So this is it; During the course of this wee blog, I had several ideas about how to wrap it up- the range from just disappearing to a protracted series of farewell posts.

Like a long list of medstudent bloggers, I'm pulling the pin now that I'm finished. My aim with Degranulated was to blog weekly until graduation, and, well, that's where I am.

I started with the aim to keep my creative juices flowing at q time when medicine and pharmacy were all that was rocking around my brain- this endeavor was my creative outlet and relaxation.

As med school rolled on and I experienced more clinically, I tried to apply some of the teachings to life and thinking about the world outside of medicine.

I consciously reduced my writings about patients and clinical settings and in so doing lost the benefit of outlet. Simultaneously, my real-world network of support grew to include people, colleagues and friends, with whom I could share views, stories and frustrations about medicine.

And now I have come to the end of this step and the true beginning of my medical education. Last week, I finished my pharmacy work and, two days later, graduated my Medical Bachelor and Bachelor of Surgery. And so it begins.

I'm excited about returning to full-time employment, thrilled about the lifelong learning that is medicine and the prospect of a few entirely vacant weekends. Right now, I'm on holiday for another month.

This has been wonderful. At times, a lifeline and clarifier. I've been able to set goals and guide my future practice thanks, in part, to this small section of teh internets.

If you've ever been caught up in your thoughts and lacked a clear, coherent way of framing them, then blog.

If you've ever thought about changing careers, work out why that thought enters your head, and challenge it.

And strive for better. For a more informed society, both medically and generally. Strive for health professionals who care, who explain, who give neither credibility nor cash to snake oils.

Seek and enjoy creative, varied writing and congratulate those who produce quality (a selection of excellence is below).

In summary, thanks to my loyal readers, the cast of hundreds, my friends and loving family. I'm going to practice medicine now. Time to rock and roll.

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Medicine is taught to most people through television shows; having watched (and been inspired by) a fair-few television medics, I thought I'd make a wee list of my top five;

5. For long stretches of the West Wing, it's easy to forget that Abigail Bartlett (played by Stockard Channing) is a medic. She balances her medical career, family and her role as the First Lady with apparent ease. Dr Bartlett shows us that being a medic is part of your life, not your entire life.

4. George O'Malley put his finger in a cop's heart in a broken lift. TR Knight's character in Grey's Anatomy undergoes a mental transition from the "holy crap this is hard and terrifying and I'm tired" to the "hey, this is important and rewarding and I'm good when I focus" in the space of an episode. Realistic self-belief is something that often flourishes when we're put outside our comfort zone; George's elevator operation is less about being a gun whilst saving the officer's life than depicting personal growth under pressure.

3. B.J. Hunnicutt, the foil to M*A*S*H's Hawkeye, always struck a tone with me. His kindness and level-headedness in stressful, ghoulish settings was unbeatable if sometimes unconventional. Additionally, Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell) could rock a moustache like nobody's business. But it's is compassion, caring and inability to say Goodbye that rockets him up this list.

2. Omar Epps as ER's Dennis Grant. It was only in doing some research for this post that I discovered that prior to becoming the superb Dr Foreman on House MD, Epps played a role that affected my early awareness of the stresses of being a junior doctor. I remember watching the character's suicide by train as an early-teenager, and the long discussions it provoked with my parents. It's always been a reminder that medicine is not glory and heroism.

1. John Dorian vs Perry Cox have been battling it out as long as I've been at University; timing that, for me, is not withough significance. Zach Braff and John C McGinley (and Turk/Donald Faison) have managed to broach many of the contorversial and thought provoking aspects of medical ethics, death and whole-person practice that come with in-hospital experience. Evidently, I'm a massive Scrubs fan; each of the doctors on the show have strengths and weaknesses. I'll watch entire seasons on the trot, as much for the issues above as the fantasy sequences, plot, character development or scorching one-liners. The pilot episode "My first day" remains powerful and poingiant enough that I'll drop whatever I'm doing to watch it through. Where JD is overwhelmed by exhaustion, I feel inspiration and joy; It's two months until I face the music.

In my final year of pharm school, I promised myself I'd never work as a hospital pharmacist. It's not because I think it's unimportant, nor that Hospital pharmacists play an ineffective role in the health care team. It's because, for all thier skills at detecting errors and spotting interactions, there is just are three vibes that I find frustrating and counter to good patient care.

Firstly, Hospital pharmacists have been known to suffer a loss of perspective. Like the pharmacist who said that an antibiotic needed to be changed because it interacted (significantly) with the patient's statin. The patient is a late-septugenarian, and was unwell. They were to be on antibiotics for five days. The organism was only sensitive to this antibiotic. So, instead of holding the statin for the duration of anti-infective therapy and treating the infection, the pharmacist recommended a change to a less effective antibiotic. I've seen similar situations several times whilst on the wards, including in Intensive Care. Which leads me to my second beef;

Secondly, although this doesn't apply to all Hospital pharmacists, the sense of medicines-related arrogance and condescenion that I've been treated by a number of times is staggering. Notably, the same pharmacists have spoken to ICU consultants with similar disdain, so I don't feel as bad. But seriously, ICU consultants are freaking gurus. In this case, the doc concerned handed the pharmacist their ass on a plate, and deservedly. Good, well-read clinical Pharmacists know a cart-load of information about medications. what they're not so good on is the pathology, physiology and more complex situations. Hospital pharmacists play an essential part of the health team, but they're not the leading role and they're rarely on the same level of knowledge (medication or otherwise) as the specialists in their field. A little respect and understanding of the 'graded assertiveness' pathway would go a long way to improving the hospital pharmacist's face-to-face communication.

Thirdly, rigid thinking is generally unhelpful, particularly in the case of healthcare. Millions of reams have been printed on the importance of 'patient-oriented' care. If a doc writes 'tablets' and the medication only comes as capules, I've heard of hospital pharmacies not dispensing the prescription, or where the alternative is avaiable but not funded, charging a patient ten times what they'd pay for the intended formulation. Moreover, these pharmacists patronisingly note that prescriptions cannot be amended to fix these obvious errors. In community, these slips of the hand, especially for regular medications (think meloxicam caps instead of tabs), are regularly amended an the patient maintained on their exisiting formulation. But not in hospital.

But what was the final step to triggering this wee rant? Recently, a Hospital Pharmacist talked to the graduating crop of med students. She was patronising, absurdly impractical and took great pains to denigrate community pharmacy, along the lines of 'not caring' and 'have no idea'.

Pharmacy is a profession mired in tension - between healthcare and business, between evidence and outcome-based prescribing and bureaucratic penny-pinching. This pharmacist did nothing to assist this situation; Pharmacists need to see eachother for their flaws and strengths.

Sure, Community pharmacists might not have the impractically high knowledege of clinically irrellevant interactions of their hospital colleagues. But they see patients regularly, they know the finer points of how their patients live. Heck, the shop assistants might even visit the patient on a weekly basis. This is community caring; it's how life rolls outside the hospital.

I'm sure this reads as though I've a chip on my shoulder, so let me be clear - Hospital pharmacists save lives. Healthcare is built on knowledge, respect and effective communication between a myriad of health professionals and their patients. Community pharmacy, hospital pharmacy and doctors are on the same team. We need to work together, realistically , practically and with patient care as our focus for good individual outcomes.

Some events in health just stick in your mind. Obvious ones, like your first Rescus or a particularly abrasive patient, and other, rarer, stranger happenings. Today I was reminded of one such event by a regular patient.

I remember the first methadone patient who was younger than my little sister, half a decade younger than myself. He was a big bloke, in all directions. His knuckles wrote "SINK OR SWIM" and looked as if they'd been trying as much in dirty fuel. He had wisps of blond facial hair around his podgy babyface and better teeth than most opioid-dependant folk. Blond hair straggled from under his baseball cap and the glimmers of gang ink snaked towards his throat.

Despite his size and intimidating looks, He was timid, shuffling nervously like a naughty-schoolboy. I think that's what drove me to look at his age. He was old enough to be in Grade Eleven.

He didn't have a successful run on the program; only two monts later he disappeared, and I never saw him again. I hope he went back on the program; he has such a long time in which to change things for the better. For those few weeks, he was on a better track. That was five years ago.

My earliest memory of a doctor is Dr Shiner. I was in preschool with his daughter, and I remember visiting his office, walking up the dark-red brick stairs of his Coogee office, tightly holding my Mum's hand. My little brother was, I think, getting his two-year vaccinations. I was nearly four.

Of course, NSFW can be taken in another (albeit rare) context. We can all think of people who aren't very good at their jobs. In Medicine and Pharmacy, these practitioners are actually Not Safe For Work. There are numerous reasons that someone might be unfit for practice, but as students the reason we're most familiar with is someone who's incompetent, can't pass exams and just doesn't get it. This level of potentially unsafe practice is usually under the control of the University or Medical Boards, and by and large, they do it well.

The next step above NSFW is the DNR list. That's Do Not Refer. A person, who through their skills, knowledge or interpersonal manner, you personally deem unworthy of any referral.

At the other end of the spectrum are the kind of Doctors (and Pharmacists) we rave about. The General Practitioners who, if pushed, you'd see yourself, and the Specialists and Surgeons whose opinions you'd seek for yourself or family. These doctors, as far as a student's interaction goes, are keen to teach, excellent team-players and knowledgeable seemingly beyond comprehension. Dubbed as Referred In Clinical Excellence (RICE), these folk are the staple to any medical professional network.

As final exams approach, I've overheard chatter about personal DNR and NSFW lists, and plenty of talk about RICE. In the meantime, most of us hover on a middle ground, ans the next few years of experience and work help define our skills as DNR, or hopefully, as part of RICE.

This coming week, I'm in anaesthetics. It's a part of the Critical Care rotation which, thus far, hasn't exactly set my heart on fire. However, in the spirit of avoiding negativity or 'letting the man get me down', I'm going to share my top ten songs for Med School.

Not necessarily my favourite songs of all time, just ones that remind me of certain parts of Med School. The ones that refresh and conjure up some salient moments burned deep into the brain, the kind that both shape and describe what, for me, Med School is all about.

10. For You - Sarah Blasko. The first track on her album, "What the Sea wants, the Sea will have" went hand-in-hand with Curry nights. As Batman, Wonderwoman discussed Politics, Medicine and Literature as I tried to whip up creations that would both inflame and satisfy tongues and stomachs.

9. Fireflies - Owl City's catchy and absurdly over-played hit reminds me of Birth. Not mine, obviously, but the half-dozen catches and many more I watched whilst Obstetrics and Gynae earlier this year. The optimistic child-like tinkling electronica crosses between medical devices and babytoys.

8. Someone Else's Town - Josh Pyke. Sitting on a park bench in Sa Pa, Viet Nam during my first year Med elective, I watched the cool night encompass the valley. The 2007 Australian Election Night raged, on some far-off frequency. Aware of the occasion, but not the details, I instead observed evening life in Sa Pa. Ensconsed in Pyke's Memories and Dusk and relative serentiy of rural Viet Nam, I was truly watching someone else's town.

7. Three MCs and One DJ - Beastie Boys. It's only since I've been in Med School I've begun to truly appreciate the Granddaddies of Rap. After taking the time to actually listen to the lyrics, combined with their B-boy beats, my taste for the New York trio just flourished. Their 'To the Five Boroughs" album was on regular rotate through first year, when Med School was all about wading through large amounts of input to make sense and get the underlying vibe, not unlike the music itself.

6. Life In Technicolour II - Coldplay. The Prospekt's March EP featured heavily on my morning commute last year. Chris Martin's dominating and uplifting opening bars made driving through dew-covered cane fields half an hour after sunrise the best substitute for morning coffee one could wish for.

5. Please Forgive Me - David Gray. Remeber that scene from the Scrubs pilot, with JD standing in the Emergency Department at midnight, just out on his feet with everything rushing around him. It's supposed to engender a sense of exhaustion, of being overwhelmed. Watching that scene sets my heart on fire. It stirs something that makes me think, every time that I watch it, how much I'm looking forward to life in Medicine.

4. I am the Highway - Audioslave. For most of the last four years, I've worked some long, long shifts at the Pharmacy. This song, on a late night drive home, reminds me to pace myself both mentally and physically. Chances are, I'll have an early start the next morning and with the bare minimum of sleep, I'll be okay. And the riffs are epic.

3. Spirit - Moby. The entire B-Sides of Play appeared on my iPod at the end of Med1. The mix of deep, soulful melodies and swelling & inspiring surges make this an ideal travelling album. Spirit is one of those tracks that just makes my heart soar; it was playing when I checked my first year marks in a dingy Indian internet cafe, and the sensation of achievement and promise still hits me each time I hear it.

2. It's a long way to the top - AC/DC. This February, a visit to Fremantle Gaol re-introduced Bon Scott et al. to my eardrums. A Hospital Variety night on the eve of Pediatrics saw several department heads 'rocking out' to the bagpipes and a room full of moshing healthworkers. Seeing the consultants, at the top and enjoying it, refreshed that yeah, it's a long way to the top of a chosen specialty, but getting there (and staying there) is rewarding and fun. Are you ready to rock?!

1. Teardrop - Newton Faulkner's cover of Massive Attack. Most Medicals TV aficionados well know Massive Attack's Teardrop as the House MD theme song, but where the original is slick, shiny and a bit high-fa-looting, Faulkner's spin is raw and basic. A fine balance of cautious inspiration, the song lets us know we're both "stumbling in the dark" and "fearless on my breath". As the music swells, where Massive Attack's original is sad, Faulkner's Teardrop inspires and rejuvenates, without hiding the message. This song is, for me, what Med School is all about;