Category: Medicine

• December 4, 2015

  The SJT, and The Beauty of Bread

  

  Today, I will be taking one of the most important exams of my life so far. That is no exaggeration. The Foundation Programme Situational Judgement Test (SJT) is a two hour and twenty minute, 70 question paper testing the candidate’s judgement in a variety of clinical scenarios. I’m not going to go into detail about…
• July 16, 2015

  Weird and Wonderful Food, and Experiences

  

  Weird and Wonderful Food and Drink I was complemented on my curry udon eating technique today because of the lack of curry sauce on my white coat – little did they know I spilled it on my trousers instead. Curry udon consists of udon (duh), which are thick wheat noodles, in a curry sauce with…
• July 8, 2015

  Tokyo Nights

  

  I’m slowly catching up, but still way behind with my Tokyo activities. Apologies if there are horrendous spelling and grammar mistakes, but it’s hard enough to draft a post on this thing let alone do any quality control. Another day of vascular surgery, another wound sutured. I didn’t expect to be so involved, but it…
• July 5, 2015

  The First Week (Well, almost all of it)

  

  Apologies for the lack of updates, but things have been fairly non-stop since I started in the hospital on Monday. People generally don’t walk very far around these parts, and Katsu insisted I took a taxi on my first day so I wasn’t late, but in the busy morning traffic it proved impossible to hail…
• February 11, 2015

  The Great Vaccine Debate

  This isn’t my usual area of journalistic interest, but I read a recent blog post by Linzy Browning and thought it deserved a response. While I can’t argue that we have become poor critical thinkers in general and take a lot of what we are told for granted, there is a reason that things are…
• January 30, 2015

  Altnageezy (*Nialism*)

  EDIT: Just to clarify, *nialism* is referring to a word coined by Niall, one of my fellow medical students. I can spell relatively well, but in this case I’m fabricating words. Life is full of choices. Some of those choices lead us down paths filled with wonder and adventure, and some of those lead us…
• January 17, 2015

  Renewed Respect for General Practice

  Bear with me – this is more medically related than anything else I have written so far, but I believe it should be said. My time in General Practice is over. Like many people who start studying medicine, I had no inclination of ever becoming a GP. My exposure to doctors was limited to getting…
• November 11, 2014

  Illness does not become me…

  I hate being sick. I try to be as productive as I can in everyday life, and I particularly loathe losing an entire free day. On the eve of Halloween, through the fault of Gucci Chip on the Lisburn road or some other nefarious mechanism, I ended up with food poisoning/gastroenteritis, and I was out…
• October 12, 2014

  Games, Mixers, and Mountain Biking

  This week marked the end of my geriatric medicine placement in the Ulster hospital, and after a grim group work session, I couldn’t be happier to see the back of it. I am a pretty tolerant person by most accounts but I have my limits, and there are some people that I cannot deal with…
• August 2, 2014

  First the morgue…then the zoo

  This is getting bad. I was writing this post to address my problem with procrastination when it comes to the subject of writing, but I have successfully put it off for another week. I’ll try this again – see below for what I wanted to say last week: I should be writing non-stop over summer,…