First Practical in Malaysia

With the return to my home country - Malaysia, the summer holidays have officially begun. Even though it is called my summer holidays, I still have to do an attachment with the hospital of my choice in order to brush up my skills to prepare myself for the up coming job upon graduation.

The hospital I choose to work at was Tuanku Mizan Hospital, which is a newly opened hospital that is located some 1 hour ride away from my house and to top that, it is a military hospital. This means that the hospital is used mainly for the purpose of checking the health of militant personnel and also to give treatment to them and their family.

The LRT ride from my house to the one nearest to the hospital took an estimation of 45minutes while the walk from the station to the hospital is another 10-15minutes of walk.

Arriving the hospital, I had to pass the guard house(where I had to leave my IC in order to get a pass to go into the hospital) before reporting to the commanding officer. It was quite a scare for me as I have never been anywhere which has any relationship with the military forces, hence the way things work around the hospital was pretty scary (the constant attention and salutation to one another and their seriousness).

After going through the admission department, I went to the A&E department (accident and emergency) instead one of the 2 departments I requested for (O&G and also Therapy).

Over here, I found 3 other interns - one which studies in Moscow, another from Edinburgh, and the last which is a foreigner that studies in Texas, US. After some basic introduction, I went along tagging after the doctors and getting an idea of their work.

At the beginning, the flow of patients were pretty slow, but slowly, as the doctor were busy with other stuff, the amount of patient grew and I got to see a few different cases, ranging from basic flu to heart failure. It was a pretty amazing experience.

We were allowed to go home at around 1pm but since I found the cases so interesting, I told myself I wanted to stay for this case and after that another one. Just like that, time flew by and when I knew it, my watch showed me the time with its hour hand pointing at the figure "4".

I then headed home after a tiring but fruitful day. Hopefully the next few weeks will continue to be this exciting.