u/Roobsi

Hi all,

So I'm a UK trainee studying towards the first of the big anaesthetic exams (the FRCA primary for any uk members). I'm reading up on pharmacology and have started reading about pharmacological models. The rub is that I stopped maths in school at gcse and we didn't cover differential calculus at all. Like, not even slightly. I only barely know what it is in the broadest possible terms - I get that it's a way of determining the slope of a graph at a point, but I have absolutely no idea at all how you go about actually doing that, and I'm not familiar with the mathematical notation.

As a result, I'm really struggling to understand a lot of the equations that I'm being presented with. I wonder if anyone could advise me as to whether it is worth me trying to give myself a grounding in calculus for this purpose. My study time is obviously limited and I don't want to go wandering off into the weeds if it's not actually going to be useful.

Does anyone have any advice here? Beyond cramming facts into my head for an exam, how useful is understanding this on a basic mathematical level for being an anaesthetist?

I'm not a big pop guy and when they announced a track with Ellie Goulding I was pretty apprehensive. Muse usually have one slightly out of place pop song on their recent works.

So when it came up on the album I had to double check the tracklist because I thought there was no way this was Hush. It definitely feels like a muse track.

If you don't want to sign off portfolio forms, why agree to become a CS or ES?

Out of my last 4 rotations, in 3 cases I've had a CS who is extremely difficult to pin down.

One who didn't know what ACCS was and didn't understand the portfolio system (still unpicking that a year later), one who was frequently working in a different hospital overseas for long periods of time and now one who just isn't signing things off. Just radio silence despite emails and texts. Our rotas don't align all that often enough for me to corner them too easily so I'm doing what I can. I've got a learning outcome, a multi consultant feedback form and my end of placement meeting that I'm still having to badger for.

Fortunately my ES is great and has my back, but still. There's a limit to what he can wallpaper over.

I just don't get it. Are they not aware of how disruptive and stressful it can be to get a suboptimal initial outcome on Arcp because they're not easily accessible? My understanding is that supervisor activities are considered paid work.

I'm someone who gets easily rattled by this sort of paperwork, portfolio, CV stuff. I can manage but I'd be lying if I said I haven't lost a substantial amount of sleep over the years because of this sort of thing.

Edit:

To clarify, not a single one of these docs was anything other than supportive and helpful.... when I could get ahold of them. My current CS is lovely, and full of very useful advice with things like career planning. He's just difficult to pin down.

And it sounds like this is more of a systemic issue than I had figured.