A week before path finals...

Now that our Oxford panto is over, it's now back to cramming pre-clinical style before our path exams next week...

In the Oxford clinical course they do pathology first in 4th year (contrary to most unis that do path exams at the end of 6th year)... the thinking behind this is that you gain all the understanding you need to make better use of your ward time (which in principle sounds fine). However, one major criticism is that we're probably going to forget all the different types of brain tumours by the time I get round to doing my Neuro attachment, and a lot of the fine details we're learning now. Some other med schools have a different approach where they learn the relevant pathology just before starting each attachment (which in my mind at least seems to make a bit more sense). Also cramming the whole of medical pathology into an 8 week course is not ideal by any means...

But enough about boring path.

What else have I been upto? Well since injuring an ankle ligament at the start of the season, I've been out of all sport and been really out of touch (esp with our Balliol MCR footy team), which has been rather depressing! One of the beauties about Ox/Cam (which I've probably said a million times now) is that you do get the opportunity to meet people and make friends who aren't medics, especially doing College/Uni-based activities like sport...

One thing about clinics though is that because you spend so much time in the hosp and in with the medics, you'll inevitably get sucked into medic life (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), but is definitely a big difference I've noticed between pre-clinicals and clinicals.

At the moment (apart from cramming) I've also signed up to produce next year's pantomime, and along with the Director and Treasurer, we've picked the rest of our panto committee (including musical directors, vocal coaches, techies, choreographers, costumists, publicity, etc etc).

In 5th year in Oxf the whole year group gets split up into 6 groups, and you stick with that group of (usually 27 or 28 people) for the entire year whilst you do your specialist attachments, e.g. A&E, orthopaedics, neuro, psychiatry, obs & gynae, paediatrics, etc. The 27 of us running the panto next year are in a firm of our own, so we can pick what attachments we want to be doing in the lead-up to the panto. One of the good spin-offs of this is that you do end up with a bunch of really cool, outgoing guys to spend clinics with for the whole year, which I'm really looking forward to!

Right I think I've blagged on for long enough for now - will hopefully be writing back in a week telling you how my exams went...!

K