This will be one of my longest chain of flights yet… I am still in Christchurch, NZ. I am on my way to Sydney, then LA and then finally Vancouver. It will be about 36 h in total. Dear Canada, see you soon.
Today is my last full day in NZ. I am alone now, John and a few of the guys stayed in the south to go hiking and visit John’s family, and the other 7 guys including myself came back up here. There was a concert in town last night, Ben Harper and Pearl Jam. I wasn’t planning to, but went at the last minute. Today I am just poking around, cleaning up and returning the van and sorting things out. I tried to write posts of the trip on my phone as things went along, but there wasn’t a lot of time for typing things out… I will have to do a review of each day and sort it all out. Lots has happened. I can’t believe I am on my way to Canada so soon… Can’t wait.
After waiting for one of the guys who was supposed to come in at 1 pm, we discovered that he missed his plane. So we drove up to the springs without him, and he will catch up later. Hamner is amazing, and reminds me a lot of a small Banff. We went to the hot pools, which were really sulphur smelly. It stained our silver pretty strongly.
We went for a drive up the coast to a pretty sweet village, and then we played paintball in the afternoon. I will need to expand on these entries soon.
I am here now and things seem to be pretty good. It took longer to get out of the airport than planned but everything went smoothly. We will be picking guys up over the next day or so. We have our van and are ready to cruise. Should be good. Time zone change is a little weird, so is the long evening light. Summer is on its way…
And we’re off… I am sitting in the plane now, ready. Looking forward to this. See you all so soon!
That was it… Headed to New Zealand tomorrow.
Second year is over now, and it feels great to be done. I made it through MSAT, and both written exams, with the last one being yesterday. They went alright. The MSAT Was quite an experience. I think I had been dreading it since before starting medicine, and even more so since. I guess it just seemed like it would be a really confronting experience, but instead I had no time to be confronted, I had too much else to do, so I dove into it. The first written exam felt alright, and while I didn’t have everything down perfectly, it felt like I was in the right category. The second exam was much more random and obscure. I left feeling a mixture of elation at completion and a little baffled by some of the questions. Detailed mechanism of CNS action of Sodium pentothal? Come on! Oh well, so happy to be done. Halfway.
And it went by super fast. It was a really stressful hour, but there was not much time to think about anything other than what was happening immediately in front of me. I am really glad to have it done, and now have all the second guessing about things I said or didn’t say.
I am really glad to have it over and now I am just waiting for my train home and back to study for the next two exams.
For this year at least, classes are over. I am a little uncertain if we will be having regular classes next year or not. I think it will depend on the rotation. There are five main divisions next year, Rural Medicine, Surgery, Mental Health, General Practice, and Medicine. I think they will all run a little differently, and have heard rumours of PBLs next year as well, but run on one day instead of two (separated by study on the topic) and that there might be days or half days of lecture next year.
Anyway, it’s a little sad to realize that the student life as it is formally recognized has come to a close for this campus, right when I started to feel like I knew what was going on. I am really excited about next year though. It will be a lot of learning as it is a paradigm shift moving into the hospitals on a full time basis, but I’m looking forward to it. Now I just need to get through these next exams. I have three rounds of assessment coming up, called the MSAT, PSA2.1 and PSA 2.2 respectively. The MSAT is a Multi-Station Assessment Task, which is a live exam of five different stations, as the name suggests. There are: Clinical Reasoning, Examination, History Taking, Ethics and Advanced Life Support stations. The idea of this exam scares me, as I feel as though there’s nowhere to hide. Just you and the examiner. And the patients I guess… they usually are actors at this stage, but some might be patient-actors with real signs. This test is on November 8 for me.
Then on the 10th and 11th I have two more exams, the first being PSA2.1 (Progressive Summative Assessment) which is based on material from this last semester. Then the next day is based on all material covered up until now.
Then my plans are to recover a little from the exam, clean up and go check out the Sunshine Coast, as that is where I will be living next year, and then I’m headed to New Zealand for 10 days. I will be home in the beginnning of December. I am looking forward to being home very much.
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