About the Authors
Adam Fendius, is a Specialist Registrar 3 in Anaesthesia in the St George’s Rotation, who managed to luckily escape the whole MTAS 2007 fiasco (see Aphra Behn’s excellent posts if you don’t know what that was), by the skin of his teeth and working very hard to pass his Primary FRCA first time, and secured one of the final SpR posts in London (maybe even the country). After a year of recovering from the shock of having made it that far, he realised that if he didn’t work very hard again, he might have some problems, being caught up in the tidal wave encroaching from behind, and end up staying back a year if he didn’t pass the Final FRCA. Fortunately, he squeezed his viva in on the first day of Structured Oral Examnation week, and passed in June 2008.
Apart from that, Adam has a special interest in physics, particularly as related to medicine and anaesthesia, and has a BSc(Hons) in Radiological Sciences. He actually does understand how MRI and CT work, and gets frustrated when people try to explain them to him and get it wrong. He is also interested in Pre-Hospital Care, is an instructor on the Pre-Hospital Emergency Care Course, and holds a Diploma in Immediate Medical Care from the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.
He specialises in trying to make potentitally complicated things simple to understand (having a fairly simple mind himself), finding hard to find information, and generally improving his knowledge of useless trivia such as the fact that drinking 470ml of water at 0 degrees Celsius requires the body to burn 17.5 Calories to warm the water up to body temperature, and the fact that mucus is green because of peroxidases and myeloperoxidases from neutrophils, and that The Guinness Book of World Records itself holds a world record, as the best-selling copyrighted series (apparently).
Apart from that he teaches regularly as an instructor in Advanced Life Support, and has been known to give talks to midwives about epidurals, school leavers about medical careers, and St John Ambulance members about everything from How To Take A Brief Medical History to Heat Stroke and Heat Exhaustion. Like pretty much every other SpR on the planet he takes part in regular hospital/departmental teaching sessions, both giving and receiving heckles.
Suneil Ramessur was fortunate enough to squeeze into the last ever round of SpR intakes and opted for the South West Thames Rotation. He is currently in his third year.
Having slugged it out the traditional way to pass the primary FRCA with months of hard graft he decided to make life a little harder for himself for the final by moving house and undertaking a major renovation project in it at the same time.
Discovering that he had really left things a little on the late side, he had to utilise some new strategies to learn the essentials before the exam. He’s put that experience into this website to share with the world.
When he’s not buzzing merrily around the hospital, he particularly enjoys spending his time cooking and then subjecting his friends and family to his “experiments”. He dreams of having a Heston Blumenthal style experimental kitchen!
