410# Orthopaedic: END

"No fractures heal in less than 3 weeks time"

5 weeks of orthopaedics posting has finally over. Done my orthopaedics studies, done my task as a posting leader, and done my clinical exam.


Studies

To be honest, orthopaedics is kind of a hard subject to study. It's really dry. Not all kind of pathology that we learn will be seen in the ward. Therefore it's rather hard for us to digest what we've studied in the books, if we don't see them in the ward.

Somehow among all surgery related postings besides general surgery and obstetrics, surgery part of orthopaedics is rather fun, because of the hardware machines, tools involved during the surgery.





Posting Leader

Task as a posting leader in orthopaedic is the most feared task among all semester 7 students. The task consist of a long list, including, re-arrange all the teachings in the schedule, make a list of tasks for group mates, make an OT list, tracking down lecturers in the hospital, contact the lecturers, re-booking of all the venues, getting laptop, projector, white board ready, receiving calls from lecturers regarding last minute class cancelling and re-re-arrange the timetable, contact with all the ward leaders...

And the list goes on and on to infinity.

For a short-tempered person like me, this task was not easy. I had to listen all the group members and entertain their complains. I had to repeat things which I had announced earlier. I had to get all the thrashings from the group members for all the small things. I had to keep my phone in non-silent mode so that I wouldn't miss any calls from the lecturers in case they had to cancel our teaching at the very last minute. I had to send multiple sms to the sub group leaders... Basically it was just a task which drains time, energy, sweat, saliva and the hand phone credit.

I'm glad that it's over now.





Clinical Exam

I got the most feared examiner for exam. I had to accept my fate, and being the 4th to be examined. The latter my exam was, the more tired the examiner will be, so the condition wouldn't be jeopardising.

I didn't get to present my case like how we used to me.

"Mr. S is a 45-year-old Indian lorry driver, presented to the ward 3 days ago due to yellowish discharge from his right calf for 1 day which was previously fractured and fixed with external fixation 5 months ago"

No, I didn't get to present in such a way. Instead, the examiner asked me to get all the patient's tibia/fibula X ray films. To my surprise, I didn't see such a huge number of X ray films taken in a single patient. The patient suffered a motor vehicle accident, so multiple X ray films was taken for his skull, pelvis, right lower limb and right feet... and there was almost 40 of them.

I had to filter out the tibia/fibula X ray films from the others, and arrange them in chronological order. And then I was asked to interpret the X rays from the oldest until the most recent ones. That was almost 20 films there. And I had only 5 minutes to go through all of them...

After that, I was asked to sit down. The first question threw to me was, "So, what is your management for this patient?" I didn't get to present my case in order. Instead, the whole case presentation was made in a Q&A way.





I've tried to answer every single question asked, hope that I've done my best.

What's worse was that the patient I got was previously clerked by the one of the smartest guy in my batch. Having the same patient, same examiner and different grades will be funny. However, he got to present systematically, but I was not given the chance and I got examined differently, though.

5 weeks of orthopaedics is now officially over. Will be returning to this posting in the next semester, but for 2 weeks only.

Paediatrics: Starts. Tomorrow.