life of a placement student

good morning lovelies!
It's been an immensity of time since the last time I poured my thoughts on the internet and the culprit is...placement! Oh yes and my laziness but we will aquit it for once.

Placement..a whole year in hospital and general practice on different rotations.  Placement, that magical year in which we would finally be in hospitals, seeing "real" medicine..yet that seemed so far away when I first started medical school. Needless to say, it had crept on me faster than I expected. I woke up one morning in early September and it was time to head into this adventure.

first day outfit

I finished my first rotation on Friday (and I got emotional about it on instagram), 15 weeks split between teaching and time on the wards on our own.
It's been a heck of a rollecoaster, going from the mines of uttermost despair when I realised how little the past 2 years of medicine had prepared us for a clinical environment to feeling like a rockstar the day I finally managed to do a complete round of bloods by myself  (which may or may not have prompted a little victory dance in the staircase).
I have been overwhelmed by a whirlwind of personalities and people, patients and doctors, surgeons and nurses, different tales and attitutes which swept me off my feet and left me with a overflooded brain. On the train home I would try and tidy up all the impression of the day, only to find myself among a pile of scattered old knowledge, new clinical experiences, human histories and tips from other doctors.

library days|

this file: the bane of my life.

It's been a great, soul turning 15 weeks which made me grow more than I could even imagine from a university course. However, life got a bit frantic and some of my passions slipped quietly in the shadow of the back burner. Blogging was one. Running the other. It's hard and ugly to admit but I haven't trained properly since May. Surely, I ran while I was in Israel but that wasn't proper hard training. And once I got back, a knee injury, my laziness and a uninterrupted streak of chest infections and a flu stranded what was left of my running. It has been frustrating and complicated: at uni  a lot of people kept asking me of my running (I trained hard last year) and I had to admit that I wasn't running at all. And most of all I felt I had left a piece of myself behind.  But now I am back (well sort of) and ready for a cracking start of 2015! I can't wait to start my new rotations (they are more specialty orientated than the one I have just finished) and to go back to training with my lovely TBH crew (or by myself if the timing isn't good-the joys of a commuter).