wasp infestation at the moment, but I shouldn’t complain too much about halls because Manchester Uni gave me a free shower without any questions asked after my last one only gave out cold water.

Medicine’s turned out to be a bit like hard work. Obviously I didn’t think it’d be a walk in the park, but it feels like I’m learning the contents of an A-level in a month. We also get to do dissection on a cadaver, which is really interesting, but I’m not looking forward to the day that I go into the dissection room (which has a bit of an odd smell) with a proper hangover. I must admit I was quite worried the first time I went in there; I picked apart a model of the brain and it took me a good five minutes to put it back together. In my defence, it was a pretty complicated model, but still, it didn’t inspire me with confidence. I reckon the most interesting lecture so far was the one titled ‘Normal Birth’, part of which was a video of a woman giving birth. Our lecturer went on to say “and as you can see, it’s a bit of a tight fit”. I didn’t quite agree with her choice of words after seeing something the size of a watermelon pop out of the poor woman.

Manchester’s been a good night out so far, with the pyjama pub crawl in a onesy and the curry night that nearly descended into a pretty messy food fight being my favourites so far, as well as seeing Nick Grimshaw’s DJ set. The benefits of being a student are most obvious when you can go downstairs to your halls bar and buy a pint for a pound. It’s fair to say that the nights out are usually much cheaper than Bolton.

I reckon my mum will probably be the only one who’s still reading to this point, and I’m about to go to the bar and try and improve my table football skills so we can somehow, eventually, beat the duty tutors, who are absolutely amazing at it. On that note, I’m going to finish up. Hope it’s been a vaguely interesting read.