Doc Ahmad Hajiri

Assalamu Alaykum! (Peace be upon you all!) No, this is not about my first born son. We are still way too early for that! haha. This is about the first baby boy I delivered (or helped or assisted in delivery) during our 24-hour duty at the Labor Room-Delivery Room (LRDR) in PGH.  Well, the experience was indeed something to really cherish. Simply witnessing a baby being born right in front of your eyes, and hearing his first loud cry is simply ... see? I can't even find the right word for it! Just SubhanaAllah! (Praise be to Allah!) Life indeed is an amazing gift only He can give. The story was: We started our duty at exactly 7AM last November 29, 2014. At first we were all clueless as what to do. We were the first group in our block to be on 24H duty. so we practically don't have any idea, until later on, we started learning things, starting doing things that are requested of us to do (I will publish a separate post about LRDR duties in sha Allah). Everything wa...

[Helpful for: All LUs/Year levels but not in all schools] Assalamu Alaykum! (Greetings of Peace!) Transcriptions or “transes” are the concise and summarized copies of the lectures by your professors. There should be some people who will do the dirty job of transcribing, and they are called the transcribers or in short: “Transers” Your class will usually divide you into groups of transers with three members each (some schools will have only two) and you will be assigned to a scheduled lecture for you to transcribe. It is then your responsibility as the transers to get the necessary and significant information discussed in the lectures. You also have to do your best to persuade your lecturer to give you a copy of their presentations and handouts. Some professors are generous while others are just plain, nasty ones. So you have to be prepared if you have to start from scratch for the trans. But this (starting from scratch) does not happen very often as you will also be ...

[Helpful for: LU3 and LU4 (1st and 2nd Year)] Assalamu Alaykum! (Greetings of Peace!) We will jump from the topic on “lectures” to one of the dreaded yet fun type of exams: the Kodachrome exams! This was supposed to be in the later part but knowing the schedule of the exams is already near, I have to push this post up the schedule in hopes of it to be of use somehow. Disclaimer! I am not the best guy to give you these tips, but because no one is doing it, then what’s the trouble of doing it instead? Haha! So what is a Kodachrome exam? This one goes back in time immemorial when medstudents are still using the real kodachrome machine where pictures of specimens (usually tissues) will be projected on a white screen. (In LU4, you will experience using a real kodachrome machine thru Dr. Dimacali’s lectures in pathology :D). Nowadays we are using the overhead LCD projectors with the ever-so-convenient MS Powerpoint presentations where digital copies of the specimens wi...

Assalamu Alaykum. It's been a while since I last shared about life in Med-school... hope I could catch up with my schedule and write some of them here as the end of the year draws near...  Aside from Fridays being my favorite day, there is yet another reason why I consider Fridays are great... No, it's not about the fact that we have exams every Friday (-_-), that one is just exhausting... But it's about out 2-hour session every Friday that makes a change for us.  The Art of Medicine is a one unique course we have every Friday afternoons. For 2 hours, we will talk not about the complex pathophysiology of Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, or the Cushing's Syndrome, or Systemic Lupus Erythematosus or Kawasaki's Disease or whatever alien names and words only the medical student's can understand (or are still trying to understand). No, we don't even talk about the brain-bursting pharamakokinetic and pharmakodynamics of drugs of different disease...

Bismillah the Island of Siasi with Bud Siasi on the background Last summer I spent more than a week in Siasi, a smaller island in Sulu. I went there not to spend a wonderful vacation with my family, but to do something bigger, something greater: to conduct my first one-week community immersion! As one of the Regionalization Program (RP) students in the college, we were required to return to our community every summer and conduct our own community immersions before the next school year begins. This is one of the requirements that we have to accomplish for us to be allowed to enroll for the next Learning Unit (or year level). And so, being one of the only two students (out of 160) representing ARMM in our batch, I chose Siasi, Sulu to be my immersion site for the next five years of my stay in Medschool (in shaa Allah), and perhaps until I become a licensed physician someday (Ameen). Now, what did I do in my one-week stay in Siasi? I might not be able to tell all the th...