A day in the life of a London medical student

Good morning. It's just before five. It feels criminal to be awake this early. I think I got three hours of sleep. I have surgery scheduled for seven, but it's an hour commute to the hospital, and I also need to make time to find a theatrist, find a consultant, and also change into my scrubs. I want to give myself plenty of time so that I can get where I need to be on time. It's so early. Hello. I'm gonna do my makeup now while I couch up on a few lectures that I haven't watched. I just finished my makeup. This might be a bit too much, but I recently bought this posture corrector. It essentially keeps my back straight and makes it really hard for me to slouch. My posture has always been really, really bad, and I've been trying to fix it. I don't know if it's gonna work, but I'm hoping if I wear it for a month straight, my posture will magically be great. I wish I had a cute fit to show you guys, but there's no time for that. This is my hospital ID. It comes with this, like, lanyard, and this is the one that you get at the hospital I'm at. I had a placement in Barnet, and they had these NHS branded, I don't know what this is called, like, strings. So I got one while I was there, and I was really excited to use it. But why am I so excited for NHS merch? That's honestly crazy. It's so cute. The sun isn't even up yet, but I'm up. It's so cold today. It's six o'clock. It's actually a bit busier than I thought it would be at this time. Oh, tube is coming. Turns out I was in the completely wrong hospital. Guys, I'm so happy. I just finished my surgery. I didn't get to stay for that long because I have teaching scheduled now, and I am so late for it because the walk-in was honestly so far. But I'm waiting for the lift, and hopefully I get there before the consultant gets there so I don't get screamed at. I'm so late. I'm so stressed. I don't want to get picked on. It's surgical teaching as well. I know nothing. I just had an hour of surgical teaching, but we're not done yet. I'm heading to the student centre now. I'm just going to pick up my bag and my coat because I have a teaching session with my mentor. There's a running joke that you spend more time in the lifts than in the wards in medical school at UCL, and that is very true. Got to eat. Confused and scared. I just had some teaching with my mentor. It was honestly so useful. Why is it that students teach better than actual professors? I don't know. It's only 11 o'clock, so I was going to go get some lunch, but I feel like I should wait until after midday to eat. So I just dropped by our clinical skills centre to see if I could do some suturing practice, which is why I have the fake skin. I have the suturing kit. I also have some sutures in here. These are just like spare ones because I'm just practicing. I don't need to like make a sterile field or whatever. Honestly, I'm only doing this for the sake of the vlog, so to make it a bit more interesting because otherwise it's just going to be a load of me running around the hospital trying to find where my teaching is, and I don't want that. I'm going to seem like such a nerd coming into the clinical skills centre just to practice suturing, but here we are. One day I'm going to be able to palm my tools, but that day is not today. I appreciate I'm not amazing at suturing, but you have to start somewhere. I think I am improving. My hands are less shaky, that's for sure. I'm proud of my free sutures. I think I'm going to go get some lunch now and then go to my next teaching session because it just never stops, does it? My teaching got cancelled, so I'm going to go back to the theatres for a bit before I eat lunch. It's just so I can get a few more sign-offs. When you've done that, just make sure the connections are secure. Pop it in there. So if you just twist it slightly, or you can even do it at 90 degrees, that'll stop it from blowing. Guys, he gave me a free pastry. I'm actually so touched. That's never happened to me before. Hi. What do you think? My way to work now is to start in half an hour. It looks kind of sad because we ran out of all the ingredients. I'm back in my room. I feel like I haven't had the chance to properly sit down and talk because today has just been so hectic. Even though teaching got cancelled today, I don't know what came over me to think that it would be fun to go back to the theatres. I am so physically drained. I feel myself crashing a little bit. When I was at work earlier, I would just start staring off into space and the world would literally start disappearing. That's how bad it got. Honestly, those three hours of sleep that I got this morning were not sufficient for today's events. In an effort to keep myself awake for just one more hour, I've made myself a glass of kombucha to give myself a little boost of sugar to try and get me through the evening. Even though today was so packed, I didn't have enough time to get everything that I wanted to get done, done. So I'm gonna try and lock in for an hour now and just wrap up all of the loose ends from today. And I also wanted to prep for tomorrow's teaching. I am scheduled for surgery again, so that means tomorrow is basically just going to be another repeat of today. It was a good day. I think it was a good day. And I also got a free pastry, so thank you. Thank you, prep. It really boosted my mood for today. Thank you so much for watching this vlog. I hope you enjoyed it. I'll see you in the next one. Bye!