*yawn*
*stretches*

Lazy Sunday afternoon!! wah. i can hardly peel my eyelids apart. *snores*

Can't imagine i haven't felt the need/urge to blog in so many donkey yrs. to think i am now in the LAST mth of housemanship! *gasp* that's such a scary thought!!!!

looking back, the past yr has been full of ups and downs, many experiences i have had would be probably the very ones that would accompany me for the rest of my life.

Housemanship.

You covert it when you are a struggling medical student, panicking in the wee hours of the night trying frantically to get hold of your best friend at the end of the other line, practically begging for words of reassurance as you sweat over The Exams that begin the next day. You slog your guts away, look in awe and envy at your seniors The Houseman who have Passed MBBS *oh how god-like they were!) and wonder if your turn will ever come.

Next come The Results Day, when happiness mingled with a sense of relief and a teeny weeny sense of loss/regret that you are now officially an working adult. Student no more! and of course many of us would look forward to our very first pay-cheque! Hoooray! Just ten more years before we can finish repaying our debts!!! :p

The first day of housemanship will forever remain a blissfully blurry fuzzy kind of picture for me; haha i can't really remember how my working life started. er with some briefings i guess?! maybe some sort of welcome? but truthfully you don't really have the luxury to think; too much pent-up adrenaline and sense of impending doom mixed with a desperately trying-not-to-panick feeling is all that i remembered about my first day of work. Some of us have it good, what with superbly nice baby MOs guiding us along whereas some of us have to make do with the NTS MOs who, to be honest were not the best people to show us the ropes. At the end of the day, after many "scuffles" and secret "i-totally-can't-stand-working-with-you" kind of recurring thoughts, many of us eventually got rid of the demons and surprisingly got along rather well with the NTSes. hehe.

I guess for many of us, the first place we started our HO-ship will always feel like home. :D

I remember the trauma of having to change postings at the end of 4 months. The familiar sense of anxiety, self-doubt! Wondering if you will ever get used to the new system, new people, new kind of patients, newly down-sized paediatric veins that you will have to set plugs in! and of course, dealing with obsessing neurotic and overanxious +++++ parents is never a piece of cake. (many a times you will be called to see patients' PARENTS stat, only to be posed a question: Doctor doctor! my child is crying! HOW!?!?! U learn not to jaw-drop too obviously after awhile. haha) and of course at the back of your mind you always have this niggling feeling you will turn out to be the champion of all neurotic parents when you become a parent yourself.

The third posting is in a way, potentially the most enjoyable of them all. We would all have reached a stage where we are comfortabel doing changes, whining about our lack of rest but yet seasoned enough to clock 40 hours straight at work without a wink a sleep and yet do a decent day's work. Competency comes with time. And i personally feel that it is when you know that you aren't embarassingly inadequate as a HO that you begin to chat more and share more with your MOs and regs... No need to paper-bagged your head that often anymore! ahah.


The impending end of HO-ship is the mark of another chapter, another challenge, another new wave of paper-bagging for us all. And i can't help but feel very sad that i will be turning into a MO, and from then onwards my class of '2008 would be scattered all over Singapore, each pursuing our own desitinies. It is kind of sad to come to realise that no longer will you be seeing familiar faces among your fellow peers, more often than not your fellow MOs will be people you have never seen before, and who may be so caught up in their exam prep that they may not even take a second look at you. HOship has been fun, despite all the horribly long hours of work. You find joy in helping your peers who have so often offered a helping hand when you were drowning in oodles of work. You find joy bitching together about the system, about the infamously horrid bosses, about the low pay, the bitchy secretaries, the horrible food, the nasty patients. haha.



i somehow have this feeling that the houseman yrs would be sorely missed, even though we are phytoplankton turning amoebae. And perhaps being a plankton is more carefree then being an amoebae bah. At least there's always plenty of sympathetic phytoplankton willing to lend their ears for your grouses.