Thread by @favorytDr

There are some who enjoy the medical school experience. They thrive. They proudly present the fruits of their midnight endeavors at quizzes. They get stratospheric scores on MBBS exams. Lecturers love them, their letters of recommendation are glowing.

I was not among them.

Within a semester of starting med school, I found myself thinking: "this was a mistake".

Spending day after day for many months dissecting a dead human body was a very effective way of getting desensitized to gross looking stuff and weird & bad odors.

I really struggled.

During the first 2 years, if you wanted to do it right, it was like a job where you had to be studying more than 40 hours a week. There was always a huge test around the corner that covered roughly the same amount of material as an undergrad semester exam.

And, truth be told, I didn’t like the courses I was studying. Physiology had always come naturally to me. Biochemistry? Not so much. You couldn’t derive things from first principles. As best I could tell, it was a bunch of memorization and regurgitation. 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

I knew medicine was founded on biology more than anything else but I convinced myself that since I was smart, I could learn anything, my personal emotions be damned.
It was I who was damned. Damned to years of misery and depression.

Damned to dreaming that maybe next year would be better, only to realize that, no, it didn’t really get better and things just kept being hard.
It was hard for me to focus on my studies and I fell behind. There was 30+ hours worth of lectures coming at us every week.

So, if you fell behind, that was pretty much it: you weren’t going to be able to catch up. I was afraid that I would fail a class and have to retake it, which I did eventually😁. I couldn’t bear the shame. I imagined myself going through the halls of the school amid murmurs.

"Look at this guy… such a failure? Can you believe he FAILED? How dumb do you have to be? He probably didn’t belong here. They probably let him in because he bla bla"…

I grew more and more depressed. I took refuge in escapism. Maybe I’d take JAMB and head to law school!

Maybe I’d take the GMAT and get into a top Business school, abroad. I’d look at their curricula and grow even more despondent: I cared even less about that stuff. If I couldn’t make myself give a damn about lysosomal storage diseases.

I sure as hell wasn’t going to enjoy reading a huge amount about torts. And business school? What the hell were these classes? It looked like I was going to have to do lots of the types of projects I’d always hated in school.

Inertia prevailed. Depressed though I might be, I didn’t quit.

I had thoughts of suicide. I thought of my mom. Poor woman!
But you can’t will yourself out of depression. What saved my life was seeing Chantel Akarman take his life. Seeing another person do it made it seem absurd

Plus, narcissist that I was, I couldn’t get past the fact that people wouldn’t care that much that I’d killed myself. Sure, they might be sad for a little bit, but then they’d quickly forget about me. 🙄😒
I somehow managed to [barely] pass my pre-med classes.

Then, it was on to clinical work. Now I get to be in the hospital! Yaaaay! To hell with biochemistry and anatomy. Now I’ll study real medicine.

More misery.

Long hours, stressful rounds, people asking you questions you didn’t have answers to…

It was not fun. I found that, except for a select few courses, I simply didn’t care enough to will myself to read about most of that stuff. So I’d study - but I could never spend the hours and hours required to do really well.

Paediatrics was torture: lots of god complexes, lots of being put down, lots of seeing people being gratuitously 'hmmm' 🤐.
Within minutes of starting my 6-week clerkship, I’d already reached my conclusion: “nope.”

By this point, I was too far in and too deep in debt for quitting to be realistic. I thought: “I’ll drag myself through one of the milder residencies and work part-time when I’m done. And I’ll try to avoid fields where I have a high chance of killing someone”. 😒

Fact is, medical training is long and brutal. Even those with the most positive attitudes will feel really down from time to time.

And with medical training lasting 7+ years, the light at the end of the tunnel is so far away, it can seem like the Hubble Telescope’s deep space view is needed to catch a glimpse of it & with medical training lasting 7+ years, the light at the end of the tunnel is so far away.

It can seem like the Hubble Telescope’s deep space view is needed to catch a glimpse of it, but you've got to hang in here fam. 💪

This year has been absolutely insane. The learning curve is absurd. 💪🚀 .
So for everyone about to start anything new that seems terrifying, don’t worry about it.
Like learning a new language, the best way to learn is to dive in. Get in there and get your hands dirty.

Will you be terrible on day 1? Probably, just like everyone else. Then guess what? We figure it out. So don’t let the daunting scare you.

I've been knocked down a couple of times, probably would get knocked down a few more times in the future, but who cares tho? 🤷‍♂️

The character of an individual isn’t how often he/she gets knocked down. It's about getting back up 😁

Merry Christmas everyone 🤶🎄 I hope my story inspires someone 😁😊