Grey's Anatomy

No, I'm not talking about the anatomy textbook "Gray's Anatomy". (Well, I think the population who knows that Gray's Anatomy is a textbook is very few, but that's not the point.) I'm taking about the TV show.

I started watching it because I was bored but to my surprise, the show itself could not be farther from the truth. I'm not an intern yet, but I still am a medical student, and I've seen some facets of a life in a hospital. And this is what I realised: sure, there are people who want to be doctors because it's a noble cause and wonderful and blah blah blah, but that's just a pretty hullabaloo. What you have to keep in mind is that most people only meet the general practitioners for their entire lives, and those people don't get covered in blood and feces. Besides, not many physicians see their patients covered in blood. They always smile and have nice stethoscopes around their necks when they meet their patients.

That's nice and dandy, but as a medical student or an intern, there's no way you can be smiling. 36 hour shifts are ordinary schedules, and everyone ends up looking like zombies and there were no pretty female doctors like you see in Grey's. Sure, I saw some physicians who might have looked pretty, but their dead tired expressions ruin everything. Patients scream at them and nurses order them around and their daily lives consist of just perseverance and patience.

This TV show is weird from the setting. Why are the patients getting carried into the ER being treated by interns? Aren't they supposed to be treated by, you know, the professionals, called ER physicians? Additionally, the scene from Episode 1, when they treat the appendicitis? Just by common sense what kind of a hospital lets a first-day intern treat that? Just that weird enough for me.

Even more, you know when Grey guesses what's stuck in the throat of the rape victim? When you think about it, that's pretty weird. The doctors in the surrounding are all experienced. If they don't know what's stuck in the girl's throat and a spanking new intern can guess it, that's WEIRD. As if that's not enough, the main surgeon is a guy. As those who have watched that episode may have noticed, there is no way that an experienced male surgeon doesn't have a clue what it is and a brand new intern - Grey - can know what it is. I guess it's same all around, but interns are usually yelled at, warned, and taught in most hospitals; I've never seen the vice versa. If the opposite happened, we wouldn't know which one's the intern and which one's an attending! Interns are apprentices. If the apprentice was teaching the teacher, we wouldn't know which one's an apprentice and which one's the instructor.

On a tangent, apparently my personality resembles Christina's the most. I don't know if that's a compliment or not.

Dorm Life

My dorm was finalised today. I was rather afraid that they'd change their mind after all and stick me in this place across the town, but luckily I'm in a place two minutes away from campus. The area isn't... exactly safe, but it's not like I'm in White Chapel where there were murders recently, so I'm not too worried. The bank is close by, and the Borough Market and other supermarkets are within walking distance. The underground is facing the back of the school. It's a compact place, really.

An English boy of Chinese decent is going to the same dorm as me. Since we're pretty friendly to each other and he takes same classes as me, I'm pretty thankful.

I'm coming home for Christmas. I'm pretty happy about that. Just like the Japanese go home for New Year's, it's kind of miserable to spend the Christmas alone. My friend is coming back for Christmas as well, sit it might turn out to be a pretty happy homecoming.

I have three friend(lies) at the uni now. One is the same person as the one sharing my accommodation. He moved to the US in sixth year. His parents are from UL as well, so his history is very similar to mine. Additionally, he plays the violin, just like me.

Another person is in the residence at Russell Square. She's from Thailand, and she told me she's studying Business. She's extremely friendly and always cheerful, so she's the opposite from the grouchy and not really friendly me. Her hobbies are shopping and cooking. For someone like me, who cooks because he/she wants to eat good food but can't get it readily, or for someone (like me) who goes shopping because it's necessary, she's a completely different type. I think she thinks I'm interesting.

The last one (but not the least) used to live in Cambridge. She's a British. She's studying music (specifically piano) at Kings. She has short hair, and there is no doubt from her appearance that she's a British. She's in the same residence as the Thai girl. She was my first acquaintance at KCL.

I'm leaving in about twenty days, but I can't really believe it's true. Since it's me, I can just see myself packing three days before the day I leave. I can't really believe I'm going to be living alone either. Well, since it's a dorm, it's different from living in an apartment alone, I think.

I finally bought the Return of the King movie. Since I didn't think the last couple of scenes weren't well made, I decided to buy it when the price got lower... and two years passed before I actually got around to buying it. I watched it last night, but since I was reading 'The Elladan Show' right before then I couldn't stop laughing. The Middle-Earth depicted in the fanfiction isn't the beautiful, romantic Middle Earth, but it's a land where cars are running and cell phones are jingling and there is an unstated rule that you must never eat in Uni cafeterias if you don't want to risk mystery food. Basically, the Earth with Middle Earth geography. His father, Elrond, is the Prime Minister of Rivendell, and Elladan is a senior at Grey Havens University. He thinks he's the only one with common sense, but just like his family and his acquaintances, he lacks what he thinks he possesses. His twin brother (Elrohir) is a kind of an elf who just grew up while keeping a mind of a three-year old, and his sister Arwen was on the volleyball team in high school and married Aragorn right after graduating high school. There was no sense of solemnity or mystery.

But apart from the setting, the events in Lord of the Rings is very well depicted, so it adds even more to the humor. The things Elladan is worrying about is extremely trivial; each character is very well created and that adds more to the laughter.

Apparently most of my high school classmates leave either this week or the next. I guess my school starts extremely late.

Why I decided to do medicine

On a tangent, I've never been reccommended to be a clinical physician. Rather, people usually stop me. For a female medic student, this doesn't happen very often, and I often find people losing their smiles at this.

Now, thinking about my own wish, I don't mind being a physician who cares for patients, but I don't care for anything else but university hospitals. Rather say, clinical researcher.

Pediatrician? Nope. (I pity those children who would be my patients anyway.)

To think about it, I think it's clear that I shouldn't be that kind of a doctor. I like to be backstage but I don't like to be in the front. I don't like dealing with people. I find it tiresome to constantly watch for people's expressions and cater to their happiness. For someone like me who likes to do things alone, clinical medicine just isn't the thing.

What about research? Let's see. I like to do things alone. I like to control things in the back. I'd love to leave a legacy behind. Besides, it is practical and I get to feel good about myself if I could leave a substancial research and saved five million people at once instead of just one.

Simply put, I'm not feminine. For me who likes power, being the center of envy, and fame, I'd rather leave my name in a thesis after research than treating hundreds of patients and ending my life in a hospital as "just another doctor". I guess I want to be the brain rather than the hand. I know it's not lovable, and if I were a male I'd probably run away from such a girl.

Ethically speaking, I don't think I'm clinically inclined anyway. Most likely I'd see the patient as a guinea pig for a new set of data rather than poor human beings who are in desparate need of help. I can't slice people up if I were looking at them as humans in the first place.

Completely off topic, I saw my friend leave for her university today. She's going to a Mormon school in Utah. For me, who had always left people behind, the experience of being left behind was rather novel. I've been friends with her since I was nine; that makes it eight years of friendship. When I think about it, we've been friends since we were little girls. That made feel a little odd.

People who go to med school

A lot if people who go to med school are those who, in my opinion, should never go there in the first place.

Mostly, the motive is impure. It's on the cute side when the motive is "I wanna get rich". In my case, I think I just wanted to slice people open. Of course, when I was little I probably was burning with this high spirit to save people's lives, but that was when I was three. Now that I'm 17, no such thing remains in my mind; it was out of sick and sadistic desire that I applied to a med school.

If that was it, it's not too bad. The most I see is "I wanted to look clever", "I wanted to change people's lives", "I wanted to play god", which is extremely close to insanity.

If it was just the motives, there's still salvation. What's even worse is that there are many people who are just not suitable to medicine from the ability or mental stability. And you find them everywhere.

My high school is probably one of the best in the area, and we have two who are going to private school pre-meds (I'm already in medical school so I'm out of count). Well, I'm not proud of my school, but compared to other schools around it's dramatically better. It's not easy to get into pre-med, so it's a good thing, I guess. Now, let me introduce you to the two young pre-meds who were my classmates.

One is a Spain-born Spanish. Both parents graduated from the school of medicine at the University of Barcelona. Very smart. Since he's the elder boy, both parents expect much from him. He gets pretty good grades, and he works hard. He was in my chemistry class, and since I rarely attended classes he was a good friend to borrow notes from.

But...

When he was little, he told me, he wanted to be a cook. Both parents adamantly were against it, and he gave up his dream. His current future career is a cardiologist. For me, cooking and cutting up hearts were pretty much the same thing, so I thought maybe it was going to be okay. That was last summer, when classes just began and I didn't know him too well.

But as classes progressed, I began to worry if I could trust the heart let alone cooking, and it began to bloat. He happens to be extremely careless and clumsy. For the proof, my chem class was given two boxes of Pyrex test tubes from Procter and Gamble, because the CEO of Procter and Gamble was my school's alumnus. For them, they were probably just giving away some junk that was sitting in the storage, but for us, getting nice, good expensive test tubes is a happy thing.

The first day we used those test tubes, our dear Mr. Clumsy managed to break two of them. Not only that... it was on a different day but he managed to burn half my classmate's tie. He repeatedly caused similar accidents.

"Erm... if I got some heart attack, I'd rather die than have him treat me," I thought, and I'm sure you'd understand why. But apparently college admissions don't really care about those things, and he got into pre-med with no trouble.

Another person is an US - born American. He was in my fifth year diff. eq and English class Senior year (since I took summer pre-cal, we were a year ahead). He looks like what President Clinton might have looked like in high school, and he acts like him too, if a little more vulgar. He sucked at English, and was constantly the class duck. He also happened to get 18 out of 80 on one of the English tests. Of course, he just grinned and let it go. He was the captain of the golf team and was apparently a good scorer at the state tournament. He told me he started golf when he was three.

He was a normal student at first. But when we were Seniors, he began to show his true colors. First of all, he had a wild party with drinking at his house and got arrested. Then he got pulled over in Florida for speeding. In the end, he got drunk, got talked into by a friend to get a tattoo, and went ahead and did it. Apparently this tattoo looked awful - you know the kind that you seen on ramen bowls in Chinatown? Those. He said it was pretty painful.

This idiot's aspiration is COSMETIC SURGERY. I couldn't stop my mouth and asked him:

"Is that to get rid of your tattoo?"

He gestured around his thigh and said, "Like this?"

"Yep."

"Duh."

A year ahead of me was a dude who got straight into medical school - the same school as the tattoo boy. This one was weird as well - he had no friends. His parents gave him a complete inventive education in sciences, and he completed Calculus freshman year. He is OCD and probably paranoid in some bizzarre way; during lunch when I was a junior, he always went up the stairs right by the place where I was waiting for my teacher to arrive. Well, he just HAD to go up the left side of the right staircase, and if someone was there, he'd come back down and start over again. I was with him during the math team, and not once have I seen him laugh. He originally wanted to go to engineering, and got into CalTech, but he decided to refuse the offer and go to med school. To me, he would have been better off going to engineering. Medicine is something more than "fixing", after all; it's healing, with mental and spiritual care. But before we even talk about him thinking patients as humans, he needs to work on recognizing himself as a human.

Then there's me. One day in math class, the tattoo boy asked me what I wanted to do after med school.

"Brain surgeon."

"Why?"

"Well, first of all, my patients are all knocked out, so they won't talk back. Second of all, it looks fun."

His expression became really tense and he said, "you know, you'd probably fix the problem but you'd probably change the patient's personality as well."

Considering the fact that these kind of people will take care of so many people's health and welfare and possibly change their lives, I'm feeling a little cold. But then, I find myself that I just need to be careful to the doctor I go to; after all, I won't be my own patient. There must be some moral physician somewhere, right? I just need to find him.

By the way, lectures at Kings College London will start from 24th of September. I'll see you then.