Blur

It's seven in the morning and I just woke up.

Went to bed at seven last night; was supposed to wake up four hours later to meet some friends in Slippery's. My phone started ringing at twelve. They were looking for me. Shit-faced tired, I put my phone on silent, rolled over, went back to bed.

Mistake.

Just got up now.

There were multiple texts on my phone when I woke up. All expressed disappointment and disbelief. It was a pretty important get-together, as one of the girls' boyfriend is down from Dublin to visit. And I promised promised to be there.

Wah super senti emo ramble. I feel really bad. Shouldn't have stood them up. It was my first time standing them up, but it wasn't my first time turning them down. That I have done quite often.

They're kinda new friends, see. We were all in Dublin together, but in different colleges. And now that we're back in PMC, we're classmates. And they're the bunch I feel most comfortable with, I'd say.

They're a cool bunch; fantastic people to hang out with, but I just always seem to not be able to join them for stuff. Ah. Shite. Now I don't know how to apologise.

I'm bloody tired. Sleep time is all fucked up. The papers went alright, but what's next is most probably gonna be the killer. Come Tuesday, I'm gonna have to go to the wards. They will randomly assign me a patient and I'll have to take a thorough history, perform a thorough examination and come out with a diagnosis.

And it will be supervised. The surgeon/physician in charge will ask questions, tell me to perform specific maneuvers etc etc.

I'm fine with the pressure. I'm okay under pressure. What I'm worried about is my lack of knowledge. I don't know all that much. (I think it's due to the fact that I'm a lazy waster.) But I'm a confident/cocky fucker and therein lies the problem.

Based on whatever scraps of medical knowledge I know (which may not be that accurate), the cogs in my mind will spin into overdrive, and I'd try to figure out an answer. 'Figuring out' is not the best thing in medicine. It's best to 'know'. Haha.

And the thing is, I'd be there, trying to bullshit my way through, turning left, turning right, confusing the surgeon/physician in question. In the end, they'll usually be looking at me with a bewildered expression on their faces. And scratching down a very low mark on their clipboard.

More often than not, I'll be digging my own grave. Deeper and deeper. The fucked up thing is, everything you say, you have to back up with facts.

For example.. if on examination of the eyes, if there is significant protrusion, you're supposed to say like.. There is proptosis (of which eye/or both) or There is exopthalmos. Then you'll see the surgeon/physician's face light up, his lips will curl into an evil smile..

Please explain the mechanism of proptosis/exopthalmos.

Which is pretty simple, even for a loser like me. (The answer is abnormal connective tissue deposition in the orbits or ocular muscle hypertrophy.)

But.

Sometimes if I get a really obscure finding (let's say a murmur when you're listening to the heart - my greatest nightmare) then I'm pretty much fucked. Basically my mind is working like crazy, trying to stop my mouth from working before it's too late. I'll be thinking to myself: Can I back this statement up with the relevant facts?

It's usually a super big fat no in my case, so all the patients I examine in the exam setting are perfectly healthy, devoid of any weird signs. Ho ho.

But sometimes my mouth gets ahead of my head, and I die.

And if I really don't know, I tell them I don't know, which pisses a lot of them off. Haha.

Wokey, enough of boring med stuff. My apologies.

I'm really quite the blur right now. I have a cigarette hanging out the side of my mouth, but I just realised - there's another cigarette stuck onto the ashtray.

Man. So wasted. Think of all the people in 3rd world countries without adequate fags. And here I am.. wasting a perfectly good Marlboro Light.

...

I've started to dream again. Just that this time, they aren't sad nor depressing. No. This time, they're the dangerous type. The ones that give you hope. The ones that spur you on.

The ones that scream HEY BABY JUST DO IT GO FOR IT.

When I open my eyes, I'm pissed to find myself in my bed, slobbering all over my pillow. For it means the dream wasn't true (d'oh!).

There's no Pikachu waiting in the kitchen downstairs with tapau-ed breakfast, there's no cuddly yellow soft toy waiting to go for Tokyo Drift with me. No one called me up in the middle of the night saying I love you I love you please take me now I am yours.

Ho ho. I should probably be thinking about the more pressing matters at hand, like how my doom will be decided come Tuesday. But no.. No.. I'm thinking about a girl.

Story of my life.

This entry was posted by tsh, on Saturday, June 24, 2006. You can bitch back.