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.