Exam

Taking an exam is just like playing the roulette. You spend as much as you can afford on as many numbers as possible and fervently hope upon your lucky stars that the silver ball rest upon a number you choose.

An element of luck is needed together with all the hard work you chipped into it, especially in assembling the money.

For those caught in the feverish exam mood, I wish you best of luck. May the exam gods smile on you, and you in turn, walks out of the exam hall with a foolish grin on your face and be promptly spanked.

If your luck is in the dumps, oh well, go find a four leaf clover to put under your bed and have a nice dream. You won’t fail. The Uni loves to boast having a 99.9% passing rate.

Anyway, just good luck and all the best!

Six months

October sixteenth was the day where I passed my sixth month mark of my year as a provisionally registered pharmacist (PRP).

Half of the road travelled and am I none the wiser?

Come to think of it, this half a year had been an enriching experience, in terms of pharmacy knowledge, human relationship, work politics and keeping a right frame of mind for the job.

I remembered starting my work in the Out-patient pharmacy (OPD) a picture of blur-ness, not helped by the marketplace like scene.  OPD was madness then, the baskets of prescriptions piling high, the pharmacy people having harassed look, patients, frowns of impatience. 

That’s what happens behind the scene in OPD the middle of the night…

Six months down the road, I found myself in OPD again, this time seeing mirror images of myself writing down notes  on things to learn tonight, flipping through books, asking questions. Ah new PRPs…they never cease to amaze. Me? well, I am a little bored now, feeling mechanical dispensing yet another paracetamol or benadryl. Just trying my best to keep the smile on my face going. Knowledge had improved leaps and bounds – its all about experience. But of course, it is still a process of continuous learning.

Office politics is all dirty, with half-baked rumours of back stabbing and two-faced people constantly flying in the air. Everything you did is tagged with an evil motive by green eyed monsters.  Being neutral is hard – genuine friend or spy from the other camp? Guess just need to survive as best as I can. Diseases of the human mind are more complicated than the sum of the diseases caused by all those little bacteria and viruses. Why can’t everyone just be friends…

Pills are now my best friends…

Me? Just going to work everyday in a cheery mood. I need to go work anyway, why choose to be in a bad mood? Amidst all this hocus-pocus I still find work fun. It feels great to be able to help people managing their medications and life better everyday. In the end, this is what pharmacists are trained to do – making a difference in the lives of the sick. Okay politically correctly, the medically deranged.   

So my views or wishes or outlook for the other half of the journey? Bring it on!

Salmon galore

 

Rich succulent raw salmon

Plus a prehistoric carnivore who loves raw salmon

Equals to salmon sushi!

Proof that I made them:

 

Sushi master at work. I just adored raw salmon. Their texture is just heavenly. Yum..

Night Shift

It had been over for a while but I guessed I should’ve blogged about my night shift. It was a week ago to be exact.

Anyway as the hospital is open for 24 hours, someone gotta be out there to man the counter at night. I was the designated one last week – to work from 10pm to 730am.

The main reason we were required to work is to cater for those people being sent to the Accident and Emergency department. The amount of human traffic was very random, from one solitary person every hour to a sudden bunch of ten in a few minutes. As they say, accident happens anytime.

It was actually quite a boring shift. The medications dispensed were similar every time: either the asthma meds, the upper respiratory tract infection meds, the gastric meds, or the painkiller meds. 

And time passed real slow. Most of the time the waiting area was empty.

And I spent the time there munching tit-bits, drinking caffeinated drinks and watching dramas.

 

The only eventful thing was that there was a drunk guy on my third night of shift. He was complaining how the doctor sort of looked down on him. He rambled on and on for like 40 minutes. It required quite a lot of patience just to keep myself from shouting “wake up” to him.

Once in a while you get these kind of patients who think the doctors are useless coz they didn’t get better or didn’t treat them as they expect to be treated. They expects us to hear them out and  to ring and complain to the doctors. Yesterday a lady was complaining for half an hour that the doctors incompetency got her surgical wound to be infected. She had been bitter about it for 3 years. I actually was quite tempted to refer her to a psychiatrist to get rid of her victim mentality.  No quality of life at all if you are unhappy all the time.

Overall, working nights was not too bad. Just that it causes reactivation of dormant pimples and probably some weight gain due to overconsumption of junk food. But a novel experience. I didn’t realise I can cope with an all-nighter that well.

Lanterns.Cameras.Food for thought

The moment I stepped into the park, I can feel the first prangs of regret.

For even at the ungodly time of 11pm, The Malaysia-Chinese Friendship Park was filled to the brim with colourful lanterns and people.  

Imagine this, beautifully sculptured red Chinese gazebo next to green bamboo trees that were dotted with lanterns of myriad colours; people of all shapes sitting, strolling, laughing and chatting all around and soft smoke billowing in the background. All this bathed by the big round moon in all its shining glory.

The ultimate scenery for a good snap. And I didn’t bring my camera.

But obviously a lot of people didn’t forget theirs. Shutterbugs in droves paraded their toys, one bigger than the other. Snap snap snap, busy fingers trying to capture the moment in bytes and bits, to be stored and reminisced sometime in the future.

A bunch of sour-grapes I am not, but are we not better be living in the present rather than saving the present for the future? In our fascination of taking photos, are we not living the moment in real life but rather behind lens and apertures and lightings? How can one drink in the whole scene, with all five senses behind the bulky frame of a camera?

Sans a camera, I did my best to store the whole picturesque scene into my memory. I see the lantern swaying gently in the soft breeze, feel the cosy heat  from the candles, hear the carefree laughter of kids. It enriched my experience. I feel contented. Happy to have witnessed such amazing random arrangement of things and people that create this smorgasbord of senses.

But yet, I couldn’t channel and share it wholly with you. Even I wrote the whole scene in a thousand words, using the most beautiful words, picturing it will still be akin a puzzle in the process of being pieced together, broken and incomplete. Only a camera taken picture can ensure a grasp comes out from your mouth, a breathtaking ‘wow’, a murmur of praise for the beauty of the night, a yearning wish that you were here in the matter of seconds.  

Perhaps taking a photo then is really an ultimate case of selfless sharing, an action of forsaking the fulfilment of your five senses at that time for the enrichment of others not there. How noble is that!

Nevertheless, perhaps it is good sometimes to take in the world not from behind the camera lens. =)

This mooncake festival was also the first time in 6 years that I spent it with my family. We had a feast with lanterns as the backdrop.

The only dish that I cooked was the pork with salted fish. My and my housemates in Melbourne used to eat this a lot as it was LamTK’s signature dish.

Ahh.. brings out the memories. The good old days.. How I miss them!

Anyway, Happy Mid-Autumn festival.