The Bane of My Existence

It varies from week to week, day to day, moment to moment, but there is always at least one thing we're studying that drives me round the bend - whether it's through level of difficulty, boredom or sheer irrelevance.

In the first few weeks it was our microbiology pracs - a weekly two-hour session where we performed swabs, stains and assays as we were told, with no inkling as to why we were actually performing any of these tasks, or how what we were doing could possibly be clinically relevant.

Then it was our entire respiratory block. I apologise to all thoracic physicians, and I am aware that, no matter what specialty I go into, a vast proportion of my patients are likely to have some form of respiratory dysfunction, but to be completely honest, I find respiratory physiology and pathology SOOO BOOOORRRINNNG. Maybe it's the physics. I'm not sure, but I just can't bring myself to be interested in all that FEV-1, type II respiratory failure, blah blah blah... sorry, where was I? My mind was wandering to something more interesting, like supervising the drying of paint.

The current bane of my existence I actually find quite interesting, but am terrified that I will never actually be able to remember any of it. Oh, pharmacology, why do you tease me so?! With all of your unpronouncable names, and drugs that don't fit into the classes, and similar but not quite the same mechanisms of action! I think my main problem is that pharmacology seems to involve a hell of a lot of rote memorisation, which I find significantly more difficult than learning via the understanding of a process (thank god for physiology and pathology, the two domains that really boost my self-esteem).

Anyway, enough of my whining - I need to go and figure out the difference between clopidogrel and acetyl-salicylic acid...