In your end-o

Today we did the first half of the student presentations.... and I'm going next week!  I've finished my presentation this morning in case I was first up and to get it out of the way before revision week next week.

It's nearly the end-o of the endo-crine module and I really like endocrinology.  I also really liked biochem, cardiac and respiratory so far (not so much musculoskeletal).

My lecturer said she's doing neuro next term, so I guess neuro is on the list of possibilities for me.  In fact I think she said she was going to request that I be in her class because she is also my academic advisor right now (I'm supposed to have one in Australia but there is none currently in that position) and she wants to tutor me in molecular biology and other basic sciences to help me for the USMLE.  It is such an amazingly generous offer, but half of me is thinking "oh no, not MORE study!  i have bought the textbook to do the MITOpenCourseWare free online course in mol bio, so I hope to do that over my 4 week break.

I have been concerned about my finances for enrolling into next term, but I've decided I will find that $3000 somewhere, even if it means borrowing it, which I really don't want to because of the high interest of repayments and my budget is already stretched - so repayments with interest is not exactly ideal.  Plus, I have those clinical modules coming up for which I need to SAVE money, not borrow it.  That is why I was hesitant to borrow, but I've decided to do so anyway (if I need to - I have a few pay cheques coming up before then) to get these preclinical modes out of the way.

I just got sent a Google-alert for the following article which is talking about the numbers of females in medical schools has now passed the number of males and they are predicting soon there will more female doctors than male doctors in Australia, especially in certain specialties - no points for guessing that those specialities are the "family-friendly" ones some of the female medicine specialties.

Rise of women doctor numbers in Australia

(PS the title of this post is a quote from Scrubs)

Female traveller

I'm back in the relative comfort of Kathmandu. Despite its dirtiness and craziness, for some reason I feel more at home in Nepal than I did anywhere else on this trip.

The flight was delayed due to weather in Kathmandu. You can imagine my surprise when they made their boarding announcement and the only aircraft I could see out on the tarmac was a twin-propeller plane!

At first I was scared, then a bit happier because I thought it should do better on the shorter runway at Paro and in and around the mountains which flank the airport.

Then I started to get scared again when I questioned whether a twin-prop should go OVER the Himalayas. Agh.

Obviously, I survived in one piece.

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Being a female traveller can be interesting. Of course there's the extra male attention, extra caution when out at night, but then there's the fun of trying to find tampons...

I came with extra tampons on this trip because I knew from previous experiences how difficult such a luxury item can be to find.

Trying to explain to housekeeping, the pharmacist, and the taxi driver what it is I'm after, and even showing a tampon as an example, became very not fun very quickly.

I suppose I can last two more days without the luxuries of home.