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Friday, March 23, 2012

Into a New Weekend, with additional material for discussion

I am now reading a little as my Saudi Council examinations are just three weeks away. Due to this, I may become even more irregular in posting on this blog. I, however, do crave the indulgence of my readers to await the installments with patience. Today, I finally completed a book called "PreTest" for Pediatrics. It is a collection of 500 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) on different aspects of Pediatrics. I have fared reasonably well, I think, for someone who hasn't read much for the past two and a half decades. I mean, one does attend conferences and so on, but organised reading? You've got to be joking!The most I have done is to turn the pages of the new editions of the Holy Grail of Pediatrics (Nelson's Textbook) for a few days after purchasing it every few years. In addition, I read to understand difficult cases, to teach my students and sometimes, to kill time in the clinic when the patient flow reduces. This cannot substitute for systematic reading, and I well know it. As I went through the questions, I realised how little I actually knew about so many disease entities. Although there was an explanation attached to every answer, I still felt quite inadequate and so kept turning to the textbooks to know more about a particular subject/illness/topic. 


In a way, this reading will help me not just for the Saudi Council exams, but also when I want to appear for the MRCPCH examinations later in the years to come. So, I am trying to be serious here.


The weekend began as usual, today being a Thursday. I did not cook anything, but managed to stave off starvation by eating leftovers for both breakfast and lunch. I skipped a formal dinner as I had already had snacks earlier in the evening. Today, I used a downloaded program called SPORTS TRACKER on my Android-platform mobile phone (Samsung Galaxy Ace S5830) to monitor my walk. I went from home to the hospital on an evening visit, then returned home, and proceeded onward to the garden after a few minutes' break. In the garden, I walked just 1 circuit and then went to the cafeteria to have my customary snack and tea. From there, I walked back home. The entire walk took about 6.2 km and discounting the 2 breaks (one at the hospital and one in the cafeteria), took about 70 minutes, thus giving an average of about 10 minutes or so per kilometer.Which, I think, is a pretty good effort. The app calculated a consumption of over 320 calories, which I made up with my cafeteria snack and one cup of tea with milk.

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