Sunday, July 30

I don't like what I see...

Its another Sunday afternoon, and the weekend is nearly gone as I get ready for the week. I have to print out my lecture notes and week outline and bits and pieces. Some people may or may not know, that despite me being amazing and brave and confident in all sorts of ways (hehe!) I'm actually really not a big fan of needles. Ok.. so I locked myself in the toilet at Mum's work one of the (relatively recent) tiems I was going to be vaccinated. And now we have a blood prac this week. First paragraph, safety guidlines as folows:
Students must only use their own blood for their personal experiment.

I think somehow, that involves getting the blood out of me. This is confirmed on the next page where you get 'add four drops of your own blood to....'
I can deal with taking other people's blood but I don't want to be stabbed! Will have to be big and brave and get over it one day... this week!
In other news, we get the house monday week - a week from tomorrow... wheeeeee! But seems liek our plan is to actually move in mid-semester break so that gives us about 5 weeks to get sorted. Lots to do....

Monday, July 24

Monday-itis

Ho hum. Monday again. Weekend was ok - had a fun night on Saturday out with med students at the TUMSS 40th anniversary cocktail party (with beer, wine and champagne.. doesn't sound like cocktails to me!) then to see Andrew's band play (Tahnee's boyfriend) then a wander over to town to sit in the bakehouse for a bit! Otherwise.. i spent lots of time not studying (only 1 week in - don't wanna work too hard yet!!). I made bread, went for a walk to boronia beach... lots of fun things. But now back to uni - up next lecture on hip anatomy.

Thursday, July 20

Tidying frenzy down the drain (and some gory med stuff)

SOLD. Today, it seems we sold our house. This is good because of all the bridging finance blah blah blah (I don't pay attention to these money matters!) although it did go for less than intended by a fair bit. But it was a cash offer and its now whereas it could take months for something else to come along. The family who bought it were really keen but just couldn't go up another inch - so I think we're all happy about it. Mostly!!! Its still kinda wierd, but I think it will feel like that until the day I go - and probably after that when 'home' is to another house. But still, its exciting. A new phase of life in a new house, with a slightly different arrangement of people - and room for extras! And there's no argument that it will be convenient to live near town for clinical school stuff, and just to be close to things - docks, aquatics centre, domain, town, not far to north hobart, salamanca or anywhere really. Even back to Kingston to visit won't be far not that I'll have a house there.. but other people I know will still live there. And I'll still go to Margate Church so I can still be part of down there in some ways!

So... now we have a 90 day settlement on the house during which there is a lot of packing up to do. But its not as daunting as when we thought it was 30 days.. it was looking bad!

Today's other news is that I've done my first few hours of cadaver dissection. I won't say much on here anyway because somepeople might prefer not to read it. But because I can, I'll make a few comments - so if you're squeamish don't read the next part of this post :)



Cadaver dissection details further down... if you're game!




Our cadaver on table C is an elderly male chap. It seems that Tassie doesn't have enough cadavers of its own so it imports some from South Australia. This is all well and good, although SA needed some heads to use for surgical training. As a consequence, 4 of the cadavers our class is using have their head and necks removed. I wasn't game to look under the rags covering that area yesterday, but I peaked today. I could see the bones and trachea and oesophagus, neck... arms... all there! (windpipe, food tube etc.. gosh - i've almost forgotten their colloquial names!!). The Tasmanian bodies only have 1/4 of their heads as the 3rd years already dissected those!

Meanwhile, today we began with the lower limb - in particular the thigh. We slit the skin and began to separate it along the 'fascia' - junction between skin + fat and the covering of the muscle. It was kinda amazing and kinda gross and smelly, and exciting all at once. The gross bits were mostly when you got collections of liquid - just water fermaldehyde and ethanol or something but it collected in the skin and dripped out! Also some collections of fat were really yellow and some were orange and they were kinda gross. But mostly he's quite a slim chap. The hands and feet are particularly yellow. We noticed some little holes in his feet - apparently feet are hard to embalm, so they must have injected the embalming liquid into the sole of his feet plus into each toe!! By the end of our afternoon work we had removed the skin in 2 strips from the upwards facing parts between the hip and just below the knee, exposing the muscles and parts of bone in the knee. Interesting!!

On the emotional side... I want to remember that he was a person who lived, and had family and interests and aspirations, but at the same time chose to donate his body for the education of others (ME!). Whilst it is confronting, it was not as bad as I thought to see him lying there. Its a body, but it looks like plasticene or something - not like someone who could be sleeping or just died. The embalming process causes it to take on about 30k of fluid which I guess changes the look of the body as well as causing it to be much yellower. And then today when it was time to cut I tried not to think about anything else apart from the section I was looking at. Working gently, the scalpel smoothly cut through skin. We started pulling back the skin with some hesitation - unused to our dissection tools and the tissues themselves. After a short amount of time I was relatively happy peeling back the layers to find the muscles attached to the knee. We found some nerves and blood vessels too. I don't think we cut through too many things that we weren't supposed to!

It is an amazing thing to let your body be cut up and studied. I'm not sure if I would be brave enough. But perhaps when one day I decide my organs are no longer worth donating, my body could be useful instead...

Wednesday, July 19

Buy This House

Its kinda wierd to see my house on realestate.com.au! But its good that its there for all to see... pity no-one's bought it yet but there's still time. (One family were keen... will see what evolves!). Meanwhile... back into uni. I met my friendly cadaver today - start dissecting tomorrow which is a little daunting but should be ok. Only tricky part is the co-op shop and surgimed both sold out of the anatomy atlases (crucial before and during dissection) and another textbook I was planning to get. The anatomy atlas is actually out of stock in Australia so onlie I can't do better than '2-4 weeks but may be delayed' to order it - unless you go the extra expensive versions! The other one should be in soon... (Cost here's nothign I'd rather spend my money on!)

Sunday, July 16

And then I wore him out.... for about 5 minutes. Posted by Picasa
The dog I threw slobbery balls for in Grafton (grandparents place) - He couldn't decide which ball he preferred. Posted by Picasa
Me, Lockie and Tahnee enjoying our hot chocolate drinks also at San Churro. A white hot chocolate, a mocha, and a hot chocolate with chilli... all very good. Posted by Picasa
Sarah, Sirocha and Genevieve sitting at San Churros chocolateria in Brunswick St. Posted by Picasa
shots of coldplay members on the big screen Posted by Picasa
Big screen at coldplay concert (not quite sharp but familiar images) Posted by Picasa
And it was all YELLOW Posted by Picasa

Friday, July 14

Formatted

I was annoyed that whenever I typed blog entries it all turned into one big lump of text.. and now I have found the setting to fix it (I think). And I get space for the little titles as well. Now I just have to think of imaginative ones! Hurrah

Last Day of the Holidays

I saw on Jac's blog a lovely picture of the sunrise this morning. I have to say that by the time I got up it was looking lovely but more like this: compared to Jacs pic of this: But still - I'm allowed to sleep in in the holidays! Today all I have lined up are exciting things like restocking on notebooks for uni from Big W (it will be my 2nd venture into the new one in Kingston!) and more house sorting out.
This evening I am going to something or other in Moonah to see Tahnee's boyfriend Andrew's band playing, and then to Salamanca for drinks with a friend going to the UK for a bit.

I had an interesting time demolishing Dads bathroom yetserday with a crowbar and sledge hammer! Actually he did the sledgehammering - which is good because only he is to blame for hte fact some plaster fell off the wall on the other side - which happens to be my bedroom. Hmmm - I don't fancy plaster in my bed.

Wednesday, July 12

Results Day

Today is results day for university students like me. However because Utas obviously can't quite cope, the best I've managed to get to so far (after 'utas server timed out') was a site that said 'You should not be at this page' and 'invalid location'... so I still don't know my results. Not sure that i'd post them on here anyway - but you get to read about my frustration in trying to find them!

My other plans for the day have also been foiled - was going to try to fix the wireless network on the desktop coputer at dads but I can't find the bit with the security settings that made it stop working, and I was going to take papers to centrelink but when I went home to Mums to get them yesterday unbeknownst to me they'd been hidden in a cupboard due to open home. Excellent! But with a change of plans, it may still be possible to do what needs to get done, just in a different order! Not much else to report.

Oh I saw Pirates of the Carribean - Dead Man's Chest last night. Enjoyable but not as good as no 1. Its sillier and over the top...but Arrrr its still got some great effects and good pirates. Arrr.
I also watched Princess Mononoke - another Studio Ghibli anime film. I didn't like it as much as Howls Moving Castle and some of the others but I still enjoyed it. The tree spirits are great.

Tuesday, July 11

Blog-strolling... I went on an adventure to see what I could see!

This morning while putting off getting up properly (I've had breakfast....) I was having a look around a couple of other peoples blogs that I found with blogorama.

This one is all about 'fab packaging' of normal-ish supermarket products and it caught my eye!
Another one was a collection of someones collages - arty kinda stuff. I haven't explored it much but I was interested to see a record of someones ideas. The links to other sites from here included sites in English, I think Spanish, some arty, some political/poetic.. interesting!

One of the links, Blue Tea has a heap of interesting posts - links to photos - lego suicides, animation/claymation, mini photos etc. Looks like a collection I'd like to look into more except that Dads internet doens't have a large limit so I'll save it for another day. It did have a link to a Russian Climbing video clip Jack showed me the other day - kid climbing and leaping from rooftops, up and over and down buildings etc! Even the links down the side to other photo/games/arty/science/other random sites and blogs look fun to explore. I haven't worked out where most of these people are from, but another link I followed from Blue Tea was talking about Melbourne - not far from my world at all!

Home again

Hello. I thought that I wrote a blog since I've been home, but either I was dreaming or my computer rejected it rather than posting it as it should have! Still... I'm home and all is going well... Its holidays so there is no problem with me getting up late and doing very little. I watched some of the soccer yesterday morning. I had watched Pirates of the Carribean the night before on TV and then deliberately went to sleep on the couch. This way when my phone alarm went of at 4am all I had to do was turn the tv on. I would have watched it all but I went back to sleep at some point in the second half!! I woke in time for the penalty shots at the end and to see the ecstatic Italian team. I didn't want either France or Italy to win, however at least the socceroos were beaten by the team who took the World Cup!

Today I am going to look at a rental property with Tahnee - for her and Andrew, not me. My house story is still the same - Mum's is for sale, and settlement for the other one is coming closer... this means packing and sorting out lots of stuff at home. I'm pretending it doens't and have done nothing! But I will be back at Mum's tomorrow and perhaps I'll get stuck into it then if I can't find any other distractions.

Friday, July 7

'narrowband'

I did write another post since I've been here in Grafton, however the internet was sooo slow(broadband = narrowband!!) and it died out just as I went to post it! So more about Melbourne later... but I will say that we went to the ACMI=Aus centre for the moving image where they had an exhibition relating to 50 years of TV. There was an A-Z of differetn elements of tv - news, gameshows, kids etc.. one letter featured a remix thing from a website called YouTube which we really enjoyed! I managed to find it - although the clip we saw was only part of what I found on the website. This is the clip we enjoyed - think techno lord of the rigns.
I also found an amusing Adams family clip while searching through the other Lord of the Rings clips. Anyway, back home tomorrow evening - flying Coffs Harbour to Sydney to Hobart. Normality will return soon enough but thankfully I have one more week of holidays before semester 2 starts.

Wednesday, July 5

Hello little blog.
I have had a fun time in Melbourne passing the time in a variety of ways - shopping, eating, shopping, walking lots, shopping, looking through some exhibitions etc. Got up early this morning for shuttle bus transfer to station and skybus to airport. Flew to Coolangatta (dont' even know how its spelt!!) where I met my Dads parents. They had just flown into Brisbane from a holiday of their own. Anyway we drove back to their place in Grafton where I'm staying for 3 nights. Out to dinner now - more later.