I’m at the end of the second week of my last block ever. I Feel very happy and excited to finally be getting this degree over with. I’m left, overall, with a bad taste in my mouth after spending 6 years with my class.
I’m at Red Cross Children’s hospital for the next 2 weeks. I’ve been placed for the month in E2 – the medical super-specialist ward. I complained thoroughly about the placement because I am not seeing anything common or useful. I also never take blood and am getting no practical experience in performing procedures. My complaints were heart, acknowledged and then nothing was done. On of the ward consultants is also on the course convening committee. She told me that I get more teaching and see more clinical signs than in the other wards, plus I am needed.
The work is generally quite laid-back, though it is subtly harrowing. One of the patient I worked with was a really sweet 7 year old boy. His mother got married to this preacher and dumped him with his grandmother who has her own children, one of which is younger than him. His a condition called prune-belly syndrome. They have abdominal wall muscle defects, undescended testicles and dialated tortuous ureters. Neither his grandmother nor mother are committed to him enough to ensure that he is able to spend the amount of time at the hospital required to get him stable in peritoneal dialysis and then get him transplanted and followed up. In summery, he’s going to die because nobody loves him enough.
There are other harrowing patients, but overall the ward contains a lot of hope. We have some bloody sick kids: Some child with jaundice, bilateral cystic kidneys, liver cysts, hypertrophic obstructive cardiac myopathy and neurological deficits. Nobody knows what’s wrong. We have a kid with familial hypertriglyceridaemia and pancreatitis on total parental nutrition. We have a kid with a urea cycle defect. We have a kid who thrombosed her renal arteries after a reimplementation procedure for renal artery stenosis. She has pneumonia, peritonitis and 2 necrotic, non-functioning kidneys. There are other kids with renal failure awaiting transplants that are better. One of the worst things with kidney transplants is that they only last for a maximum of 10 years.
I am no longer selling ADSL. The guy I was working with was the most unreliable and unpleasant person to work with. He “bought me out.” In truth I could have gotten a lot more money out of the arrangement, but I would rather just never have to deal with him again ever.
I am in need of love and attention. I’m finding it a very difficult thing to find. I try put myself out there as much as possible, but people are too tied up in their own lives. It’s difficult. I don’t really know what to do. It seems like there is little hope of things ever getting much better. I’ve just got to get through this next bit of uni, but things are highly unlikely to get much better once I’m done. I’ll have less time and less in common than my friends. Things will get rougher without reprieve or hope of escape.
