Saya Ingin Mengucapkan......

i know it's like waaaay overdue, but here goes:

Selamat Hari Raya & Happy Deepavali!!!!!

oh God, i sooo miss malaysian food. i'm actually jealous of you people back home! anyhoo, hope you all had a great one...cheers!

Disappeared

If you look at the sidebar... you'll see that the tagboard and jokes have disappeared. The jokes were appearing in random characters that doesn't resemble any language I've seen before. As for the tagboard, it is a huge troublemaker. Popups, spam... absolutely crazy.

In future, if you've got anything to say, leave a comment, ok?

Fight or Flight

The ever famous response to a stressor. Your pupils dilate, so that you can see your opponent better or for the way out. Your heart rate goes up, so that oxygen and other nutrients gets pumped to every muscle of your body to throw in your punches or give your legs a little haste. Blood gets channeled to away from your guts to the muscles, you won't think of food or hunger, but only to smite your foe or finding a haven immediately. Every neuron in your brain starts firing millions of impulses, the world slows down, thousands of scenarios play through your mind, your whole life flashing in the background, happy times start fading from memory... The list goes on...

Stress, I define as mental exhaustion from stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system due to stressors. THE stressor being exams. Appetite for food and knowledge are gone. The brain goes numb, while the body becomes hypersensitive. Everything is amiss, nothing is right. The feeling of impending doom draws near as the haven falls further away. Hail the glorious dead. I shall be joining thee in the plains of despair.

But take comfort, for there is also the last entity from Pandora's Box. And even when that is lost, there is always something more powerful... Faith. Have faith not in just God, but have faith in yourself as well. You know more than you think you do. You are ready.

"Faith leads to hope,
hope leads to despair,
despair to fear,
fear to anger,
anger to hate,
hate to suffering"

IMU is on Youtube!

New discovery that I have to share! Apparently the juniors have made their mark on Youtube with all sorts of videos - from videos for Moral Education, to club promotional videos, to various extra-curricular activities caught on video. Here are some favourites:

Super Mario in IMU:


Ultraman Dance - not the one I remember, done during Friday Nite, but funny nonetheless:


IMU Choir - some vestiges of our batch left. Featuring YK's wonderful voice and a moo-ving song:

Scrubbin' In

I'm positive you've had this question glide through your mind, "Mammoth-sized textbooks to digest, indecipherable case notes to pour over.....why the crap am I doing medicine?"

I was going through one of those phases, and thought I had to resign to feeling uninspired for a long time, until........I scrubbed in.

It was 9am Friday the 13th, and there I was in theatre 15, awaiting a left hepatectomy with radical biliary tree resection. Not long into the operation, I was given the opportunity by my tutor (a consultant surgeon) to scrub in...gosh, it was exciting!

Surgery is such a medical stereotype, and for good reason. It may sound cliche, but the view on the operating table is nothing like what you see in textbooks. No blue veins or red arteries standing out, no labeled arrows to refer to...just plain organic tissue. And far from being a put off, it was like beholding a genius, complex work of art. Marvelous.

9 hours of standing later (honestly, I could feel varicose veins growing on me), I left the theatre overcome by a sense of renewal. My tutor, his collegue and the nurses who stood with me throughout showed such successful teamwork, suave surgical skills and this deep understanding of medicine (unknown yet to fresh medical students like us), that it all re-ignited an inner flame..... I was ready to begin another love affair with medicine.

Why so philosophical, i hear you ask? Maybe its the novelty of this being my first full-blown surgical experience. But it may also be the miracle that is, medicine.

I wish everyone all the best during the fine clinical years ahead...it's going to be a blast! Cheers!