March Market Chat '12

 Being in KL has its advantages. On a fine Saturday morning, I followed my parents to the Market Chat organised by Kenanga. It was all the way at Subang Jaya and the three of us too the train there as my parents, being 'old' enough, they get to travel for free for 6 months. Hahahaha. The event was held at Empire hotel, which was a 10 minutes walk from the Subang Jaya KTM station.

We were served hot coffee or tea during the 4 hours talk on the outlook for the 2nd quarter of the year and two companies advertised their share. I was starving by the time it was 12.30pm. Usually only a light brunch of stir fried noodles or nasi goreng was served but this time, we were invited to Kitchen Art, their restaurant to have buffet lunch! Anything that can make Malaysians the happiest is free quality food.

 

I started my course with squid salad, fresh tomatoes and pasta salad. It was shortly followed with prawn salad but I finished them too fast before I could take a photo of it.

 Main course was a mixture of roti Jala, meatballs, Hong Kong style roasted duck and Satay.

Being busybodies, we later found out that the buffet costs RM 55++ for each person. The trip was worth it. However, not all events have such luxury. I guess the sponsors this time around were really generous.

If anyone is interested in attending Market Chats to get the latest insights for the Malaysia market, click on the icon below and you'll be directed to the program for the year. I just realised that it's held in all parts of Malaysia. So, what are you waiting for?

The needle-stick incident

Never think that removing a securely capped orange needle after taking ABG is safe. The least expected thing could happen which was the needle piercing past the cap without you realising it. This was the first contaminated needle stick injury that happened to me.

Suddenly, I became the patient, needing someone else to poke and take blood sample from me and yet, I still needed to take the blood sample from the involved patient. I realised that actually nobody knew the process of reporting a needle-stick injury. There's no support whatsoever. You just feel lost. The irony was, there was a flowchart of steps to take after a needle-stick injury on the main board.

Going to A&E, I was still trying so hard to console myself that the risk of catching anything from such a small wound is just 0.3% and at least I've been immunised against hepatitis B. But what about Hep C and HIV? Plus that patient was an Indonesian, status unknown.

I got my first tetanus ID jab. It was quite painful. An MO even asked me if I could clerk my own history but he was nice enough to do it for me in the end.

Transporting my own blood sample to the infectious disease unit was one of the weirdest thing that I've done. At least it only took them 3 hours to process the sample and finally, I got a phone call to confirm that everything was clear. Phew.

I don't know what have I learned from this episode as I've taken all the necessary measures of taking ABGs from whatever limited tools that we have in the hospital. We don't have the safety needle for ABG taking like in the UK. We still heparanise our 1ml or 3 mls syringes ourselves and remove the needle to cap it with a stopper before transporting it to the lab.

I think it's the hassle and lack of support that deters many of my colleagues from reporting needle-stick injuries. I hope that this won't turn into a normal occurrence for me.

Wee Vien's Wedding

 

 10th of March was lovely Wee Vien and Jinn Did's Wedding. Congratulations!

 Dinner that night was really luxurious. It was held at Noble Banquet along Jalan Bukit Bintang. I guess this is still one of the places that you can find sharks fin soup (bottom picture).

 All the lovely ladies.

My next post will be all about food and more food as I've accumulated so many photos and too busy to blog. You all must be wondering what have I been up to lately as I've somehow disappeared from the blogging world. Been busy undergoing surgical rotation. It's tough as we're short of housemen and there's no such thing as shift system here. I really wonder how did I survive when I first joined. Last night's oncall was bad as one of the emergency laparotomy took 5.5 hours. You can actually see me withering away towards the end. The good side of this rotation is, it's always in taxing rotations that you get good bosses to compensate, I don't know why. Somehow that still motivates me a little to get up at 5.30am in the morning to go to work. Haih.....

More to come in the next post. Till then.

The broken elastic band

A little girl pick up an elastic band found lying on the playground.
Happily, she starts playing with it, tugging and pulling, stretching it and watching it recoil to its original shape.
As she plays along, the harder she pulls, amazed at how much she was able to stretch it.
Suddenly, the band snaps and tip of it smacked her hand causing her much pain before it drops to the ground.

Gingerly nursing her injured hand, now left with a red mark, she bends to pick the broken elastic band with the other. Now it's just a useless piece of thin rubber. She tried to tie both ends together, but as soon as she starts to pull, the knot snaps off and she was left with another sharp pain. She then spots a dustbin at the side of the road and throws the broken elastic band away.

I feel like the broken elastic band. Please leave me alone and not stretch me beyond my limit.

Big baby

I broke my record of heaviest baby that I helped deliver during my night shift in labour ward yesterday. The mother was a small size lady and it was her first baby. Guess was was the birth weight - 4.0kg. I almost lost balance carrying the baby up to show to the mother as I didn't expect her to be so big. Big baby and big cry too. So cute but poor mother had to put in a lot of effort pushing.

Happy Chinese New Year!!!

I'm finally back to the blogging world. The reason for my absence was due to preparations for exams, laziness, politics at work and of course, playing too much. Gong Xi Fa Cai everyone. May the year of the dragon bring luck and prosperity to you and your family.

I was lucky that I was off on the eve and the first two days of Chinese New Year. Our family brought my 86 year old grandmother all the way up to Genting Highlands and taught her how to gamble on the one-arm-bandit. Hahahahaha. I'm glad that she's still very strong and adventurous. My parents and I were amazed to see her try all sort of food from the buffet table including sushi. I got so fascinated watching her eat. Sometimes I wished that there were not that many people at the theme parks. The queues were so long and I was too lazy to wait so I ended up losing RM20 at the casino. With my small contributions combined with all the other gamblers, my GENM share did go up over these few days and hopefully the trend stays that way.

Thinking of all the events that I still haven't blogged about, I think it's about time I start a post a week just to update my blog before I forget. Blogging is just like hobbies, studying and everything else that requires constant effort, once you lose your momentum, it's difficult to start again. I should be more hardworking. The reason why I want to put in so much effort in this hobby is that it gives me so much joy when I'm reading back on all the entries. The things that you do when you're so naive. Ok, I'm still naive but maybe less now.

Dragon year isn't a good year for people working at the labour suite. So many babies were delivered since the start of the Chinese New Year holidays!!!!!! My fellow houseman and I almost fainted during that night shift as we were constantly admitting, delivering, assisting casesareans for the whole night and we didn't even had time to sit down. I'm dreading tomorrow's oncall starting from 9.30am till Monday morning. Haih.....I hope that whoever wants to deliver this holiday has already delivered. But this will never come true. Imagine, for the past few days, labour suite has been so full that patients in active labour has to be admitted to the antenatal ward first. I can't wait to leave obs and gynae posting!

Most entries to come, backdating since last October 2011. Now I'm wondering if I have the motivation to do this. Hmmmm.....

Selfishness

It's sad to say that not everyone you'd expect to safeguard patient's well being especially in this line of work actually practices it. Nowadays it's all about documenting that i've informed the house officer on call to safeguard themselves and what happens after that is not important at all as they've already passed the buck to the HO.

I know it's important they nurses do their passing over by a certain time so that the night shift person can go home on time and the morning shift can start writing her report on time. But please, don't take away the nursing care plan (containing patient's vital signs cart, drug cart, investigation chart, etc) when I am in the middle of attending an unstable patient with my oncall MO.

Next time, can I say please don't touch the notes as doctors are passing over as well? I thought we were supposed to practice beneficence and nonmaleficence but I guess most of us are practicing selfishnesscence.

Urban Poverty

There's just too many new graduates and professionals including housemans who are living in poverty nowadays. 'Housemans poor? You're doctors, how have you be considered poor?' but that is very true. Any pay below RM3000 nowadays is considered urban poverty and my latest basic pay is RM2550.23. Sadly, I need assistance from critical allowances, living allowances aka 'bantuan sara hidup', and there's still no sign of our shift allowance. Imagine even professionals are living in poverty in Malaysia, what a joke. Ok, there's a pay increase of RM91.84 but even with that, my basic pay is still far below the poverty line.

In our parents generation, a new graduate can easily afford to buy a car after getting 6 months of pay and afford to own a house in a few years. Nowadays, we have to rely on our parent's Employees Provident Fund (EPF) and savings to help us own our first homes as our pay doesn't qualify for that bank loan.

Inflation is getting out of hand and our pay is not increasing proportionately. Poor doctors you say? There's so many aspects to it and now you can add financially poor to that.

Fear of the unknown

If only I could channel the energy used to worry about what will I have to face during my first night shift on the labour room tonight to positive thinking and enthusiasm to learn as much as I can, then life will be less stressful.

Will I be able to cope? Luckily time waits for no one, so no matter how bad things turn out, at least it'll be over by Friday 8am. Muahahahaha. Can this be counted as a motivation?

Surviving

I bet you all must be wondering what happened to me for the past 1 week or so. Life had been tough but now it's getting easier as I got more used to things in the labour ward. Seriously, it's a highly stressful and scary place to be in initially. The most important thing that could make the transition easier would be good seniors but sadly, that wasn't the case for me for the first few days.

I seriously wonder will degrading and demotivating help in the training process. Sometimes I think that energy used to scold us is better channeled for something better. I admit that most of us don't have enough experience conducting deliveries but that doesn't mean that we're that stupid to the extent that we can't learn. Luckily I've applied enough local anaestetic to both eardrums to withstand all insults and have mastered the art of selective hearing. Muahahahaha. Now even the porters (PPK) scold the doctors for throwing the scrubs into the wrong bin or wrapping the placenta in the wrong way before returning it to the mother. I wonder what happened to the very least respect that I think I deserve to have. Luckily for all those cute little newborns to give me that tiny bit of motivation to go on or I'll fall into a really deep depression and you won't see me ever again.

Labour ward can really suck the life out of you. I go home every single day not only mentally drained but physically as well cause I'm not only the houseman conducting the delivery, I set the drips up, give IV bolus and infusion medications, assist in OT, carry those 10kg stirrups to put patients into lithotomy position and even dismantling and fixing back the end of the bed pre and post delivery. I even change the bed sheets after each delivery. The workout is even better as compared to going to the gym. Good way to cut expenses and stay healthy. I still wake up the next morning having severe aches over both arms, shoulders, legs and even my back. Actually I'm a bit worried if I'll get a disc prolapse from all those lifting. Hmmmmm.....

Can't wait for the end of my attachment in labour ward. I hope that the other wards are more relaxed and seniors are better.

On night shift on Gynae ward tomorrow. I hope that it'll be a relaxing call. I'm dreading my shift on the labour ward which is just around the corner.