survival of the fittest

Before i dive into the story, i'd like to give a bit of background on my class - my class is called Direct Entry Medicine year 4 or just 4th meds for short. We're the people who got into medical school with our a-level/IB/irish leaving certs. there are also many people who already have degrees (qualified pharmacists, accountants, economists etc.). The 4th meds are people who have to do 5 years of medical school.

Now, there are also the GEM 3s - Graduate Entry Medicine year 3 - these are the people who got into medical school with a background of a science degree, so they get to skip subjects here and there and only have to do 4 years of medical school.

This year,the two classes are fully merged into just one class because the GEMs did what we did in our first 3 years in only 2 years (the don't really have any summer break at all).

The major problem this causes is that there are wayyy too many people in our class (approximately 180 - the current first year only have 100+) . Being in the lecture hall with a massive amount of people isn't too bad - even though it gets way too intimidating to ever ask any question - the worst part is that there are so many of us in the wards.

The medical school did their best to spread people around, but it still is a problem. We're all fighting and competing to learn. If we were characters in the Hunger Games we'd be brutally murdering each other right now.

To give you a better understanding of how competitive things get, I will now tell you what happened to me today.

After my scheduled tutorial I went straight into theatre, skipping lunch so I can get there early and not miss the surgery again today (I missed it yesterday - not because of lunch, but because I got lost. tsk tsk). When I get there I was so relieved to see that I was the only medical student there. As I was about to observe a cataract surgery, Ali walked in. There can only be one student who can watch the procedure at one time, so Ali had to just stand there waiting for the first one to be over while I stood next to the surgeon.

Before the surgery was over, another Aly walked in (all of the Kuwaiti men are called Ali, the way all Malaysian men are Muhammads), making 3 of us in the theatre.

I left right after the first one was over because I know there were only three scheduled procedures that afternoon - which means there's only one for each of us.

So I walked down to the outpatients to be with any one of the ophtalmologists during their clinics - there were only two of them then, and both already had students in their rooms.

Feeling rather defeated, I went up to the wards and thankfully found myself a patient with a really good history who have not met any of the medical students and so was not grumpy and tired.

After I was done with him (LOL no pun intended) I walked out of the ward and bumped into Kak Amy. We were walking down the hall and as we were passing a bunch of my classmates, Kak Amy stopped to tell me (in English) that she has an interesting patient for me to examine, if I want to. The group of 4th Meds we were standing by suddenly fell silent and they were all staring at me like vultures, and were obviously straining their ears to hear the patient name. When Kak Amy said goodbye and left, I turned to one of them to borrow a pentorch and the girl standing next to me actually stretched her neck to peek at my notebook to see the patient details Kak Amy just gave me!

Uuuurgh. I had a lot of things going on today that I have to get done so I have to leave it until tomorrow, and I KNOW one of them would've stolen my patient by then. And it's a neurology patient, which means the examination takes a long time and a lot of effort on the patient's part, so there's a very slim chance she'd want to do the whole thing twice :'(

Competitive medical students are competitive.

Getting Past OK : still 40! There are some quotes I really like that I want to write on this blog, will get on to that...eventually.

pictures that paint stories rather half-heartedly

why hello hello.

i always worry Ain by (almost always) sounding depressing in my blog, but i'm alright, really. i just write more when i'm at my lower points in life.

so Ain, if you're reading this, by any chance, don't worry, k? and i miss you, by the way.

so anyway. today i wanna talk about pictures.

i think i've always been the kind of person who wants to be in pictures because i want to have the memory immortalized in print (or, in the case of the modern days, in facebook). but i'm always put off by the throng of friends who like to jump in everyone's pictures...when they start doing the run-to-where-the-camera-is-pointing thing, i will tend to just stay out of the picture.

and i'm also the type who can't stand people who have 50 pictures of their face with 0.2mm's worth of background in their profile picture album. i can't even...just...no.

but, lately i realized that i haven't many pictures of myself looking presentable. my pictures usually look like this


or this

or this


while there's no denying my habit of morphing into a four-year-old when taking a picture, i sometimes take normal ones too, only it usually look like this

or this



or even worse, this


i don't know whether this is just a manifestation of me realizing that i do not photograph very well, or an expression of my insecure-self, or just me being the low profile antisocial geek that i am.

all of these factors make finding pictures of me to, for example, give to the class rep for the year book, a rather difficult task.

very rarely, i will take pictures that end up like this

or this


but these kind of pictures make me feel like head-desking myself towards a lethal brain haemorrhage.

and then, very, very, very, rarely...i'd luck into this

and this


it's a problem that will plague me for the rest of my life.

after all the above rants...i think the picture that represents what i look like every day is this

mata sepet, senyum penat, glasses, white coat and stethoscope.

my name is Atiqah and i'm your average 23 year old girl :)



p.s. writing this entry made me realize the sheer volume of pictures that i lost when my laptop crashed last year.

way more difficult than i anticipated

the 100th post is written. it's final.

my firefox foxclocks now only show two timezones; Ireland, and Malaysia.

i no longer have a red Geisha doll standing on my windowsill.


Atiqah

Getting Past OK : page 40 (5 pages in a week - major fail)

waiting for my real life to begin

Any minute now my ship is coming in
I'll keep checking the horizon
And I'll stand on the bow
And feel the waves come crashing
Come crashing down, down, down on me

And you said,"Be still, my love
Open up your heart
Let the light shine in"
Don't you understand?
I already have a plan
I'm waiting for my real life to begin

When I awoke today suddenly nothing happened
But in my dreams I slew the dragon
And down this beaten path
And up this cobbled lane
I'm walking in my own footsteps once again

And you say,"Just be here now
Forget about the past
Your mask is wearing thin"
Let me throw one more dice
I know that I can win
I'm waiting for my real life to begin

Any minute now my ship is coming in

sold and too late.

I accepted my ex's fifth friend request after rejecting it time and time again out of sheer hatred and anger and menyampahness and also just for the fact that I really don't want to be friends with him again. What? The guy's a massive jerk and threw me into the deepest of relationshit pits. And he's also partially insane.

Ok he's not really insane, but whatever.

Anyway. I thought since its Ramadhan and because I'm no angel myself and have hurt many many people (a few of which have not yet forgiven me), and I also thought of the time when this former friend of mine who hated my guts sent a friend request as a sign of truce and how it made me really happy - I thought I'd accept his friend request in return, as pay it forward.

That sentence doesn't make any sense at all ahahahaha adeiii.

So kesimpulannya I accepted his friend request last night. And already he's being weird on my wall. MAKE HIM STOP T_____T

To be fair, he's not being THAT weird, it's just that his threshold of being weird in my head is much lower than everybody else's.

I just...wish he wouldn't try to be my friend again, and I wish it's enough for him that I forgive him and I also pray to God he wouldn't start commenting on every single thing I post after this and maybe he would even start to ignore me! That would be fantastic.

*prays*

p.s. HAPPY BIRTHDAY KAKWE!!! I sent you a tweet bc I don't want my birthday wish to drown in the sea of facebook wall wishes. I hope you had (/are having) a great one!! Love you lots lots lots.

p.p.s. please read this entry with my dry sense of humor in mind!


Getting Past OK: still page 35

the weather hates me because i called it gross

Throwing stuff all over the place, hastily pinning her hijab in a barely-acceptable presentation, the girl silently cursed her habit of doing everything last minute. It was nearly three, and she was about to be late for her lecture.

I need to finish reading that stupid Getting Past OK book to get out of this vicious cycle. She thought to herself.

She peeked out her window to see if it was raining - who was she kidding? this is Ireland she is living in, the rain is some sort of an outlandish powerful being over here. Invisible, silent. It attacks you out of nowhere, and the next thing you know you're soaking wet, wishing socks and pants had never been created.

But I digressed. It wasn't raining (or so she thought). Grabbing her bag, the girl ran downstairs and slammed the front door shut as soon as she was out.

Two minutes into the long-stretch-of-road-with-no-place-to-seek-refuge walk, it started to pour. I mean it actually poured cats and dogs and sheeps and whatnots. I'm talking east coast Malaysia tengkujuh sort of rain here. Visible and audible and even with bits of hail! good God.

In a pathetic attempt to rescue herself from the insane shower, the girl ran down the hill as fast as she could, holding her (totally not waterproof) fake Kipling backpack with one hand and holding the hood of her jacket with the other.

Needless to say, all that running was just a waste of precious calories. By the time she got to the sliding door of the hospital, she was dripping wet from head to toe. Looking like an absolute freak show (because it only just started raining, and everybody else got there early so they were as dry as an ikan kering), she walked into the lecture hall.

The good news is, the lecturer wasn't there yet.

As she was walking up the stairs to her usual seat, she heard a voice yelling her name among the noisy chatter of the hall. She ignored it, since she was too busy feeling sorry for herself and trying to hold her composure and not take off her pants in the middle of the lecture hall because it was wet to the point that it stuck to her skin and threatened to cause her hypothermia.

'ATIQAAHH!!!!!!!!!' that voice again. she turned and saw a freakishly tall Irish boy with blonde hair grinning sheepishly at her.

'What!?' she yelled in reply, rather annoyed.

The boy pointed at her soaking-self, tilted his head back and laughed his bloody tonsils off.

'GOD, Sheehan!' the girl yelled again, throwing her arms out in an exasperated manner, calling the boy by his last name.

What a jerkface. She thought to herself.

This is going to be a trying year for her, being stuck in the same class and in the same group with her former love-hate friend John Robert Sheehan all over again. He moved on to second year while she repeated first year in 2006, but last year he took the year off from medical school to take some other classes to qualify him for a double degree.

So now he's back in her life, tormenting her every day with his big giant 6"2 self.

Anyway. The girl walked away from him, walked up the stairs and sat down on her seat at the middle row. She unzipped her backpack to take her notepad and pen, and gasped in sadness/horror.

Her copy of Getting Past OK is ruined.






Getting Past OK : page 35

annoyances #1

atiq : atiq tak sedar langsung akak kejut the first time! *eats sahur*

anon1* : ye ke...nasib baik akak kejut lagi sekali.

anon2* : tido lambat ke?

atiq : a'ah

anon2 : pukul berapa?

atiq : satu

anon2 : saya tido pukul dua

atiq - dalam hati : SO? doesn't make me sleeping at one any earlier, does it?
luar hati : oo *senyum*



I should clarify though that sleeping at one is not late for me if it's not for the tiring 8.30-6.00 lectures and fasting from 4.30-8.30

I should also maybe clarify that anon2 is a lovely person, just maybe too competitive with a somewhat failing interpersonal skill.

I wonder if I unknowingly annoy people, too. I probably do.


Patience : I need to have more of them.


Getting Past OK : page 6

*name omitted for obvious reasons