G'day team,

I've been a bit quiet recently, so figured I'd throw together a post explaining my absence and do some public wallowing in self-pity. I'll give a bit of a breakdown of my rotation in Biloela and the fun things I got up to when I wasn't terrorizing baby lizards.

Me, Showing my Love of Biloela Fauna

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Recap

My six weeks in middle-of-nowhere central Queensland have come to an end and for the last five days (as we can tell by the blue dot below), I've been back in my country-town-come-city home of Brisbane. So for those (probably very few) who're interested in hearing about what it's like to be a Medical student in a rural Australian town, here're the highlights.

Biloela

1. Freedom!- In big hospitals, we're monitored pretty closely, with very little opportunities to do procedures. In rural locations the opposite is true. I sutured cuts, drew blood, helped relocate bones, put on casts and, eventually, canulated patients.
2. Surgery! - One of the most awesome things I got to do was assist in a C-section. When I say assist I don't mean stand around a table with four qualified surgeons and pass the scissors. Biloela has only one qualified surgeon, so I was assistant number 1. This means everything but cutting and suturing. I got to pull a baby out of a woman's uterus and then hold her uterus while the surgeon searched for bleeds. Pretty great experience.
3. Reality - I got to see things most people would rather not see, too. I can't (& won't) go into details because patient privacy means even de-identified information is not shareable. Suffice to say, I was closer to death, disability and loss than I'd imagined possible before I started my rotation. When you're in a doctors office people open up and often their bodies are not the only things that need healing.
4. People! - Every person in the whole world who lives in a rural or remote location will tell you that people are better out bush (or their equivalent of out bush), and while I don't want to attract competitions, I would say there's a lot of character in Biloela.
5. Learning - There was no way I was going to get away with six weeks of med school without at least some book-learning & to be honest I had a bit of fun covering out modules this time around (more on this shortly). It's always useful to know basic stuff like how to treat snake bites and jellyfish stings, or deadly infectious diseases, while in a rural setting.

Overall I'd give this rotation an 8/10... the freedom and hands-on learning experiences were the highlights, but there were drawbacks too. A small rural town means I'm often at the mercy of chance, if we get no patients for half a day then that's tough luck. Similarly, there's very little in the way of structured learning in a two doctors hospital (with overworked doctors), so a very... self-guided approach was required.

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Exams

I've been home about five days now and locked to a desk most of this time, my Fitbit tells me my steps per day has gone from around 17,000 to around 7,000 this week. My exams are in nine hours but my brain is saturated, so I'll burn off a little adrenalin before bed by venting. My main frustration over this exam period has been an emphasis on rote-learning management guidelines for rare conditions... let me explain this a little.

I call this piece: "Trying to Study While Someone Nearby Cooks with Onions"
I also call it: "My Hair Goes Crazy in Humidity" & "I Apparently Only Own One Shirt"

When a patient comes in with a rare condition, it's VERY important that a doctor picks it up. There's really no way I can complain about having to recognize Melioidosis or Leptospirosis when a patient may die if I miss it. But any half-conservative doctor will treat these conditions according to the most recent guidelines, which means getting online and having a look at eTGt to see what the latest research says about giving the patient the best possible treatment. Unfortunately, the Faculty of Medicine has decided that instead, we should memorize the management plans ourselves. I can tell you right now (off the top of my head, because the exam is tomorrow) that management options for Brucellosis include Rifampicin, Doxycycline, Gentamicin and Sulfamethoxazole-trimethoprim. We'd start with Rifampicin and Doxycycline in an adult out-patient and substitute Rifampicin for Gentamicin if they became an in-patient and Sulfamethoxazole-trimethoprim for Doxycycline if they were under 8, pregnant or breastfeeding.

I can also tell you that in two days, a day after my exams, I won't have a clue how to treat Brucellosis. I can tell you for the rest of my medical career I will refer to antibiotic guidelines for best-practice and that this will probably change many times in the next forty or so years.

Why on earth are we being asked to learn such utterly useless information? Something that will probably change in the next few years, and that's available to us at the click of a button? It's not like there's a lack of information to teach medical students? There are dozens of potentially fatal emergency presentation we simply glossed over!? Arghhhh.... okay.

So, that's my little rant done.

For now, I will focus on studying our other learning module...

• Skin lesions
• Snake envenomations (important in Australia)
• Insect & marine envenomation (important in Australia)

..where, often, the time it takes to read a guideline could be how long it takes a patient to die.

I will also 'suck-it-up' and learn all my tropic infection and their treatments because, at the end of the day, I signed up to med school knowing that just like any other field, I will be forced to learn irrelevant and pointless information. I also know people in other fields probably suffer this a lot worse than I do, so I'd love to hear what everyone else has been forced to learn for the sake of learning, during their studies!

Thanks

As usual, thanks for reading team! I hope everyone had fun and I haven't bored anyone with my little vent.

Wish me luck in my exams

-tfc

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steemstem

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