Hopeful nerd cum lifesaver

welcome, to all you freshies, fresh graduate from the school of medicine. i will entertain you now on the job of a doctor, the thing that you’ve been dying to achieve for these recent past few years of your invaluable life.

your first day will be full of awkward innnings, topsy turvy, really poorly done jobs, and left you wondering "what did i do wrong?". thanks for the corticosteroid (i think its from the mineralocorticoids kind) you still able to wake up the next morning, earlier than usual, looking foward for the very next day, rather innocently, and if i may add, simple-mindedly barmy, thinking things can only get better. like the wine, once it popped open, it can only get more and more sour. well, not that i know how wine would taste after it freshly popped open, let alone after 3 days of open fermentation, but thats beside the point. lets get along with the story.

after you incidentally, or so they said,kill someone or two or five; even deep inside, or not so deep inside (depend on your moral values) you know its just another low BP that you’re too lazy to review or acted upon, or another stomach ache on a decrepit, maggot-infested bedblocker with a borderline low haemoglobin, another shortness of breath after a heavy meals - the things that you busily persuaded your tiny circle of concern that less important than your next IV cannulation or urethral catheterisation or blood culture or new admission to clerk-in - the things that ended opinting towards the senior house officer on-call’s fault; you realise that its inevitable that you’re just crap at your job and you can only climb the hill ever so slowly, and you feel so much hatred and agony and loathe and abhorrence and abomination and disgust that you were stuck to this profession for the rest of your life, and you started to envy the janitor, the teacher, the farmer and the serene life of fisherman. they dont have to take the arterial blood gases AND run to the machine AND print the result out AND run to your senior who just stood there with folded arms spitting about this and that. They dont have to do PR afterwards. They dont even know how to arrange for outpatient exercise stress test.

after the hatred, then come the force of unwilling. you’ll become zombified, thinking it’ll be just another day before the next 5 hour sleep, or it’ll be just another 24 plus 9 hours of doing stuff that no one else would dream of (taking blood from people who have arms made out of woods, cleaning wounds that smell worse than yours in your postcall days, speaking to belligerent, rancorous, unsympathetic, formidable seniors for them to see your feeble patients, mopping the floor and desk and walls, change the curtain while wiping the fans clean, and last but not least, do them all in 30 minutes). you’ll stay in this state for the whole week, or if you’re lucky, for the whole 2 years.

if you only take things easy, one step at a time, and realise that you can only take so much that you need to (guess what?) take it all one at a time, and focus, one at a time, you know that its not so bad being an underpaid slave.

like i said, welcome, to the university of life.