x one of us ate a cookie*
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Saturday, February 03, 2007

The absense of do-nothingers like me have made this place a quiet one.

I'm here at yw's request to update!

Snail and I have been so busy with attachment this past week that we're both absolutely exhausted. Especially snail, with her feet that hurt in the weirdest places.

Snail's utterly dependant on me and and the other JC3 students in the same attachment. Without us she'd just die and wither because of her inability to follow the signage in the hospital. Thus I am not allowed to leave the MRT without her each morning, neither am I allowed to leave the hospital without her.
Still, she kindly agrees to keep my locker key for me while we're in our pyjama looking scrubs which DON'T HAVE POCKETS so I am extremely grateful for that.

On the issue of scrubs. All non-medical students attached to A&E are required to don scrubs consisting of a white shirt with (or without, if you're unlucky, like yours truly) the hospital's logo and blue poofy drawstring pants. Snail is very bad every time I complain about my huge size M scrubs, which is not fair because she got size S scrubs and guess who is shorter, a fact she is always reminding me about.
Slug laughed the first time she caught sight of us in the scrubs. She said we looked like patients. -_-" Patients on the run. Anyone who has seen snail in her psychotic laughing fits would get the same idea as well.

For all the embarrassment we go through being seen around the hospital in our scrubs (and believe me people DO stare), the attachment has been fulfilling. At least for me. We got too see tons of different cases each day... people complaining of chest pain, with SOB (shortness of breath, not son of a b**** like that psychotic doctor claimed), with distended abdomens, with dizziness... even the odd psychotic patient or two.

This attachment has reminded us the importance of being fluent in our languages! And by that we don't only mean English and Chinese, but Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka and Malay. You won't believe the number of patients who come in speaking dialects.
Language is very important indeed.

The doctors have so far been tolerable of our intrusion into their work. And most of them readily share their medical knowledge, and allow us to listen through their stethoscopes even though we're not medical students! :)
So far, it's still mostly negative comments about the profession, except from the registrars and above.

The other students, non-medical and medical alike, have also made this experience extremely enjoyable. From the way we'd all go high after lunch, to doing our daily bending-down-to-open-our-lockers ritual. And it's been really nice just knowing them, as I'm sure snail would agree!

We've thus decided to extend our attachment, and also because we need to make that $52.50 we paid for admin fee worth it HAHA.

Snail and I have also been up to other stuff: namely volunteer work at the Assisi Home and Hospice. We had our second session today and it was sad because some of the patients we saw last week were no longer around.

Anyway, we're doing night shift tomorrow night! Just to see!

More updates later! (looks pointedly at snail)

x one of us ate a cookie*
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i see that we haven't been updating on our lives for a little while now. i shall take the lead and hopefully more will follow (:

wednesday was the first time i became the mastermind behind a vlog. we were supposed to interview two guys who had their own vlog - the tim and ben show - and i suggested making the interview episode 3 of their vlog. so we had the stomp crew filming while we asked questions frm behind the cam. cool huh? the guys were very sporting given how we dropped the bombshell abt the filming roughly fifteen minutes before they arrived for what was supposed to be an interview. if you're interested check them out at www.timandben.blogspot.com to catch their first 2 episodes.

thursday i went to the autism resource centre. a pretty little place housed in pathlight school, a school for autistic children run by the centre. it made me feel safe and welcome the moment i stepped in, because of the lovely wooden covered walkway, the playground surrounded by a short fence, the many plants, the students' artworks on display, the boxes marked out by tape on the assembly ground floor, the cabinets outside classrooms for students to put their bags in, and the peace and quietness of the grounds.

i spoke to their president ms denise phua. and didn't realise she was actually an MP and a full-time volunteer (doesn't get paid a cent) until she told me later. must have looked like the most ill-informed journalist ever. but she was a really nice lady, as was everyone i met there. i got a free t-shirt and cards designed by the children. and enjoyed a lovely nasi lemak for lunch at the cafe run by their students. i'm determined to write a good article for them. this journalist can be bribed by goodwill heehee.

friday was the day i made my first big mistake. i covered the shaw hongbao giveaway in the morn (really really boring non-event) and since my editor wasn't in when i went back to the office i didn't debrief her right away and promptly forgot all about it. until later when i was on a ship docked at raffles marina (more later) doing another interview and two editors called and said they couldn't find my story. cos i hadn't written it yet. and i was holding up the page cos everything else had alr been done.

so followed the fastest article i had ever written, 15 min of frenzied scribbling in the capt's rm (only quiet spot). luckily kym was in the office and could type it out for me while i dictated over the phone. thank goodness for kym. (: lucky too that it was a short and boring article that didn't need agonizing over.

on the bright side i got to tour the SV Concordia! it's a floating campus for 48 lucky students who spend 4-5 months sailing around the world and docking at 20 over ports of call. it's aimed at college prep students and they're big on experiential learning. so if you're taking marine biology you get to see whales and dolphins, and catch your own plankton. how cool is that. the only downsides were the cramped quarters, no internationally recognised exams available and the super expensive fees.

and the other silver lining today was when my editor (a third one) decided to hold over my article so i didn't have to camp out at the office while waiting for the graphics people. so i went home at the relatively early time of 2130, instead of some unearthly hour like 2am.

saturday i went back to the office to interview a parent and her autistic child cos they couldn't make time on weekdays. nice people all over again. trooped to j8 to get orange socks, then to roxy square for a haircut. boy do i miss being a student - i paid $13 ($2 extra for cny period) instead of last year's 8. also bought three lovely lovely slices of banana pie from the divine dona manis cake shop in katong mall. and returned home to bake choc chip and raisin muffins. lesson of all time - never substitute sour cream with oil and milk. bad bad bad decision. it makes your muffins not rise and rather oily. so they're more like cupcakes than muffins.

dinner will be in five minutes. me is a contented girl. (: