Twentysomething

I turned twenty two this month..

Yeah, I know. There is no need for the dramatic ".." after stating that you've turned twenty two. That's what I think too. But let's see about this anyway.

Since me and my friends have turned twenty and I've endlessly heard this: "We're getting old".. "I don't want anyone to know my age anymore".. "I'm removing my birth year on FB".. "Aaaaaaaaah!".. All of these with an ascending intensity with each year of course.

At first, I thought they were kidding. I mean, unless you are considering a modeling career, you shouldn't start calling yourself "old" at twenty two. In fact, as med students, the exact opposite is true. Your experience increase with years, you learn more, you acquire more skills. In short, years grant you acknowledgment and value.

The passage of years reminds you though of how precious every minute is. With every year that passes there are things that are gone forever. Being twenty two means that you'll never be the brilliant third year med student who made a brilliant discovery that would award you The Noble Prize years later (confidently assuming you are not the discoverer of Helicobacter Pylori reading this)

Few days ago a couple of high school girls shared a cab with me. They went on talking about school and courses and teachers and all the endless sanawya amma circus, and they happened to have the same teachers I had back in high school. They had the same worries, same comments on the teachers, same complaints and even same jokes. At that moment all these memories came very vividly back to me as if I were still living through them, and then I thought "It has been five years"! How come it feels just like the other day?

Friends I've known since I was six and spent the entire school years with, each of us took a different road when we went to college. I still have precious few of them very close till now, but most of them have turned into complete strangers with lives I know nothing about. We used to share every detail of our lives together one day, years ago.

Everyday that passes answers some questions about your future. Everyday takes you a step forward towards the person you'll end up being. Then one day you'll realize that you finally "are". Every aspect of you has come to existence and there aren't many questions left to be answered. I think it would be a moment both relieving and fearful. Life loses its glamour when there is nothing left to curiously wait for, nothing left to hunt and chase, no more hopes for change, for being a better person than the one you are today. You are what you are and there can't be more to it. A dreadful moment it is, and if I live long enough to it, I don't want to look back and feel I've wasted a lifetime.

Twenty two is not old. Twenty two means that "now" will probably lie in your past more than it has lied in your future as all your life still stretches ahead of you. You can still be any one, go anywhere, make new friends and still get to spend a lifetime with them. Twenty two means you still have time to build a whole new world around you. You can still fix yesterday's mistakes and make new ones. It means the best hasn't come yet.

Twenty two definitely means you're young, in every meaning the word could give..

Round #1: Chest Medicine

It's my fifth year with medicine. One of the two "season finale" years that do last for a whole year, starting this October and supposed to end next October inshaa Allah, meaning that last year's class are not done with their finals yet (and how I'll feel a lot better when they do!). The idea of a 12 months school year itself is intimidating, let alone studying the mighty Internal Medicine for the year, basically made by med students into a mythical monster that has you to torture for months and months. I don't know about what the rest of the world does, but it seems wrong to me to jam Internal Medicine, which is basically the practice of clinical medicine, in just one year out of the whole duration of 6 years of med school, making the fifth year the first time medical students learn clinical examination. Two months of the fourth year where supposedly scheduled for teaching us that, but they were hardly taken seriously by the students and the majority of the staff, two months that we're getting to understand their wasted value at the moment though. Of course, receiving medical education where we are takes the experience to a whole different dimension. Med students here can confidently state that their learning experience is very different from anyone else's in the whole world. That's one thing we can know for sure about this year. Nevertheless, I'm determined to begin this year with high spirits and see for myself how far things would go.

I've started the year with the Chest Medicine round. The beginning of the round is really the most tiresome part of it when you're still wide eyed making your early acquaintance with the basic principles of a new branch and yet expected to know, understand and practice everything as fast as you can (or can't for that matter). You're still organizing your studying material and figuring out what are the most reliable sources.  And, above all, you're learning how to perform the needed clinical skills correctly and interpret your findings into a preliminary differential diagnosis. So imagine our panic when we knew that the end of the round exam takes place after 2 weeks of its begining (one week from now, that is).

I am thinking it would be a good thing if one could keep track of what goes on this year, why it would be a good thing I have no idea, it's only that I've taken it upon myself to do so that I'm calling it a good idea.

So, what have I learnt (or haven't learnt) so far?

- An annoying feeling I'm getting since this round has begun is that apart from clinical examination skills I'm not learning any new information at all. We keep attending lectures that's main focus is still pathology. I don't know if I'm right, but I expected more focus on the clinical presentation, diagnosis and treatment part.

- This reminds me to mourn physiology, pathology, anatomy, histology... etc basically mourn the first 3 years of med school. It's amazing how most of us have no recollection what so ever of these sweet memories. May be that's why teaching is re-targeting them, but again, I thought it's our responsibility to review these aspects of every topic on our own, be prepared so that teaching this year can have better focus on the clinical aspects.

- Enthusiasm is just as contagious as disappointment. Some teachers are so passionate, so enthusiastically talk and move non-stop for hours to the extent that you suspect hyperactivity of their Thyroid glands. Others are totally convinced that students are lazy, stupid, useless creatures that have to be continuously scorned for whatever they do or don't do right or wrong. They waste endless time preaching without any called-for occasion. As I've said, both are very much contagious. You either want to jump up and start working right now or want to walk out of class so that you won't be put down by their idea of you.

-Doctors actually use the stethoscopes. And they actually hear different sounds that actually have meanings. (who would have guessed)

- I won't even begin to talk about the condition of the patients. It's not that they are ill-treated from the medical staff or the students. It's simply their conditions. The sad miserable mixture of extreme poverty, illness and ignorance. I can't imagine their lives outside the hospital or even inside it, and I can't endure the idea of having anything to do with worsening it one day. If success to us is not a good enough incentive for working hard, try this one.

- We are very lucky that we are in the building that has been on fire some weeks ago. You can still see the ashes and blackened walls in many of the places. This explains the sand piles occupying the ground floor, but definitely doesn't explain why these sand piles are being used as urinals. The entrance of the chest medicine building is where you hold your breath and hope you lose your smell sensation altogether. Well at least we have an entrance, check the main entrance of the Internal Medicine building that's under reconstruction and students and patients climb scaffolds to enter the building. When are they planning on closing the entrance? When an accident takes place of course, but not before that.

- Cats are freely allowed on the chest medicine floor. Huge cats that I saw the nurses greeting in the morning. It's interesting also that the cats at least respect the dress coat, they are all white.

- Aw! And roaches too.


But, as they say, life goes on....

Happy, or Maybe Not

Happiness is a tricky deal. I am coming to believe that no one is really happy at all even if they looked so to every one else. People surrounded by lots of blessings usually stop noticing them and it's as if they itch for trouble. They always make it to finding a thought, a memory, a feeling or anything to stay up all night hurting over it. People don't look for happiness, they feverishly seek disturbances.

A disturbing situation is when you look people who have been extremely unfortunate in life in the eye, and find yourself thinking "Thank God I'm not them!". It kind of gets to your better opinion of yourself, specially when you're supposed to be their care giver. You pity them tremendously but not enough to accept trading places with them. It seems odd, but you simultaneously wonder why you got to have so many graces and they ended up with nothing at all. You're not immune, anything can happen to you at any time too but for some reason it hasn't happened yet. You're suddenly taken over by this awkward fear of finding yourself really in their place. You shake your head in an attempt to cast these disturbing thoughts out of your mind, and the only thing you can do is thank God for the graces you're granted at the moment and pray for them to be consoled and supported by Him through their hardships. 

And then may be blessings are not a good enough reason for happiness. The most brilliant life can make you miserable if it has been forced upon you. But at least you'll have the comfort of knowing that you couldn't help it with your unhappiness. The real agony is when you've made a challenging choice that turns out to be just the thing that would vanquish your peace of mind. So it comes down to this most of the time: Be it your choice or not, there are times when absolute happiness lies in understanding one fact about life; the fact is that there are times  when you have to completely put aside everything you love for the sake of completely giving yourself away to just one thing that you don't like that much but you have to do anyway. Don't indulge in the sweet mourning of your lost happiness, focus as hard as you can to get the task done as fast as possible and you'll feel a lot better when it's over and you know you've done it right even though you didn't like doing it. Stand up to the responsibility of the choices you've made, and maybe you'll find out one day you were only made for doing that one task right, and maybe you'll even come to liking it after all.

Of Forgotten Places

I haven't met any one who is not extremely dramatic, and that of course, includes myself.

Everybody exaggerates the importance of something that has no meaning at all. That's simply because what's important or sentimentally signifcant to somebody may be of no value at all to anyone else on the planet. Surely enough not everything is interpreted the same way by every human being, and our reactions are all the products of our interpretations.

So, you're turning the world upside down over something, driving everybody mad with your constant talking about it while no one seems to get what's blown away your mind this way. And then you realize that the problem all along has been that you were always turning to people who, no matter how close to you they are, they can't always care or feel the joy or the grief that a particular something brings to you.

To Allah, we were meant to turn. To ask for consolation, for understanding. Who would understand better than our Creator? Who would know better how to lighten our burdens? Who would see through every thought we have without even uttering a word to explain it? With Him it's enough to kneel and plead for forgiveness and assistance, or cry joyfully words of gratefulness and thankfulness, and rest to sure that you've been heard and understood without need for further elaborations.

I'm trying to learn the art of strength. The art of ridding myself of waiting on people and hastening to Allah. An overwhelming feeling of weakness that is, and I can't find strength anymore while leaning on humans, most of all while leaning on myself. I am seeking assurance and peace of mind, seeking a reason, seeking an incentive, and they exist only where I most forget to look.

Humans are forgetful. A fact that excuses us for many of our sins, but turns against us when we forget the great power that watches over us. We keep looking in all the wrong places and in our forgetfulness, we forget that we already know where to look.

This time I want to remember. I've found my forgotten treasure.

Of Ridiculousness, Cement Walls & Originality

If there is anything I definitely ever wanted to be, I'd have given anything to be, it would be intelligence. Such a great power which comes in all different variants and forms, most important of which is the variant of being intelligently able to use whatever amount of intelligence you have, the most rarely encountered variant that is.

Now, what I mean here is not the "I'm really brilliant at maths" intelligence. I mean the originality intelligence. The inability to have a commonplace thought, to utter a commonplace word, to undertake a commonplace action. You see, that's a most guaranteed way to die young. With all the ridiculousness generally acknowledged as commonsense taking place around us everywhere, the sort of people I've just mentioned would definitely suffer all sorts of cardiovascular diseases. So, in short, my definition of intelligence would be originality, and my definition of originality would be a short life of a shooting high blood pressure.
But these are only the regular originals, they fade quickly, they fail to adjust.

An intelligent original would know how to adjust to the world and coexist. The world frustrates them but they know how to keep their frustration away from the surface. You would find them extremely quiet or extremely sarcastic. What better ways to coexist with ridiculousness other than laughing it out all through or simply looking the other way? I don't think I know.

Then there are the stupid originals who cross the line. They are very much aware of their own originality, which is not something awful except for the fact that they over do it. They despise people, look down on them and turn eventually into perfect jerks who think they have a divine right to consider others as perfect fools and treat them as mere marionettes.

The interesting part is that all three types have a common tendency that deserves to be marveled at towards crashing their lives into the nearest cement wall . They usually commit an outside the box insanity that blows everything up. All that trying new things and despising the nice old safe ridiculous ways don't always end very well. There is a reason why the world is full of happy commonplace people, and that is that the others don't survive themselves. Just take a look at Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment or Isabel from The portrait of a Lady and you'll get what I mean.

Me and a couple of my friends have been dying lately to meet any of the middle type (since jerks and dead people are everywhere nowadays). We've come to the conviction that they are a rare, almost extinct breed . May be the problem isn't that they don't exist anymore, it's that there isn't any more original thoughts, words or actions. Everything has been thought of before, has been done before, has been said before.

On a second thought though, I don't think I want to be original anymore. Looks like it ends by sudden death, oppressed frustration or being a jerk. With being a jerk the most appealing option on the list, I think I'd rather be contented with being who I am, the simple commonplace girl from med school.
Now, isn't that a relief? I've written complete nonsense and got to be finally contented with myself. One couldn't ask for more.