Things that will only excite a medical student

Hooray, hooray, I finally got my first elective confirmed and this has what made me so happy today. Only a medical student who spent days at the student health centre agonizing over their potential Hep b titer results and getting three dozen money orders just to be allowed to visit another school and waiting patiently for somebody to respond to their application within the next cycle of the moon would understand. I will be spending three weeks in minimally invasive surgery at the Montreal General Hospital and I'm really looking forward to it! I will also get to live with Mike for three weeks and eat lots of sushi at Odaki where they have all you can eat sushi and Japanese entrees. Heaven on earth. Also, MGH is nice and close to the AMC Forum in case I get depressed and feel like participating in retail therapy... it is also conveniently located on a nicely elevated hill too, if you know what I'm saying. Now I'm just waiting to hear from three other schools.

First off, some great news - as of Sunday Mike became an uncle! Hooray, hooray, now I have a real reason to visit toy shops and not just for my own pleasure. This weekend will be exciting too because Rose's documentary she filmed over the summer will be screened at the Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival in Toronto. Meanwhile, the Kenya calendar I was working on for a fundraiser is almost done and the organization I worked with now has a cool website.

Last night I was on an evening labour and delivery shift from 5-11 PM and it was a lot of fun. I got to see my first vaginal delivery, which happened to be an atypical crazy one. It was a case of shoulder dystocia or "stuck shoulders". The management is described all fancy as the McRoberts Manoeuvre and Rubin 2 and all that, but it's basically "tackle the mother". It's because once baby's head comes out, baby's got to breathe, but if the rest of its body is stuck it can't expand its lungs and that is bad, so you gotta get baby out ASAP!! It kinda scared the crap out of me and made me not want to have children, but in the end mom and baby (and dad, who through no fault of his own, is biologically useless during delivery) were okay so it was all good.

Then we had a preterm labour party when about 4 pregnant women had to get transferred to Kingston. They came from locales that are often misidentified as "Toronto" such as Newmarket (40 minutes north) and Barrie (1 hour north). Due to the fact that there were no tertiary care beds in any Toronto hospital, these poor women had to be airlifted to Kingston and the families had to drive out. It's just nuts, but they say that if you can't get obstetrical care in Toronto, the next best place to be is Kingston.

So overall it was a fun night - I always enjoy my observerships in ob/gyn and I flirt with the idea of specializing in it, but for some reason I can't quite get myself to not be squeamish over the lithotomy position and the bimanual examination. Oh, and the all the fluids! Copious amounts of gushing blood and amniotic fluid doesn't exactly smell nice.

In my medical opinion, how one should decided what to do with their life: Sometimes life seems so ironic when you meet Dr. Hurlbut, the gastropathologist and Dr. Siemens, the urologist (true names and occupations, I swear). So if you have a last name like Hart or Hacker, then you know exactly what you should be (cardiologist and general surgeon). But if you're stuck with a last name like mine (T-u-o-n-g, pronounced "twong"? "tong"? "tongue"?) then maybe you should reconsider medical school.