Alright, I’m looking for some feedback here. I’m sure everyone is very familiar with the infamous “Printing Policy” that was implemented last fall. What some people may not know, though, is that through much brew-ha-ha and negotiation the UME finally came to a compromise on the printing issue and agreed to continue printing required manuals, so long as the students accepted the cease of printed class notes. Fair enough: the class notes weren’t always printed on time, many people choose to go without class notes, it would not be possible to provide printed class note to the future UNB satellite campus anyways, etc., etc.

Since that agreement I have been working with Bruce Holmes (who, for the record, is a really good, well-intentioned man) from the UME to put together a list of manuals that are required in Med 1 and Med 2. The UME was worried that if they put out a blanket ‘ok’ to print required manuals, then various profs would just put all their class notes into one package and submit the collected class notes as a required manual, so the UME wanted to draw up a list ahead of time. The final list was supposed to be submitted by me at the end of Med 1, which it was. However, the UME wanted to have a sit down meeting to discuss the final list. Due to schedule conflicts (i.e. vacation conflicts) we haven’t been able to meet yet, but I figured all was going to go along as promised.

My faith in the UME may have been misplaced. The last email correspondence with Bruce Holmes included price estimates for the manuals (per page, per color, etc.), which was expected. What wasn’t expected was this couple lines following the price quotes:

“An idea proposed has been that we ask the class rep to identify the number of students who want a printed copy and we will print at cost for them. Everyone else can not print as it will also be on DalMedix or print on their own as they want. The proposal is that students pre-pay so we know the exact # to print”

To me, this sounds like the UME may be shifting gears and expecting us to pay for the required manuals after all, and merely taking on the onus of coordinating the printing.

“So what” you may say? These manuals can’t cost more than $80 bucks altogether. Hell, I spend more than that on a big night downtown. My main concern is this: across the courtyard, the dental students pay something like $4000 a year in “lab fees”. I am sure that bill didn’t pop up overnight, and very likely started out as something like “lab manual fees”. As it stands we don’t pay anything to the university itself aside from our tuition (student union fees such as health insurance, bus passes, 50 for life, etc. are a separate matter). And tuition is the only thing the government can easily do anything about (and I think that may be frozen for medical school - confirmation on that?). So it really doesn’t matter how much we lobby the government for student debt relief if we start letting the university itself imposing these additional “fees” in place of tuition rises.

Maybe I’m being too sensationalist here, and making way to big a deal over having paid $13 for my PIM lab manuals, so I’ve come here to get some feedback before heading off to butt heads with the UME. I know it’s the summer and many people aren’t checking the blog, but this is an issue that I foresee continuing well into the fall, so ongoing feedback over the next couple months would be helpful.

lost in the jungle and other fun travel tales

Now that I’ve got your attention (well hopefully, I can’t think of too many more exciting subject lines than the one I just fed you), here is the scoop. So where to start? I suppose at the beginning. Or rather, where I left you dangling in suspense (or not) a few days ago. It is pretty long (as per usual!) All of it is about the trek, except the last paragraph which takes a rather sober turn, talking about Tuol Sleng, the genocide museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I think I will send a specific email on Tuol Sleng shortly for those who care to read it.

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of mobs (the friendly kind), bugs, and jellyfish

Dearest readers,

I have so many new adventures to tell you about, but I must restrain myself and try to keep some sort of logic and order, so unfortunately you’ll have to read the regular email first and just wait for the juicy tales until the next time I stop by at an internet cafe (could be tomorrow, who knows?)

I left off my last email at Ubon. We were there for Buddhist lent, which in Ubon’s case involves all the wats (temples) making hugely brilliantly bright orange, ornate wax floats of various religious scenes (or so I gathered). We’d arrived at around 6am after taking a 3am bus from Surin, so plenty of time to wander around the floats and take photos before the leisurely procession started. Unlike parades at home it wasn’t rigidly organized, the floats went a few meters, then stopped, and people milled in, out, and around. In between some floats were traditional dancers. But for many young Ubon teens, the attraction was not these phenomenal artistic feats, but rather the “farangs” (foreigners). Everywhere we went, it seemed that a group of kids would see us, gasp, and run (or at least speedwalk at top speed) towards us. What ensued was all similar, answering basic questions for an English assignment, followed by about 5 minutes of photo shoots with the various kids. Since the candle festival is more for Thai than foreign tourists, we were quite a rarity, and therefore in very high demand! I felt like Britney Spears being mobbed by the (very friendly and cute) paparazzi.

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From Mae Sot, this time

Hello all!
I find myself in a tiny yet strangely cosmopolitan little town called Mae Sot, in western Thailand, on the Burmese border. Although you can walk from one end of town to the other, on your way you will pass a variety of people-Westerners, both of the tourist, trekker, and NGO-worker type, Burmese in their long sarongs, Karen, and Thai. Also a mix of Indians and middle-eastern people thrown in for good mix. We are just here for a day, tomorrow we depart on a 5 day trek in this remote mountainous region. It is the rainy season so it was kind of rainy today, but hopefully the weather is decent enough that we have a good time, although with a mix of walking through dense tropical jungle, bamboo rafting and elephant riding, how can you not?

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From Rangsit, Thailand

Dearest readers,
Please accept my most sincere apologies for my most unexcusable delays in writing to you all, let me assure you that you have all been uppermost in my mind, it’s just sometimes the fingers don’t follow the heart…typing-wise, that is. Anyhow, for those of you weren’t aware, you will probably be only mildly surprised to hear that yet again, I am off on yet another adventure! But rather than treading entirely new ground, I am back to one of my all-time favourite haunts, Thailand. I am here through a unilateral exchange organized by Dalhousie with 2 classmates. We are doing a course about community medicine. The main part of the 3-week course thus far has been a 9-day rural field trip to the central province of Ang Thong, about 2 hours north-ish of Bangkok, in the midst of Thailand’s rice-growing region.

But that will be a separate email in and of itself; first to whet your appetites is an attempt at brevity of my first few days here in the land of the free (which is what Thailand means in Thai.)
We are at Thammasat University, which is just north of Bangkok in a suburb. Although I’m a bit disappointed we’re not in the big booming metropolis, Rangsit is a big beautiful campus (so big that there are lots of free shuttles running around. Which is a good thing considering that the Thais here consider anything more than about 5 min. walk away unwalkable.) As it is in Canada, they don’t like to contaminate the rest of the student population with the dirty meddies, so we’re a bit far from the rest of campus. But luckily they have covered walkways all the way around so that we haven’t turned into complete puddles by the time we finish the 15 min. walk. We are staying in the rather austere medical student’s dorm. Our room is the only one without mountains of shoes and boxes outside the doors, but we do have a gigantic stick-on baby donald and daisy duck set on the door, so I figure that makes up for it.
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I don’t normally tell many stories about the types of things I have seen while working as a paramedic, but this particular story does have a happy ending, is a little comical (well I think so anyways) and is somewhat relevant to the reproduction part of our current unit. I told part of this story to my tutorial group but decided I would just post the rest on the blog. No names and locations will be used to ensure confidentiality.

As a paramedic, our training was heavily geared towards managing acute, emergency situations. Most of the time it was to deal with chest pain, shortness of breath, and trauma. But, another skill that all paramedics receive training in, is how to deliver a baby. Today, this is not a very common call for a paramedic as most expectant mothers get to the hospital long before they would ever need a paramedic to deliver their baby. In fact, other than their inhospital training, most paramedics will never deliver a baby. Nevertheless, all paramedics are trained to deliver a baby, as well as manage complications such as breech delivery, problems with the umbilical cord, neonatal resuscitation, etc. The thing to remember though, is that although they call it delivering the baby, it is the mother who does all the work. For the most part childbirth is an uncomplicated process, and mothers have been having babies long before any doctors were around. Usually you will just be there to “catch”. Now onto the story…

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I was thinking the other day about the alphabet. Actually I came to it in a somewhat roundabout way, but more on that in a second…

So we have an alphabet right? But what have we been doing to improve it? I’ll tell ya what. Nothing. We have had the same basic alphabet since….. well I have no idea how long, but given that it’s called the roman alphabet (or at least I think it is), I’m gonna guess we’ve been using the same alphabet for some time. Now that’s not to say that there haven’t been attempts to update it, let’s not forget Saturday Night Live’s attempt to promote a metric alphabet a fair few years back, but let’s be serious, LMNO can NOT be a single letter, it just doesn’t work.

What we need here is not a pared down alphabet. We need an all new and improved (read expanded) alphabet. And I humbly submit what I think is a suitable first extension. It came to me like a winters storm. All seemed so calm, and then suddenly… epiphany.

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This weekend the Bluenose Marathon was held and, as many of you are aware, a number of people from our class decided to train for this event. Our class had a good showing with representation in every distance category, and here is a list of those who participated.

5K – Mat Kiberd, John Morash, David Conrad, Kate Read, and Claire Hamilton
10K – Tiffany O’Donnell, PJ Rasmussen, Shasta Moser, and Alex Nelson
21.1K – Jon Chung, Annie Colwell, and Arpun Bajwa
42.2K – David Sibley

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I forgot how good it feels to write. Not just a short little blog, or a journal entry, and no, not even those lovely papers that we all enjoy writing. I’m talking about writing a short story, something I used to do frequently when I was young, but somehow got out of the habit of doing. To be honest, I haven’t written in years. I’d all but given it up. I’m not sure why. Up until sometime in high school, I was convinced I was going to become a novelist. And if not a novelist, well then, an English teacher who wrote on the side. But somehow I ended up getting a science degree, and thought sadly to myself (but would never admit) that I’d put the pen down for good! How, you ask? Perhaps it can first be traced back to my grade 9 science award. If I hadn’t gotten that, I’m not sure I would have had the confidence to do IB (International Baccalaureate) biology. But I did, loved it, and decided to enrol in biology and English in university. Already, my “science” identity was rivalling that of language arts, which was not so conducive to my creative writing efforts. My language arts identity got further eroded by a bad experience in first year English and my vow never to take another university English class ever again. SO science it was. Somehow in the midst of pipetting, dissecting, and studying, my writing (apart from labs or the odd paper) fell by the wayside. It was easy to let my “science” identity define myself, and not to make time for other things that mattered but that took time, like writing.

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Well the Bluenose Marathon is fast approaching (May 18) and I hope everyone is doing well with their training. Keep it up, we’re almost there. Myself, I am in the tapering down part of my training to ensure my legs have some time to recover before I have push myself that extra 10 km to reach 42 km. But I have had a little bit of a setback. April 27th I was doing my last long run of 32 km and around 22 km I started to develop some knee pain. Now I know the logical thing to do would have been to stop, but I was in Dartmouth and still 10 km from my apartment, so I just sucked it up and ran home.

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