Exercising my numeracy.
Hahahaha.
I'm unashamedly going to misuse my blog to brag...
I finished the Sudoku!
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go get the SMH today, turn to page 31. It's a Japanese numbers game that they're starting up in the Herald, and today's one is supposed to be the "diabolical" in difficulty. (gloating, gloating... haha)
Do it! Exercises the brain... Man I'm so going to get addicted to this, I'll never get out of the house in the mornings now...
Psychosomatica, or just psycho.
It's exam time and what do I do? Procrastinate and write an article for Idioglossia (the med publication). They were wanting me to write a year report, but heck, that's boring. They can hear about O&G from someone else.
So, here it is. I am so going to fail O&G it's not funny.------------------------------------"Psychosomatica"
Hypochondriacism is the defining hallmark of any self-respecting medical student. You have obviously not reached an acceptable degree of knowledge, nor the acceptable degree of paranoia that plagues any medico, to be truly “one of us”. If you’ve never gotten a headache and a stiff neck and wondered, even for a second, “hey could this be meningitis?”, more out of curiosity than fear, then quit now. There might still be a promising law career out of you yet.
It usually goes something like this. Late one (Saturday) night (for any self-respecting medical student is far too guilt-plagued to do anything except study on a Saturday night), we stumble upon such marvels as “often insidious in nature, with non-specific symptoms such as back pain and fatigue”. Back pain and fatigue? Oh my goodness! That’s you! Never mind you’ve been sitting on the same poor two gluteus maximus muscles for 14 hours reading this 1452-page magnum opus. It must be tuberculous of the spine! Ankylosing spondylosis! Multiple myeloma!
And before you know it, every bump and ache is a differential diagosis list waiting to happen. Runny nose? CSF rhinorrhoea! Bloating? Coeliac disease! Right iliac fossa pain? Appendicitis, salpingitis, ovarian cyst, ectopic pregnancy, Crohns’, Meckel’s, the mind just boggles…
Now, it can be most troublesome to worry that you suffer from anything from Curtis-Fitz-Hugh to Charot-Marie-Tooth to Creutzfeldt-Jakob. But can you really blame us? We are are always told about the cases that are missed, trained meticulously to have a “high index of suspicion”. Heck if we can’t even suspect Zollinger-Ellison in ourselves, how are we going to spot it in anyone else who comes in with recurrent stomach upset?
Yes paranoia is the order of the day, but all we see are the “exceptions” who have unwittingly ended up in hospital, being harrassed now by a swarm of medical students and registrars who want to make case histories and grand rounds out of them. So can you blame us when we feel a niggle of wrist pain and think of Mrs X who presented with adult-onset Still’s disease?
And as we all know, the consequences are dire should we miss something. This I blame the non-hypochondriac ex-medical students who have switched to law and come back suing our paranoid and fatigued gluteus maximuses off.
Finally, we are always taught to read around your cases. Heck, nothing spurs knowledge more than fear of impending illness. You think your headache might be due to a brain tumour? I guarantee that within 48 hours you will know everything about glioblastoma multiforme right down to the WHO classifications.
So I say, worry away! Don’t despair when others laugh at you. They are just too ashamed to admit that they have thought the same. And you can say to yourself, ha! I make a better doctor than you!
Though you know, talking to yourself could be a symptom of psychopathology. And so is paranoia. Oh my gosh, could I have…
