i think today is a milestone in my life! heh. at school wx found a white hair and helped me removed it. WAH LAU, it's like at least 6cm long. bleargh.

haha, i think i'm finally turning old. maybe it's a sign of maturity, but then again it can also be a sign of stress. haha. exams maybe? i remember i was so freaked out abt the cofm paper, thank goodness it turned out good so i shall stop at there when describing something so fear-invoking.

hmm my dad still has a whole head of black hair though he's 50 liao. haha. well, actually i'm not so bothered about my hair being black or white, but it's just interesting to see something fresh. heh.

white hair feels gritty and fake, a bit like a thin strip of raffia. haha. and it doesn't have any hair bulb thingy at the hair root too.

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today ml joined us for lunch. quite fast leh, cause she's going to become a MO liao. no more HO at the end of april. yay! i think it's v exciting to be working and i'm looking forward v much to it. well, at the v least you start earning money instead of paying money to study. also, you obviously can't be studying forever.. (debatable in the context of a practising doctor/medical student) studying is but a process, and it's exciting to see yourself move onwards in life and take yet another step in the family life cycle. heh.

it's exciting. exciting times ahead.

i finally understood what seniors meant when they said tt time in med sch would pass in the blink of an eye. didn't seem to make sense when i was cramming all tt anatomy and kreb's cycle and regulatory mechanisms of gastric acid secretion in year 1; neither did it make sense in year 2 when i was studying which bacteria grows in aircondtioning systems.

but now i see what they mean, and i'm almost in yr 4. heh. 2 more years and we will see the fruits of our looooooong labour.

whee.

came back from the study a couple of days ago and yy told me abt this:

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Clinical Trial Men's Families Told To Pray For A Miracle

Main Category: Clinical Trials News
Article Date: 16 Mar 2006 - 15:00pm (UK)

The families of two men who had volunteered to take part in a clinical trial that went tragically wrong have been told by doctors to ‘Pray For A Miracle'. The two men are still critically ill, their doctors say the probability that they make an early improvement is very remote.

Another four men who took part in the trial are still in a serious condition, but starting to recover.

Ganesh Suntharalingham, Northwick Park Hospital's Clinical Director of Intensive Care, said "The two men remain critical and it could be a while until they show significant change. The four who are seriously unwell are continuing to show signs of improvement but it is still early days. We are still treating their inflammatory response following the drug trial, and are providing full supportive care for the organs affected by this process."

Relatives and friends of the men were shocked at seeing how their features had become so severely swollen. However, patients in intensive care generally require a great deal of fluid - this results in severe swelling. As soon as the patient starts making a recovery the swelling goes down.

Nobody knows yet what made this clinical trial go so badly wrong.

Parexel International (USA) was running the trial on behalf of TeGenero AG (Germany). The experimental drug is called TGN 1412.

Parexel says it has worked within regulatory guidelines. Chief Scientific Officer of TeGenero, Thomas Hanke, says he and his colleagues were ‘shocked' by what happened. He added that his company has apologised, after being asked by reporters.

Eight men were involved in the trial. Two were given a placebo (dummy drug), the other six were given TGN 1412.

In an interview with Sky News, one of the volunteers who was given the placebo said he watched horrified when he saw the other six collapse around him. He said they were screaming, vomiting and writhing in excruciating pain - they were screaming about the unbearable pain they felt in their heads. He said it was like Russian Roulette, with two of them being spared the hell.

A girlfriend of one of the men said he looked like Elephant Man, with his head wider than his waist. She was told to pray for a miracle as doctors told her all his internal organs had failed.

Three bodies are working together to try to find out what went wrong.

1. The Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).
2. The Police.
3. The Department of Health.

The moment it was clear something had gone badly wrong, the MHRA informed other agencies in Europe where similar trials were going to take place.

Each volunteer was given £2000 ($3600) to take part in the trial. It was a Phase I Trial. This means it was being carried out on healthy volunteers.

(Placebo = Dummy Drug. This looks like a medicine but has no ‘active ingredient'. It has no effect at all. A placebo is given to some volunteers along with others who are given the active ingredient to see if there is a difference at the end of treatment between the ones who took the placebo and those who took the active ingredient).

Written by: Christian Nordqvist
Editor: Medical News Today

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well i did have a severe headache on dosing day and g was screaming intracranial haemorrhage (in accordance to the nature of my drug). bleargh. the headache lasted from 10am till the moment i fell asleep which was abt 12am. haiz. when i woke up in the morning about 8am it was gone and i felt much much better, but within an hour it was back already.

i kbed to the doctor who was doing the d/c and the diagnosis?

caffaine induced headache.

spot on!

i went home and made myself a cuppa and the headache d i s a p p e a r e d.

bleh. it is day 1 of the clinical study and right now there's a short break before the next blood taking.

bleh.

in the past 90mins i've had 5 venupunctures and 1 bleeding time test done on me.

i feel anaemic.

hehe. i'm now in nus, 10pm on tues and i'm study-ing! muahaha.

study-ing as in not chao mugging but taking part in a clinical study at nus-lily. the ward is actually in md11 (yes the same building as med dean's office).

i'll be stuck here until thurs morning, do drop by to visit me if you feel like it. hehe.

i ate something undefined today. heh.

it's a cold chicken pie! (cosec pi)!

oh well.

i thought it was quite funny because i took the pie out of the refrigerator and hungrily bit into it. although it was cold, i was too lazy to heat it up.

after the 2nd bite i realised i should go heat it up because it was getting hard to eat. heh. so i dragged my lazy bum to heat it in the microwave oven. when it came out it was too hot to eat so i let it cool.

i forgot abt it and again i got a cosec pi!

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anyway, being bored at home, teresa was so ncie to send me links to puzzle games. haha. how to escape from a room! click here.

more stuff to cheer you up! heh.

first video is abt a very angry man.



the 2nd video's crazy.



the third's the theme song of my fav anime. heh. something abt the composer (Ritsuko Okazaki), she died of septic shock in 2004. v sad. anyway i never used to watch anime before and it was this series tt made me change my mind. tt cartoons can be serious stuff too and not just for kids.



everytime i hear this theme song it still evokes a myraid of emotions within me, perhaps because it reminds me of the meaningful and touching stories in each and every episode.

i guess tt's why i was really v v happy when you bought me the fruits basket cd! haha. thanks, i luv it. :P

oh and the last video solved the problem of toilet seats tt was mentioned on this blog some time ago. heh. saw dustbins with the same concept at mustafa a couple of wks ago too. japs are ingenious.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=FgwOCELecMw

now you know why coffee is good for you. because it's the milder alternative.

when u've got too much time on ur hands and ur mind refuses to think of anything serious, you start wondering of weird questions that really have no apparent ans...

seeking ans to questions like...

1) where do ants sleep? do they arrange nicely to sleep in rooms? just stop walking and stand there? or curl up like after you spray insecticide on them?

2) do blue whales menstruate? does it get all messy? is it the reason why the sea water is so salty?

anyone knows?

blogging now waiting for the video of ho por fun to load up on youtube, heh, recommended by a friend. well, i've always heard about the video but never got down to watching it, particularly cause i didn't know where to get it.

yay for youtube!

anyway, the past couple of days after the papers ended was quite crazy. on wed night went to MoS with hyq, ht and ivan. quite fun and i enjoyed myself more than i expected. over there we met so many other pple from med like weiliang, yetyen, clarence, joops, zeyun and wenshan. haha. jp even bought us drinks to share. well, it was my first time there but i think the music was quite enjoyable cause it was all those oldies like from grease with john travolta and gang. haha. the dancing part was just rubbish, just anyhowanyhow, dun need to care about pple around you. haha. this is only the 3rd time i'm going clubbing and i previously didn't enjoy myself because of the loud music and crappy songs. haha. this time i guess the company and catchy tunes made it a better experience.

shared a cab back with wenshan, andrew and joops. haha. initially thought i had to go back on my own cause of no one to share cab with me. how convenient tt we met them there. :P

the whole of yesterday was spent in m'sia, touring around new places in jb that i've never been to before. wahahha, i think it's quite an experience. drive on the m'sia highway at 140kmph!!! haha. i think tt's the fastest i'll ever drive cause i was so afraid something would happen (choy) if i went faster. heh. the car was quite sensitive to the steering wheel too. if i banged into the railing... oh well.

then there was this humongous tanker which was definitely travelling >100kmph on the highway. OMG. it was spewing out black gas like anything. aiyoh, really an environmental hazard. as i drove through the activated carbon particles and whatsoever i was almost sure it was corroding the paintwork.

a planned destination was the nike/adidas/puma/levis/you-get-the-idea warehouse. haha, couldn't find it and ended up at this megamall at taman-U called Jusco (Japan-US-COop) instead. heh, it's a really big shopping centre, much bigger than taka. can find some good deals there, most of all the pastries. wahahaha. after dividing by 2.265 you find yourself gorging on tuna buns and chicken pies, brownies and doughnuts.

EATING SPREE. (no dota killing spree. bleargh)

well, just as i was coming out of the carpark we spotted the nike logo from afar! HAHA. what serendipity! was searching for the darned place the whole day but couldn't find it, in the end just when all hope was lost, there it was. haha. anyway the selection turned out to be quite bad. although got a good variety but nothing caught my eye.




















oh is the shop. looking at the store's advertistment, there was another shop nearby! haha, this one was not nike but had adidas (my fav label), and alot of other ones. haha. went there and subsequently bought a adidas tee. hee.

dinner was at city square, just a simple one cause it was raining and mood for eating at a coffeeshop was understandably dampened (pardon the pun). slight jam too across the causeway. enjoyed myself. :)

heh, more nice video.

this one's staring kermit the frog!


As seen on Break.com

yay pharmaco's over! whee.

heh. i think it was a very merciful paper liao, about 4/6 of the essays were quite straight-forward, just go and vomit what i've stuffed into my little brain over the past few weeks. i did have some problems with qn1 and the digoxin qn.

there was this sense of deja-vu doing this pharmaco paper. it was frustrating at times, like about the digoxin question, just before the paper, xy was telling us in the canteen about SE of digoxin, "aiyar, digoxin toxicity, very easy, remember vomit until see yellow!" then all of us laugh and laugh and laugh about her description.

@_@

of course, when i saw the qns and couldn't recall @_@ i was understandably distressed. lol.

mcq was even funnier. haha. cause some qns i was expected to know, like the hypertension one, but i got 3 out of the 4 stems wrong! which adds up to (-1)+(-1)+(-1)+(1)= -2!!!

lol. luckily don't have negative marking carried forward (i.e. the minumum marks for each qns is 0, cannot be negative), if not really jialat. then other qns tt i was not supposed to know i just wack all (because since you don't know what any of the stems are talking about, you might as well just guess) and i actually guessed all of them right! hehe. i guess it evens out in the end.

i dun feel like studying cofm now... whee. there's this great sense of inertia preventing me from reading my notes. heh. well, they arn't actually mine, because they're koped from jb! haha. believe it or not, i've always thought tt studying for cofm was just flipping through notes, don't really have anything to memorise one... and tt probably explains why i've done so badly for cofm.

well, looking at some of the past yr qns last week made me wake up from my folly! OMG, COFM MUST MUG ONE! albit late yes, which was why i was so stressed out last wk. heh. then jb kindly lent me his nicely done up notes which includes the more impt stuff. hehe thanks!

btu right now, i really don't feel like studying... haiz. tim, come online leh... i want to play...

spent an entire day in sch mugging. today was the most moralising day of all the days tt i mugged in sch cause every day cannot rem anything. and after each meal, everyone stresses me out even more.

i realised tt stupid pple often need stupid methods to remember their MoAs and ADRs of drugs, well, of course i use alot of these, jb comes a close second.

appreciating how hard it is to remember such rubbish, i tot i'ld share some ways i rem crappy stuff like:

ADR of statins:

HMG-CoA Reductase inhibitors

H = headache/hepatotoxicity
M = rhabdomyolysis
G = GI symptoms (N/V/D)
C = cataracts (lenticular opacities)
R = ashes

ADR of Nicotinic Acid (vit B3):

AA/EFGH

A = toxic ablyopia
A = arrhythmia
E= endocrine (hyperglycaemia+hyperuricaemia)
F = flushing (characteristic, face/upper body)
G = GI symptoms
H = hepatotoxicity

Characteristics of Iodism

BCD/IMMRR

B = bleeding
C = conjunctivitis
D = drug fever
I = inflamed salivary glands
M = mucosal ulceration
M = metallic taste
R = rashes
R = rhinorrhoea

soo, nicotinic acid and iodism gives you, AABCDEFGHIMMRR

more random letters for ADR of inhaled steroids:

ABCCCDO

A = adrenal suppression
B = bruising
C = cataracts
C = cough (throat stuff)
C = candidiasis (throat stuff)
D = dysphonia (throat stuff)
O = osteoporosis

ADR of cimetidine (H2 antagonist):

cimetidINE

I = inhibition of liver enzymes
N = neurological effects (headache/confusion)
E = endocrine (antiandrogenic)

ADR of heparin:

all heparin abusers are NBA players

N = narrow therapeutic range
B = bleeding
A = allergy

they also go for Tea together everyday so there's Thrombocytopaenia and paradoxical Thromboembolism. long term SEs are HOA which is hyperlipidaemia, osteoporosis and alopecia. NBA players are all balding, brittle boned and fat (due to tea everyday).

ADR of warfarin:

all warfarin abusers are NBC players

N = narrow therapeutic range
B = bleeding
C = cutaneous necrosis

like the NBA players, they too go for Tea together everyday so there's Teratogenicity.

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i know it's dumb heh but maybe just put it here for something to laugh at when i look back at life 2 years down. lol.

seen on msn:

benny says: stop asking stupid questions repeatedly. if i said it won't be in, WHY ASK AGAIN?

lol.

i was randomly surfing the net and saw these 2 videos tt i thought were quite meaningful and interesting.

the first video requires a bit of hokkien, but if you watch it through u'll roughly get what's going on. makes pple think of what's really important in life. heh. it's interesting too why lawyers and doctors always bear the brunt of such stereotypes.

the 2nd video's a bit more storybook than the first, but nonetheless a good clip.

heh, enjoy. :)