School Name

I read with interest the article about NTU naming a school after former president Mr Wee.. Must say i was very envious of them, having the name of such a well loved president being tagged to the school. Not only can they proudly say Mr Wee was a great journalist, he was also a great and loving president for the nation.

I sour at the thought of the school where i come from.. Being named after somebody (i'm quite sure about 99.9999% of students don't know before the faculty's name change) because he had kindly donated millions of bucks to the school..

What if someone asks me... Did he found your school? Who is he? What did he do in his life? How did he look like? All i can say is "he donated money to us, then we changed name.."
Ya.. i know in all advocation for self learning that i should find out all these. But i really don't have the motivation to...

Quotes

1) If you manage to diagnose a Torsade de Pointes at 230am as a HO.. you can win a nobel prize. It is as rare as faeces from a rocking horse.


2) A double blind study is 2 orthopaedics surgeons looking at an ECG.

3) Quick pulse and awake, give medicine and wait
Quick pulse and a nap, give him a zap
(hmm dun sound so smooth like what the lecturer said.. must have forgotten somethings..)

Great Sipadan

Back from a great break at the great sipadan island..

Almost everything here is real beautiful.. beautiful creatures in the sea (unfortuntely these are not my pictures.. no underater camera):

Cuttlefish

Blue spotted ray (which looked like a vacuum cleaner sweeping on the bottom)

Magnificent leopard shark

Cool huge turtles

Beautiful scenery out of the sea...


And beatuy even in the comfort of the resort room:



Must admit I was more panicky during wall dives.. Being unable to see the bottom. And knowing that the whole wall goes on for kilometers of water.. It is more useful to look up than down.. Not only because there are more fishes on the shallower waters.. but looking down always gives me a thought that somehow i will get sucked into the depths of the ocean never to come up again.. Nevertheless, got used to it after some time..

Of course there were many more creatures that i came across.. Moray eels, pygmy seahorse, tiny clownfish (size of a fingernail), flying fishes, marlin jumping out of the water.. All in all it was a real great trip, but it also made me realise how amateur i am in diving.. Buoyancy control and current tacking showed as obvious flaws in my diving abilities as i was swept here and there, up and down while our beloved divemaster Tony was able to maintain his position as if he was waiting for a bus in a bus stop.. And he used half the amount of air we used!!!

Enjoyed the interaction with the marine life.. Almost touched nose with a turtle.. (A sign in the resort prohibits touching, hitting and riding turtles.) Had a good laugh when an italian complained a turtle rammed into his face while he was ascending.. And had a bad sore after unknowingly intruding into the territory of a trigger fish and ended up being bitten by it.. (sigh, saw so many sharks and none took interest in me.. but this picasso trigger fish...)

Well, great view, great creatures, great divemaster and of course great great Dear in the trip. Cannot ask for more..

GOAL!!!

I sometimes wonder why soccer is the only sport where players run really wild after scoring a goal even though a goal does not mean they had won a game.. But i really felt like celebrating mad yesterday after getting my results.. A pass is all i want and i got it thankfully, a final stop to my weeks of worrying about having to repeat 6 months.. But i can't imagine myself celebrating by running around med fac twirling my shirt above my head, or spreading my arms out like a bird and run all round NUS (see picture)


Got to thank Pang Hung for helping me through an unnerving 5 minutes at the computer cluster.. The boot up was real slow and fortunately he was there to talk to, easing the tension in Weiqiang {who was exceptionally quiet :)} and me. I started off by asking PH about his knee and he started talking about karma, cos he had caused people to fracture their arms before etc, so now his knee is like that.. moved on to say "I really believe in karma.." At that point i wished i had helped more elderly cross the road or bought more tissue papers from the blind.. and of course that the computer will decide that its warm up is complete...

The boot up was finally complete, and there i was so excited that i was at a complete loss as to where to click for the results and it's PH to the rescue again, guiding me...
Finally heaved a sigh of relief at the result and few seconds later.. got to hug PH.. just like after scoring a goal.. haha he initiated it.. though i half suspect he wished i was from the opposite sex..

Going to NUH ortho with 3 other soccer guys.. can't blame me for the title of this entry right?

Time to enjoy the sun sand and sea this weekend :)

Murderous Medicine

Chanced upon this book at JE library..
It talked about the Holocaust and interestingly some ethical issues about medicine surfaced just when i thought the Nazis killed the Jews without any need for excuses in the 2nd World War.. (Interesting that i also completed Call of Duty 2 recently.. what a coincidence..)

1) Eugenics had already evolved in the Nazi realm.. People of the Aryan race were favoured and all the handicapped, either intellectually or physically were disposed of literally by any means deemed legal then.. These done in the hope that future generations will be free of disabilities.

2) Then come the issue of communication with patients.. Typhus was endemic then in Germany and the Nazis were manipulative enough to make most believe that Typhus was spread by the Jews. Hordes of Jews were then "exiled" into Ghettos with conditions so bad that even bathing a hundred times a day will fail to rid the risk of being bitten by lice, the vector for Typhus..
So what do the Nazis do when a Jew is suspected of Typhus? They will line the 'patients' up into 'shower rooms' with a space to accommodate hundreds in the pretext of disinfecting them.. But instead of water coming from the showers, it was cyanide gas... No Nazi doctor told the patients of the real 'treatment'.

3) Last of which is patient's consent.. the many deaths caused by these executions yield thousands of samples for the German doctors either for research or for sale of skeletons/body parts.. Of course the doctors never asked patients if they were willing to donate their body for research.. The poor people don't even know they are being killed!!

One wonders how such hatred can surface that fellow human beings are no longer treated as equals. I can so easily say the Nazis were real cruel.. But i really wonder if i were born an Aryan, and told since birth all the bad things in the world about the Jews whether true or not.. Will i still see this episode in the same light as i would now?

Anyway, this book is quite good to read in the beginning.. Even tells of the origin of the name Rickettsia Prowazeckie but as the book goes on.. facts repeat themselves repeatedly.. (ya note: repeat repeatedly..) only to highlight the author's hatred of the Nazis. Well who could blame her? I ended up not being able to finish the book...

Good Break?

Suffered from post-training insomnia on monday again.. Served to remind me that i underwent such episodes many months ago when training was regular.. Still a mystery why it happens.

Don't know what's wrong with me.. Had been doing things i liked to do but somehow i still feel that this holiday has not been fulfilling.. Maybe still worrying about the results. but by the time the results comes out... not much left of a holiday by then...

Came across a primary 4 science assessment book yesterday and was surprised by some questions they have inside that i thought i would only be able to answer as a secondary 3 student taking biology.

1) Which of the following blood vessels are the smallest?
2) You are in a state of ______ when your blood circulation is insufficient.

Kids are smart nowadays.. Maybe in a few years time a secondary school kid can prescribe painkillers according to the pain ladder...

5 more days to April 10th.. and about 1 week to Sipadan!! :)