The Miracle of Life?

In movies I have seen actresses giving pretend birth. Screaming their lungs out, squeezing their actor hubbies hands' and delivering pink tiny bundles of new life. And the estrogen pumped lot of you might have found it beautiful & couldn't wait to share with the men they love, their own mini them. But I'm here today to burst that pretty little bubble you hold so dear. Vaginal delivery is disgusting.

A month ago I started my OBGYN rotation and yesterday I finally had the pleasure of witnessing a life being brought to this world. It wasn't this woman's first child or else they would have preformed an episiotomy. Which is basically a horror movie. They cut your VAGINA! If that's not a reason to never wanting to have babies, I don't know what is? Oh yes, the baby's head passing through your vagina after you cut it!

The woman was disoriented, in labour pain, screamed a bit– not horror movie material- and she was in desperate need of human contact. Our lousy hospital's policy bans any member of her family to come into the labour room with her. She begged my friend to hold her hand and she briefly did. My friend's face didn't change while the woman squeezed her hand & I wondered if they were just pretending in movies that women in labour squeeze so hard, it'll break ones hand? Then it was the 2nd stage of labour – the push push stage. I didn't like how the resident yelled at the woman when she screamed. She's in the worst pain ever. Be more fucking gentle with her, well ya? Besides the screaming there were all sorts of discharges and other not very pleasant bodily functions that happened while pushing. I'm sorry but I was disgusted. Blood I don't mind but that... *shudders*.

The baby wasn't in a favourable position and so was hard to deliver they had to basically pull his head with a vacuum-like machine. The baby was delivered blue and was not breathing until they suctioned the fluid out of his airways. Also the poor thing had a hematoma near his eyes for the vacuum's head wasn't positioned properly. And to top it off, a part of the placenta was missing and the doctor couldn't find it. A mid wife jammed her hand inside the woman's uterus searching for it. She screamed a scream far worse than the ones she did while in labour. Amazingly, in the middle of her agony, in her still delirious state she remembered my friend's act of kindness and thanked her for lending her her hands, even though it wasn't throughout the whole thing. Manners and humanity are wonderful wonderful things. I pray she and her newborn are well and happily united.

I don't know if I witnessed a miracle or a messy procedure that stunk? But I will leave you with this: C-sections for the win!

Nostalgic Ramblings

I'm loving this song. It reminds me of good times and people. Times when I was happy and I knew it. When I used to go out from 8 am till late at night every night. When we danced on tables and sang our hearts out no matter where we were. When I was always tanned that I think I have exceeded my sun-exposure-time, if I stepped out in the sun now I'll get a melanoma. Not kidding, I have a new mole on my thumb. I'm scared. When I cried at my best friend's -at the time- graduation cuz it felt like my daughter graduating. When I got accepted into medical school and my mom's friend who hates us going out so much told me to kill the rest of the summer partying cuz I'll have no life once school start. When that summer I got hit by a jet ski in the head, lost consciousness, drowned, saved by a friend and lived to dance the night off. When we stood there for each other through out all the drama and family problems. When my family was a whole. Good times xD

أنا كل ما عمري يعدي و نقابل بعضنا أحس كأن أنا عندي يجي 16 سنة. أفتكر امبارح أدمع. حافظاه و ممكن أسمع. نفسي الأيام بترجع و نتلم كلنا

Reflection Dos: Paediatric and I

To be honest, I wasn't very much looking forward to start this rotation. It's not that I don't like kids. It just breaks my heart that small innocent children with no guilt in the world should suffer such horrible diseases.

The first week was horrible. I had to force myself a couple of times to hold it together and not cry. Everything was overwhelming. Their sick, tired faces, their mothers dead worried looks and then we had to come and inflict more misery to them by bothering them with questions they already answered and consume the last bits of energy the kids have with examining them. And they almost never said no to me. They gave different excuses to why they will gladly be a part of my education. One mother allowed me to examine her infant because she was a psychology student and had to go history hunting from psych patients and she knows how tiring it is to look for a cooperate one. Another dad at the ER gladly let me examine his son who was in respiratory distress, just because his niece was named after me and he wishes that she becomes a doctor like me one day. Things like this touches your heart. Kindness still exist in this cold world.

A turning point in my relationship with paediatrics was when I was examining this four year old girl who has sickle cell anemia. She was so tiny and beautiful. Very cooperative and quite. When I was in the middle of listening to her heart sounds she started playing with my head scarf then grabbed my finger with all of her hand just like a palmer grasp reflex. It was very endearing and sweet knowing that it wasn't a reflex and she did it out of affection. Her mom then told me "she really likes you". And it was mutual. Then my perspective shifted. I shouldn't think of how much a child is unfortunate for being sick. I should only think of how much I can help them to get better. Even at this stage where all I can give is a warm smile and a gentle touch that hopefully will brighten a gray day.

_______________________________________________________

I don't really like the third reflection. I'm not sure I'll post it.

Anywho, Paediatric is OVER! FOREVER NO MORE PEDS! *DANCING*

End of peds celebratory cake at Chili's by Ghada.

After Ghada's editing

To Always Live in the Shadow

As children we all lived in the shadow of our siblings. My older brother always got first in his class and I always came second. Although I almost always had better marks, girls' schools are more competitive that way, I felt less. And had the need to always prove myself worthy. Being labelled number two was never good.

Looking back at how I felt when I was an 8 year old, I still can't possibly imagine how those two twin girls must feel. One a healthy child who could never dream of the attention her sick sister gets. And the other a diseased child who could never live or accomplish what her normal sister can.

Rahaf is a girl with congenital hydrocephalus and plasminogen deficiency, a rare disease with only few cases documented world wide. At the process of obtaining her medical history, the developmental part at precise, I had to ask the mother to compare between her two daughters. Rahaf fell short, in reaching the developmental mile stones and in her learning abilities. Her face fell too when she heard the comparison and I felt a dagger stab my heart for I have reminded her of her short comings. Then there was the social history and I had to ask how is the disease effecting the other family members? The mother confessed she doesn't pay much attention to the other twin because dealing with keeping this one as healthy as possible is alone a full time job. I couldn't judge or blame the mother but I couldn't help but also feel sorry for the other girl. A child will always starve for her/ his parents' affection, but to be denied of it and to feel guilty for wanting it because your sibling needs it more is probably far worse.

I don't know who has it worse? The ill child with a disease limiting her life, always shadowed by her twin's accomplishments? Or to be deprived of your parents full love and care and to always live in the fear of losing your precious twin? Always coming second doesn't feel that bad at all now.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

We were asked to write our "reflection" on the paediatric rotation. Actually to write three reflections. This is my first one. Feed back is much appreciated.

Paediatric OSCE

Have I told you how much I love OSCEs? No? Well, not so much. But I love how they generate the most hilarious memories ever.

Day Uno: Too Much Oxygen Good or Bad?

Before the FU FUN FUN part begins, a tip for you all: BREATH!

At lock down, I did my yoga breathing to help me relax. Not only did it do that but I became a bit giddy and euphoric. And so when I heard the musical bell that declares the end of a station for the girls who were being examined, I thought it sounded a lot like Fairouz's song Dahlak Ya Tair Al Wrwar and started singing. That opened the door for more Fairouz and a lot of drunk singing and laughing. A bunch of girls dropped everything and tuned in for the pre-exam entertainment. I was a star.

Then was the actual exam. It wasn't great but al 7mdullah it went smoothly. At one station, I think the purpose of it was to get pissed off by the patient's irrational fears and try to calmly reassure them. It wasn't really irritating or anything but the doctor somehow was VERY impressed with me. After I finished talking to the patient, she asked how would I evaluate myself and being in the KAUH environment when you are always looked at as the idiot student, I couldn't possibly say I was freaking brilliant. I criticized my shaky Arabic and failure to answer one irrelevant question. The doctor then interrupted, telling me how perfect I was and how she didn't even need to interfere and guide me then she moved on to my "great English" and asked if I studied abroad? I said no and the credit goes to my mom cuz she's an English teacher who taught me since infancy. Then she was mesmerized by mom and kept asking all random questions about her. Who could blame her? My mom is amazing. But then the bell rang and I had to beg to please let me go.

At the history station, we were to ask a pretend dad -the intern- about his kid who has sickle cell anemia. The thing about this intern is that he is... I honestly can't find a word to describe him. He kept smiling, turning and fussing and giving lame answers in a very blah tone. Well, Mr. if you can't take this seriously, I sure as hell can't and I could match your tone and double it too. And that is what I did. Plus he was wearing cherry red lip balm, as I was.

While taking a history you should analyse the patient's chief complain then proceed to other things. I, being the amazing diagnostician that I am -Yes, House got nothing on me- didn't! The father told me his son has leg pain and I automatically thought it was a vasso-occlusive crisis. Which it was but still I needed to explore the pain even more. I now realize that the intern was actually nice as he tried to help me by mentioning the leg pain twice and I was like yeah you said that, moving on. Stupid me but what is an OSCE station if you didn't forget a thing or three? :P

Day Dos: You Never Know What You Have Until You Lose it.

Day two and another history taking session. This time hematuria. Let me first just say how much I love Nephrology and point to the fact that I KNOW hematuria. I feel so ashamed. I once again figured out the diagnosis too early and all other reasons totally blanked. I knew there was so much more to explore but I just couldn't. And this new intern/father was really into playing the role of the concerned dad. And he kept putting a sweet encouraging smile but when I tried wiggling out a clue or two about what should I ask he was such an ass. Where is yesterday's intern? He would have helped. I wanted to cry LOL.

Next station was the doctor who though I was fascinating. When I started examining the patient, she kept yelling "mashallah, mashallah ma bdy a7sdik you are so good and organized" and she didn't pay attention to what I was doing and then asked me to please repeat =_=

The 2 other stations were lovely. Run by two amazing nephrologists. God I love those people.

Man this OSCE wasn't really funny ha? Well thank God it's over. Wish me luck on the written and inactive OSCE. :)

Oscars 2011

Better late than never, right? Anyway I don't have much to say. Except this year wasn't very impressive movie wise, red carpet dresses nor the Oscar ceremony itself.

The Fighter is so over rated. It's an OK movie. And if anyone should have been given an Oscar for their performance in it, it's Amy Adams, not Christian Bale because Geoffrey Rush - from The King's Speech- deserved it more and definitely not Melissa Leo.

I'm very happy for Colin Firth. Well deserved. And plus I have been in love with him since forever. Even when he was given lame stupid roles, I loved him.

Natalie Portman, although the movie wasn't that great but her acting was top notch. Absolutely beautiful and well deserved.

As for the Oscars presenters this year, James Franco and Anne Hathaway, they were eih. What's up with Anne changing her dresses? If they were beautiful I would have understood but ... James was a total cookie, no? Miss you Hugh Jackman.

Kevin Spacey singing for Fred Astaire, HAVE MERCY! Sorry couldn't find it on YouTube.

If I were Mandy, I would be very upset with myself after this performance. Her vocals were just off. Zack did a better job and he's not a singer.

On another Tangled note, don't we just love the thief? Charming chap. But I can't help thinking the princess could have done better. Of course she would love him, she never saw another human being and he is charming. And of course he would love her, she is pure hearted and I don't know a princess with magical hair. BUT Disney why are you teaching little girls to settle? I loved the movie and I wished Flynn/Eugene was real so I better just shut up.

Now the gowns, ugly was very in in this red carpet walk. But I won't bother with that.

Cate Blanchett

A Victorian chair you might say? But I say beautiful and unique and only she can make it work.

Mila Kunis. Simply beautiful.

What was your favourite moments, gowns in this year's Oscars? Do share :)

Grammy 2011

Finally, I got to see The Grammy Awards last night. What can I say? I am a busy person. And it was fun! Here is what I have to say about it. xD

• Christina Aguilera, pregnant? Cuz nothing else explains the double chin, tummy and arms.
• Ricky Martin seems to really enjoy coming out with that silver ugly pants. LOL good for him.
• Dear Lady Gaga, "don't be a drag, just be a queen"? LOOK WHO'S TALKING! The whole night, everything she did and wore was an epic fail.
• While Katy Perry was performing Teenage Dream, Nicole Kidman was singing. The cutest thing.
• It's disgusting how Justin Biber and John Mayer would both be nominated in the same category. I didn't hate JB before but now!
• JB needs an IQ test ASAP! I looked up the lyrics and he says never in his Never Say Never song, 38 times!
• The person who dresses Rhianna should quit NOW!
• The Suburbs, album of the year, really? FAIL!

Now my favourite performances for the night:

Brilliant.

I love country music. This is just fun. And Bob Dylan, amazing!

Pure love. They deserved all the awards they got.

Those two, imperfectly perfect!

I love the three of them and I love the song, so..

MY FAVOURITE! AMAZING, BRILLIANT, EPIC!

You CAN'T not dance and sing!

Shakira, you are not alone. This girl's hips don't lie.

Grenade, this soul/jazz version, absolute freaking LOVE!

That's it. Good night xoxo

So Happy I Could Die :P

What a night! Man I feel like a G6 and I bet I'll wake up tomorrow inshallah felling like P.didy! What? Why you say? Well baby doll, Arsenal WON and wait for it, wait for it, Barcelona LOST!

The thing is, yesterday and today were BAAHD! I was so restless and out of my skin cuz I have my paediatric midterm this Saturday and I haven't had any exams since more than 2 months i.e. out of practice, double the panic! And I really wanted to go out and watch the Champions League game: Arsenal vs Barcelona but the guilt was killing me. Obviously I ignored my guilty conscious and went but it wasn't all flowers and roses. When I got to Fratelli cafe the douchebags were airing Hilal vs Ahly match, even when A vs B started! Saudi stupid teams instead of the UCL? REALLY? Obviously, I talked to the manager and demanded to switch the channel or I'M LEAVING AND THEN IT'S YOUR LOSS! They didn't! he just begged me to wait a few minutes. Hilal won. WHO CARES?!

Now finally we are watching the game. Mood already beyond fucked up. And then bam David Villa scores a goal for Barcelona. No comment.

The 2nd half begins and Van Persie scores for Arsenal! I screamed and clapped and the party begun baby! And then Arshivan scores the winner and I was on cloud nine xD

Source: thecowofthesea

Seriously the game was amazing and I'm not just happy becuase Barcelona lost. I also consider myself an honorary Arsenal fan since I'm the sister of 2 die hard Gunners! :p

So yeah happy happy day al 7mdullah xD

Wish me luck on my midterm and good luck to Real Madrid against Lyon next week xoxo

11-2-2011 A Historical Day

Hosni Mubarak FINALLY stepped down.

God bless you Egypt. Stay beautiful and free. May this be a new chapter of happiness and prosperity to all our Egyptian brothers and sisters. ♥

La Tortura

I love Shakira. And this song is one of my all time favourites of hers. But to tell you the truth, before last night, I only could understand the word Amor.

Last night I was in the Spanish-Shakira mood and since I really want to learn Spanish and I don't have the time to take proper lessons now -inshallah I will in the summer- I decided to google the lyrics of Spanish songs, memorise the new words and their meanings. One song a night. And La Tortura won tonight. I must say, I'm more in love with this song than ever. He's begging for her forgiveness and giving her his heart and she's dismissing him like the cheating dog he once was. Estoy gusta. I don't know if that is even gramatically correct but I likey :P

Let's hope I keep it up.