Shitty week :(

Well, if I thought last week was busy and annoying and wanted rid of it, I had no clue how much worse this week would compare.

Things started to go downhill on Thursday when, after sitting through 2.5 hours of terrible histology with Mr B I got told someone else I know who was applying for a phlebotomy job got an interview. This told me that it takes around 3-4 weeks to get recognised and that they clearly don’t like me. The poor guy was quite taken aback when I told him I’d heard nothing and his comforting words were polite, but devoid of any hope. That could effectively be warning shot #1.

Warning shot #2 that this wasn’t my week came Friday morning. Having finally got some free time I knew I had to head in and get my kilt for the ball. This first place I knew for kilt hire, having hired from them before, was charging a ridiculous £75. I quickly asked Google to sort it out and happily found another that was £25 cheaper! It gets even better, if you print off the special token you save another 10%. I headed in their direction, only to be told the 12th May wasn’t doable. Bugger!

#3 was the big one - I should have known then to give up and hide for the next while. It came when I turned up for our 1pm lecture (having rushed back from town to make it) at the wrong lecture theatre. Bugger! I tried phoning someone to no avail so, not knowing where the lecture was, I shot home. I immersed myself in the latest episode of Lost to try and rid myself of how stupid I’d been. But boy I wish I’d saved that episode for later.

At about 6:45 I got a text telling my the MILE results were available. Excellent - these were long overdue. However, hidden within the next was another warning short. My friend who I worked with on the MILE had got a D. This was a pass but he’d stayed for a while on that day after I left. I wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been, surprised to find out I had an E. I failed. Shit. Immediate reminder of week 1 flooded into my head “You have to be really, really stupid to fail the MILE” said Ian Brown. Well gee, thanks. Was I though? How could I fail an exam that doesn’t test knowledge? I hadn’t sat around all day looking at Scrubs’ episodes on YouTube (though I know some people did). I didn’t start it at 12am and rushed through to get it done with no sleep. I done, what I thought, was my best. So hell, maybe I am stupid after all. Texts of sympathy came in but none could really help and they email issued shortly after made this worse:

Unfortunately, a few students have failed - if you are one of them Dr Brown
will arrange to meet with you next week.

A few? 3? 3 in 250 people failed - only I could get those odds. As for the meeting, I was expecting that. The only problem is, I don’t know what to say.

Shit!

Election time

Yes, May 3 is fast approaching. Since I’m away from home I decided to do a postal vote and got my papers yesterday. I’m not sure what this election will really mean for us, but I’ve got a pretty strong feeling that SNP will snatch it. And to be honest, why not? Lab/Lib coalition hasn’t been phenomenally great and at Westminster it’s been quite a bit worse (in my opinion). A perfect example of this which is quite close to me is the training system (MTAS) for junior docs which was implemented this year. I mentioned it before when they were marching in Glasgow and since then a lot has gone on to try and sort out the problems.

Yesterday, however, MTAS was back in the spotlight. It seems that, somehow, personal details were available to those who wanted them. These details not only include names but also the sexuality of individuals. I don’t know about anyone else, but I hate getting asked those kind of questions - never mind knowing that anyone else may have found it out! The Department of Health apparently fixed these problems within 30 minutes of being informed.

Today, however, the plot thickened as an anonymous reported:

Any applicant can see ANY correspondence sent by another candidate or from MTAS to another candidate by just going to his inbox and changing the message number displayed in the url.

(NHS Blog Doc)

The story hasn’t made the mainstream news yet and the MTAS website seems to be down for “planned essential maintenance”. Planned my ass.

As a rookie web programmer, I’m astonished at this. I’ll admit security was not my strong point but something like this should never have been released into a system being used by over 30,000 people. Did the programmers know this wasn’t secure? Did they consider any of the possible consequences? Who knows, but I sure would like to see some of the code being used and I’d love to be a fly on the walls in the DoH offices around about now.

Personally, I think heads should roll over this one. Everyone seems to be looking at Patsy and I can’t imagine what she’ll have to say about this. Hell, it took her ages to apologise for the first batch of mayhem she cooked up.

Yes, time Labour was moved out I think, at least Scotland has an election this year.

Making friends with foam

My first OSCE was today. OSCE (Oh-ski), by the way, is an Objective Structured Clinical Exam which we have to do as part of the year assessment from next year onwards. Today was just a mock to get us used to how they work. It was a long morning, starting at 8:30 with a briefing and finally ending at 1:15 where I managed to get some food. It may have been a mock, but they weren’t trying to make it seem like one - we all had to dress formally as we would for patients and as soon as 8:30 hit the doors into the Seminar Room were locked with only about half the number that should have been in there.

Once we got started though, it was quite good. We were number 1, 2 & 3 and depending on the number we were either an examiner, candidate or the patient. I got the short straw and was the candidate first. As a candidate there were 7 stations - suturing, blood pressure, two actor communication skills, and 3 limb movements. I did OK. Need to remember to wash my hands all the time and confirm patients’ identities. Also need practice on introducing myself to a block of foam (suturing). This was the first year they’ve done this in year 1 and I think they’ll be keeping it here. Despite the mayhem at the start, it was worth the early wake. Plus, I got to run around clinical skills with my stethoscope around my neck! (Yes, I’m sad).

Five weeks to go till exams and revision is going slow. I’m hoping the exam will be lots of anatomy and biochemistry (I like diabetes) with very little waffle (my English teacher would’ve hated it!).

Even scanners don’t like Internet Explorer

Quite impressive actually, I’ve had Vista for some time now and only just ran into this problem. Well, maybe that’s being kind to Microsoft. I installed it at the end of February and sat about putting all of my needed programs on it, including Firefox. With FF installed, I never really needed to open Internet Explorer (IE) and ignored it. Occasionally a program would launch IE itself, upon which point I would be presented with an “Internet Explorer has stopped working” dialogue box and the assurance that “Windows can check online for a solution to the problem” - fine and dandy…except there was no solution.

This didn’t really bother me for the last 2 months, until today when I needed IE. Obviously since Windows couldn’t solve it, I’d have to do it myself. Taking a look at the detail of the error I found out that:

Fault Module Name: ophookSE2.dll

I’d never heard of it and expected to find Google telling me it belonged to Microsoft somewhere along the line. In fact, it was published by ScanSoft, Inc. This was a little bit more helpful, I had a scanner, a Canon, but would that really be causing the problems? A quick look down the Programs list told me that ScanSoft, Inc. were responsible for OmniPage SE - the OCR software that comes with my scanner. Since I don’t really use OCR that much, I was happy to uninstall it to check it was the culprit. Annoyingly, it wouldn’t budge as the uninstaller wasn’t designed for Vista (although the installer worked…typical!).

A little more Googling turned up this rather unhelpful page which provided the new software but told me I first had to uninstall the old version. I decided to try the new installer anyway, but it didn’t want to run at all. My temporary solution was then to rename the file OpHookSE2.dll (in Program Files -> ScanSoft -> OmniPageSE2.0) to something like OpHookSE2_.dll (shouldn’t really matter). I was surprised an happy to see that this was indeed a solution, and I now have a fully working Internet Explorer.

In the hope that someone else out there has similar problems, I’ve put this here.
—
After testing some OCR, it appears that this hasn’t affected the normal working dramatically, so I’m going to let it be. If anyone manages to get it working by installing the new software, do tell.
—
After leaving it a bit longer, Vista doesn’t like this missing dll too much and wants to try and install it every right click of an image. To get around this, I used ShellExView to remove it from the popup menu. You need to run this program as an administrator (right click on it in the start menu) or else it won’t work.
—
Thanks to a comment left below by Angel, the Canon USA website seems to offer Vista downloads. This may be the best option, but I haven’t tried it personally.

TGI Friday!

It’s been a very busy a hectic week, one I’ll be glad to see the back of. Thankfully, we’ve had no major backfire from the flat escapade (yet!). A few more 4 beds have popped up, so we’ll go see them at some point. In saying that, a certain someone doesn’t seem keen on visiting others.

Managed to get my third coursework mark back - no idea what happened to it though. Happily, it was a B, which means I’m going back up (BCB). Still have 1 piece outstanding (who knows…A? pfft!) plus the MILE which they aren’t exactly rushing to give us back.

Our original facilitator for this block was back yesterday. It turns out my theory was wrong and she is not a supply. She was a little bit more cheery yesterday but she wasn’t exactly pushing it. We have her marked as a possible biochemist…just need to find out her name.

Interviewing the actor on Tuesday wasn’t half as easy as I was expecting. I had the angry mother who was furious at discovering her 15 yr old daughter had been prescribed the pill. I was meant to explain to her all about competence, Gillick & Fraser Guidelines. However, in previous actor interviews all I had needed to do was extract information from the pseudo-patient, not give it. Angry mum wasn’t too pleased and demanded to see the doc which cut the interview short. In retrospect, yes, I could’ve given a little bit of info but wasn’t expecting to need to do so. I also hadn’t heard of Fraser Guidelines before then (but could’ve talked about Gillick I guess). Got the interview recorded, which I’m dreading to play back. Hopefully my next angry mother will get a better deal.

We’ve been back in the dissecting room this week, which is where I’m about to head off to. Better go try and find food first or else I’ll be starving after. (I should point out, the chemicals make you hungry…not the actual dissecting).

Flats and …flats.

So today I got a chance to see the flat my flatmates are in love with. Back on Monday he had two four-bedroom flats available at the same price. Today however, he had already managed to sell the first one (that my flatmates didn’t really like) but took myself and the other flatmate who hadn’t viewed it along anyway just to give us something to compare.

It was pretty small, even with 4 double bedrooms. A couple of the rooms had a double bed in them just to illustrate that it was physically possible (although made it remarkably smaller). The kitchen was perhaps large enough for 1 person to cook and someone to watch - there was no room to do much else. I wasn’t too impressed, and moved on to the second viewing with much scepticism (which, of course, isn’t at all like me…).

The second one was immediately larger. One of the rooms in particular had a lot more floor space (plus the double bed). The rooms themselves were nothing impressive - bed, desk and wardrobe - but I’m not really expecting much more. The main difference was in the kitchen where certainly a few people could be cooking at once. The living room had a really nice bay window which faced the back of the Boyd Orr - location couldn’t get much better. My flatmates were really excited about it and it was looking like I would be the casting vote. The only problem I had were cost and starting the tenancy at the start of June. I knew that the tenancy was going to be a problem everywhere unless I waited unless September, by which point I’d be getting desperate. So it all came down to cost. I didn’t really know what my parents had planned on helping me out with (I still don’t). It may be that I need to cover all the costs via grant and summer work so I decided that (at a considerable push) the costs would be doable. I therefore agreed to put down the deposit, which could be refunded within 24 hours if it turned out we weren’t able to go ahead.

On the way back I tried to imagine my mum’s response. I wasn’t disappointed. No sooner did I get on the phone were there several phrases “you’re a bunch of idiots” and such like. By the end of the conversation she simply told me I was paying for the summer months and that was it. I got an email soon after which covered it all:

I think it is mad that you are going to pay over £1000 when you don’t
have to! you’ve let your more-money-than-sense flat mates persuade you
into something that is mad! thought you were the sensible one!

She wasn’t too pleased is what I got from that. Happily for her the only other flatmate who hadn’t told his parents refused point blank to let him take this flat.

Chaos ensued and now we have two former best friends opposing each other. The one who could afford it (and was very, very excited about it) was ready to punch him. The other said he was going to Morrisons and hasn’t returned since (now over 4hrs ago…). He raised some good points however, and the flat is quite on the high end regarding cost. I don’t know what this will lead to. Likely an argument, probably a falling out. Myself and the final flatmate are sitting on the fence as much as possible. I’m optimistic (which, of course, is what I’m always like…) that something else will be around soon which people will love more and hopefully at a lower cost. If we can keep the peace till then, I’ll be happy for it.

I’ve already found another 4 bed which I’ve asked for a viewing of. No pictures so I don’t really have a clue what to expect.

It’s Monday!

Well, I guess now it’s almost Tuesday, but that’s not really the point. It really didn’t feel like a Monday to me, possibly because it was a really nice warm sunny day (funny how that happens when exams are approaching). With some amount of relief, I was happy to walk into PBL today and see a totally different facilitator in the chair. However, he was not our permanent facilitator (this one actually talked to us) and we currently have no idea who will be.

I was less pleased in the morning when my coursework result has apparently been misplaced. I have no idea as yet whether they coursework has been marked, completely forgotten or whether the feedback sheet is just in the wrong box. The year secretary was out of the building today so I’ve left an email asking what’s going on and also asked about our facilitator too. Hopefully I’ll get my coursework mark tomorrow, but I’m not holding my breath.

Another 9am tomorrow which I’m not looking forward too. It’s on the pancreas and is by the same Mr Boring from last week. Get to spend the afternoon interviewing actors though, and that’s always a laugh.

My flatmates organised a viewing for today (which they told me about at 1am and I couldn’t go). They are apparently in love with it. I’m a little bit more sceptical as it is around £350/mo each, plus bills. I’m going to see it at some point this week though and I guess I’ll see what it’s like. I’ve been in flats where others are renting (and for a lot cheaper) so I can compare it to them which I’m not sure my flatmates can do. I also don’t like the idea of taking the first flat we view, plus we’d have it (and pay rent on it) from the start of June, sigh.

First Week Back

It’s been an interesting week. Tuesday I spent a few hours in Accident & Emergency which I really enjoyed. Was expecting it to be quite unorganised but instead it was probably the most organised visit so far. Unfortunately, accidents and emergencies don’t often fit the schedules of visiting medical students so we didn’t see anything terribly interesting. I’m happy though that the visit didn’t manage to stroke it off my list of possible specialities.

Wednesday was back to proper work. We had a histoloy lab in the morning which, although informative, was dreadfully boring. This was followed a few hours later by a computer exercise about membrane signals. Again it was good information and since I was learning it myself it was a little bit less mundane. We took a large trip (spent 2 hours!) to ASDA in Govan. Whilst on the way, we managed to get a shout out on Sunny Govan Radio. Well worth listening to if you’re feeling bored! My flatmate managed to fit into a 11yr olds top which was a bargin at £2.25. Slightly worrying though that it doesn’t look too bad.

Thursday we met our new PBL group which turned out to be a really good group. Our facilitator however appeared quite (well…very) rude and didn’t even tell us her name (so no need for confidentiality!). Apart from that, I was very impressed (and a little worried) with the volume of knowledge everyone had - clearly I’ve got some reading to do. Managed to phone the other name I had for phlebotomy but unfortunately didn’t get anything new so I’m still playing the waiting game. In the evening we had a 21st birthday to celebrate which we spent at the Hive. It was better than I expected and stayed a bit later (and drunk a bit more) than I should have for my 9am lab on Friday. When I eventually did go home I spent another 30min talking to my flatmate about next year…which we still haven’t organised (sigh!).

So I had to wake up after a few hours and face the 3hr lab on Friday morning. It could’ve been worse, but it also could’ve been a whole lot better. At least the staff in these labs are friendly in comparison to Tuesday. The lab consisted mainly of testing different carbohydrates with Benedict’s and checking which were digested. Not exactly something we hadn’t done before many, many times.

Now I’m looking at the good weather and get to look forward to revision in the sun…

New term - new group

Finally got our timetable and PBL groups for the next 10 weeks this week. Timetable isn’t too bad, only 1 fully free day (how will I survive!?) but I’ve got a lot more free mornings than before - probably end up using them to sleep in. There is a lot of biochem in the next block, which I’m looking forward to. Let’s see if I say the same thing 2 weeks from now…

Know a few people in my new group but most of them will be new which I guess is the idea. I’m hoping they’ll push me this block otherwise I ain’t gonna know it for the exam. Doesn’t help that we get absolutely no revision time (last feedback is Monday 4th June 4pm and exam Paper 1 is Tuesday 5th June 9am!). Probably should have spent a little bit more time revising this Easter but the weather has been far too good to sit in and learn about respiration. Guess I’m going to have to learn at some point how to revise properly, hopefully before the 2nd year exam which is apparently horrid.

I’m trying to work out where my 3 weeks went, cause it sure doesn’t feel like it’s been that long. Least I won’t be complaining about being bored any more and might update this more often. We need to sort out next years flat when we get back and the sooner the better. There are a few OK flats available at the moment, but the problem is everyone wants us to move in straight away. No big deal if I could actually afford it but those extra months would be annoying if I wasn’t living there. Would settle for getting it from July (and I’m not sure I’ll have much choice) cause then I could go back through for my birthday and have somewhere to live. So much better than the current mattress on the floor I have back here.

My other aim when I go back is to cook for 1 week with no ready meals. It’s going to be a challenge but I should manage it. Watching the F word has inspired me to do a bit of proper cooking. I’m tempted to get the Wagamama’s cookbook because I know I’d happily put the effort into cooking if it tasted like that all the time. Thank God I get my student loan through on Tuesday! I’ve decided (with a lot of pain) that I’m only allowed to buy a laptop if I work for a bit during the summer. Roll on phlebotomy!