Pethidine Pleasure

I spent first week of psychiatry sitting around doing nothing for half the day, sitting around trying desperately to stay awake. If I was lucky, I got to see a patient, but the consultant rooms were too warm and that made me even more sleepy. Painfully sleepy. My eyes would water, overloading my lacrimal ducts, causing my nose to run as well. I even resorted to reading a Cochrane review of olanzapine for schizophrenia to try and stay awake.

Then week two arrived. Before I knew it, I had sat in on three new patient consultations and had to write them all up in full psychiatric glory - 4th year case history style. Except in 4th year we had to write up two cases over six weeks. I had to write these new patients up ASAP! Oh, how I long for the days of surgery....

S-abdo pain

O-RLQ tenderness

A-appendicitis

P-NBM, BMC, OT

Psych could be the same really...

S-sees dead people

O-what dead people!?!?!?!? *play spooky music here*

A-MAD

P-clozipine stat.

Alas, psych is not like that. Painting the picture of a psychotic patient is very difficult indeed. Yes, I know being slightly psychotic myself, it should be easy for me however unless you've had exactly the same delusions as the person you're writing about, it's quite tricky to portray how the patient presents in a Word document.

Anyway, I digress. Fortunately, by Thurday morning I had managed to catch up on all of the paper work. Then I sat in on another new patient and had another case to write up! I spent all of Thurday afternoon working on that. Received feedback on Friday, and spent the rest of that morning making the necessary changes. I emailed it to my consultant before I left, but sent it to the wrong email address! So now he's probably thinks I'm a complete slacker and didn't get the work done before I ran away for the weekend.

In other news, I'm quite disgruntled with my tennis. In singles, I'm on a 4 match losing streak. I feel like it's becoming a habit and I don't know how to win anymore. Today was particularly frustrating because all of my shots were working - even my backhand which I've been dumping in the net - but I couldn't get a decent serve in! I even tried rolling my arm over just to get the ball in play but they kept on dumping into the net! A sure sign of a lack of practice. Unfortunately, that's just another of adverse effect of medicine. It insidiously draws you away from other things that you enjoy, until they become fun no more.

However I'm trying to not let medicine destroy the fun of tennis. I'll try to practise a little more this year and at least get back to a decent standard where I don't have to do scream in agony every time the ball dumps into the net.

OK, that's enough rambling for one night. It's getting late and my English is deteriorating fast. BYE!