
Today was the first time I got out of the lab later than 5 o'clock. The practical was on extemporaneous preparation where we had to prepare the Ichtammol cream and Kaolin suspension for kids. I've been looking forward to this particular practical as it marks the first time we actually get to prepare drugs, real ones, instead of just mixing, pipetting, titrating and playing around with useless chemicals. As exciting as it was, the part where we had to grind the Kaolin powder with raspberry syrup (oh I just found out today that the smell of most of the medicines we take when we were kids is actually the smell of the raspberry syrup) and chloroform water using the mortar and pestle was damn tiring! It's 10times the workload of making sambal belacan as we had to ensure all the solids are dissolved till they literally can't be seen at all. Okla maybe 5times. But the point here issss, preparing drug is not really an easy task. Apart from the tiresome mixing and diluting and grinding, we also have to make sure that the calculations are accurate so that the dosage is correct, refer to the reference books and cross check the prescriptions with the recommended dosages, make ammendments or suggestions where possible etc etc. And my first attempt today? not that good apparently. I poured water into the mortar first instead of into the calibrated amber bottle which was supposed to be the final step, making my Kaolin suspension a little bit diluted. Sigh.. Hopefully tomorrow's preparation of tablets and solutions would be better though. Aaand that I get to leave the lab earlier as usual. Hehehe.