The Most Difficult Concept About Becoming a Doctor

11:18 on Wed 19 Jan 2022

To me, the most difficult concept about becoming a doctor is change, both professional and personal.

I have seen change over the past few years within myself. I am making decisions within my academic and personal life that can be overwhelming at times. As a child used to being spoon-fed, I am still adjusting to being alone, making decisions for my present and future with significantly less guidance than I am used to. I am still finding out what I am good at without being told ‘well done!’ – through merit, not affirmation. I am looking out for my own happiness, fulfilment and self-worth because it is not that nobody else is, rather, at this age, nobody other than myself can know better.

I want deserved success, not through chance or circumstance, but because I have the same right to it as anyone else. I rationalise success within my reality and tell myself that I deserve success in my personal life, my career, my work life and in the life that follows this one. I should run a steady course to all of those things, if I falter above and below the line of best fit, I should always come back to it. ‘It’ being a gradual and sustainable increase in good.

I am learning how to depend on myself for my own happiness. I see this to be linked intrinsically within the realm of my becoming a doctor. What I am is from my parents, I strive for my patients and where I come from is from God. This notion is the pinnacle of my essay and it is my creed and conviction. I will be forever improving and keeping a personal relationship with God. Within my personal life, I hope that I can pass it down to future generations, to keep it alive forever; my only permanent mark on the world. My parents, now separated, were the foundation of my upbringing and my education. Their pooled and entire effort during my childhood had been in and of that pursuit, despite presently going about their separate ways. Despite this, these remain the things that build a person, a personality. The colour of my personality comes from this. I want and hope to give colour to others in similar and different ways. Patients, family members, a partner, friends.

Through medical school, on the path I am walking to becoming a doctor, I have grown in confidence. I am self-assured in my identity and my moral compass. My current and future journey will involve covering my academic and occupational terrain with the same notion.

For a long time, it has been a personal challenge of mine to improve my personality by showing a patient that I truly care about them and their own lives. This underpins many of the reasons as to why I have wanted to be a doctor. It has taken me time, age, maturity and self-development to arrive at this level of introspection yet I often still do not believe I am mature or self-developed. However, I do want to care about people and their lives and challenge perceptions, set impressions and raise the bar. I often find it difficult to understand that I am going to be a doctor; I do not often feel wiser or more mature than I was at fifteen, sixteen. Reflection — this essay and away from this essay, makes me realise that I am older. After years of living in London, I am older and I have more than halfway walked that path to becoming a doctor. What I attempt to tell myself repeatedly in my mind is that I am older and I am well on my way to becoming a doctor. Patients will depend on me, ultimately, so I have to be a good person. Dependable. If I have not already, I must grow out of my childlike mindset into this.

Upon re-evaluation, the most difficult concept about becoming a doctor to me is the responsibility for the care of someone else’s life whilst feeling uncertain about my own, at times. I have found exploring adult life difficult and therefore struggle to feel entirely deserving of the title that becomes attached to my name upon graduating. More than the self-doubt of fulfilling the slightly whimsical status associated with being a doctor, it is the gradual fatigue I, with my erratic personality, am feeling of the endurance course it has been so far.

I am of a fast-paced generation filled with fleeting relationships which makes me evermore grateful for the few, dependable ones that I have. It is easy to complain, yet I can almost swear by the nearly perceptible release of serotonin, dopamine or reward-pathway activation that occurs within me after telling a patient that I like their pyjamas, after a patient insisting I make myself comfortable on the end of their bed or after a patient telling me I remind them of their daughter. These are the fleeting interactions that only I will witness collectively and accumulate, and I will collect and hoard them until I have no space within my memory left.