Final week next week. It’s been a haul, but we are also presently surprised how quick it has gone. My diary is absolutely chocca this week. Not just with presentation list but the new first years start this week too. I do feel sorry for them, Covid has taken away their first year from them and they are doing everything from home bar one day a week for anatomy and clinical skills. However, at least first year is just 95% lectures so they haven’t lost out on too much.
This week we also have the non-international students arriving to campus meaning that my block will be full of freshers once again ……. gulp.
Monday
Went to the hospital today to try and get some experience on the wards. It’s difficult though when the consultants and doctors are running around trying to get things done and you can’t even log on to the IT systems to be helpful.
At 11am I scooted off to an empty lecture theatre and was honoured enough to be asked to speak to the first years on their first day! My talk was apparently titled “Succeeding in Medicine” which I was slightly confused about as I had scraped a past and had at least three breakdowns in the run up to exams but we persist 😀
It was important to me that I made sure the Freshers didn’t make the same mistakes as I did. Academic tips are cool but useless if you are too burnt out enough to use them. I was really touched to be given this opportunity. I feel like I am a mess of a human most of the time so by having that offer, it picked me back up off the ground !
Thursday/ Friday
These blogs are so hard to write day by day, so I think I’ll just start having to skip days when nothing happens. On Thursday I actually got to meet some of the first years, they were allowed one day in to meet their CBL groups and I guess, see the building that’s meant to be their home.
It was bizzare. I remember my first day like yesterday, and now I was in my third year of education here giving advice from the other side. I think I may have pushed student seminars just that little too hard though.
On the Friday I managed to score something I have been wanting for a year now – a sacred WMS water bottle !
One of my lecturers commented on my tweet saying he had plans to steal one for me anyway and instantly earning the empty spot of favourite lecturer since Jamie left last year.
We decided to take the final week of the block off. We had completed everything we needed to do, and we desperately needed a week away. We did go in for our final GP session and treated ourselves to cake from the bakery near it – only to have three bites and have the biggest sugar crash about an hour later:
We also had our FIT testing for our masks for surgery block as we will be using these in theatres. Unfortunately it was 7:30am all the way in Nuneaton – dragging myself out of bed was hard, but we got rewarded in watching each other look ridiculous for 10 minutes each.
MedBeeMedic 