One Thousand Years of Pain

End of the first week of clinical and it has been pretty bludgey so far. That changes next week since I'll be going to Accident and Emergency, which will require me to actually carry out certain x-ray projections.

Last day of fluoroscopy was alright. Nothing to exciting. The only procedure that was interesting/disgusting/shitacular was a double contrast barium enema. Basically the doctor shoves a tube up your back passage and injects barium contrast. He then pumps some air to help drain the contrast out, hopefully leaving a thin film of barium on the surface of your large intestines. Various x-rays are taken, hopefully showing pathology. It's pretty disgusting and luckily it was the doctor having to do the insertion and not us. Now I see my doctors get paid a lot more than us radiographers; they have to do the dirty work.

After that I hung around Work Area 1 doing outpatient x-rays. I did a chest x-ray and was glad to see that my skill had not degraded that much. It wasn't perfect but it was good enough.

Also, I've made a nice little discovery. It's a fish and chips shop that also started doing Asian food. I tried it for lunch with a friend and I give it two thumbs up. I can't transfer photos from my phone since I don't have the cable and I'm not the type to start taking photos of my food. Neither am I a connoisseur, but I was hungry and the food was great. So if you ever visit Westmead Hospital or Westmead Children's Hospital, just go towards the station and stand in front of Oportos near the corner of Darcy and Hawksbury road. Turn go the road and go into Queens Road and you should see the shop Western Seafoods.

Also been playing Advance Wars: Days of Ruins. Not enough for a review, but it's a much darker game then previous AW games and the COs are much more balanced. In AW:Dual Strike the CO powers could instantly changed the tide of battle.

Now to catch up on rest.

My eyes are burned by the fluoro

Finally, something happened that was worthwhile to blog about. My clinical placement at Westmead started yesterday.

There are six guys altogether at Westmead, including me. We're all in the same awkward position; technically, we're second-years, but we really only have first-year knowledge. Plus the assignments that we have to do really screws things up a little bit.

It was the usual show and dance. We rock up, get kicked in the teeth with all the OH&S and emergency regulations and get the standard tour around the department. This being my second time at Westmead, I had a good idea of where all the departments are located. The radiology department is full of right angle turns and intersections, so you best bet is you're lost is to turn randomly and if it's a dead end, go back and take another path. Personally, during my first visit I spent a ridiculous amount of time simply walking to the other departments, using the tea room as my reference point. So I can always find my way to and from the tea room.

I've been working in fluoroscopy since the beginning and will stay there until the end of the week. Fluoroscopy is basically real-time x-ray imaging. Occasionally, patients will swallow some barium contrast to show extra details. Apparently that tastes really bad because a prison inmate was supposed to get x-rays of his throat and he puked on the barium and refused point-blank to drink any more. And he was supposed to swallow it two more times.

Fluoroscopy is pretty good in that, there is only a handful of ops in the morning and there is plenty of time between ops to have a break. Some ops can take well over an hour and the other radiographers there brought books along to pass the time. Unfortunately the time can work against you. Today, there was a patient in for an op on his small bowel. Twist number one: he has MRSA. Look it up if you don't what it is, but it's bad. During the op, we injected contrast into his system. As it made its way through the bowel, we gave him three booster shots of contrast to ensure it would reach the whole bowel. Which leads onto the second twist: he shat himself. He wasn't in the best of shape, so the booster shots actually worked against us in the end. It soaked through all the layers of sheets and reached the foam mattress. Plus he has MRSA. So we had to disinfect everything with copious amounts of hospital-grade disinfectant. This sort of shit doesn't happen often, so it was bad luck for us.

I also go to sit in on an ERCP prcedure. ERCP stands for Endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography, and it combines fluoroscopy and endoscopy to treat problems in the pancreatic duct systems. It's pretty simple actually, you turn on the real-time x-rays when the doctor tells you to, and you take an x-ray when the doctor tells you to. And it has 20 minutes gaps between ops. The bad thing is that the doctors always seem to speak softly, so you have to concentrate like hell on listening to the doctor. I had a go at using the system during an actual op and there is nothing worse when you miss the doctor's words and he has to repeat them. That happened to me several times and each time I felt like a complete dill.

Well, the clinical is only two days in and I have 28 days left. Now off to bed to rest. I can't remember the last time that I had to stand with no place to sit for 7 hours.

The odds against me

Nothing much to report. The holidays are beginning to draw to a close, and with clinical looming ahead, I actually feel glad about it, despite my nervousness. There is a whole bunch of assignments and evaluations that I have to do during clinical and its got me a little overwhelmed. Still, it'll be a interesting challenge.

There is a new little show that I'm having fun with. Since that writers' strike doesn't look to end anytime soon, I've been on the search for new stuff. This little gem is called Never Mind the Buzzcocks. It's basically a British version of Spicks and Specks, a musical quiz with a lot of humour thrown in. It's on Youtube, here's a little snippit.



Pretty fun stuff, like when Myleene Klass briefly talks about her pregnancy diary and the host is making a joke on who people don't really knows whats going, and Bill Bailey just yells out "THE BABY" and plays some scary techno music, "WHERE DOES IT COME FROM?", more music, "MYSTERIES REVEALED!". Definitely some funny stuff.

Playing some Oblivion as well to pass the time. It's a massive world.

I'll post some more stuff when I have some more news.

All the little sparkly things

Happy new year for 2008 everybody! And belatedly, a Merry Christmas. I was capped in the leadup to Christmas, but the new year brings uncapped internet once again.

Because of the capped internet, I spent NYE with a whole bunch of friends in the city to watch the fireworks. Lesley was the organiser and he did a bang up job of getting hold of the hotel room. The room itself was small. It was meant for two people and with around 15 people enjoying the the new year it did get a little squashed. But the views were excellent.

It was basically dinner at Fullhouse then fun and games back at the hotel. There was handheld gaming on, with several PSPs and Nintendo DS games. Mario Kart DS and Tekken 5 were the favourites. There was a poker game that basically went through the night and into the morning. I'm still new to poker and most of what was happening went right past my head, but I did get lucky in beating Olivio and he was forced to drink 8 shots of vodka (or was it tequila?). Not all at once mind.

The fireworks were good and there was plenty of cheers around when midnight struck. I still think the 2000 fireworks were the best. Whenever you were tired you did your best to take a nap with the the sound of poker chips and gaming dancing around your ears. Things got quiet early in the morning and everyone was suffering from the late nights and drinking. Breakfast at Macca's took away the edge though.

It was some good fun on NYE. It makes you realise that in the overall scheme of things one year isn't really that long. Time really flies and it's important that you cherish your friends and family. All the good times over the year add up and now 2008 starts on a very positive note.

Oh, and here's a little pic that Mi Zhou took sometime during the night or day.

I never got any decent sleep, so it was basically one-hour blocks of bad shut-eye, although I think I ended up 4-5 hours of sleep, which is pretty good. The bed was full so I grabbed a bathrobe to use as a makeshift pillow, put my feet up against the wardrobe and grabbed some snooze time. Here I was asleep with the legs propped up at 45 degrees by friction with the wardrobe and the arm resting on the strategically placed drawer. I did get a bad case of the pins and needles and there was some residual pain afterwards although everyone else thought it was pretty funny.

Proof that when you are dead tired, you can fall asleep anywhere.