adrift

How does your experience of being a medical student compare to practising as a doctor? And do you think having been a medical student and being a doctor has changed you in any way?

That’s a really interesting topic. Sometimes my friends and I reflect on just how much we have all changed.Med school is intense, but it’s very theoretical. It feels like a superpowered version of school. You still have homework, you have lectures, and you have lots of exams. It’s scary, and you’ll spend the entire 4-6 years constantly worrying you’ll fail your exams or get kicked out. When you’re a clinical med student, you are there in the background. People aren’t always sure where you are meant to be, or what you are meant to be doing, and you have to work to make opportunities happen, or learn as much as you can. You get put on the spot a lot, because people want to make sure you are learning. You might see patients (if your seniors think it is appropriate), but you don’t have any *real* responsibilty. It’s very protected in that way. And then you graduate, and people ask you to make decisions that actually impact people’s lives; that’s a huge responsibility for any new graduate! It’s scary, and you feel out of your depth, because no matter how much theory you learned in med school, it’s nothing like knowing what to do in practise. Fortunately, you have seniors to supervise you and to ask for help. But the higher up you go, the more you become the senior who others ask for help, whilst still being far from all-knowing, yourself! And medicine is vast, and things are difficult, so you can work for a long time and still have so many things you don’t yet know. The most important thing remains that you should always seek help if you need it. I still feel like the same science-obsessed arty teenager that I was at school. But I think it’s also changed me a lot, in many ways. University makes you more organised and responsible with your studies; you become used to planning your life, juggling lots of responsibilities, and doing things that have to be done, regardless of whether you like to do them or not. Which, if we are brutally honest, is kind of what adulthood is about. Things that just feel really awkward and unpleasant (like calling up an important senior, who is a stranger, to argue for something I know they will give me a hard time about, but I have to advocate for my patient, so I have to do it) become easier and less scary. I think the fact that we are exposed to life-and-death situations and people’s personal lives also makes you mature quickly. By being exposed to so much illness, suffering and death, you learn a lot of lessons about life and people.   Where most of your peers might be spending their early 20s getting drunk or out on the pull, you try to balance having a social life with holding the hands of dying pensioners or comforting people whilst they cry about their life. You still get time to ‘be a young person’, but at the same time you have to balance it with trying to shoulder heavy responsibilities.  Even if you’re introverted, you slowly learn to cope with a world that values extroversion. You talk to so many people in your professional life, and though it’s really intimidating when you start, it gets a lot easier with time. You learn to work with a lot of other students, nurses and doctors, until it becomes second nature to walk into a room full of important people and announce ‘Hi, i’m X and I’m the on-call doctor’, and people actually care that you walked in! It’s so strange. Teenaged me would never have had the guts.   You meet a lot of patients, who absolutely need you to present the image of a doctor. You learn to present yourself as a confident and competent clinician, even though inside you’re still a nervous person working out what you are doing. You learn to fight your corner when it comes to requests and referrals, and know when you have to stand your ground. You slowly learn to look and act like a professional adult, developing a manner and body language that both engenders respect, but also puts people at ease. It’s funny to think of it, but none of us were like this back when we were teenagers, and even when you are out of university it doesn’t exactly come naturally to you. I know a lot more, obviously, and that’s not a knowledge you can switch off; medicine becomes like a sort of lens through which you view life itself. Evaluating evidence, and thinking critically are also things that you don’t just use in your day job, but something that become part of your life. I do think medicine changes your outlook on life, though perhaps each  of us take away slightly different lessons. It might teach you how short life is, and how insignificant most drama is. Perhaps it teaches you that hell is other people, and that we can all help to reduce human suffering. It might teach you to be efficient, hardworking and focused. Nowadays I’m not fazed by seeing a deceased person, and I can handle really quite scary medical situations without feeling traumatised by it all. I deal with hostility or abuse from the public, and though it’s still draining, it’s less scary than I thought it would be. When you realise most people are really scared and upset and acting out, it makes you see interactions differently.  I’d go as far as to say it makes you see a lot of things differently; it really helped me put a lot of people and things into context. And the more you work with people, the better you become at reading them, and knowing just how to act and what to say to make them feel better. And actually, being introverted and insightful can be great when it comes to observing people and learing to understand them.People think a good bedside manner is innate, but it’s really not! I was a shy, introverted teenager with a nerdish streak, the kind who might not speak up at all during some lessons because the ‘loud students’ were answering all the questions, only to eventually pipe up with something insightful. My teachers (bless them, where would I be without their patience?) would always give me feedback to speak up more in class. “She has lots to say, if only she would speak up”. Every year, in every school report. So I’m not a natural born leader, nor an extrovert, and yet I love the communication aspect of medicine and have always tended towards specialities where you could make people feel, as well as be, better. Perhaps it’s hard to truly tell how med school and medicine changed me, or any of us, because we all change with time anyway. It’s not really impossible to truly remain as we are. We experience lots of interesting things that make us grow as people, and we mature as we reflect on the things we’ve learned throughout out lives. But I’d love to read what other people have to say about this. Medblr, how has med school or being a doc/nurse/etc changed you?