i've moved to http://itadakimas.livejournal.com/

^^

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.