I am a third year medical student from a British university, writing about the experiences I have on my first clinical year.  I have no particular blog-writing credentials and I certainly don’t consider my life as being of any interest to anyone else.  However, my medical school are always banging on about the importance of “reflective writing” and so this seems like a golden opportunity to say what I really think…

I’ve just come to the end of my second week at my second hospital placement.  On the first day we received a short induction, which went almost entirely in-one-ear-and-out-of-the-other, as I spent the session looking around at my peers and wondering who the hell everyone was.  OK, so I recognised a few individuals, but given the fact that I have been sitting in a room with these people for a fair proportion of the last two years, I could have filled a double decker bus with people it felt like I was passing my eyes over for the very first time!  I began to worry that I had developed that rare neurological condition known as Capgras Syndrome – where you are unable to recognise familiar faces, places or objects…Or had suffered a cerebrovascular incident during the night…Or, worse still, I had wondered into the wrong lecture theatre and was currently surrounded by the new intake of occupational therapists…

I was brought back from this weird direction of thought by something the administrative gentleman giving the talk said.  He warned us that we were all bound to suffer from a rose-tinted, nostalgic longing for our first placement during the next couple of weeks, but that we should ride it out until we became familiar with our new surroundings.  Well I was completely outraged by this.  It was all I could do not to walk out to the front of the lecture hall, pull him up by his slightly oversized ears and scream at him about how cruelly I had been treated by the people at my last placement.  About how I would rather spend eternity locked up in a prison cell with only a very hyperactive, constantly shrieking, omnipresent Graham Norton for company, than be made to go back to that dark, foreboding wasteland of a hospital.  But then I realised this would have been kind of missing the point.

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