The very idea of helping the sick has always fascinated me even at an early age. I remember vividly how I’d feel giddy every time my aunt invites me to go with her in hospitals for her daily rounds. I remember wanting to own my very own pair of stethoscope and let it hang around my neck just like how I see doctors in my hometown wear them. I remember having so many questions about what doctors scribble on patients’ charts. I would always end up with a slight headache for trying hard to decipher the medical Morse code that is their illegible penmanship. This was me when I was a little girl. I had dreams and hopes that someday soon I’d be like my aunt. The air of authority my aunt exuded was infectious and even if I didn’t bag an MD degree I still walked around hospital halls like I’m some hotshot doctor and peek at wards pretending to check how my patients were doing. It seems funny now but for me then I felt like I was in seventh heaven. I wanted to become a doctor so bad that I took up Nursing over Creative Writing as my college course thinking that it would serve as an excellent foundation once I get admitted into Med School. The exposure in hospitals at a young age helped me in more ways than one. I easily understood how oxygen tanks are manipulated. Injections weren’t foreign objects to me and a dying person being defibrillated didn’t scare me as much. The drive to be a real doctor was overpowering but it wasn’t easy. Nursing was a struggle. I thought college would be so much different from high school and I thought I was going to have a lot of time in my hands but I was wrong. I woke up every day for four years before 7:00 AM and sometimes when I was scheduled to be the team leader in our shift I’d compel myself to wake up before sunrise, and mind you, I am not an early riser. So you can just imagine my chagrin when I first laid eyes on my whole year round schedule. Fast forward to a few years later and I graduated with flying colors. I took the board exam, studied hard, and burned the midnight oil until my eyes turned red just so I could have my Nursing license. News got out and I passed and all the hard work I invested in the span of four years paid off pretty well. I took that as a sign to pursue my dreams of becoming a doctor since everything turned out exactly how I planned it to be. The whole summer before classes started I gathered all my requirements, took all the necessary entrance tests, had my interviews done and waited until the Registrar approved my enrollment. Everything was so new to me. I felt like a hometown girl swallowed in the shocking culture of a big city. It took some time to get used to all the traffic and all the noise but eventually I got the hang of it. The only thing that I didn’t get used to was Medicine per se. It was a far different world, so different from what I was used to. We had doctors for teachers and we had daily classes with no one to lecture us on all subjects. It was a very independent way of learning and we didn’t rely much on our teachers, we were taught to rely mostly on books and it was something that I didn’t enjoy. There were so many distractions that came bombarding from all directions and it affected my concentration. Back in college I used to get distracted all the time but I always found my way back. This time, I was completely lost. I didn’t go out to study in groups. Instead I visited coffee shops all by myself. I ate breakfast, lunch and dinner alone. It was a very depressing time for me and my desire to become a doctor little by little died out. I lost my motivation and will to study. No matter how hard I try to tell myself that I had to do this that this was the right thing to do, my heart doesn’t seem to agree. My only way of coping was to cry it all out and cry was what I did for the most part of the school year. At the end of my first year in Med School I decided to quit. It wasn’t an act of cowardice; it was sheer bravery for me. I overlooked the potential obstacles and I thought that it was going to be easy but I was wrong. I wasn’t all that prepared for the battle. I wouldn’t say that giving up Med School was a great decision but I know deep inside that it was the best decision for me. Perhaps in another life I could be a doctor but for now, I think that plan needs to be placed in the back seat. The reason why I didn’t pursue Medicine was because I know that I am not going to be happy. If I spent a whole year crying, being depressed and getting stressed over the most trivial things then I cannot imagine myself surviving the next four to five to six more years of anguish. I was constantly vomiting, my doctor told me I had irritable bowel syndrome, my Restless Leg Syndrome has gotten worse and I always had massive headaches. It was the most tormenting phase of my entire life and I didn’t want to experience that again. Yes, my dream did not materialize but it wasn’t the end of neither me nor my career. Perhaps someone up there had other plans for me and I conditioned my mind to believe that this is true and that faith can take me to places that I never thought I’d be. Medicine is no joke. If you are just like me, who clung tight to your dreams of becoming a doctor, I salute you and I wish you well. The most important thing to remember is that whatever career you put your heart into; don’t ever lose yourself because if you do, you won’t be able to enjoy the satisfaction and the fulfillment of what you’re doing. And it will all be useless in the end. Medicine requires 150 percent of your dedication, 101 percent of your time and 100 percent of pure hard work.
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