Pop goes the doctor

It's been a long time since I last wrote anything here.  As most of my dear, loyal readers seem to have noticed, most of my updates come at a time when, either I have an impending deadline, or I am (meant to be) very busy.  Well, this morning finds me with all my deadlines for this rotation met and taking a ‘study day’ to celebrate.

To update quickly on the last 4 months, I went from Grimsby back to Hull to work on a gastro ward – mostly liver patients (I once commented – perhaps insensitively – that finding a liver patient on a ward is much akin to finding a banana in a fruit salad.  In the words of Coldplay, they are all yellow.)  And now that’s finished I’m packing trusty suitcase and moving to Scunthorpe to pretend to be a GP for the last rotation before exams.  I can’t quite believe this has come round so fast.

Spending all our time on the ward gives us some idea of the kind of doctors we’re likely to become.  All doctors have little catch phrases and it’s interesting to work out what your own are.  Mine is revealing itself to be “that’s great,” combined with indiscriminate use of the word ‘pop’, which I think is common to most of the medical profession.  “Could you just pop up on the bed for me?  That’s great.”  “Could you just pop your shirt off for me?  That’s great.”  “I’m just going to pop a finger in…”  That’s never quite so great.  It’s probably something that everyone who works with people develops as a way of keeping up the background level of ambient chitchat.

I’ll try and keep the blog going for at the least the next 5 months.  It’s quite good to look back over the last 5 years and see how I got here.  Also for those expecting illustrated tales from Uganda, my heartfelt apologies.  I will try to correct the situation.  I’ll pop a few pictures on the web.  That’ll be great.