Julia

Hello, I am Julia, the medic with the undead rat (a strange and magical construct of clay and fake fur called Tibbles). I have an odd sense of humour and should probably never be left in the kitchen by myself as so far we have had a 2kg cornflake cake in a washing up bowl and black cookies.

End of Michaelmas 2008

Today, the 5th December, is the official end of Michaelmas Full Term (which is shorter than just "Term", of course) 2008. The Newnham Fresher Medics Class of '11 (or '14, if you're counting our three years of clinical medicine, which may or may not be spent in Cambridge...) have therefore survived their first term.

What have we learnt?

That it is possible to mix lay and anatomical terminology: "lateral to the bumcrack" is fine.
That it is always best to keep all thoughts of food out of your mind while wielding a scalpel on a cadaver, otherwise said foodstuffs will be ruined forever.
That no matter how much washing powder you put in, your anatomy labcoat will never stop smelling of formaldehyde.
That once Felicity's room has become untidy, it is frankly unlikely she will find time to tidy it before the end of term, unless she has significant inducement to do so (for which read: someone might see it, and she might care what they think).
That, as a general rule, it is impossible to learn BioChemistry in less than two hours.
That life is never as simple as it looks from the outside.
That medics apparently can have social lives, and generally look kick-ass good in their dresses.
That the Cambridge Union is the coolest place in Cambridge.
That red heels equal free drinks, in the right set of circumstances.
That nothing is so bad it wouldn't get worse if one of your supervisors set you an extra essay to write.
That one should never ask about Tibbles.
That lectures are much, much more fun if there is the possibility we'll get to watch one of the Anatomy Demonstrators dislocate a fellow student's shoulder.
That there is no phrase more awesome than either "two-for-one cocktails tonight" or "his moobs are twitching", but you have to pick the right one for the situation.
That the less interested you are, the more interesting you become.
That the answer is nearly always the ulnar nerve.
That you do not mess with the brachial plexus.
That it is a bad idea to lose one's College card, and sadly, one's Union membership card will not always stand in as a substitute.
That a week in Cambridge is more eventful than the average month out of it.
That the forecast is always wrong when it says it will snow, and the snow will settle.
That it doesn't rain in Cambridge, but it pours.
That the medics always start their lectures first, and finish last.
That just because you're working the hardest of any student group in the area doesn't mean you're not having more fun.
That being a medical student makes it automatically ok in the eyes of every desperate male to use "I need an examination" chat-up lines.
That much older men bearing mistletoe at Christmas parties can be quite hard to shake off, and are best avoided in the first place.
That is is actually moderately good fun to spend an evening hiding behind other people so that much older men don't see you.
That spending the evening hiding from much older men is actually conducive to attracting more men of a more suitable age.

I suspect that life is going to seem quite dull when I get home (no offence to my friends back home, of course) - in comparison, nothing will be happening! Also, although I've known the medics and other Newnhamites eight weeks total, I'm going to miss them as much as I miss my friends from home at the moment.

Have a great Christmas, everyone, and wish us good luck with catching up on all the work we should have been doing this term. It would be quite nice to start next term ahead...

Love, Felicity xx

Quotations

We've come across many of these, most of which require recording for future embarrassment (after all, we have to have something to write on the medic hoodies when we get them). So, without further ado, our favourite quotes so far:
'I want to be reincarnated as an amoeba'
'Everyone else appears to be cutting lateral to the bumcrack'
'It was anatomy...until Felicity arrived and made it into porn'

I'm sure I'll get round to updating this as soon as I remember the others...

Added on 03/02/2009:

"Would you like your birthday announced to a roomful of dead bodies?"
"Warning: these poisons are poisonous!"
"Be aware that the reset patient function is not available in clinical situations."
"I have to kill myself to start again."
"I'm wearing an anatomically correct heart around my neck...what did you expect?!"
(From Juno) "Why can't I just have the frickin' epidural already?!" "Because doctors are sadists who like to play God and watch other people suffer."
"You might have reached the stage of hypothermia where you start removing clothing." "Stripothermia?"
"From this, we conclude that although I can write HOM essays and answer MIMS MCQs, I am incapable of dressing myself appropriately." "By the law of natural selection, you should be dead by now."
"What do we reckon: essays>men?" "Well, essays- because you do them and then they're gone...though that may occasionally apply to men as well..."
"I just had a revelation: medics are the only group of people for which the phrase 'I'm going to wash that man right out of my hair' can be LITERALLY true."
"It doesn't smell very nice..." "You wouldn't expect it to- it's a dead person."
"The spleen isn't part of the gastrointestinal tract, but it is included here as a regional convenience."

Added beginning of Easter term 2009:
"Oh, I've missed Cambridge tap water. It's so disgusting."
"...my other arm. Other than the other two that I have. My third arm." "When was the last time you opened Gray's?"
"You are aware that a toothbrush is not an effective form of contraception, aren't you?" "So THAT'S why I have two kids!" Yes, yes it is.

03/05/2009: while watching "every sperm is sacred":
"Felicity, please have lots of children so I can teach them this song!"
"Why me?"
"I don't want them!"
Later: "Maybe we could teach our medic children to sing it..."

*guhhh*

I am ill :( this is very sad. What is worse is the fact that, being a medical student, I know that when one has a cold, there is no treatment beyond bed rest and drinking lots of fluids, and so basically all I can do is take painkillers and suffer. Boo for that.

Love,
Felicity

Mourning

The Medics Of Newnham are in mourning.

Why? I hear you cry. Well, in order to answer that, I have to explain a little history.

After our arrival at Newnham, we rapidly came to realise that transport in Cambridge means either walking or a bike. Or both. So it came to pass, in a rather Biblical turn of phrase, that we bought ourselves bikes. In particular, several of us bought second-hand, reconditioned bikes from OWL bikes, a charity in Cambridge. These bikes were given names. Names such as Felicity, Geraldine, Jo (I think it's short for Joanne? or maybe Joanna...) and Julio (Julio is fluorescent pink and green, very flamboyantly gay, and we keep on catching him having rampant bike sex with bikes we don't know).

These names we adopted (well, Geraldine and I adopted them, anyway) as our names for posting on here (just in case we say something dim and might get in trouble for it, also because who doesn't like a little alter ego in their life?). We feel even closer to our much-beloved and relied-upon bikes as a result.

I went home this weekend, leaving my bike chained up outside the station. I think you can see where this story is going, can't you?

When I returned to Cambridge (laden with bags, and after a truly horrific journey, filled with bus replacement services and delayed trains and missed connections), I found Felicity (the bike) had gone.

Felicity has been stolen. I am very, very, very upset.

A moment's silence, if you please, for a lilac bike that only ever wanted to console, with her charming whirring-squeak and falling-off mudguards.

Love, through my sadness,
Felicity (the medic)

College Scarves

Useful things, these. But not only because they let us walk around Cambridge being Newnham-proud (yes, I went there) and keep our necks warm and suchlike, oh no. They have MANY MANY MYRIAD uses.

1. Oven mitts. When taking a bowl of hot soup/baked beans/jacket potato out of the microwave, you cast your eyes around the kitchen and realise that once again, there isn't a teatowel. You put your hands around the bowl - gingerly - and yank them back because, damn, it's hot. You look around the kitchen again, in hopes that a teatowel will have materialised. No such luck. You fold your college scarf in half, and use that instead, and it keeps your hands from burning. Excellent

2. General-purpose cloth. Admittedly, being woven wool, they're not ideal for this, but they're better than nothing. You get to your bike; it is pouring it down rain and you either forgot to put a plastic bag over the seat, or you didn't think it'd rain so it wasn't necessary, or it's been torn, or you thought your bike was undercover but the driving winds meant it got wet anyway...you don't want to sit on a sopping wet bike saddle in your jeans. You also don't want to stand on the pedals the whole way home, for stability's sake (what with your tonne-weight of lecture notes in a bag over one of the handlebars, you understand). You get your college scarf, and you wipe the saddle down, and it is all a little bit better.

3. Muff. One of our lecture theatres is freezing, I think because the air-conditioning is apparently still on, despite it being November and cold. I always forget this when I get dressed in the morning, though, so I quite often end up wearing tops that leave my arms bare. Brrrr. The solution? Wrap the Newnham college scarf around your forearms! It's long enough that you can actually carry on writing after you've done this.

...don't you just HATE it when you start a list and it was going to be beautiful and long and then you forget half of it? That just happened. I'll put the others in later when I remember them/if I remember them/when people remind me of them.

Love,
Felicity

A brief aside

Clinical Training

Yes, you're quite right, I have work I ought to be doing. On the other hand...

Love,
Felicity

Outside the Cambridge Bubble

I heard this rumour that something was happening in America...?

OK, I'll be sensible.  America are voting for their next President tonight (our time).  I am TERRIFIED.  There are basically two reasons for this:

1. Sarah Palin.  God, that woman scares me.  I wake up from nightmares in a cold sweat and screaming in which she was chosen for vice-presidential candidate...and then I realise IT'S ALL TRUE.

2. The possibility that McCain might be elected.  This used to be OK, on the grounds that he's old and natural causes or forced retirement or something might take him out of the picture soon; now it's NOT OK because he's old and if he gets taken out of the picture, we get probably the most powerful country on the planet being run by a woman who doesn't know whether it's Pakistan or Palestine Israel's got that problem with...

I am NOT going down to the Union to watch live coverage; I choose to spend tonight sleeping on my brand-new mattress (hopefully I will recover from the back pain the old one gave me...) for possibly my last night EVER of safe, peaceful sleep in a relatively sane world.

I so don't want to see the words "MCCAIN WINS IN LANDSLIDE" anywhere tomorrow morning.

AND another thing...

Boo to having "formal assessments" with only a family-filled weekend in which to prepare...we have a test on the muscles, nerves, bones and generally everything to do with the upper limb (medical-speak for what you plebs call an arm) sometime this week and I KNOW NOTHING.

*panic*

Love, Felicity

Glossary

Well, it's not really a glossary, because that would imply some sort of order, and also a point.  It's more a randomised guide to things that become normal as a medical student at Cambridge.

Formaldehyde:  Smells horrid.  It gets used to embalm the cadavers we cut up, and it is just REVOLTING.  It burns my nose and throat and makes my eyes water (not everyone gets this), and it also makes my stomach churn.  On top of which - I was eating macaroni cheese last night, and I put a forkful in my mouth and suddenly I could TASTE formaldehyde.  I stopped eating...so we could add "macaroni cheese" to the list of "things dissection has ruined for me".

On top of which: when you cut into an embalmed body, embalming fluid comes out.  EW.  You have to drain it out of the body-bag.  Also EW.  And then, sometimes, like today, when you're happily reflecting the skin, the skinflap slips out of your forceps, because it's slippery and your hand aches from holding them closed.  And then you get splashed with embalming fluid.  That has been in a dead body.  EW.  Then you spend five minutes washing your face and generally freaking out.

Obesity:  using the BMI guide (something to do with height and weight squared, or the other way round, or something...I'll get back to you on this one), most of our textbooks are obese.  

Poverty:  textbooks are expensive; we need two or three per course; we do three courses.  And then you have anatomical atlases and medical dictionaries (it's a whole new language) and anatomy colouring books and revision guides and CDs of people talking about anatomy and...yeah.  It gets expensive.  Hurrah for grants from College!

Procrastination:  Yeah...guess what this is?  This is what you can file everything that's not WORK under...

Workaholism:  Alternatively, always being miles behind where you should be.  No two ways about it; choose your path, medics!

Wow, look at that - I achieved alphabetical order without meaning to.

Love, Felicity

Things that dissection has ruined for me.

Ribena
Orange Juice
Custard
Banana
Loft insulation (which is weird...what's there to ruin about it?)

I'm sure that this list will grow over time.

New additions as of 21/11/08:
Pancakes (particularly sad about this one)
Chocolate
Wagamama's (thanks to one of the boys on one of the dissection tables...more on him later)
Crayola markers
Onion (weird but true)

And again, 3/12/08:
Wrapping christmas presents, or presents in general

15/4/09:
Well, I knew I would lose track, and I have. Basically, if you hear someone at your dissection table say, 'You know what this reminds me of?' in the middle of a session, do everything you possibly can to silence them.

Geraldine xxx

Something Further from Felicity

I am sat in my room at Newnham, looking out over picturesque lawns strewn with autumn leaves, my hair wet (after spending nearly an hour in the shower, using all the hot water, trying to rid myself of the smell of formaldehyde - more of that later), with the early evening (we're further North than you, if that seems weird) sunlight gently streaming through the remaining leaves on the branches of the tree outside my window, and a five kilogram copy of Gray's Anatomy, 40th Ed. on my lap.

It doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink", does it?

Anyway, scene-setting aside, I have just read Geraldine's post and would like to add, on the topic of "that's a lot of work, you know", that some of us honestly believed we knew what hard work was.  Oh, how wrong we have come to realise we were.  Not that we're (I'm) not loving it; not that we (I) have even the slightest of regrets; we (I) just think we (I) should be allowed to complain about it.  Or at least tell you all that you have no idea.

Every week, we have at least three hours of supervisions (four, if you count SCHI Seminars as a supervision, and five if you include the fact that our Anatomy supervisor is incapable of limiting himself to a mere hour).  We have two two-hour Anatomy practicals (yes, that's dissection - cutting up dead patients) at least, plus some lectures (this week, we had three.  Some weeks, it's only one).  We have 3 BioChemistry lectures, 3 Physiology lectures, up to four hours of BioChemistry practicals and a similar number of Physiology practicals in an average week, and then on top of that we have "Social Context of Health and Illness" (Sociology) and "An Introduction to the Scientific Basis of Medicine" (which we thought was the entire course, but apparently not - this is basically Epidemiology, so far).  That's about 27 hours of contact time a week (compare this with the Arts students' 4), and we're expected to spend as much time going OVER our lectures as we spend IN them.  Plus, we get essays and questions and extra reading and so on to do as well.

As I said, you have no idea.  But it is truly wonderful.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to move this book before I lose my legs to necrosis.

Felicity

Greetings from Geraldine

As a further 11th of the Newnham medics, I'd like to ask you to picture the moment that myself and my 10 fellow masochists first announced that we were going to be doctors; some of us as young girls wearing an oversized white coat and a plastic stethoscope round our necks, but some as supposedly informed teenagers (though quite possibly equally as likely to be wearing the plastic stethoscope). At this moment, we proudly proclaimed to friends, teachers or parents, 'I am going to be a doctor, because I am going to help people and cure diseases', to which the reply often was, 'That's a lot of work you know.'

Of course, we nodded along and declared that we didn't mind, and that we would just work really, really hard and become the best doctors ever, saving people with our life-giving hands and encyclopaedic knowledge of medicine.

A similar thing happened when we decided to study in Cambridge: more mentions of how much work there would be, met with assurances that we wouldn't mind at all.

And now we are finally here, and suddenly all that hard work we promised to do seems scarily real and difficult, we are haunted by the little facts that we haven't learnt that may some day cost a patient their life, and the people we were presented with as our very first patients are already dead.

I think that more than a few people sat in the lecture theatre at 9 o' clock on a Monday morning are wondering why, years and years ago, when reaching into the toy box, they couldn't have picked up a paintbrush or a book, instead of that fateful plastic stethoscope.
But then, this is just the beginning...

Hello, and Welcome

Dear Readers,

I am 1/11th of the Newnham Medics Freshers '08, and I would like to welcome you to our world.  Today half of us had our first 9-to-5 day of lectures (ouch), and so we consider ourselves fully initiated into the world of Medicine.  For the next three years (at least), our time will be spent dashing to and from lectures, practicals, supervisions, sports practices and matches, bars, clubs, pubs and other Colleges, in an attempt to have the best possible time, while also learning enough to pass our Tripos and MB exams and become your doctors of the future.

We would like to take you with us on this moderately terrifying journey.  Why?  Because, unless you too are a medic, you cannot possibly comprehend what we've let ourselves in for.  We know, because we've realised that already.  So, over the next three years, or maybe even six, or perhaps twenty, we will let you know how it's all going.

I hope you enjoy reading about what we get up to; I also really hope we enjoy doing it!

Felicity