omg this video is damn funny. heh. maybe something the m2s mugging for microb would appreciate more. but still...

heh, i read in the newspapers the other day that they are going to be installing (or have already installed) cc-cameras in the SGH ots and the surgeons are crying foul over it. well, it did irk me too when i saw the news because i guess this would also affect medical students.

the best part about it was that the surgeons were only notified AFTER they cameras were installed. which is really quite sly. beats me though how the installing managed to go unnoticed when sgh surgeons are in the ots hours on hours on hours.

it's only a hypothesis, but i hypothesise the reason is that behind those closed doors in the ot, many 'illegal' things go on, no not stuff like stealing 1 kidney or a lobe of the liver, but stuff that do not follow protocol such as letting students palpate/pr once the patient undergoes GA. or letting the medical student practise stitching.

of course, the problem does not solely lie with the rare nice doctor who is ever so eager to teach and benefit his students, because otherwise the students would have little chance to practise. respect for the patient and all that has an important part to play, but how better would you train surgeons who are skilled with the knife? with slabs or pork? com'on you got to be kidding if you any patient compares him/herself to a pig. there has got to be someway students can be allowed to learn, of course under the close supervision of a senior surgeon, making sure nothing would go drastically wrong.

it would be unfair to extrapolate and conclude that medical students should then be allowed to do heart surgery (clause: under the strict supervision of a cardiothoracic surgeon), because that would probably be unsafe, having unkeen hands working on a delicate procedure. but that doesn't exclude having someone with experience that commensurates the position of student in that circumstance, say a post-grad surgeon working on the op under the guidance of an expert.

there has to be some place to allow young doctors to learn through experience within a safe environment. but sadly, putting those cameras in there would probably resign medical students to holding retractors and suctioning smoke from the cautery. worse, they may not even get to see the surgery close up to learn from the operating surgeon because they might accidently "drop something in there", or "dirty the place". or maybe not even be allowed to scrub up because you would be wasting hospital resources. heck, they might even ration sterile gloves for what our sch fees are worth.

i guess there must come a time when medical student involvement in the care of the patient from admission to d/c must be legitimised some day. not doing so might jepordise the career of the surgeons who have wisely provided for medical students to have hands on experience. these are the surgeons who bother and i truly respect them. paradoxically as it may seem, they are often the nice doctors who care for their patients and bother to take time to clarify doubts and help to solve problems that they have in the clinics. and of course, vice versa.

i don't fancy the idea of having Big Brother watching your every move, because it instills fear in the hearts of people and make them doubt themselves in times when they would have make prudent and quick life-saving decisions. some rules are made more as a guideline rather to be followed to the letter, and i'm pretty sure that many of these rules in everyday life, not only in ots, are broken time and again, but with no detrimental effect on any one, rather facilitating progress and encouraging efficiency. what the hospital administration is doing is introducing red-tape and bureacracy into the ironically sanitary environment of the ot. if nothing more is done for the medical student and surgeon, medical students of the future might find "scrubbing-in" a foreign term.

the hospital admin should make a stand that sgh is also a teaching hospital and their doctors who have pledged to teach in an oath they took when they graduated have every intention of keeping to that pledge. they should make it clear that patients in the subsidised wards should expect to see medical students running around in the wards and ots. by default medical students are allowed to observe and examine their medical condition in a respectful manner, and opting out of their role in the teaching process should be an active one, ala cadaveric organ donation.

there are certain dumb rules which hinder the running of the hospital. for example, in doing surgery for harmorrhoids, does the surgeon really need to go 3 rounds of scrubbing with povidone and chlorhexidine, brush his nails and all? well i stand corrected but it is really quite 'dirty' surgery in itself and time saved on inonsequential nitty gritty details could enable the surgeon to perform another surgery in the next ot. not scrubbing "properly" in this case is not detrimental to anyone, but just makes things less anal.

to me, this camera thing is a mistake and is totally crap. the hospital admin is too obsessed with proving efficiency, patient care and healthcare standards. these do not benefit the patient but only serves to fill up the resumes of the management, and of course their empty heads. ultimately what is worrying is that patients will lose out if every surgeon chooses to do things remembering that everything he does and says is recorded in a tape somewhere.

heh. think i'll post the results of my johari window here and post-date it so it'll stay on top for the next week. remember to do it ok! darn. no one seems to be doing my nohari window...

Arena (known to self and others) helpful, observant, sentimental	Blind Spot (known only to others) calm, cheerful, dependable, energetic, friendly, giving, knowledgeable, mature, modest, reflective, searching, self-conscious, sensible, shy, silly, sympathetic, warm
Façade (known only to self) accepting, logical	Unknown (known to nobody) able, adaptable, bold, brave, caring, clever, complex, confident, dignified, extroverted, happy, idealistic, independent, ingenious, intelligent, introverted, kind, loving, nervous, organised, patient, powerful, proud, quiet, relaxed, religious, responsive, self-assertive, spontaneous, tense, trustworthy, wise, witty

Dominant Traits

60% of people think that elpis is cheerful

All Percentages

able (0%) accepting (0%) adaptable (0%) bold (0%) brave (0%) calm (40%) caring (0%) cheerful (60%) clever (0%) complex (0%) confident (0%) dependable (20%) dignified (0%) energetic (20%) extroverted (0%) friendly (40%) giving (20%) happy (0%) helpful (20%) idealistic (0%) independent (0%) ingenious (0%) intelligent (0%) introverted (0%) kind (0%) knowledgeable (20%) logical (0%) loving (0%) mature (20%) modest (20%) nervous (0%) observant (20%) organised (0%) patient (0%) powerful (0%) proud (0%) quiet (0%) reflective (40%) relaxed (0%) religious (0%) responsive (0%) searching (20%) self-assertive (0%) self-conscious (20%) sensible (20%) sentimental (20%) shy (20%) silly (40%) spontaneous (0%) sympathetic (20%) tense (0%) trustworthy (0%) warm (20%) wise (0%) witty (0%)

Created by the Interactive Johari Window on 23.2.2006, using data from 5 respondents.
You can make your own Johari Window, or view elpis's full data.

ooo, i thought this tt i saw on FoA's blog was quite funny, quite true and quite thought provoking. i did identify with it some point in my life too. heh.

u know when i first saw this on FoA's blog, i thought he was talking about himself. heh. cheh. it's a quote only lar.

---

"Have you ever been in love before?

It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up.

You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armour, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...

You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.

Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like "Maybe we should just be friends" or "How very perceptive" turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart.

It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain.

Nothing should be able to do that.

Especially not love.

I hate love."

-Rose Walker [Sandman IX: The Kindly Ones; Chapter 9 page 7,8]

was waiting for dota game when plhu sent me this pig link . oh well, it's supposed to be some sort of personlity test (duh) but this one starts differently. well, you have to draw a pig! anyway, i realised i didn't save a snap shot of my pig. but the results of the analysis was quite amusing.

hee. anyway you can click on the picture to see more clearly what it says.

actually, your drawing doesn't matter. in fact, they don't analyse your picture too! heh. they just asked you to answer a series of questions, which reallky makes it just like any other personality test. nothing really special.

yes, and the dota game was damn challenging and damn exciting. haha. i think all of us also study until sian liao lar... so must play 1 game to relax a bit! :D well, not really 1 game, but 2 games. heh. 2nd game was only tim, y3 and me because we started at 1230am, all the rest were sensible enuff to go sleep.

our other teammates were actually quite good, 1 pudge and 1 necro. heh. it was a damn exciting match! haha. and we were actually winning liao until...

sniper got 3 bashers!. omg. we were deciding our MoA when suddenly...

FATAL ERROR.

i swear i almost fainted from the shock. i was like wtf!!!

but then off to bed it was, i couldn't believe what happened really. heh. but it was 2am liao. what a b-l-e-a-r-g-h ending.

wooo. today is a happy day. haha.



anyway in the morning went jogging with sw and jp at mac ritchie. wah it's been a loooooooong time since i've ran - only running was after the bus since standard chartered marathon on dec 4 last year. heh. putting on those extra pounds liao. i think jp read my mind tt's why he organised this running session.

i've never felt so shagged out in a long time. although today we only ran the cross country route, i was experiencing symptoms of AMI, namely 1) cold sweats (duh!) 2) chest pains. in addition, i felt like collapsing and it seemed tt there was an elephant sitting on my chest. heh. SERIOUS!

well, in the last stretch i asked the 2 of them to go ahead while i took my own sweet time jogging up the hill before the carpark.

totally shagged out. but it felt good to start exercising again. althought it was a sunday morning tt we met, i think the time was well-spent. :)

heh. qich asked me to fill up her johari window, which is here. then i went to try to do qy's johari window, which is here. hehe, i thought it was good fun so i decided to get my own johari window, which is HERE.

heh.

in addition, i got a nohari window. which is really just trying to assess the dark side of you. help me do also k?

heh. it's interesting to see what pple think of you. whee~

did you realise 2 days ago on sunday was yuan(2) xiao(1)?? which is also the valentine's day for chinese pple. haha. and today is valentine's day proper. hmmm wonder if both yuan-xiao and v-day will fall on the same day someday. well, regarding yuan(2) xiao(1) i remember once my friend mixed up yuan(2) xiao(1) with duan(1) wu(3) jie(2). which is in fact the dumpling festival. haha. so unromantic! imagine all the oily ba-chang tt are associated with the latter and all romance vanishes in too much of a hurry. even the foods associated with each festival is different. yuan(2) xiao(1) must eat tang(1) yuan(2)... not gorging down on oily rice dumplings.

1) do you'll know what's the similarity b/w tang(1) yuan(2) and booger?

well, both also take and roll roll roll...

heh.

2) so then, what's the difference then b/w the 2??

other than the fact tt one is edible and the other is not (debatable), tang(1) yuan(2) are to be put on top of the table after you finish rolling; but pi(3) sai(4) are stuck onto the bottom of the table after rolling.


happy valentine's day everyone. :)

p.s. heh, now don't go putting your hands under tables ok? scarly find some tang yuan then you know. =P of course, all us civilised pple use tissue papers.

hehe, i was looking through my past photos, those tt i took in hk with the lt pple in medicine. haha, certainly brought back alot of good memories. wah lau, it was really very fun going with you guys. yup, so i thought i'ld photo blog some of the nicer pictures. pple who went on the trip included me, ivan, ht, qich, alvin, yiqing. yup, 3 guys and 3 girls. heh. haiyoh... i want to go back hk again...

this picture was taken at changi airport on departure night. although they didn't go for the hk trip, huili and txl came to see us off!!! wah so nice. at that time i still didn't really know them well. heh. xiang(1) hen(4) tai(4) wan(3)... aiyar, anyways, u'll should have come along lor!! i think we'ld all have enjoyed ourselves more with your company. :)

this is sleepyhead sleeping on the plane there. heh. think we were all very excited the night before and couldn't sleep much, so catch up on sleep on the plane lor.

at the hk airport. heh. i remember we were happily taking photos once we reach there. like v sua-ku liddat never see before airport. i was so excited taking photos tt i banged my head on a horizontal beam. this hk trip i banged my head so many times on so many different things tt i think my iq must have halved. i banged my head on a kfc tv stand too. stop giggling now you...

our first meal in hong kong. to me it was the BEST meal there. haha. the white green plate in the bkground is roasted goose/duck (can't rem) and it was DAMN nice. the white plate is char siew. i remember that was the best plate of char siew i ate so far. very lean but not dry, and very nice to chew, very tasty too..

hehe i took this photo because i thought it was interesting to note tt guardian is not guardian but mannings in hk. this was the first day when we arrived and were exploring the place after we put down our luggage at the hotel and had lunch.

this was taken near nu(3) ren(2) jie(1) where alot of good bargains could be found. can shop for clothes, wallets, accessories, clocks, soft toys, table mats etcetcetc. yar you get the idea, almost everything. but after shopping we were desperately in need of toilets and couldn't find any around. amazing isn't it. we wandered off into this esprit shop to use their toilet. heh. well, esprit is a hk brand and the items there though same as singapore, are cheaper. didn't get anything from there on that trip though. oh yar, see the cute row of pooh bears? heh. i bought them with him, i think got 6. i've got another 6 but different design one.

this is at the wishing tree or yuan(4) wang(4) shu(4) where pple write their wishes on pieces of yellow paper, tie them to oranges and throw them up the tree. you will hope that your oranges will cling onto the branches so that your wishes will come true. pple can wish for peace/prosperity/love/family/health. yup, different types of papers one. mine was for family. heh. oh yar, this photo looks as if it was taken with me in action but actually it is not. haha. it was a posed picture because my oranges were up there liao. i remember!! yq took 10000000 years to get her oranges up the tree and we were all waiting for her! haha. she was so apologetic for making us wait. i remember when your throw missed, the oranges would come falling down. which was quite a hazard. haha. sometimes you can even dislodge other pple's oranges. which would be double the hazard. a couple of months after we came back from hongkong i read in the papers that a branch of this same tree had broken off and injured some tourists due to the weight of the oranges stuck on the tree. scary sia.

well on the same day we went to one of the outlying islands ?lantau island(can't rem the name) where there were alot of seafood restaurants! i think i like this picture because there are alot of types of seafood featured there. i mean... i couldn't believe they ate STARFISH... zzz... alot of other weird seafoods as well. on the island there was some famous actor ?chow yun fatt's mother's house. apparently he specially custom built it for her. heh. anyway i rem it was a loooooong walk in and to see the house was not worth the hike in cause it was just a plain-looking house. of course we weren't allowed in, can only see from the outside... zzz... come to think of it, even if the tour guide bluffed us no one would have been the wiser.

we went to ocean park too. here is a picture with yq after we just alighted from the bus. i think it wasn't a very fun place... but it was thr place where i took my FIRST roller coaster ride. haha.
this is the first roller coaster ride i took. ever. yar i know it doesn't look very challenging lar. haha. but i was damn humji. i ended up taking the ride after the others literally dragged me to take it. haha but w/o them i would still have been a humji tt haven't taken a rollercoaster ride.
maybe the only thing tt was good about ocean park was the dolphin show. besides dolphins there were seals as well. haha. got some videos of the show but dunno how to put it up. hmmm. ei, i took this picture, not swiped off some tourism promotion website. pro right?? heh.
of course, we went to the peak too. i remember we had dinner at marche. the food there was just like singapore marche. haha. we took the tram up and there were some points on the tram ride where the incline was a crazy FOURTY-FIVE degrees... just an experience, not something i would want to do again. anyway on my 2nd trip back to hk with jem theresa showed us the public bus service tt we could take up the peak. more spacious definitely and cheaper too. the tram is just a tourist gimmick. and again, this photo was taken by me. heh. a bit blur though.
the trip was 4d3n and it finally came to an end. this picture was on the way to the airport when we were in the tour bus. although it was a free-and-easy tour, the tour agency provided transfers to the airport, and also the trip to lantau island. all the rest were planned and arranged ourselves! heh. i remember i was damn sad when we were on the bus back. oh man.. i love hong kong!

a friend told me today that she just found out tt her ex got attached. and she felt a bit sian. haiz. yar i guess that's the way things are.. having spent time and having memories with the person, it's hard not to feel sad; hard not to think about and brood over the matter, often sprialing down into a state of self pity and start asking all the what-ifs. well, tt also started me reflecting and thus this post.

i'm increasingly thinking that affairs of the heart are really very very very complicated. it's not simple and straightforward of boy-meets-girl, boy-like-girl, boy-marries-girl but instead, relationships themselves are tricky issues what more when you're dealing with a special someone who you intend to spend the rest of your life with. heh. so many things to consider. anyway, i must admit that my views on relationships have changed really so much over the past 2 yrs. no longer the luvy-duvy scenarios tt u see on tv or books. i think they rarely happen in real life and it would even be dangerous to lie hope for that from your partner.

well, because with hope, disappointment may follow. heh. pun not intended.

i've trained myself not to expect so much, not to be so demanding but i guess there's still a long way to go. heh. but compared to the past when i would get very upset when the situation didn't match my 'love-belief' model. haha.

and i think it has made me a happier person. hehe, don't know if it has made me an easier person to get along with, but hopefully so. :) but i guess there's still a long way to go.

aiyoh so headache.

hmmm, i figure if pple are to read this blog often i've got to post more regularly. heh. and of course we want more pple to read this blog more often, because if they read it, they can click on the google-ads and can help me make money.

hmmm... but i've realised it's not easy to post regularly. obviously you must be either quite committed or have really NOTHING to do if you were to post every day.

in fact b/w the last entry and now, i there were so many things i wanted to blog about and many a time i typed the first paragraph before there would be a call-to-arms. aiyar, call to arms just means dota lar. haha. theni would abandon my blog post and go play. of course, you don't usually blog after a game because you would be so excited and go on to play yet another game.

hee.

well, the playing has to cut down... cause exams are coming. oh crap. i've about 3 more weeks to my exams, which is really REALLY scary, so much so tt i just refuse to think about it. heh. maybe like living in delusion... haiz. doesn't help too i think.. if you see me lazing around, pls remind me tt i have to go study if i want to do anything meaningful in the post-exam break...

well, the other day i was tokking to qy and he was just remarking how bloated he felt because of indigestion. heh. i'm the KING of indigestion! well, ok... i was the king of indigestion. not too long ago after every meal, i would feel damn bloated, to the extent tt i felt nauseous and wanted to puke.

and puke i did after every meal.

but it's all air tt comes out, not food. so i would always empty my stomach of air after almost every meal, failing which i would feel extremely uncomfortable and
experience headache and saliviate excessively (copiousm watery type). hanor. it was a damn sianz period.

haha, yes i know you're thinking of anorexia! but i didn't have an eating disorder! i just felt damn sick after every meal. and maybe because of tt i ate alot less and lost some wt. heh. talk about side effects. but i really appreciated what a privilage it is to be able to EAT freely. i avoided all the oily and gas inducing foods. oh man, i couldn't eat chilli!!!! my fav! maybe tt's why now i eat indiscriminately, having known how there is really a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e-l-y NO quality of life if you can't eat freely. dieting has just no place in a life so short.

well, 1 more interesting thing somfounded this whole situation, tt is... i didn't know HOW to BURP. well, all the way till m1 or m2. yar. which was why i couldn't burp out the excess air and had to PUKE out the excess air...

haiz. so poor thing.

but no more! i'm now a happy burper. acquired the skill since a yr or 2 ago and tt made me abdicate my position of KING. heh.