Expensive

Today was a good day :) Teaching session in the morning that I was able to actually follow along with because I'd had the chance to read up on the subject matter ahead of time. Then I did a bunch of clerking for practice. Clerking as I discovered is the term they use here for taking a patient history. So I practiced my history taking skills and presenting them to a doctor, in this case a Senior House Officer (SHO, like an upper-middle class resident).... (Residents here start as Foundation Year 1, Foundation Year 2, Senior House Officer, Registrar, until you are finally the big kahuna: Consultant.) She offered me some helpful tips that I intend to put to good use. Then I decided to take the rest of the day off. Oh, oh, oh! And I got to put on some blue surgical gloves and help change a pressure bandage. lol. Lame, yeah, but hey at least it was actual patient contact! Yay. Also I'm going to start doing blood draws. How exciting.

I learn a lot from doing histories because seeing an actual patient with the clinical problems that I've been reading and learning about for the past few years puts a "face" to the disease, disorder, complication, etc. Also there are so many things that I haven't even read about or only studied because it was part of the curriculum that become real when a patient is telling me that she's had an ovary removed because of a hemorrhagic cyst, or she's here for a Mirena coil replacement, or she just had a hysterectomy because she initially started out with just some annoying malodorous vaginal discharge that was resisting all treatments thrown at it until it was discovered there were displastic patches of abnormal cells growing in her uterus. I met a lady today who had a very strong family history of breast cancer. Her mother died of breast cancer, she had breast cancer which ended up in a double mastectomy (DCIS in one breast and stage 3 invasive breast cancer in the other), and one of her two daughters also had breast cancer and had an elective double mastectomy when it was found that she also carried the BRCA 2 gene. So that's 3 generations of breast cancer. It's something you read about with genetics and how genes play a role, but to actually see the family that was so affected makes it more real and tangible. It's not just academic now, it's reality. Plus it gives me a reason to read up on breast cancer, endometrial carcinomas, IUDs, etc and this is a good thing :)

My roommates and I went into town this afternoon to do some grocery shopping. From Wednesday to I think Saturday there is a sort of small open market type deal on Market St. We found this really amazing stall with fresh baked goodies. Couldn't resist loading up on the carbs even though, I had so far resisted buying and bread. Everything tasted heavenly and we promised to return next week :) Once again, it was raining so we were quite soaked by the time we were ready to head back home.

Lua and I are planning on going out to try a Thai restaurant we saw in town when we were there earlier. It looked kind of fancy though, and we heard from a taxi driver that there are no cheap restaurants here because after all we are in Winchester. Apparently if you can afford to live in upper-middle class Winchester, you can afford the prices here. Guess that makes what that lady said yesterday about a well fed, well paid, middle class population here, make sense. There is a pub by the O & G building that apparently a lot of the students go to for decent food that's reasonably priced, so if the Thai restaurant proves to be unreasonable, we'll head there. Since Lua and I are still waiting for our refund checks, we're still counting our pennies. But we've been here for a while and haven't really had a chance to do much in ways of chilling and down time, so we figured this weekend was as good as any to start. Also interestingly, the only "fast-food" restaurants we've seen have been American: Subway, Pizza Hut, McDonald's. Perhaps they are others, but just aren't obvious to us that they're "fast-food." Or that could also be another reason why there's much less of an obesity problem here as there is in the States.