huilin

Yet another tiring week went by. This one saw me with yoga lessons on Monday, dinner with Lawrence followed by Joel’s birthday surprise at AH on Wednesday, an exciting night call on Friday, the release of the new Harry Potter book on Saturday morning, and lots of sleep plus a night out to Acid bar last night.

A random photo we took whilst in the MRT station waiting for the train.

At 1030pm on Wednesday, about 13 of us gathered at the AH lobby to surprise Joel who was doing night call on the eve of his birthday. It was rather hilarious, as the original plan was for Suriya and Honlyn who were on call with him, to get the birthday boy down before 11pm; presumebly for supper with Baorong and Eugene who were also on call that night. Unfortunately, the dear boy went to the OT to watch a surgery, and refused to budge till after 1130pm.
The lot of us hid in random places in the AH lobby – with most of us behind the reception desk. When Joel finally came down, however, he spotted some of us behind the desk and whilst we didn’t get to yell “SURPRISE!”, the look on his face was priceless.
Happy Happy 23rd Birthday dear Joel! =)

Friday’s night call was pretty exciting. The best so far amongst the 3 night calls I’ve done. We stayed up till about 130-2am, and I got to do a plug, take blood, do ECG, PR a lady etc. Fiona and Alvin got to catherise patients, and Fiona even got to do an arterial blood gas! We also went around clerking many new cases for the doctors when it started getting busier at about 12+. I had lots of fun, and even “almost” got to write up a patient’s history in the case file.

Last night, Marcus, Pooja and I met up at Acid bar for some drinks, catching up and good music. Zj came for a little while but scooted off to join his friends soon enough. Sarah was really good, as I remembered from a few weeks ago with Celene. Acid bar’s mojitos are great too! Surprisingly, the strawberry daiquiri that I ordered (wasn’t on the menu) turned out really nice as well.

Towards the later part of the evening, Marcus, Pooj and I started playing with the manual function on the camera, and took several shots without flash and high ISO, which explains the graininess and blurring of these subsequent photos.

Its Sunday and I’m really exhausted from the week. Waiting for Lawrence to finish with my new Harry Potter book then I can read it to find out if Harry dies. In the meantime, its to the bed for me, even though its noon now. Too tired.

This week was yet another busy busy week. Met up with Selene and Huiling (separately) on Tuesday, had another tiring yoga session on Wednesday night which left me aching on Thursday, got to assist with my FIRST surgery and finally touch a breast lump on Thursday, Harry Potter movie outing with my parents and Lawrence on Friday, and the TTSH surgery potluck party on Saturday! As it seems, I didn’t get much time to study at all. Perhaps a few hours here and there in the TTSH library, or at home after I get back for a couple of hours.

Here are random photographs from the week.

The CG (clinical group) guys and I slacking outside the TTSH Mr Bean outlet after the 730 tutorial on Tuesday. I love it that TTSH has Mr Bean. Their pancakes are great whenever we’re feeling peaky and have a few minutes to spare in between clerking patients and tutorials, and soya bean is definitely a welcome alternative to the copious amounts of teh-ping and coffee we guzzle.

With Selene and Wenkien at Dome cafe later on in the day. And the happifying strawberry and cream cheese donut with a girl face that I got treated to!

On Thursday, Zhenjin, Jon and I all got to scrub in and assist with our first surgeries! An exciting day for all of us. Zj started off by assisting with a female inguinal hernia repair, then Jon and I got “picked up” by another surgeon whom we followed, and I got to assist with a male inguinal hernia repair. Jon later assisted with a laproscopic cholecystectomy and got to hold the patient’s gall bladder. It wasn’t much, I must say, considering that all I really got to do was cut the sutures after the surgeon tied the knots, but getting to go in up close and even touching internal anatomical structures (i touched the spermatic cord!) that I’ve only gotten to read about so far, was really amazing. I was really clumsy though, constantly accidentally touching the sides of the sink and random places as I was scrubbing up, which led to the constant need to re-scrub up again.

Here are some fooding photographs from the post-movie dinner at Bakerzin on Friday. Somehow, the shots that I took of us all turned out blurred.
I was surprised to find that just about everywhere in Vivocity is closed at 10pm on a Friday night. We walked through the entire shopping complex after the movie looking for some restaurants that were still open, and the choice left was paltry. Thankfully, Bakerzin had seats, and we had a great dinner there. I especially loved the profiteroles and waffles with ice cream that we had for dessert. The waffles were crisp and warm (so hard to find nowadays, with the innundation of poorly made soft soggy waffles) and still remained so after at least 15mins of ice cream on it, which were quite remarkable.

On Saturday night was the potluck that a bunch of us organised for the TTSH surg people =) It turned out really well, with most of us in attendance, and yummy food each of us prepared! To me, the best of the night was Candice’s chicken pie. But like Alvin brought his mum’s yam rice, Fiona brought her granny’s beehoon, Mingjun brought jiao zi, Esther brought edaname, Daryl brought fishballs that I got conned into believing that she made herself, Joshua brought satay, Chris brought pizza, Jerry&Zj brought drinks, Mag brought yummy lime jelly with mango and a custard sauce, Zub brought ice cream, I made my cheesecake brownies, and Jon provided his house =)

We had SO MUCH food, but had lots of fun sitting around sharing stories from the hospital and gossiping about random things. We watched a gay german star wars spoof in Jon’s home theatre after. I had a great time, bonding with everyone, and getting to know Jon’s gf Geri.

Finally, I shall end off this extremely long post with a nice photo of Zj, Bean and me. I miss Bean.

Cel just sent me this picture we took at her party. I thought that it was too nice a picture not to share here. =)

This week has been an extremely busy week for me, what with exhausting clinics daily from 730 till abt 6, my first yoga session in a LONG time on Tuesday (which I felt extremely invigorated after), night call on Wednesday with Daryl and Weiming, and Cold Rock Ice Creamery on Friday evening with Lawrence and his mum. That’s not even counting having to read up on surgical stuff (still ploughing through my Browse and Washington manual, dont even dare to look at the tremendously intimidating Bailey&Love on my desk), and Pathology, which despite the dept having “taught” 4 systems already, I still dont know anything at all. No idea how to study for the upcoming CA (which coincides with my surgical posting CA) that includes almost everything in the syllabus. Am feeling extremely stressed indeed.

Nonetheless, I’m loving every second of it. TTSH is a really nice place to be too, the wonderful and fun people I spend my days with in the hospital just makes it all worthwhile. The TTSH surg people are actually planning a mid-posting potluck soon! I’m looking forward to it.

Today, in lieu of not having gone out for our ritual Saturday night family dinner yesterday because of Andrew’s party, my parents and I brought my granny to Bosses restaurant at Vivocity for dim sum. Lawrence came along too =)

(I just lumped all the pictures together in one big collage as I don’t have time to make multiple small collages as I’ve been doing so far.)

The dim sum at Bosses was really surprisngly very very good! My favourite was the “Tian Xia Di Yi” Bao (the Number One Bun) which had char siew and preserved vegetables in a deliciously soft bun. I also loved their custard bun (with sinful warm liquid eggyolk and salted egg inside), even though it was extremely messy to eat. Their xiao long bao is comparable, if not better, than our usual Crystal Jade or Din Tai Fung favourites. And their la mian is really really very fresh. That’s not even including the extremely nice decor of the place, and the amazing view of the Sentosa causeway, cruiseships and restaurant junk boats our table had. I think that all of us, especially my dear Granny who’s not so mobile and has to go around in a wheelchair now, enjoyed lunch very much indeed.

To my dear neighbour and fellow meddie Andrew, happy birthday =)

It was a fun and simple party at his place, with delicious hawker food from all around that his obliging mother went to dapao! We had Boon Keng mutton soup, laksa, hokkien mee from the hawker centre behind our houses, delicious sashimi, citysatay’s chicken satay, etc. His sister also baked many goodies for the party! (as a plug for Lynda, her carrot cake is really the best ever! Tasty, wonderful, full of walnuts… get her contact from me if u want to purchase some!)

There was also poker and mahjong after, and some of us amused ourselves with his piano and music scores. I had the most wonderful girly chat with Pooja too! Thanks Andrew for a great evening!

Tonight saw us celebrating our dear friend Celene’s 21st birthday, which passed a few days ago on the 27th. It was a really chic affair, with excellent food catered from Marmalade Pantry (I unfortunately did not get to try the mini sticky date puddings despite cel’s double order of them sighs), a gorgeous three-tiered cake with sugar rose petals which was a special order from the pastry chef at Canele, live music by the fantastic Ngak and his partner, and many other gorgeous little touches everywhere. Really beautiful rose flower arrangements, pink silver and white balloons everywhere, the wonderful people whom she invited… it was really such a beautiful birthday celebration.

Darryl even surprised our birthday girl by singing her a song with Ngak & partner in accompaniment, which was really sweet and drove Cel to tears. And I had a lot of fun chatting with friends, looking at the toy that the guys got her, catching up with old friends like Aimei, and enjoying the really wonderful music. Ngak sang all our favourite songs that we always dedicate on Tuesday nights at Timbre!

I hope she liked the easel and Tiffany&co silver heart shaped lock charm necklace that about 22 of us shared for her =)