I sit and type this on my brother’s 9 inch netbook because my Dell Inspiron 1420 seems to have basically crashed. It started off yesterday when I started seeing flashing zig zag lines and flashing blue and green screens, and it culminated in basically crashing or whatever you call it last night. I basically can’t even get to the log in screen now, it just goes black with zig zag flashing lines.

Fortunately I was able to back up my most important folders on an external hard drive (including my medical school notes, I would be very sad if I lost those!). It’s just frustrating because my last Dell laptop’s screen busted, and now this one just busts after maybe 1.5 years of use. I guess I’m not buying a Dell ever again.

A Light Week at Medical School

This was actually a pretty light week, at least in terms of UofT medical school standards. Most of the week was spent on our respirology unit, including a visit to a hospital to see some pulmonary function tests in person. Nothing too interesting or memorable about that.

I had my second session for my Arts and Sciences of Clinical Medicine course yesterday. They are pretty much slowly easing us into learning clinical skills. This week we discussed how to write a good case report (i.e. a report you write after interviewing a patient). After that, we split up into our small groups and had another go at interviewing standardized patients.

The standardized patient I interviewed was elderly, and came in with stiff pain in her knuckles. Although I wasn’t nervous last time, I still felt a bit out of place in terms of figuring out what to ask and having some direction in the conversation. This time I felt a lot more comfortable, and felt much more in control of what I needed to do. At the end of the interview, when the standardized patient was giving me feedback, she told me that she could see the empathy on my face when I spoke with her, and my tutor said the same as well. I was just like “what?” because I honestly wasn’t feeling empathy because I knew it wasn’t a “real patient”. But hey, that’s still got to be a good thing.

Best part of this week was that we got let out early at around noon yesterday, which is a pretty nice start to the weekend. I met up with some friends from class and we had lunch at this Thai restaurant, followed by an insane four and a half hour session of karaoke.

I started off by completely butchering Jason Mraz, but I think I recovered alright by the end. Highlights included attempting to rap Eminem and Jay-Z and realizing how tiring rapping is – I have a lot more respect for that craft now.

Oh Screw It

I got some unsettling news last night. I don’t want to go into details, but it’s just one of those things that makes you reflect on how short life really is. I’m not one of those big believers in living every day as if it were your last (I don’t think that phrase even makes sense), but I’m trying to be a bigger believer in just going for things and worrying less.

So many times an opportunity will come along, and I will think about going for it, but just chicken out at the last minute because I waste so much time thinking.

Something like that came up this week, and I finally just said “screw it” and went for it. And even though it didn’t work out the way I’d hope, I’m really glad I decided to just go for it. I hope this is a sign for many more “oh screw it” moments to come.

Anyways, I’ve taken the last few days off from studying, so I really need to get back in the swing of things. I also need to study more efficiently because I’m generally wasting time on the Internet half the time at the library.

Have a good weekend! 🙂