The day of least rush

Pre-pre-Ad day.

To understand that term, you must first know what an Ad day is.

 

Ad-day is short for admission day. It is the day of the week when the OPD and Emergency is reserved for us, namely, Unit 4 in medicine. Every unit has it’s own day. Unit 4 has Thursday. So, on Thursdays, any patient who gets admitted is under our care. Profs and Docs from Unit 4 look after him, diagnose him and treat him.

 

On Thursdays, everybody from Unit 4 arrives at 8 – 8:30 am, and prepares everything for the coming day. Patients flow in. By the dozens. Often too fast for 4 interns and 6 PGTs to handle. The day drags on to 10pm, with patients coming and going. Of course, if you have the night that day, you will be let off at 2pm, to come again at 9pm, and spend the night there.

 

In short, everyone at Medical College will tell you, Ad days are stressful days!!!

 

Then as the days pass, patients get diagnosed, get treated, and get better. The major rush for this falls on the Post-Ad day, with a significant part continuing into the the Post-post Ad day, i.e. Saturday. Sunday onwards, the rush is less. A number of patients have been discharged by then, and the remaining getting better…  As we reach the nest week… Mondays, Tuesdays… the workload reduces. Finally, Wednesdays is the lightest. That’s tomorrow! :-)

 

But no smiles for me… My light Wednesday has sort of been killed off, owing to the fact that I have the morning shift of the ER tomorrow. There’s never a dearth of patients in the ER. But, I enjoy the ER immensely, and am seriously considering a future in Trauma Surgery.

 

Let us see what transpires.

Kinjal

 

The guy with the liver abscess... contd.

We had sent this guy with a deep abscess to USG for drainage of the associated pleural effusion.

They just did the USG, didn’t drain, and sent him back. A final year PGT tried again today, but to no avail. His pleural fluid just won’t come out. Like I said, guys… It’s too deep inside for your needles to reach!

 

Kinjal

 

The guy with the liver abscess....

Saturdays. Post-post-ad days in medicine.

Normally we have evening rounds…

I got my PGT to let me off evening rounds 2day. I had to meet a friend from school. Someone I’ve not met since we left school. The meeting turned out great, though her exact word was ‘appointment’, given the fact that she was meeting a (half) doctor. We sat at the CCD, City Centre, and talked to three hours straight!!! About what? Absurd question. About everything and nothing in particular. It was loads of fun, and I had no idea how time passed. Time stopped, literally… My watch stopped midway… :-P

At college, we have a bunch of patients with Liver abscesses admitted. I have no idea how Unit IV got 6 liver abscesses in one day of admission. One particular guy, with a nice Punjabi name, has one such abscess, spreading to his lungs. We wanted to aspirate the lung abscess, but did an USG prior to that. Turns out the abscess was 78mm deep to skin, and  measured 110mm x 97mm. 78mm is too deep for any needle commonly available in the wards. The longest we found was 48 mm. So, no drainage in the ward, and the patient was sent to Radiology for USG-guided drainage with a special long needle.

Kinjal

F.R.I.E.N.D.S.

The inseparable six from school. Those who complained that you’ve never of these people… they are, from left to right

Moumita, Granthana, Neerajana and Pallavi, with Kingshuk and myself behind them.

Picture was taken in 2005 on film, with a Minolta P&S.

New camera

We're hoping to buy a new camera. While was advocating a dSLR, they are really expensive. A basic kit (body + 18-55mm zoom) prices begin from Rs 28,500, but more lenses cost just as much, making a fully equipped kit cost close to 1 lakh, a price I can't afford now.
So, the alternative was to buy a super-zoom. Though I mockingly call them the 'dSLR wannabe' segment, they do sport nice zoom lenses, say from 28-560mm, i.e. a 20x zoom. Their picture quality isn't bad either, and their optical image stabilization helps make up for the not-so-fast lenses and ISO settings. (They do have ISO settings commonly upto 3200, but noise makes one stick to values below 800.) They end up being complete packages, and have no further upgradation costs as opposed to SLRs.

This is the camera I'm looking at right now, the Canon Powershot SX20 IS, which comes at an MRP Rs 25,990.

22nd Dec 2009

ASCII will definitely be one of the most popular subjects on this blog, partly because I love taking pictures of him, and partly because I like taking pictures of landscapes/animals more than people.

This was again taken with the same compact, Olympus FE-210, with slight photo-shopping done.

ASCII's most precious

It used to be that lovely blue hankerchief that ASCII used to play around with, daring us to try and steal it from him. Long gone, that blue colour is. If you did find it somewhere, it's probably in a dozen pieces by now.
This is His Highness' latest. He's guarding it, but, for all you know, he might be sitting, and waiting for it to hatch!