Pethidine Pleasure

I've been so flat out since creating this blog, that I've had no time to post!

I would like to introduce TH, my brand new nephew . He is the newest addition to the family, my sister's first child and my parents' first grandchild. He weighed a massive 4.44kg and will probably be bigger than me sometime next week. (OK, so I exaggerate a little, but he's a big kid!) He is only 9 days old but it sounds like he is definitely making his presence felt in the household! It seems like he may be naturally nocturnal - just like me! I will upload pictures of him as soon as I figure out how.

I've just had the first week of my urban GP attachment in a very busy practice in South Auckland. It has been a fantastic experience and the work is very challenging because many of the cases are very complex. Since almost all of my attachments have been in the controlled environment of a hospital, learning how to handle these complicated patients in the community setting is scary but also very satisfying. Also, the patients come from a really cool community. They're a great bunch of people to work with.

Despite all of the difficult cases, the most scary moment this week actually happend on Thursday morning at peer review group meeting. It all began late on Tuesday afternoon when my supervisor, TF, asked me to read up a little on the evidence for giving Vitamin D for the prevention of osteoperotic fractures. I thought she asked me this so I could follow the discussions at the meeting. I did a quick medline search, and found a nice little meta-analysis in JAMA. I just skimmed over the abstract, introduction and discussion quickly to get a very brief idea about the latest recommendations about Vit D.

On Thursday morning, I innocently turned up and waited for the meeting to begin. GPs from several practices were there. Then TF announces that I'm going to give a short presentation on Vitamin D. At that moment, I very nearly lost all sphincteric control. The overseas elective student laughed his head off when he saw the terror in my eyes. I suddenly felt very very small and hoped that the ground would just open up and swallow me. Unfortunately that didn't happen. I just managed to scramble together the salient points from the article and made it sound like I had read the whole thing, being careful not to mention things that would lead to more complicated questions. Luckily, I remembered the NNT, which one of the GPs is particularly obsessed with because he has a special interest in public health. That seemed to fend off any major attacks on my limited knowledge and withering self esteem.

This entry is much longer than I would have liked but there's just so much I want to put in! As time progresses, I'll figure out what's important to blog and what's not. I don't want this to become a long and boring blog that nobody wants to read. Any input from you is most appreciated. Please post a comment!

See ya later!!

M