When I am king you will be first against the wall...

It's been a long week so far. Was on-call over the weekend, which is never an easy experience and I've been working 12-hours days for the past 3 days, with tomorrow bound to be worse since my SHO won't be around. Yes ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the world of gastroenterology.

The upside of it all is the fact that I've probably learnt more in the past 2 weeks than in my entire 3 months of surgery. The consultants I work for are known to be of the garang sort, but they're good teachers who're constantly quizzing folks (I'm currently buffered by the final year medical students attached to us) and that's educational. And there's also the myriad of cases to learn from and opportunities to practise skills e.g. I've done 2 paracentises this week (having never done it before) and I did a pleural aspiration today. Nothing particularly exciting for senior docs, but definitely milestones for me. It's funny thinking that I'm getting more practical experience in my medical rotation rather than surgical rotation and I dread to think of how stupid I'll be when I enter my F2 year after spending 3 months as a house officer in orthopaedics.

The main prob we have is the lack of nurses on the ward, and the fact that we hardly ever have a ward clerk. Making life that much more difficult. And whenever my SHO is not around, it gets a little difficult too since there's almost never less than 40 patients under my teams' care at any given moment. Luckily the registars (and the consultants) are rather approachable but I'll only find out for sure next week, when Pierre goes onto night duty.
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A friend of mine said that I'm like a sponge - I soak things up from people around me, but I don't really give away much about myself. I was a little surprised at first, but I guess I'm able to see how she came to that conclusion. Funnily enough, I don't think there's any one fact about me that absolutely nobody knows about - somebody almost always knows what's going on in my head, especially Sweetie. If all my closest friends came together and exchanged information about me, all the pieces would come in nicely. But then even Sweetie has said that I should be more forthcoming with my thoughts, so maybe I'll speak out a little more.

That's not a problem with a couple of nurses from over the weekend though - I managed to articulate quite succintly that their behaviour was unbecoming and in total contrast to our aim of maintaining an optimal level of care.
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Don't really know what to make out of the new cabinet line-up. The only good thing is that Tok Pa has been put in place of the Higher Education Ministry, a move that might hopefully yield some positive results. Other than that, most movements seem to occur in 2nd tier positions. Perhaps a certain play is at hand to ensure that the next generation cabinet ministers are in place to snatch their positions at an appropriate time? Say when the masses are finally truly madly deeply fed up of the jokes that're scattered about?
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It's funny how everyone's up in arms over the cartoon published by the NST. Yes, one should not insult Islam or any religion/believes for that matter. But the cartoon in the NST is a far cry from the one published in Denmark and I despair watching the reaction of some individuals - screaming for heads to roll, marching in protest and the likes.

There are so many other unethical/unIslamic pratices going around that is more worthy of mention. Why not protest against allowing men to be polygamous, whenever they feel it's 'necessary' without consulting their wives (as per the idea of the Islamic Family Law)? The excuse of 'Nabi Muhammad kahwin 4...sunat...' is laughable at best, and is actually insulting to our Prophet as well, since the idea behind being polygamous are of a worthier nature e.g. taking care of orphans and those who're in need. Not because one has an urge to slide his dick into every other orifice that's available. And I don't ever recall reading anything in the Quran or Hadis (although I have to admit to not reading that many hadis') that encourages discrimination based on religious/ethic grounds and the application of policies that make the rich and well-connected richer and the poor poorer.

Our country is heading for a slippery slope and something needs to be done to correct it. Priorities are misplaced with silly actions like banning so-called black metal music but allowing national assets to be sold to the highest bidder. But what exactly needs to be done?