Still pretty stranded in Accident & Emergency department, providing orientation help guidance to the freshies…
Pretty pissed off these few days when I asked some of the questions to my juniors aka freshies. Firstly, I asked them the typical old traditional conservative question "Why do you choose medic?"
Typical bullshit nonsense answer: "to save lives"
How many lives can they actually save? If death is inevitable, how could they help the patient? How can ‘mercy‘ be matched with the word ‘killing’ when both is words carries a totally different background of meaning? I faced a silent mode.
This is Andy the ambulance. I had the honor to follow an ambulance call at A&E recently. That night, it was raining rather heavily, and none of my group members would be sane enough to go to A&E, but I just felt like going despite that rainy weather at night. I was tagged along with a superb male nurse Ah Chai. The caller identified the emergency as ‘heart attack’ at the Pasar Malam at SS2, somewhere rather near UMMC. Reaching there, I saw the man still could walk, very very weakly, limping, i guess. Very very breathless and once he summoned all his energy to get into the stretcher into the ambulance, he just collapsed with GCS around 8/15 (meaning his consciousness dropped). And there I was delivering oxygen with the face mask & Ah Chai inserting a line into the patient’s vein with the ambulance swinging wildly from left to right, acceleration with deceleration. Superb skill from Ah Chai. And he also had time to ask & tutor me about the situation. Learnt a lot. The patient was resuscitated and he SURVIVED!!! We were all extremely relieved, especially me. Whenever I heard about "to save lives", I had an urge to request a few freshies to go for the ambulance call.
Besides all the other stupid questions that me and my fellow had asked, I asked a serious question: "what is the name of the course that they are taking in UM?" 30% don’t even know the name of the course, 90% don’t know about the curriculum, 70% knows only about the basic sciences they are taking in the first year, namely anatomy, biochemistry, physiology… And they already had at least 2 introductory lectures about the NIC (new integrated curriculum) and they don’t even know that basic sciences is just 1 of the strands in NIC, together with PPD (personal & professional development) and DPHS (doctor, patient, health & society). I had doubt whether all my beloved coursemates (including juniors) knew about this. To some of them, Basic Science 90%, PPD 5%, DPHS 5% as in our exam papers.
I had a lecturer who seems to strive for excellence for his patients and always critises the inefficacy of malaysian systems. But on one occasion, he really disappointed me very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very much. There I was waiting for the elevator to go to 12th floor, 2 elderly ill looking patients in wheelchair waiting together with a few nurses. Suddenly the door to the lift opened, and as the 2 wheelchairs were heading towards the lift, out of nowhere, suddenly that ‘respected’ lecturer rushed into the lift talking some Greek with another dweeb lecturer, ignoring the 2 patients. Even the nurses paused to give way to the patients. I guess the freshies could not ’save lives’ at this moment, nevertheless the least they could do is BE CARING, BE SENSIBLE. Caring is not a word, it is an action.
Surely I wanted to yell to that 2 lecturers "I know what’s their (patients’) problems, but what YOURS!??!?". But I didn’t. Let me pass my final MBBS exam first, anything could happen in our ‘malaysian’ setting, right?
- It is the little things that we do that matter the most -
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