Here comes one of the dreaded days (among a long list of dreaded days) when all of our high school class has graduated except us, Med students. Not only are we not graduating this year, this year also doesn't end! It's 12 long months almost linked to the sixth year, which also happens to be another 12 long months.
Now this could be frustrating. It's no secret that specially the last month has been hard on everybody. The atmosphere smells very strongly of stress, irritation, boredom and fatigue. If we have been working hard through the first four years, certainly it doesn't even come close to the hard work we've done, and still doing, through this fifth year. The back to back clinical rounds each consisting of 2 weeks, you being expected through each to learn a new science of Medicine and master, as far as possible, the basics of its clinical skills and then take an exam. The unbelievable amount of information that you have to learn by heart, understand and "digest" properly and apply to use. Add to that the dissatisfaction with the quality of education we're receiving and the fear that we won't turn out half as proper as Doctors as we have expected we would be. Add also the terrifyingly approaching finals (less than a couple of months away), the frustrating political national and regional atmosphere and the recently fulminating hot weather as summer gets started. Well! Who, under such circumstances wouldn't be burnt out?.. All very tangibly felt through the last month. I've noticed how I have been turning into this chronically tired and bored creature, which affected my attitude towards everything else; people, events, plans. I even haven't really had the time or the patience to process thoughts before coming to decisions but I have rather "gone with the flow". A sort of apathy has crept into everything and got me wondering if I even like my life the way it is any more.
So as my friends prepare for graduation, I feel the need for some time out -just few minutes- to sort out my thoughts. To take a look at what we've accomplished through that time, and what a long way we've come! From the 18 years old kids who couldn't believe their wide opened eyes burning with the fumes of formaldehyde as they faced the cadavers in the Anatomy classes for the first time, to those young men and women in the wards taking history from patients and learning how to examine them. It's not just our brains that has become far more knowledgeable than they have formerly been, but also our personalities have been greatly altered. For the better or the worse, we are definitely not the same people who stepped into Med school five years ago.
At the expense of good health and peace of mind, what have I really learnt? What have I become?
All of the required hard work at Med school demands sacrificing time and effort for doing things you may not be very interested in doing at the expense of other things you would have loved to do. As bad as this may be, it kind of teaches you to grow up. You learn to make choices and categorize things in your life as some of high priority that deserve all attention and sacrifices, and other things that may be saved up for a little while later after the high priority stuff have been accomplished, and other things that must be given up completely and left behind forever. That's the most vital process you must learn to do at Med school, and not being able to do it will literally tear you up all the time and put your life in ruins.
19 months away from graduation, Do you feel all responsible, mature and grown up? Do you realize that you're expected to be so before an even greater responsibility, somebody's life, would be entrusted to you?
The minute you step into the hospital and put on the white coat, people call you "doctor". They have blind faith in your knowledge, in your ability to help them, in your honesty and high principles. You have probably heard many of them pray they would see their children turn out to be just like you some day. They tell you details and secrets about their lives they wouldn't normally share with a stranger. They undress and let you examine their bodies. They swallow these chemicals you give them to take. They go to sleep while you cut through their insides. Such unbelievable trust! Such unbelievable responsibility! Have you learnt to appreciate being trusted to people's bodies and secrets? Did you come to full conciousness of God watching your every move, every thought, every given -or ungiven- attention? Did you strengthen your principles solid and deep enough to be tested by such blind helpless trust?
Through the last couple of years we've come to very close contact with the patients of the university hospital. We see them every morning with their pale faces worn out by illness, poverty and hardships. We listen to their stories and write them down everyday when taking history for our sheets. That, along with the lack of resources and deterioration in the medical services in the public hospitals, combined with a sense of responsibility towards these patients as their future health care givers and a conviction that it might be within our power to help lessen their suffering, has brought out the best side in many of us: the compassionate and charitable. Charity has become year by a year a principle daily event. Whether raising money for the hospital, throwing parties and fun days for El-Shatby children and even extended activities outside the campus to help those in need where ever they are after such constant contact with the some of the millions out there who need help.
Have you felt grateful for being in a position to give help rather than receive it? Have you felt an urge to exert effort and go a little out of your way for the sake of some one who is not you? Do you understand that the so called "troubles" in your life are actually nothing compared to theirs and might even be blessings you should be thanking God for?
Medicine as a science gives you a detailed view of God's most sophisticated creation, humans that is. I can't recall how many lectures or clinical classes have we studied a very accurate highly complicated physiological or disease process, and finding ourselves unable to fully grasp at once its sophistication, our minds have wondered at the quality of the brains which have discovered for the first time such a process, at the Mighty Creator who has created the process and created the fine brains capably of discovering and understanding such miraculous beauty. How many times we have felt with owe how extremely weak and fragile we actually are, brought down to sickness and death in all our greatness by creatures too tiny to be even seen, or by a seemingly trifle defect in a very long pathway (a detail that you may easily forget to write down in an exam paper without considering it a big deal) and yet brings the whole pathway down?
Do you feel the passion for this science? Have your mind and soul been elated when learning of such beauty and order? Have your soul been humbled when learning of the weakness of the body that carries it around? Has it brought you closer to God?
After five years, it is definitely about time our answers to these questions would be a YES. If not, then we are doing something the wrong way or yielding more than we should to all the negative energy that surrounds us. If we manage to have "yes" as an answer to these questions, then we've gained everything in the world that's worth sacrificing some health and peace of mind for its sake and it's never too late to start turning all your negative answers to positive ones. But if they never turn positive, then you've have successfully thrown away the best years in your life for no reasonable cause at all.
