The misadventures of an elective med student in Aberdeen, Scotland

Hello and welcome to my blog. As you are probably aware, I am doing my medical elective in Cardiology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Aberdeen is Scotland's third largest city - about the size of Geelong, it is located on the northeast coast of the country about three hours from the capital Edinburgh. Being this far north, you'd expect it to be cold, and yet it ain't the case. It's high summer here and the trees and flowers are in full bloom. It's about as warm as Melbourne in spring - with breathtaking hayfever to match. It's worst on the rare sunny days... it rains most of the time here. I tried to take some antihistamines but not only didn't they work very well, I was so drowsy I nearly fell asleep on a ward round four times. It also doesn't get dark until very late - the sun sets at about 10 and even at midnight it never gets completely dark, while it's light again by four and it plays havoc with your biological clock. Anyways, Aberdeen is quite a vibrant place with a busy city centre and lots of nightlife (not so much this time of year as the students are away). It's also far more multicultural than I expected, although people of my own ilk are much less frequent than in Melbourne.

The Royal Aberdeen Infirmary is THE hospital in town and serves a catchment of over a million people. It has a total of 1500 beds, nearly three times as big as the Alfred, and incorporates a stand-alone children's hospital. There are a myriad of wards, and many are divided into male and female sections. We have a 12-bed CCU that looks after people who have had MIs or some life-threatening arrhythmia (that's an irregular heartbeat for you non-medical berks). There is not much of a private health system in Britain, instead most people get their health care through the NHS (National Health Service). NHS also takes care of many things that aren't covered back in Oz, like orthodontic treatment.

The food here is shockingly unhealthy and it sums up why this place has the highest prevalence of ischaemic heart disease in the whole wide world. Green-leaf vegetables and fruit are few and far between and even grand round food has plenty of pork pies and unwanted calories. (Haha, I can eat anything I want and stay the same size, hehe.) The national dish, "haggis, neeps and tatties", consists of a mixture of lamb and/or pork offal (heart, lungs and liver) served with mashed potato (tatties) and turnips (neeps) - it tastes vaguely good - if you don't get told about the ingredients. A traditional breakfast consists of toast, beans, sausages, Lorne (a square pork sausage), and black pudding (made from coagulated pork/lamb blood), hash browns and bacon. Eventually, today I had to go to the only Chinese buffet I could find - there are no Asian grocery shops. For five pounds ($12.50) I got lunch which was worth about a three out of ten.