Babbling at Six Months, Extremely Talkative at Twenty Two Years..

I had a very strict non-negotiable schedule for today: stare at the ceiling. The only allowed variation from the plan was to stare at the wall or the closet. But then you realize that you became physically incapable of being still and that you have to be always moving or doing something, it's writing then..

We are taking the Fifth year exams! We've been planning and working for these days all year that they have turned into a myth that we doubted  would really happen, but here we are. Now I understand why my high school friends who have seen older siblings or cousins take the fifth and sixth years med school exams have completely eliminated med school from their choices. They told us we won't have a summer vacation and we thought: "Meh.. so what?". Nobody really saw this mountain of stress and work coming. It kind of reminds me of Coldplay's song: "Nobody said it was easy, no one ever said it would be this hard!". We've been under-warned.

Two very valuable things you build up through your years with medicine are exaggeration and a passionate love for drama, and what could give better display to that better than exams? We wrap our lives around it and turn it into a matter of life and death. It's a misery to have to cram that endless amount of information in your human memory in that impossible time of the year, and we know how to rejoice in our misery! We take exams too seriously, too personally. Twitter has showed me that it's not just Egyptian med students who do that as I previously thought, we are a clan of obsessed maniacs who exist literally all over the world. I can't blame us though, we give away too much of our time and lives to medicine and we want to give it a proper ending. We're exposed to levels of stress that not everybody can handle, and if what it takes to get through it is screaming around a little bit, so be it. Sometimes you've got to stop calling yourself silly and dramatic and just do what you do, and that's just the perfect timing.

Stress, boredom and bad levels of physical and mental exhaustion make you appreciate lots of little things, makes the life you take for granted all the time seem so pretty and glamorous  Like how suddenly you notice that you can watch forever the fan in your room as it moves slowly producing a magical hypnotising low hum with a soft air current  that can send you to another peaceful world.. Like how it's unbelievably comforting to have two buddies around who don't share a single care of yours, and even better, can't share it even if they wanted to. I get into the room and find both the hamster and the guinea pig standing motionless like statues in anticipation of the foot steps they've heard, and unless you're allowing the former out of her cage or have a cucumber or a neck scratch  for the latter, then they can't possibly care less about you. They are my constant reminder that whatever problem I have has no global impact; no one else in the world cares, it is not the end of intelligent life on this planet and so it definitely can't be that dangerously serious.. Like how you recall every event and every person your memory has recorded since it could ever record leaving you in a nostalgia for everything and everybody you remember.. Like how you not only effectively scan your exhausted brain for solutions for national political, economic and social problems, but also you find your solutions brilliant enough to call them applicable. Life, the universe and everything seems pretty close at hand and graspable to understanding, and the only thing you can't grasp is how you've fallen into that mess in the first place.

Some days I can snap out of all of this meaningless drama and be a normal person who is just doing her job. A difficult job but still just a job. On other days I speak of fans, consoling small animals and nostalgia. And some better days I just think of how good and right it would feel after this job is accomplished. I think of the beautiful taste of exerting yourself that much, handling it and getting through it. It's sort of pushing yourself to the extreme to find out what you're really capable of getting done. And my prayer is that when I discover how much I can really do, I won't be very badly disappointed.