Meriting Merit

Our exam results came out today. While I would have been happy merely to have passed, I was actually awarded a merit. Medical degrees aren't graded (well, would you actually want to know that your doctor only qualified with a 2:2?), but my university does offer honours to the top 15% of the year; the merit/distinction allows us to accrue points towards these honours. Although I thought that I struggle to keep up with the 'hard science' part of the course, I have been finding the more clinically based element of the course makes it much more accessible.

I've also started doing some part-time work for the local hospital as a nursing assistant. Although the benefits are largely fiscal, it's also great to be able to increase the amount of patient contact I get. It can be very difficult to talk to a patient who is stressed, or angry, depressed or in pain. Despite its noble intentions, medicine is a highly nepotistic field, where it's not so much what you know as whom. Most of my classmates haven't done much in the way of work experience; usually it's a few days shadowing a consultant who's a friend of Daddy; I find it worrying that tomorrow's doctors can prescribe cyctotoxic drugs but don't know how to hold a patient's hand.

This has become the year of placements. Currently, we are learning medicine systematically; after studying each system (renal, GI, respiratory, etc) we then do a week-long placement in hospital, learning basic clinical skills, such as history taking and examination, which are relevant to that system. Sounds great, but for me it has meant spending half my week on a bus, being dagged across the west country and vomiting repeatedly in front of everyone I know.

Next week is our gastro placement, and I have to say I'm looking forward to it significantly less that my cardiac or respiratiory placements. Partly because the shine is off the apple now, and the format of these weeks has started to become repetitive; partly because the hospital at which I'm on placement is very small, meaning that it can be difficult to find patients prepared to be manhandled for the umpteenth time, bt largely it's just because I really don't like intestines one little bit, and even my new and beautifully pink stethoscope can't cheer me up.

However annoying the placement may be, it is far less troublesome than what we're doing after it: the dreaded neurology. The nervous system is really the chink in my armour, and I struggle to grasp even fairly basic concepts. But the system is six weeks long, and I know it's going to pass as quickly as the hundred years war. But for all that the course is becoming difficult and at times, dull, I still wouldn't rather be doing anything else.