I spent last week indulging in fiction. The biggest of all, is of course Star Wars III. Prior to that, I revised the previous two episodes.
Then, I consume the post-Return of the Jedi Timothy Zahn's trilogy comics. In between, I read short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri.
Back home in Ipoh, I joined my sister in a TVB drama series marathon. "Triumph in the Skies" - the series about pilots and airport staff was too good for the ortho books.
Having returned to PJ yesterday, before I could open the ortho book, Pang gave me a DVD - Team America: World Police - Trey Parker's gross puppet comedy. Later, more of Star Wars comics.
Even now, my aim for this week is to acquire the DVDs for the original trilogy.
Sigh, too much fiction already......Gotta stop and give way for Orthopaedics already...
National Service in Malaysia. Was it the idea of the gangster Dr. M or the fat bast*rd Najib? Anyway, NS and its legal consequences are rearing its stupid ugly head.
Breaking News 1 :- Latest study by the University of WIB, Faculty of Biomedical Sciences has discovered that pigs can actually fly.
Breaking News 2: - Badawee announced that the national service programme would be terminated for the purpose of diverting the allocated annual RM 500 million for increasing government doctor's salary.
"We realised that NS was and always would be a stupid idea, conceived by a retiring megalomaniac as his swansong after 22 years. And my dear doctors in the government, they have suffered much, and it is time to give them a break. The increment is not very much, but we are trying...we are trying," he commented.
When asked how much an increase a government doctor would receive, he said, "You kiralah!"
We counted, and here it is:-
no.govt docs=x increment /year=500 000 000/x
monthly increment=500 000 000/12x
katakan x= 20 000
monthly increment for doctors = RM 2083
Hip, hip, hip hooray..... if the pigs really can fly
The comercially motivated entry that does not make sense: Please ignore
It was not easy to earn a side income while studying, unless of course you have the stamina and the character to go direct-selling. Google Adsense helped me to flirt with the idea of making some cash out of blogging, something that I am not particularly good at, but fond of doing. However, after months of putting it at the side bar, it is not generating much income. Nobody clicks except myself ! Still counting the days for it to reach USD 100 before I can cash in, but then again, local banks may not let me earn much out of a foreign check. So, in order to generate more revenue, this is the entry....:
There was a new programme on TV called Trans Union that feature diseases common among life insurance brokers. One of them is Mesothelioma, cancer of the pleura, which has insidiously recruited more victims among the brokers. Yet so, even now we have more law graduates becoming mesothelioma attorneys and mesothelioma lawyers. Also known as Asbestos Cancer or malignant pleural mesothelioma, this disease although still less common than lung cancer, can generate ripples among the banking community because of so many brokers involved. It has even created higher premiums in home insurance, home mortgage and bank home loan.
Medical students of an unidentified medical school has started using Linux host and webhosting to host a formidable search engine to optimize research about mesothelioma.
In Psychiatry, I learnt that Humour is a mature defence mechanism to divert our attention from a certain conflict or worry. ( More often that not, Malaysians do not find it easy to laugh at ourselves, at our own shortcomings)
Some of us were somewhat unhappy to realise that some of our colleagues and even some juniors would one day become our department heads and academic consultants while we are still slogging to apply for post-graduate courses or trying to pass the exams.
This is because there is an animal called SLAB (Skim Latihan Akademik Bumiputera) created to produce more bumiputera lecturers where only a year of internship is enough to qualify for you for this scheme. Meanwhile, the rest of us would have to go through the ridiculously long process of gaining qualification for a post-graduate course.
There is definitely nothing wrong about specialist training early in our career instead of working for years in the government with no steps ahead in specialisation. I am taught by some great teachers who had made it through SLAB.
However, it is quite disheartening to limit this wonderful programme to just a certain group in the medical fraternity.
Looking at our country where there are worse problems, political and social, it is no use crying or making noise over this. Instead, maybe instead we should laugh about it.
Training process - To be conducted at District hospitals only (central hospitals sudah penuh) 1.Self-mentoring - Teach and learn from medical students 2.ER dvd sessions - Learn from Chicago GH and Dr Greene 3.Curi dengar sessions - eavesdropping on real postgraduate students 4.Monthly ' Living below your means - How to survive with a small salary' seminar
Certificate of completion of training (CCT) would qualify you for none other than further government service as senior MO or private practice as GP. The board of SLACK examiners and mentors will try to get recognition in Papua NG, Cambodia and the Maldives.
On 5th of May this year, the medical library of UM was renamed T.J. Danaraj Medical Library.
This is probably one of the few good decisions by the administration in recent years. Even better, they should rename the whole medical faculty as T.J. Danaraj School of Medicine.
The late Tan Sri Professor T.J. Danaraj was the founding dean of the UM medical school, the great teacher who have set the high standards of the school, and taught so many great doctors.
Besides being an authority of medicine during his days, he had a genuine passion for medical education. Later he moved on to Saudi Arabia to help plan their medical school and teaching hospital. He spent his later years in Dungun, Terengganu.
The current medical undergraduates did not have the privilege to get to know this man, but his name lives on in books, magazines and from the senior doctors who have been inspired by him.
The standard of graduates have since then dropped, the enrolment criteria crippled, and the training compromised. Renaming the library may be superficial, but at least this is a sign we are looking back to our founding dean. Let's hope we are also looking back at how he managed the school, and the things he stood for as a doctor and as a teacher. Let's hope we can get inspired and break free from the current poor standards.
I always wonder what Professor Danaraj would say if he were to be one of our examiners. Would he be happy or would he be hugely disappointed?
*W.I.B is the personal blog of fooji. He works for the ministry of health seven days a week, skips his breakfast and looks forward to a good dinner at the end of the day.
w.I.b:warung ikan bakar:
