Study With Me - Weekend on-call

Key Takeaways

hey friends welcome back to the vlog in this study with me video I'll take you through a day in my life during a weekend on call for obstetrics & gynecology where I try my best to squeeze in some studying during moments of downtime the day starts at 6:15 when I wake up in the hotel room that I'm staying in with my cousin for the weekend of on calls just for fun at 7 a.m. I head down to the restaurant for breakfast which sadly doesn't open until 8:00 but they very kindly make me an avocado and rocket sandwich which I have with a croissant orange juice and some coffee while eating I read about my terrible posture issue of anterior pelvic tilt on the website nerd fitness and I decided to sort my life out by buying a set of body fat calipers on Amazon to help me get rid of my pot belly at 7:45 a.m. I drive over to the hospital where I change into scrubs get a hand over from the night team and head over to the obstetrics ward who are I do my usual saving lives thing by writing a handful of discharge summaries a few prescriptions for medication and reviewing a couple of postnatal patients to make sure they're fine to go home one of the patients had a cesarean section the previous day so I check in with her congratulate her on the birth of her first baby and answer any outstanding questions that she's got about the operation or the recovery period we chat a bit about exercise and contraception following a c-section and I wish her the very best for a future filled with sleepless nights and the joys of parenthood by 10:15 all the morning's jobs are done so I head to the restaurant for a cheeky latte and a banana I bust out my trusty iPad pro and start plotting the structure of this very video before sorting out some of my e-portfolio assessments as doctors in every placement we have to do a handful of case based discussions and get feedback from different members of the team about our performance last year I left this till the last minute so this year I've promised myself that I'll get these things sorted well in advance so I'm not scrambling around like a raccoon with a foreign object in its erectile orifice at 11:30 I get called to the labor ward for various small bits like discussing some discharge medication with the pharmacy and doing a bit more paperwork then at noon are head back to the restaurant to grab some lunch with my junior doctor colleagues and then get a bleep at 12:30 to review a lady on the labor ward she's a few days post-delivery and has had some bleeding so I see her examine her abdomen and with one of the midwives I do a speculum and swabs and send her home with antibiotics and our very best wishes from 2 to 6 p.m. things are busy on both the obstetrics and the con ecology awards mostly with random bits of paperwork but I did get a couple of patients with abnormal blood results who needs sorting out and a few ladies referred from the emergency department who are review on the gynecology ward and make plans for them that I confirm with the consultant on call but because this is a study with me video I won't go into much detail on this front but there's a proper day in the life video that I'm working on in partnership with my hospital where I'll dive into more of the clinical details anyway at 6 p.m. I finally make a start on studying kidney physiology as usual I'm on my iPad Pro and I've got the lecture notes open in notability on one side of the screen and my own notes in ocean on the other side of the screen a huge thank you by the way to notion for sponsoring this video and therefore indirectly funding my hotel stay and all the meals that I had during this weekend if you haven't tried notion yet and you're a student or teacher you can actually get notion person off completely for free by using your edu or dot a/c email address more details in the video description the first thing I do is scope the subject of course that means that I blitz through the lecture notes and create toggles for every subheading so that overall it gives me a big picture idea of what's in each of the lectures then as I'm going through a lecture number six early on there's a reference to something that was discussed in lecture number one because at the end of every paragraph in the lecture notes I'm asking myself firstly does this make sense and secondly could I explain this to a five-year-old I realized that I'm not a hundred percent clear on this point about fluid redistribution across different compartments in the body and that maybe I wouldn't be able to explain it to a five-year-old clearly enough so rather than ploughing on with this niggle in the back of my mind I go all the way back to lecture one and start to build up the story of fluid redistribution using the Cornell note-taking system in my previous video about how I take notes with a notion lots of people wanted to get in-depth look at that so here we go firstly as I'm going through I'm typing out the main points using language that's as simple as possible but secondly because I'm taking notes using the Cornell method I try and hide every piece of information underneath a question for my future self that means that when I'm reviewing my notes in the future rather than just passively rereading stuff which would require zero brain power and be completely useless I'll be testing myself on these questions as I go along this is active recall in action it's the act of testing ourselves on stuff rather than just rereading it and as you'll know if you're a regular viewer of this channel active recall is the single most effective studying technique that I've been preaching about for the last two years for some of the content I'm typing out the key bits in my own words again as simply as possible but for other bits if typing it out will just take too much time I'm just screenshotting the lecture notes cropping to the relevant bit and then inserting the photo as an image in notion then I like to hide the images under their own toggles because I don't like big images clogging up the main body of my notes so here for example I screenshot this books about vant Hoffs equation and I hide it under its own toggle and later on I screenshot this box about starlings equation and again I stick it under a toggle so that it doesn't mess up the beauty of my notes by this time it's around 6:50 p.m. so ahead to the hospital restaurant to grab a super healthy snack french fries with ketchup and mayonnaise and 20 minutes later I'm back at the gynecology clinic room and back to work I continued my way through lecture six but after about twenty minutes I realized that my current levels of brainpower motivation and discipline really aren't enough to get through this topic right now so from 735 to 745 i procrastinate by slumping on the chair with my belly hanging out wishing I could take a nap at 7:45 I get a phone call from a patient asking about some blood results so I spend around 20 minutes on the phone explaining those to her and then at 8:05 p.m. I meet with the night team for handover there's not a lot going on so the Registrar is super nice and lets me leave a little bit early so I change out of my scrubs and head out of the hospital at half past 8:00 arriving back of the hotel at 8:45 from 8:45 my cousin and I take a seat in the hotel lounge to continue bashing out some work he's preparing for a postgraduate medical exam and recently discovered my study with me playlist on Spotify so he's listening to that while going through practice questions and after ordering a virgin mojito and some proper food I find a second wave of activation energy within myself and get back to studying and even though John's aids doing his own thing the fact that we're both studying in the same place helps keep me going when I'm doing my work and to make things a bit more social we're both using the Pomodoro Technique here where we work for 25 minutes and then take a five-minute break and repeat the process I don't often use the Pomodoro Technique these days but I find it's still quite helpful for keeping me motivated such discipline to study when my energy levels are particularly low or if I'm working with other people anyway I make a start on lecture 7 but before I start it properly again I scope the subject and just make a quick note of the other lectures within the series just to give myself an idea where we're heading with all this stuff and where the lectures I'm doing at the moment fit into the bigger picture and then when I start actually going through lecture 7 again I scoped it by turning all of the subheadings into toggles in notion once that's done again I'm just following the basic process of the Cornell note-taking system I'm typing on the bits that I want to remember all the bits that are new to me all the bits that are particularly insightful and I'm hiding them underneath toggles with questions to force my future self to actively recall them later another thing I like to do is convert pros into numbered lists wherever possible so for example in this bit about the different experiments that Vernie did I want my future self to know these off by heart and so I summarized the various paragraphs in the lecture notes into a list of five and I hide them under the toggle experiments by Vernie but the toggle experiments by Vernie wouldn't be too helpful to my future self so I add a little hint to remind myself that there's a list of five that I need to test myself on this is another important point that I like to keep in mind that when I do take notes I'm taking them for my future self and because of the way memory works I know that my future self is going to forget a load of stuff before I see the notes again and so I make it as easy as possible for my future self to maintain good habits like using active recall and spaced repetition and another side note here you'll see in the lecture notes it says if you plot the concentration of ADHD created against the plasma osmolality you'll find that the slope of the relationship is very steep and accounts for the sensitivity of the response this is way too much of a mouthful so in my notes i've rephrased it simply as the Ozma regulatory system is super sensitive that phrase super sensitive is way too casual to see in a text book or to write in an essay but I find that the simpler and more casual I can make my own language while understanding stuff the more likely I'll be to actually remember it later on and of course I've hidden this bit underneath the question what's the difference in sensitivity between the Ozma regulatory system and the baroreceptor in terms of ADH regulation and that question is a prompt to my future self as usual anyway our first Pomodoro session finishes at 9:20 p.m. so during the break we chat for a bit we intend for the break to be five minutes but end up chatting for a little bit longer and so the second pom session starts at nine twenty nine nothing much need to add here really I just finished lecture seven and make a start on lecture eight again scoping the subject before diving into it at one point I realized to my absolute delight that I can use emojis to represent up and down arrows when typing out Physiology processes which wasn't really a thing when I was going through my first year of medical school because back in like 2013 emojis weren't as well supported cross-platform as they are now what a time to be alive anyway the final point I want to make in this video is that when I'm making notes I'm thinking of them almost as a representation of the model that I've got for the subject in my own brain if my notes are very clogged up then so is my thinking on the topic but if my notes are nicely categorized and looks simple enough then the concepts in my brain will end up being quite simple as well that's one of the reasons why I absolutely love the toggle feature in notion because it lets me see the big picture in a nice unclocked fashion and if I do need to drill down into the details of a topic I can hit the toggles and get all the detail I need anyway our study session ends at 10 p.m. and we end up chatting for another half an hour while sipping on caffeine free peppermint tea just before bed I tried to do a session of gratitude journaling in my loss term 1917 notebook but then after a few seconds I realized that I really can't be bothered tonight because I'm absolutely knackered so I call it a night ready to get up at 6:15 the next morning for another 13 our on-call shift so thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next video goodnight [Music] [Music] [Music]