OMG! I'm past 30 years old and still a student! How did I spend my birthday yesterday? Day off? No... Nice dinner? No... I stayed till 7pm in hospital yesterday and to top it off, I received scathing remarks from a patient's mum behind my back... Thankfully the nurses told me about it... So did I enjoy my birthday - that would be a resounding NO!
Also I have been without internet access for the past few days as I switched ISP... Seriously I do not understand why it takes more than a week for me to get my new service activated... I hate to do comparison but in Singapore, within 3 working days my internet service would be set up and ready to go. You can't say oh because Australia is bigger thus access is an issue.. Come on, I live within the metropolitan area, and all the freaking phone company needs to do is to activate the ADSL on their exchange... How difficult is that? It's not like laying out a whole new line of cable.
Okay got that off my chest... Now to better things... Tmr I meeting with some of my classmates for a nice dinner - to celebrate us coming this far and almost finishing our med (or MAD) degree. I'm looking forward to this dinner for some time...
While I'm physically tired everyday, I must say that I am enjoying my term in paediatrics neurology. It is a very fascinating and challenging speciality and can be rewarding as well. Most of the patients I see have some form of epilepsy aka fits, while many are able to control their fits with medications, there are some who despite the trial of all medications still have uncontrollable seizures. Today I saw a patient who have continous seizures that cannot be controlled with any of the medications we have. When I mean continuous, it's really continuous. it does not stop even for 1 sec... The last resort is for the patient to undergo surgery but this is no ordinary brain surgery (not to say any brain surgery is ordinary) but the patient is scheduled to undergo removal of half of her brain in the last attempt to stop her seizures...
While I have even exchanged a word with this patient, I cannot feel sad that despite all medical advances made so far,the patient will undergo such a drastic measure. It is understandable that the patient does not want to even talk about the condition and I can only imagine the anguish felt by the patient knowing that if surgery was not done, the seizures will continue and eventually cause devastating damage to the brain and on the other hand, going for the surgery means that in all probability, the brain will still be grossly damaged. How do one choose? Not to mention the amount of anguish felt by the parents. How do they make a decision on the patient's behalf (because patient is a minor)? What would I choose if I were the parents? I cannot even begin to imagine...
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