I get by with a little help...

...from my friends, and other medical students who I don't even know that well.

The burnout that I mentioned has really been affecting my ability to work. I'd got books out from the library, from which to re-learn everything I knew in January, and hardly opened them. When I did open them (following an extensive internal battle to make myself do some work), I either struggled to concentrate or just fell asleep. I needed to leech off other people's energy to get things done, as I didn't have any left of my own.

A few lovely friends had offered to help; I found this really useful. There was no internal battle to work, as I'd met with them specifically to work, so I had to do it, and they wanted me to. A friend played the patient and either invented a history or tookone from a book (book review coming soon!) while I played the doctor and took a full history, with OSCE-style strict time limits. Friends in my year who had passed everything gave advice on how I needed to improve my performance. I also practised examinations, such as orthopaedic joint examinations, again to time limits.

This was so helpful and avoided me having to motivate myself (unsuccessfully); I realised I needed more of this. But three friends couldn't provide the help between them, and I'd feel bad taking up so much of their time.

I posted a status on facebook asking if anyone could help over the weekend, and had conversation with a friend offering me advice, but nothing more. Eventually I realised that motivating myself was getting nowhere, and although having three friends to help was wonderful, it wouldn't see me through the exam. So I sent a facebook message to 16 other people, students in my year and the year below, good friends and less good friends. I explained my burnout and need for people to help, what I needed (extensive surgical knowledge not required!) and the times that I needed help. Within 24 hours I had seven wonderful replies, all encouraging and movtivating me, and each offering different times that they were free to help.

Just reading those replies made me feel that this huge task might be possible, that maybe there was a chance I could face this big exam with confidence, and succeed. All except one stuck to their word and came to help (the one who didn't, didn't live near and we hadn't made as concrete a plan), all for over an hour.

For a whole week I did no work on my own, and felt very little guilt about it, because I'd worked with nine different people, and the quality of the practice was so much better than anything I could do alone. Quality over quantity, number of hours less important.

I had a little further help the next week, to ensure that I maintained my history taking skills, which had improved greatly, becoming slick and fluent. I there had some confidence going into the exam, I  knew that I could do it because I'd done it many times before. There is nothing like preparation to grow confidence.

Failure lies not in falling down, but in not getting back up again. For me to get back up, I needed help. There is no shame in needing help, the failure is in not seeking help. Asking a whole bunch of people to help me was one of the best things I've ever done. If only I'd recognised the neeed and could have asked for it earlier. Oh, hindsight.

If you need help, ask, and keep asking. Ask for specifics - I told everyone what I needed, and when, in timeslots for people to choose (e.g. "I need Thursday evening, Friday morning and evening" etc). It was easy for people to help because they knew what I needed.

In paediatrics people sometimes talk of "the team around the child" (or the team around the family). I've had so much support the last two weeks it felt like the team around the [TTBAMS].

If I have passed, it will be thanks to all these lovely people, and because I asked for help.

That's "me" in the middle of the team huddle - having that much support feels amazing. (Thanks to the Nigerian football team for the picture)

The loveliest statistician (i.e. geek)

The other day I had an exam in the morning, it was two hours long and a bit stressful. After joining the other half for lunch (amazing chilli nachos), I spent the afternoon with a good friend. We spent about four hours working on her medical dissertation project, which needed some statistics. I have the statistics programme, SPSS, went to lots of statistics courses last year (which I STILL have yet to be reimbursed for) and my dissertation last year was basically all statistics, which I had to teach myself and do myself, so I can sort of hold my own when it comes to medical statistics.

Although it took a fair bit of brain-effort to recall everything I’d forgotten over the past year, this came in very useful for my friend. Her project has gone from having some percentages that look quite nice, to having Chi-squared for trend with a p value less than 0.001 – to anyone who knows research, that’s gone from “somebody found that the intervention probably changed things a bit” to “they found that changes resulting from the intervention were highly significant, with a less than one in 1000 possibility that they were just caused by chance, therefore these interventions are good and everyone should adopt them”. We also added in some nice standard deviations because ranges should be left behind at Maths GCSE.

Surprisingly successful for a post-exam afternoon, where the temptation to just slump is strong. Instead we spent hours fiddling with SPSS, transferring her data from Excel to SPSS, making new data files, fiddling until we found some results that meant something, were the right type of statistics, and were reproducible for the rest of her data. But the worst of it is: I really enjoyed it. I feel I shouldn’t admit to this. This is statistics after all – possibly the most boring thing I’ve ever had to learn about throughout both my medical and genetics degrees. It is the realm of geeks of the dullest kind. I’m not going to deny my geekness, I did do a genetics degree after all, but statistics geekery is a few steps too far; I am not that boring! Learning about stats is mindnumbing, but actually implementing it, playing with SPSS sot that you get something shiny and publishable – I’ll be honest, that is fun. It’s experimentation, with useful results.

I feel I should embrace my inner stats-geek, and have a potential idea: I’ll become a FREElance statistician, as a junior doctor. Here’s the deal – you (consultant, researcher, clinician, nurse specialist, whoever) have a research project that you hope will show something exciting, and you’ll want to tell the world about it. I am an academic junior doctor, and I will do your boring statistics for you. Give me your data, and I’ll give you the shiny publishable results. If you ask nicely, I’ll even write your results up for you (I like a nicely displayed table). I will not write anything else – your introduction and discussion and all the wordy bits are yours alone (I hate writing). I’ll write the paragraph on how I analysed the results, I’d have to really. And the best bit: I’ll do all this for free. All I require is that you put my name on your publication or conference abstract, after all, I will have contributed to it.

And if you’re really organised, I can discuss your data collection methods with you before you start, to ensure you’re collecting the best data to get the best results.

Do we have a deal? What’s not to like?! I would love to know if this would actually work in reality. If you (non-existent readers) know anyone who needs some medical stats… Trying To Be A Medical Student is here to help – you know where to find me.

Win-win situation: the researchers who don’t have time or understanding or patience or SPSS get their statistics done for them, I get more research experience, and I get published, which can only help my academic career. And will add something non-gynaecology-related to my CV, and since that’s not an area I plan to go into (never going to be a surgeon), that would be useful.

Here’s to embracing the inner geek. And to helping friends out.