It’s been a while!

What can I say? A month with no posts is a bit poor on my part.

Bristol and uni are both good, although we are still waiting to get hooked up to the internet in our flat.. I'm plodding on with mobile internet for the time being. The company are dragging it out, apparently we need 'planning permission' to have the cable put through, that's our fault I suppose for choosing a flat that is somehow also a listed building.

I had an amazing week of clinical medicine last week. I was on placement at a hospital nearby and we were let loose on real patients for the first time. This was a daunting experience for both us and the patients I'm sure, but it all went so much better than I had been expecting! We took histories from some of the patients on the wards and had to present them back to the consultants at the end of the week. I think I had built it up to be such a milestone in my head, but in reality it was really easy to sit down and chat to the patients - and they were all lovely ( considering the number of medical students wandering around!).

This week has been much busier, we're back in Bristol doing systems teaching. We've just started learning about the respiratory system which is going O.K, but the added load of year 2 SSC's on top of it all is taking its toll.. I managed to miss a doctor's appointment and nearly miss a teaching session in all the jumble, so I've made it my mission to get my life in order over the weekend!

Going back to SSC's, we have to study these in year 2 of medicine. They stand for 'Student Selected Components' and are basically study modules that we choose for ourselves. Only that isn't quite what happened when we signed up for our written projects this week... About a third of the year abandoned our lecture theatre to race to the curriculum office to get 'first pick' of the titles on offer ( there are limited places for each project so everyone was a little stressed).. at the end of the lecture mayhem broke out. Following in the style of those that had already run off, the whole lecture theatre jumped to it's feet the second the speaker finished and there were medics running up the hill in an effort to get to the front of the queue! Yet another example of how ruthless we all are. Despite all of the warnings that anyone cheating the system would be sent right to the back, this didn't happen, so by the time we got to the front about half way through our year of 250 there wasn't much chance of us getting anywhere near our first choice!