My excuse is that I had an essay due and I'm heading home this weekend for a beautiful friend's wedding. Somehow I had to study extremely hard so that I could do absolutely NO study for those few days at home.
Over these two weeks I've thought a lot about the power of words. Does saying something negative really make it happen? To me this has always been a ridiculous belief. Yet, I now wonder otherwise. I have a veggie patch- that I nurtured from seed. The soil in Perth is basically sand and yet some zucchinis and a pumpkin were beginning to grow. Every morning I'd eat my breakfast by my garden and lovingly water it. It was one of the best times of the day.
I suppose love is blind. What I thought was beautiful, was scorned. My housemate's friends would come over and they would stand in front of my garden and laugh. Every day it seemed, someone would give me some more advice on how to improve my ridiculous garden. This upset me. My beloved garden was now a laughing stock. I no longer ate my breakfast by it and hence forgot to water it.
Over the week I got upset enough to forbid my housemates from paying it out. However by the end of the week most of it died through lack of watering. Only the basil and eggplants continued to thrive. If only people hadn't paid out my garden. If only I hadn't let their words destroy my enjoyment of my garden. If only... then my garden would not have mostly died. Quickly I just want to say that I'm not blaming my housemates (Australians basically pay out anything thing that they can). Still I think this is a part of our culture that we ought to lose.
So words killed my garden... sort of.
Applying this principle to my studies intrigues me. Each day I plug away at what I need to learn. Yet I regularly feel completely inadequate. I am vulnerable to attack. Imagine if I believed that it was no use and that I should not bother. Imagine if in my vulnerability, people began talking and saying that I didn't have what it takes and laughed at my poor grasp of medicine. Would I study harder to prove them wrong? Or would I slowly lose motivation to study and believe that it's no use anyway?
Normally I would be resilient and prove them overwhelmingly wrong. Yet now I am pushing myself to the extreme. I am tired. I am stressed. My brain is working harder than it ever has. I am away from home. My defences in other words are down. Therefore I've come to the conclusion that as med students we should encourage and support each other. All pushing each other to believe that we can in fact pass and that yes.. all the study is worth it.
Enough deep(ish) thinking. This week has been full of med brain instances. I poured cereal into my coffee mug. I tried to pay for my printing with my transport card. I boiled the kettle with the lid off. Despite this med is still wonderful. I love it how our lecture went 30 minutes overtime tonight, but it was so engrossing that no one told the lecturer. I love it that as many of us chat on the train ride home (7:30pm) after a day of lectures, we laugh and share our favourite parts of what we've learnt. I love it that we love med.
I'm way too tired to describe something medical in detail to finish this post off tonight. Instead I'll leave you with this cool fact. Some people don't like big scars. This poses a problem when surgeons want to remove something big like a kidney. So they make a tiny cut to slip the scalpel in and detach the kidney... but how to pull the kidney out through that tiny hole? Well they make a cut into the colon and put the kidney in there and then suture up the colon and abdominal wall. What... so they leave the kidney in there??!! Yes! The person then wakes up and excretes it like they normally would with anything else in the colon, ie faeces. Now that is gross, but awesome.
This is a giardia cake that I baked for my tute group.
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