Medical student syndrome

Tonight I noticed I had a rash under my chin and on my arms and I'm really achey, so I convinced myself that I had meningitis.

I've since realised that I was being an idiot; the rash is just a boring rash and I'm achey from going to the gym last night. Over the last term I've also thought at various times that I had anaemia, a congenital heart problem (because I sometimes get palpitations), GI cancer, hyper and hypo thyroidism and that I was pregnant. I wonder how many more medical conditions I'll diagnose myself with before the end of med school?

[EDIT] Hah, the day after I wrote this we had a lecture on meningitis!

Medicine, a secure career?

Recession proof degree subjects:
http://www.studentbeans.com/student-money/a/ten-recession-proof-degrees-subjects3828.html

Annndddd........ *drum role*, Medicine comes in second (below nursing) in careers least affected by the recession! People are always going to be ill I suppose! Apparently unemployment in medicine graduates is "virtually non-existent" at 0.1%. Although this year apparently nearly 300 medicine graduates are currently without F1 jobs (though this figure will probably decrease over the next few months with people not passing finals/not graduating and freeing up jobs and apparently foundation schools are being asked to take on more doctors to ensure that everyone ends up with a job http://www.foundationprogramme.nhs.uk/news/story/ukfpo-update-on-fp2013-oversubscription). Apparently in the future there will be a 2% decrease in the intake of medical students in the UK, in line with future workforce planning (http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/view-article.html?id=20010044) so hopefully there will always be jobs available for doctors (although I have heard that there are problems of shortages of consultant posts in some specialities).

As many people probably know, there's been a bit of a kerfuffle with FPAS F1 job allocations over the last week, with some candidate's SJTs needing remarking which has meant that all the job allocations that were given out last week no longer stand and all the jobs will be reallocated tomorrow. This must be so stressful for all final years (especially as they already had the stress of being the guinea pig year for the SJTs, and many of them either have their finals now or in the near future). I really feel for everyone in this situation and hope that not too many people are left disappointed.

We did a practice SJT question last week (although technically it was packaged as an aptitude/professionalism question as the med school aren't meant to be prepping us for the SJT...) and I got all the answers in the correct order! It's all a bit vague though and the middle answers seem as though they could be mixed around a bit depending on which way you interpreted the question. Who knows though, we might all prepare ourselves to take the SJT and they could change the assessments again for our year so I'm not getting too stressed about it yet.

My younger sister (of 2 years) is currently in the process of buying her first property! She's a nurse and can afford it, but I didn't think she'd be in the position to buy a place quite so soon. It puts everything in perspective though with regards to my own situation. If I hadn't gone back to uni to do Medicine, I would probably be in the position of looking at buying a property also. Now though, I'll be lucky if I'm house hunting in less than 5 years time. Currently I can barely afford to eat. It's a bit depressing. I know that in the future it'll totally be worth it, but sometimes it's just hard seeing all my peers enjoying their 20's and putting down roots whilst I'm still living off my overdraft and finding money just to pay for rent/bills/food a struggle some months. This should improve slightly next year when I don't have to pay the £3000 odd fees that I've had to do this year, but not substantially. Many people in my year come from quite wealthy families with parents who are paying all of their fees and living expenses, and even buying them a house to live in in some cases, but unfortunately I'm not in that position. Being a responsible adult is hard. I really hope that I don't fail med school after all of this!

The O&G workshop

I went to an obstetrics and gynaecology conference last weekend. I meant to write about it sooner but it’s been a busy week!

The workshop was a one day event for students run by several O&G registrars from the local hospitals. I wasn’t sure how good or useful the conference was going to be, but it ended up being both! The registrars were obviously trying to sell O&G as a career, but not from some underlying agenda but purely because they genuinely really enjoy O&G and think that it’s a great specialty to be in. I found it a bit hard to believe that it’s as good as they say it is from other things that I’ve heard, but I do believe that compared to many other specialties it’s a good one to be in.

My main concerns about O&G were about the working hours and the range of work that you do. I think that I would enjoy the obstetrics side more than the gynae side (particularly gynaeoncology), but they were saying that the split is approx 70:30 obs:gynae and the majority of the more complex gynae things and gynaeoncology is generally done by specific gynae specialists in tertiary hospitals. I also learnt that you can be an O&G generalist doing a bit of everything in a DGH (with a better work life balance), or specialize in a specific area and work in a bigger tertiary type hospital (but with a worse work life balance!).

They gave an example of one of their consultants who works Mon, Thur and Fri daytimes and a Tuesday nighttime, and because out of hours work counts for more than normal working hours, doing these 4 shifts counts as the consultant working full time! One of the registrars there was working LTFT (less than full time), working 60% of full time (which equates to 3 days work a week and just over half of the on call time) which I think would be a good option if I end up having children, although it does increase the specialty training length.

I love medicine! There’s so much variety and choice. My problem with deciding what specialty I want to do, is that there’s so many amazing options, that choosing just one is going to be hard! I have thought about a career O&G previously, enough to choose it as the specialty to base my patient case studies on that we’re doing in uni at the moment, but after the workshop I’m seriously considering it.

At the conference we also did several different workshops, and modesty out of the window, I was awesome at laproscopy! My friend and I were the only pair to manage to get all of the pasta tubes onto the string J. Too bad I don’t have surgical aspirations! I also got a freebie tourniquet! I was under the impression that you had to use disposable tourniquets in hospital though, so I don’t know if I can actually use it, but I still enjoy having it.

I also went to one of my friend’s engagement party the other day and we were looking through a wedding magazine. It made me really want to get engaged now and have a big sparkly diamond on my finger too! In all seriousness though, I have heard that it’s beneficial to get married before the end of med school because otherwise you’ll end up having your non married name as your professionally registered name and only be able to use your married name personally as it’s hard to get your doctor name changed. I don’t know how true this is though.