How to Do a Liver Transplant Read Online Free Page A

My butt was planted firmly at my desk, surrounded by dozens of books and papers in a frenzy of learning. I lived on Diet Coke and caffeine tablets. It was outrageously unhealthy and some nights I could not go to sleep because of the caffeine-induced palpitations. There was no time to lose so even eating becamea low priority. I suffered terribly with constipation and my mother suggested I try to eat a few prunes to get things working again. I was so hungry and they were so delicious, that before I knew it I had eaten a whole packet. A few hours later I felt the deep rumbles as the prunes worked their magic on my colon. I spent the wee hours prior to my pathology exam sitting on the toilet with profuse diarrhoea. Even this couldn’t stop the study. I just took the textbooks into the toilet and got on with it.
    After the first three years, the learning switched gears and my study became dedicated to applying my basic knowledge to patients and their diseases. This was a big change. I no longer had carefree days of skulking around the university campus in flannelette shirts and Ugg boots. I now had to dress like a professional and act like a doctor who knew what I was doing.
    Around the same time, something else happened that would change the course of my life. This was the day I met my future husband, Andrew, an extraordinary man who would soon share my life and put up with the demands of my job. Andrew was at university studying economics. As it turns out we had already met 15 years before, when we attended the same preschool together in Toowoomba. Our memory of that encounter was less than dim. The second time we spoke was one afternoon while I was lazing around the college dorm room of my best friend and fellow medical student, Jamie Von Nida. I was going through myshort-lived goth period and was wearing black leggings and what I felt to be a particularly cool black leather motorcycle jacket. Andrew had gone to school with Jamie in Toowoomba and they now lived in the same dorm. Andrew had dropped by for a visit. He had long flowing hair, just like George Michael from Wham!, and was wearing blue John Lennon sunglasses. I thought he looked great.
    â€˜Cool leather jacket,’ was all he said to me. I was quite strapped for cash at the time, so I smiled and replied, ‘Thanks, would you like to buy it?’ I sold it to him for $200 and when we moved in together six months later, I got that jacket back. We still have it in the back of the closet 20 years on as a memory of that time.
    The beginning of the fourth year of medical school saw me shift my location from the main university campus in St Lucia, to the School of Medicine. This is a grand building in the Brisbane suburb of Herston, resplendent with Roman columns and domes, heavily steeped in the history of medicine. Its halls were decorated with portraits of wise and slightly angry-looking professors who had discovered amazing things. The building was designed to be an intimidating reminder of the special nature of the profession we were entering. Andrew and I, along with all our friends, moved into share houses a few streets away. We happily set about decorating our rented Queenslander-style house. It was dilapidated and came complete with natural air conditioning in the form of a big hole in the bathroom floor thatyou had to be careful not to fall through when stepping out of the shower. They tore the house down shortly after we moved out. We all turned 21 that year and it was an endless round of parties amply catered for by our substantial home brewing activities.
    Lectures began every day at 8 am, outrageously early for a student. We would drag ourselves, bleary-eyed, into the back row of the stadium-style lecture theatre, listen to the professors talk about pathology and pharmacology and try to take copious notes to read later when we were more awake. The latter half of the day was spent in small groups seeing real patients in the hospitals. I was assigned