Jackpot!

After 3 1/2 years of worrying and wondering if I had chosen to study the right course, something kinda clicked in my head recently. Yup, something about narrowing down the choices while choosing a specialty that I would be faithfully married to for the rest of my remaining years.

I must confess that Medicine was not my first passion. I was never one of those kids who woke up the morning and suddenly decided that they were going to be a neurosurgeon. Neither was I one of those science whiz kids who aced every biology chemistry exam. I am proud to proclaim that I have always been outstandingly average actually, abit like neither here nor there :P
Parental pressure? Sure, my dad did play a minor teensy-weensy role in influencing my decision. There were many many instances where he subtly dropped hints that if I didn't know what to do in life, at least pick a broad-based degree like Medicine. Which btw, is such a chinese play-safe mentality.

Nevertheless, I brushed aside all that daddy-daughter advice. And for some odd reason, my impression of doctors remained skewed. I visioned them to be bespectacled nerds who were really smart and worked in clinics/labs all day having no social life. Could well be the posters showing photographs of those singaporean doctors plastered along the walls of the hospitals. Google image ''singapore doctor'' and see what I mean.

During those younger days, I fantasized about being a pipe-smoking Burberry trench-coat wearing kinda Detective. I was really inspired by Mr Sherlock Holmes himself, as being a big fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle during my younger geekier days, I literally devoured the Sherlock Holmes penguin classics collection. Short stories like the Hound of Baskervilles and the Speckled Band still leave a indelible trace somewhere in the recesses of my memory. Holmes kinda reminds me of Dr House, since both of them would crack cases with powers of deductive reasoning and source the right areas for clues no-one would think of, minus all that smart-ass sarcasm.

Then it was the Journalism craze. I started making up unbelievable stories out of thin air and compiling everything (layout, text, fonts) into my personal newsletter that was printed, distributed (to myself) and kept in a file. Using some kiddy microsoft news-letter writing software my dad bought for me when I was 12. And believe me, I wrote alot of crap stories back then (coz I'm F.O.S), which I still gloss over during moments of sheer boredom just to give myself a laugh at my own naivete and whimsical superficiality.

Then came the African Kenya missionary trip. The 2 week wonder that changed my perception of medicine and doctors. Maybe it was the total deprivation. And the look of utmost gratitude on villager's faces after you've treated them. The fact that everything was so bare and spartan meant that we had to rely on the minimum to serve the maximum population. It was remote old-school medicine, back to basic bedside teaching as I observed in awe at how the young missionary doctors diagnosed and treated the malnourished yet tough kenyans.
That magical experience gave me a brief flicker of inspiration, which I recounted again while writing my admissions essay for medicine.

Next came the drought. The first three years of PBHell. The countless number of times when I felt like tearing my hair out, especially when we were forced to fish around vague learning objectives and memorize details of subjects without realizing the greater significance behind it. And wavering moments of inconsistency when I doubted my own interest and abilities to pursue medicine as a career.

So finally, after climbing past the haystacks and bypassing all the cow-dung.....you've reached the clinical years (4th and 5th), where the learning of real medicine only begins. No one gives a shit about how much you know about the cerebral vasculature of the brain until the application of that knowledge becomes wholly relevant. Its kinda like reading the bible really (no blasphemy intended), but no one enjoys reading the tedious boring bits of a story until every detail clicks together to make perfect sense.
And thats why I'm starting to love this bit so much. Knowing what you need to know and realizing why you bloody well have to know it.

So anyway, back to my topic behind this long rant. I'm sure many budding doctors out there are still struggling to find a decent specialty that they can see themselves doing for the rest of their lives. Or maybe even medical students, who have second thoughts about continuing this course.
*This is not an career advice column*

And for myself, I think I might be narrowing it down to a few possibilities. It definetely makes studying alot more motivating because at least, I found something I'm interested in :)