Bouncy Obstacle Course

What is the point of living one of the most vibrant cities in the world if you don't advantage of it? There are always so many events going on in London.

A new breakfast drink is trying to break into the UK, and they have set up a bouncy castle style obstacle course in South Bank as part of their advertising campaign! I saw it in Time Out magazine, and decided to give it a go in the afternoon after my morning lectures. Take a look at the obstacle course...

 This is what it looks like from a far...

 Slither through the holes...

Jump over the low ones and roll under the tall ones...

 Climb up the slope...

 Then the leap of faith into foam!

 Me looking confident before I took part, but it was much harder than I thought! My time was 44.86 seconds. My friend made it to Top 10, but so many more people have taken part and he's down to 20th now...

 Walked along the South Bank for a bit then we took the tube back to mine place. I had a games night at my place after. It was definitely a fun afternoon!

Strawberry Jam and Summer Drink

After a busy day of running errands, exercising and meeting up with a surgeon for a potential project, I decided to spend my evening making healthy strawberry jam. This is a recipe from Deliciously Ella's book. I also decided to make a healthy summer drink- pineapple and grapefruit green tea with passion fruit.

These strawberries were not the best, they didn't look that tasty for eating, and I've never made jam from scratch before, so why not?

All you need is strawberry and honey and chia seeds. 

Boil, boil and mash mash...

There goes the chia seeds!

Boil boil and boil, with some stirring...

You can see a bit of my dinner in the corner, which was smoked salmon in scrambled eggs with spinach and rocket. YUM.

The magic of chia seeds, look at how thick that jam is.

In the fridge it goes! (Apologies for my bad photos...)

 I used two pineapple and grapefruit tea bags in a mug. Left the tea to cool and added more cold water in my jug. Then just added some passion fruit too. Sometimes you just feel like something other than water! Best served with ice. Healthy and tasty.

Admin, admin, and more admin

At my medical school, the first clinical year has three major 12 week rotations of different placements. While I thoroughly enjoy my time at placement, the beginning of each of those 12 weeks brings a fair amount of anxiety and stress.

Before we start, there is a long waiting period for our timetables. For my last block, I didn't receive my timetable until 2 nights before I was due to start. Not a lot of time to prepare and know what's coming my way. The good thing though, the timetable was quite self-explanatory and easy to navigate around.

For the first rotation, it was just plain confusing. There was two hours allocated for us to sit down with the module lead to go through the timetable on a Monday morning! We still didn't know where to go for some clinics after that... I promise we are not stupid students- medical school is just so massive and hospitals and clinics are all over the place.


To be honest, I didn't expect to receive any news about my rotations next week until Thursday or Wednesday. However, I had the pleasant of getting an email from the admin people this afternoon. I thought that was very speedy of the administrators! Then the pleasure disappeared as soon as I opened the email...

I swear the front is extra small in this email, and it is much much longer than the usual ones, with bits of it in blue, bits of it highlighted, bits of it in red, bits of it capitalised, bits underlined, bits in bold, some bits are even in capitals and underlined... Where are my eyes supposed to look?! That is not all though my friend. There are EIGHT attachments! Eight! With five different timetables! *bangs my head on the table* I can't wait for the day when I get to have a personal assistant. *cheeky smile* Anyway, I know what I will be doing with my evening now: admin, admin and more admin.

Friday Morning in Theatre- Edited

I want to be a surgeon. Therefore I value all the opportunities I get at Medical School to watch surgery. I've attended theatre quite a few times, but yesterday's experience was like no other. I met the fiercest nurse ever in my life. And she was not fierce in the good sense of the word.

Like most days, when a medical student arrives at theatre, the consultant surgeon is nowhere to be found. They are usually late, so I'm always hanging around feeling a bit lost and trying to find the relevant people and the right place. This happened again (the theatre I was meant to go to was closed that day...) but it was no big deal as I was used to it. So I introduced myself to the theatre sister (the nurse in charge), and wondered who and where the consultant surgeon was. She was a short oriental lady. And she was very loud. Straight up, she told me she didn't want a medical student watching the surgery because the patient had an infection and the operating theatre was small. I stuck around anyway, because I wanted to meet the consultant and see what he says.

After around 30 mins of waiting and trying to figure out where I was supposed to be, the consultant arrived. He told me it was fine for me to watch. Then he went off again to get changed. When I was left by myself, the theatre sister told me go away again. I didn't want to antagonise her by saying the consultant said it was fine, so I said I just need to wait for him to come back to sign my attendance sheet. Then she said she can sign it, and then said that after she's signed it I can't just run off with my boyfriend for the day. She told me to go to the library and study vascular surgery. This was unnecessary. I didn't mention I had a boyfriend. I didn't even want to leave in the first place! And it's called surgery. In order to learn surgery, you actually need to SEE the procedure! It's not just something you can learn from books. I was very unhappy about the way she was speaking to me but I let it go.

So the morning wasn't off to a great start. But then something pretty amazing happened.
I scrubbed in and actually participated in the surgery! This surgery was an arterial bypass surgery. In basic terms, the patient had very bad circulation to his legs. Due to this, he had very bad ulcers in his legs, and he's lost a toe due to ischaemia. If this problem wasn't solved, he would lose his leg in the future. So the goal of the surgery was to take a long vein from his arm, and graft it into his leg- i.e. bypass. After being scrubbed in (this is when you wash your hands, put on sterile gowns and gloves), I saw the surgery very close up. I got to pass surgical instruments, use forceps to pull up the skin, I felt and held the vein that was taken out of the patient. It was INCREDIBLE.

Unfortunately, the theatre sister came back and had a massive shouting rant. She said it was ridiculous that I was allowed to watch in the first place, and now I'm scrubbed in. Nonsense, she thought. She kept staring at me, literally giving me the dirtiest look I've ever received in my entire life. She kept calling me 'the medical student'. If I did something wrong, she would talk to the registrar surgeon and say 'the medical student is...'. She was nasty and made me feel like the size of a grain of rice. I felt so awful that tears started streaming down my face and into my surgical mask. *sigh*

It was such a shame that one of the best surgical experience was dampened by this nurse. I spoke to my friends about it and learnt that she was quite a reputation for being like that. Anyway, this is my final rant of the event. It shall now stay in the past, and I will just remember the good bits of assisting in theatre!

Weekending 18-19th April

Weekends are always more active and fun when my boyfriend is here visiting. We also had the pleasure of British sun on Saturday. Therefore we took a nice stroll from Camden to Embankment with several small stops on the way.

Tavistock square at UCL Bloomsbury campus- looking glorious in the sun. 

Inside Russell Square. Where there is an arch, pose under it. 

Seven dials at convent garden. 

Trafalgar Square. 

 A trick bike. There are always street performers at Trafalgar square on the weekends. This bike was particularly difficult to ride on because the handlebar turns the front wheel the opposite way, i.e. handlebars is turned left, wheel goes to the right and vice versa. The performer promised £10 to anyone who could ride the bike for 10 metres! £1 per go. I think he made quite a lot of money that day! 

National Gallery. It is such an impressive architectural building inside and out.

And the weekend was ended with a swing ride at Primrose Hill on a Sunday afternoon.