#6 - This is... new

Over the past few weeks, I've felt something, an emotion, that I haven't felt for a long long time.

No, it's not love. I ain't simping for anyone but myself 😤

No, it's not sadness.

It's excitement. But more specifically, it's excitement about Medicine.

Ever since COVID hit—which happened to coincide with me starting clinical placement—my enjoyment of med school has plummeted considerably.

I'm sure it's the same stuff that most med students feel at times. I felt lost and in everyone's way at the hospital, I felt like I was spending lots of hours at placement and not really gaining a whole lot and I didn't feel like I was actually doing anything that was getting me closer to the ultimate goal of being a doctor.

As a result, I was getting a little despondent about the career path that I had chosen.

It was later that year that I decided to start my YouTube channel and diversify my identity to get back into things outside of Medicine, because I was starting to feel like I wouldn't be able to do Medicine full-time as my career.

But over the past few weeks, as I've been undertaking placement in the Emergency Department, it's all clicked and I finally feel like I've been able to use some of the knowledge that I've accumulated over the past 5 years to make a difference to patients' lives, rather than purely for the sake of answering the niche questions that doctors ask to test your ability (and show off their supreme knowledge).

I've thoroughly enjoyed being able to work up undifferentiated patients and use problem-solving and clinical reasoning to come up with differential diagnoses and rule these in or out. I've loved that I've been able to feel useful, organising investigations and charting medications and fluids.

And then, the great thing about ED is that you don't get bored because there's so many different things that you might see in a day!

You might start off seeing someone with abdominal pain and end up suturing a laceration on someone's scalp from when they've had a fall.

You might reduce someone's fracture, then move to telling someone they've had a recurrence of their breast cancer.

You might see a cute little kid with a bit of croup, to a man who's body is shattered after being in a motor-vehicle accident.

Of course, I would prefer that the ED was empty and that everyone was home safe and with their loved ones. But unfortunately, that's not the way of the world. ED is a very stimulating environment to be in where you don't know what the next patient that you'll see has got.

Does this mean I'll become an ED physician? Who knows.

You'll have to wait until I go more in-depth into what specialities have piqued my curiosity at this point of my life as I approach the pointy end of medical school. Perhaps that'll be next week?

Resource #1 - Article

Work Life Balance is Impossible

The nobler goal of life bucket integration

Infinite PlayNat Eliason

This article expands on an issue I've had with the term work-life balance.

A better term imo is simply life balance.

Work isn't separate to the rest of life. It is part of our lives, one of the buckets of life along with other things, like physical health, relationships, hobbies etc.

In my opinion, the goal isn't to balance the rest of life alongside work. The way I approach a career is with the goal of finding something that you can integrate into your life along with the other buckets.

You shouldn't dread going to work 5 days a week in order to be able to enjoy your 2 days off where you can focus on your other life buckets.

Resource #2 - Tweet

I don't know if anyone else reading this is interested in growing an online audience, but imo Twitter is one of the best platforms for building an authentic audience.

I've intermittently experimented with trying to grow on Twitter, but I've never really given it much time.

I thought this was an interesting insight into how much luck and timing plays into growing an audience on Twitter. On YouTube, you could never post the same video twice, but on Twitter, since old tweets are rarely shown to people, it's probably better that you do since it may result in your content reaching a wider audience.