Saturday, May 05, 2012

Licensed to Heal


When I was a little girl, all I had in mind was one thing: to be a Doctor. 

Somehow, it was just one of those things that I was sure about right from the start. At the age of 13, when we completed some profiles of each of our friends as an English project, my profile on Momo's page read:

Aspirations: Neurosurgeon. 

Of course, that has changed vastly since. Firstly, because I actually realised while on work experience how difficult Neurosurgery actually was, and secondly, in Med School that I was no genius. In fact, I was soooo mediocre, it was a huge piece of humble pie to swallow, realising that I was, in fact, hardly a dent in the pool of geniuses that made up a graduating year of medical students. 

Yesterday I passed my Med School Finals. 

We laughed, we shouted, we teared, we chugged down the alcohol, we partied hard, and then that was it. This phase of our lives was over.

The last Undergraduate exams of my entire life. A whole lot to take in. I struggled with ups and downs while trying to juggle sanity between OSCE-ing, calculating drug doses, placating people and laughing manically with my chums. Eventually, it seemed, I did know some Medicine after all in the past 5 years.

There have been brief moments in my life where I was fed a dose of reality of how tough Medicine really was. How much effort it took, emotionally and physically to be a great Doctor. How much my hand shook each year waiting to find out if I had passed yet another year and edged closer to becoming a Doctor, each time wondering aloud WHY I had chosen to put myself through such emotional turmoil.

At the end of the day, I say this over and over again, and I attest to this still. There is nothing else in this world I could imagine myself doing. I know I have yet to start properly Doctoring, but I do have high hopes for myself. 

The day I became Dr. S.

Another step closer towards possibly becoming that Cardio God :)