Friday, December 14, 2007

Attachment at UM hospital

There'll be another post in Chinese about this attachment but not the translation of this post. Hope u'll enjoy reading it!

Day 1
The 20(only 3 chinese; the rest... well, you know...) of us reached at 8.30am, searching for Cik Intan who was responsible to bring us around the hospital. She looked at us disapprovingly, "where are your labcoats?" Ooops, I didn't have one, because nobody told me that we needed to bring one! Luckily I was not the only one who didn't have labcoat at the moment. My friend, apparently, did not know about that too. I was so worried that we would be sent back. Well, we were fortunate enough to be just warned by her. "No labcoat tomorrow, no follow!"
After taking attendance, our tour started at trauma & emergency department. As the name suggests, it is for all sorts of cases, especially the emergency ones, e.g. food poisoning, falling from building, gunshot wound and labour etc. It is further divided to 4 zones; the patients that need medical attention immediately, i.e. really really emergency cases will be located at the resuscitation hall(zone 1). The others, depending on the level of seriousness of the injury, will be located at zone 2, 3, 4 respectively. Due to it's only early in the morning, there weren't many cases yet. We just watched an unconscious old man being resuscitated in zone 1. That reminds me of some scenes in Grey's Anatomy.
In just an hour, we finished visiting the department. We went back to Cik Intan again. I thought we would immediately be brought to another department. Instead, she said that we were 'lucky' that there was free breakfast for us - a seminar was cancelled and the food prepared for the participants was given to us in order not to waste it. Hah! What a luck! What shocked me the most was her attitude. "Makan-makan dan rehat-rehat dulu ya! Kita start pada pukul 2." My God! It was only 10 something and after barely doing anything we had to rest for 4 hours?
She is really some MALAYsian!
However, we soon finished the food and seeing us have nothing to do there, she finally gave in and brought us to see a high-ranked nurse. The first thing she did when she saw us was to ask,' What is your objective?' (Hello??? Can't you see that we are a bunch of A Level students and had a letter saying that we had to do an attachment here? So what do you think is our objective?) Ok, fair enough, somebody answered 'to observe and experience the life of a doctor'. But she seemed not to be satisfied by the answer. Never mind, forget about it. There, we had a lecture on how the hospital works and some stuffs. Then the nurse divided us into groups and we were to go to different departments and switch with other groups the next day. Suddenly, someone asked, "What about the students taking pharmacy? Do they have to go to these departments too? Aren't we supposed to just stay at the pharmacy?" Well done! All this while the pharmacists-to-be just sat there and kept quite like mouses until groups divided and everyone ready to go. Now we had to be regrouped again, thanks to them. 4 of them were immediately sent to the pharmacy department, leaving the only Chinese - me, among 16 of us.
My group went to the Obstetric and Gynaecology(O&G) department. Nothing interesting happened. I hated it when the nurse there asked again, "What is your objective?" (Come on, does objective really matter that much to you?) We watched a demonstration of new improved blood collecting syringe and got a free pen, spoke to patients, medical student, house officer, medical officer and specialist. Also, we managed to observe how an ultrasound scan is done. We could see a cyst near the ovary(not very clearly). And we managed to convince the specialist to let us watch her performing surgery the next day. Yipee! Not bad for the first day!

Day 2
Even though it was only early in the morning, we already had an exciting experience by going into the operation theatre. We watched the removal of a large pedunculated fibroid(kinda like cyst attached to the uterus). It was really large! After that, to our disappointment, we had to go back to the same department instead of going elsewhere! It somehow ruined my excitement of the morning. We just walked up and down and observed a doctor diagnosing her patients.
Eventually we couldn't take it anymore; we fled to another department ourselves(nobody really bothered us anyway)>> the medical department. Here they accommodate patients suffering diseases associated to gastrointestinal tract, chest and kidney. We followed the specialist around; she kindly and patiently explained the conditions of some patients to us.
There was a Chinese male patient which was admitted without his family. He seemed to have Alzheimer because whatever we asked him, he would answer with something else and kept repeating the same thing. At first the specialist thought it was the problem of language and asked me to do some translation. Well, he turned out to be a banana! haha! I tried hokkien, cantonese, mandarin.... None of them worked. He spoke only english. And when the specialist examined him by touching his stomach, he exclaimed "Oh my God!"and laughed. Maybe he thought she was seducing him. Haha! It was so funny!

Day 3
We went to the paediatric ward. It accommodates mostly children with cancer undergoing chemotheraphy. During lunch time, they suddenly wanted to go out to eat at A&W. I went there Zarul's car. A&W's food was not that nice. I still like KFC the best. After lunch, we went back to the ward again but did nothing much there. We went back earlier than the first 2 days, at around 3pm.

Day 4
We were taken to the forensic department by Cik Intan. The person in charge took us inside to look around and showed us the bodies after post-mortem. First, he showed a died-not-long-ago body. It was nothing actually, just that the body was stitched back already after autopsy was done and became black. Next shown were a body of 2004 and one 2006. Creepy! The bodies could not be disposed yet because they were under police cases. The was some stinky smell already and some fungus grown on the bodies.
After that we had nothing to do, Cik Intan brought us to visit the place where all the clothes worn by patients, used by doctors during surgery etc were washed. Not that we are interested or we are going do work like that also... But since we had nowhere to go, we just pretended to be interested to look around. Then someone suggested that we go to the psychiatric ward. Fine, we went there, but again, nothing interesting to see.
This day was the day we went back the earliest - at lunchtime! I didn't really go back, I went to mid-valley with Yea Kee and had fun there, hehe....

Day 5
We were supposed to have the attachment for 5 days but due to the laziness of the nurse and Cik Intan, the 5th day was cancelled. So I went back to shah alam that day.

During this attachment, I've learned that communication is very important. We must communicate well with patients in order to make accurate diagnosis; we must communicate well with nurses so that we won't be isolated and ill-treated(never, never offend a nurse!); we must be good with the specialists so that our life won't be miserable! Besides, I find that we need to equipped ourselves with more medical terms to understand what the specialists and doctors are saying. Also, the hardest thing we face in the medical line is not death; it is when we have to break the news to the deceased's family. I too realised that some of the doctors-to-be are not certain of their ambitions yet. Hopefully they'll make up their mind soon because it is a pain to do something you do not have passion in. Das ist alles for this post.

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