Goodbye, Yorkshire

It is the 1st of August and as I write this, I am on a train that is taking me to the Midlands, where I’m starting GP training.

It’s been a week of reflecting (and crying) as I say farewell to the city (and flat) that have been my home since I graduated from university three years ago.

All I can do is thank God because He really did that! There is absolutely no way I could have survived the ups and downs of going into the unknown on my own, and God really sent help and people my way when I needed them most.

From colleagues like Lisa, who I met on my first day and haven’t managed to get rid of yet (haha I joke, SO much love for my fave future obstetrician), to my CMF and church family, who were a constant source of encouragement, and my friends who never let distance get in the way of keeping in touch, I have been so blessed to have such great people around me.

Can’t forget my actual family, ofcourse, because the last three years have really made me appreciate how close we are. I’ve met people who don’t have healthy relationships with their relatives, so knowing how loved I am is most definitely something not to be taken for granted.

I can’t reflect on my time in the north without giving a shout out to the best flatmate ever, Boss. He moved in after I finished FY1 in July 2020, and living with him has truly been one of the highlights of the last three years.

As well documented on this blog, I was so SO sad during the first COVID lockdown, so Boss moving in helped me start to make happier memories in my flat, as prior to that I’d associated the flat with feeling lonely and isolated.

And what fun memories we’ve had! Here are a few of them:

– Christmas 2020, when The Keen One a.k.a Kenny came up and we made so much food. We also watched Bridgerton and sang numerous encores on the karaoke machine that he got for me as a present, and it really was such a great day.

– That phase we went through of doing Tiktok dances during lockdown, as well as the Hello Fresh times and taking turns to cook for each other (#neverforget that time I spent a small fortune on lamb shanks…)

– Catching up on the cultural zeitgeist daily with Ken and the many phrases that are now part of my vocabulary – “It’s upsetting me and my home girls,” “It’s so funny to me… payback… I was waiting for the right…moment.”

– Heather by Conan Gray- why did we have that on repeat for so long? 😂

– ALLLL the bakes! I’ve really missed having cakes/cookies/brownies whenever I want because Boss is an excellent baker.

– So many film nights and Boss patiently listening to my fun facts about the film/actors in them, before eventually falling asleep while the film was still playing…

And so many other memories that would take ages to recount. When I think of my flat now, what stands out the most in my mind are memories that include Boss, as they are my happiest ones and I’m so glad that we lived together. Boss has been such a great friend, and I’m so blessed to have him in my life.

So yeah, that concludes the Yorkshire chapter of my life and I’m so excited for what the future will bring.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while or are new here, thanks for still reading! I know I’ve not been as good at updating it recently, but as I get settled into my new city, I’ll be hoping to get into more of a routine with it.

As always, if you’re someone who knows me in real life and you read this blog, send me a message for a proper catch up! I’m always so honoured when I find out about old friends/students who have found my blog and enjoy it, so don’t be a stranger. Trust me, I have even more to say when you get to know me properly 😊

See you on the other side!

Reflecting On My First Term as a Clinical Teaching Fellow

With Omicron cases on the rise in the UK, I’ve been anxiously watching and keeping updated on the news over the last couple of days because I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle another lockdown. In four days, I’m meant to be going down south to spend my first Christmas since I qualified as a doctor with my family, so praying that no new restrictions get in the way of that…

As first term is coming to an end, I thought it would be good to look back on the last couple of months, and how I’ve been getting on with my role as a Clinical Teaching Fellow. For anyone who hasn’t been following this blog, I was miraculously offered this role after I finished FY2, and it allows me to split my time between clinical work in AMU, teaching first year and gateway medical students, as well as working on projects for the Trust Improvement Team to improve support and training for ethnic minority staff. It’s so great because not only is it a role that allows me to do work in areas that I feel passionately about, but the fact that it’s 9 till 5 means no weekends or oncalls! As well as this, I get some university holidays off too, so this means that I can have a whole two weeks off at Christmas, we thank God!

Anyways, here are some highlights from my first term as a CTF:

• Helping to put together an exhibition in collaboration with the local art college to celebrate diversity at the Trust.
• Feeling like a proud mother because my year 1 students, some of who were visibly shaking with nerves when we first started patient bedside teaching, can now confidently take a whole patient history without needing prompting from me.
• Getting involved with the teaching of gateway medical students! As someone who started medical school on the foundation/gateway programme, I am a huge champion of providing more access to medicine, so I’m glad to be a part of it here.
• Starting work on updating our Trust’s zero tolerance framework re: racism and discrimination. I’ve been working with the Organisation Development team, and our hope is to make reporting incidents more clear, as well as to provide more support to staff on the receiving end of both microaggressions and overt racism.
• Delivering a talk on my personal experiences with microaggressions for the third year in a row to FY1s at my Trust as part of mandatory teaching. I’ve been approached by heads of GP schools in the area who are interested in adding it to their curriculum, so that’s been a bit overwhelming but very exciting!
• Working with the medical school to update their health inequalities teaching, as part of their ongoing work to decolonise the med school curriculum. I’ll be helping to deliver a series of lectures in the new year centring on racism as a determinant of health, so I’m really looking forward to that.

And ofcourse, getting to know my fellow CTFs has definitely been another highlight of the last couple of months! I knew quite a few of them already because we were FY1 doctors together, so it’s been great to work with them again and introduce them to #TaieatsThai

Forever grateful to God for all the opportunities I’ve been having, and what a breath of fresh air this job has been so far. I’ve officially sent off my GP application for next year, as I’m now very sure that being a GP is what I want to do, as it’d allow me to create a role similar to the one I have now. Will be updating on how it all goes, but in the mean time, a song to appreciate how great God has been:

NO MORE PSYCHIATRY

Dear readers, I am officially done with my Psychiatry rotation and I AM FREEEEEEEEEE. AT LAST.

This has definitely been my most emotionally and physically draining job so far – I am well and truly exhausted. Psychiatry has been such a challenge for me, so I’m glad to be at the end; it’s been a very long four months!

So as always, a recap of the highs and lows of the job:

What was I good at? – Getting my documentation done during clinical reviews so that I didn’t have to type up notes afterwards. One of the pros of being a fast typer!

What made me nervous? – “New admission” are still two of my least favourite words, especially when oncall. I really had no idea what to expect when seeing patients sometimes because people present with psychiatric conditions in different ways, so every new patient encounter was always lowkey nerve-wracking because of this.

Useful thing I’ve learnt? – How to prescribe medication for rapid tranquilisation, which are drugs given intramuscularly for urgent patient sedation. The doses for these meds are now ingrained in my brain forever.

The last time I cried at work was? – My last day. And the day before that. And the day before that. And the day before that… yeah, I cried quite a lot towards the end of Psychiatry because I was starting to feel very overwhelmed by the demands of the job. Having to deal with being short staffed with high patient turn over, as well as being the most senior junior doctor on site most days and managing unwell patients was A LOT.

My happiest work moment so far was? – Again, my last day. The ward manager and nursing team gathered in the office to present me with leaving gifts as a thank you for my work on the ward. They told me that they’d noticed how hard I’d worked and how difficult it’d been for me, so they thought I’d “smashed it” overall. This meant so so much to me and I was such a speechless, teary mess. But happy tears this time!

Another happy work moment from my last day was being given this by the patient I’d had to be hidden from:

What a journey it’s been with this patient, so a very fitting end to it all.

A memorable non-med related thing I have done: I finally watched Greta Gerwig’s Little Women and it was amaaaaaaazing. I LOVE the book, and I was supposed to watch it in the cinema last year… but then lockdown happened. I’ve put off watching it for months because of how gutted I was at not being able to see it on the big screen, so finally watching it was really quite something for me.

Anyway, here I am on my last day on the Psych ward:

#freeasabird