Dream on....

LIVE YOUR DREAMS--- before you stop having any!

Being a Mom of three toddlers, and living in a joint family system, I have come to realize that you dream big only when you are 22.
When you have no family responsibilities and you are not tied down by complicated relationships that demand your time and attention, you should live your dreams and explore new horizons. The experiences you gain and the raw exposure to situations helps strengthen your outlook of life and make you a better person at work and at home.
From a medical point of view that translates into doing clinical rotations in a diverse variety of disciplines to help build your clinical experience. Years later even if you become some world renowned doctor in your field of specialization, your basic knowledge of medical subjects and hands-on training in different disciplines, shall help you not only in your chosen speciality, but make you a popular  all-rounder! Female patients generally like to discuss complicated gynaecolgical and obstetrical issues with female doctors even if they are just hematologists or dermatologists. That not only saves time and money in underdeveloped countries like ours but also helps address a lot of health issues that would otherwise go unnoticed. In today's world of fast streaming internet facilities, anyone can read up about the complicated details of diseases you diagnose, but to diagnose them you need skills that don't come from just reading books or articles.  Besides it helps build your self esteem and confidence when patients question you on health related problems.
Another friendly advice to myself at 22, when I was bubbling with fresh knowledge and a passion to excel, would have been to start preparing for my USMLE or PACES foreign licensing exams, even if I didn't have the intention or resources to go abroad then. Destiny can place us in the most unusual of circumstances and being prepared in advance for a change of events can prove very helpful. Besides even after your post graduation, if you contemplate about working in the US or UK even for a short period on locum without permanently settling there, a few STEPS or PACES exam can come in handy. Its better than being stuck in your career ladder at some point with no prospect of promotion due to lack of professional experience or plain saturation of career opportunities. A foreign qualification can put you ahead in your career by a mile, enough to out class your adversaries and keep up with new infusion of talent and advancements in medicine.  Although nothing is impossible, but preparing for MRCP or USMLE, after post graduation can be quite a daunting task. To go back to basic medical subjects and read what had already been revised can be quite a drain on time and money. If I had prepared for these exams while I was preparing for my graduate exams I would have been perhaps more focused in my study approach and yielded better results in both!
Now though I enjoy this God-gifted motherhood (after six years of trying to conceive), and spend the better part of the day changing diapers, cleaning up after-meal messes, and singing nursery rhymes with my precious babies, before settling in to study for my post graduate exams in the late hours of the night when they are asleep, I am aware of people who have made it through and are enjoying the fruits of success. Having taken a break from my professional career to spend time with my little kids, I know this is a decision not many career-oriented, zealous enthusiastic professionals like my former self, would have made, but one I am comfortable with now. Perhaps motherhood changes your priorities..and your dreams, or maybe you are so drop dead tired at the end of the day that you stop having any!
So my advice to all budding doctors at 22 would be to live their dreams while they can, and to be prepared for life's challenges.

courtesy: http://weheartit.com


(Post was originally conceived based on a simple question by LinkedIn Influencers to mentors :
What do you wish you had known at 22?

 Above are my personal feelings on the topic.....If I were 22).


cover photo credits: http://studio-404.com/2013/freebies/wallpaper-live-your-dreams-august-2013

Jumping off the Diving Board

When a young lad marches into the world with all his degrees in a neat little file, all he asks for is a springboard from which to start.

Courtesy: http://www.mypersonalimprovement.com

While sailing along magnificently through the most productive years of his life, academically speaking of course, the guy who had broken last year’s college record of the greatest number of wickets in a cricket match, broke down. His father retired from government service and declared his financial assets before the boy. The family fortune was barely enough to see him through college. He was the eldest son and that in itself was self-explanatory of what was expected of him. He locked up his bat and ball and bade his cricketing pals goodbye. He looked a dilapidated man as he walked off the cricket ground, his dreams of stardom shattered, his studies all in a mess.

Out in the world, it was a different ball game altogether. There was no family enterprise to take over except a garment shop, which did not seem very enterprising to him. He started hunting for jobs. But here, he had few qualifications to prove his worth, and where he was academically adequately qualified he lacked experience. At last he found himself standing outside the Army recruitment centre staring at the sign-”The Army needs you”- They did.
It was a decent way of running away from home and responsibilities, or so he thought. But the rigorous military training soon drove the thought right out of his mind and he returned- a shaken man whose confidence in himself had been shattered. Sitting alongside his father at the shop, he wondered where things had gone wrong.
That’s the question most of us end up asking ourselves when we end up in the no-man’s land. The guy had been thrust into the world to make a niche for himself, but he needed some kind of footage- a springboard from which to start. For most people its the family business that cushions them when they start out to face the world. They are able to manage with what little talent they have. The graduate student who has his degrees to boast about may soon find that good grades may open for him the doors to top universities, but they cannot guarantee him a bright future. While the son of a business entrepreneur may go abroad to enhance his profile, the son of a grade 16 government servant may well just rust away.
Round about 22, when most of us jump off the diving board and plunge into the professional world, we are bursting with ideas, more adventurous than our predecessors and waiting to try out life’s uniforms. We have our competence to prove to the world, but we are also aware that we are on trial. This is the big moment we have been waiting for all along, and we want to strike it big. But if we rush head along into the professional world we are bound to be hit by a whirlwind. The susceptible period of our formative years is too precious to be wasted in unplanned moves. Recklessness on one’s part could lead to life long repentance.
So my advice to anyone poised for action on the diving board would be to trust their instincts. You can never be Mr. Perfect and too much introspection interferes with action. And as the proverbial saying goes, “just keep your fingers crossed”. There’s a whole new world out there to discover but if you start out too early and jump off ill-prepared you will hit solid ground, and that hurts!

Courtesy: afaq.edu.pk

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Long walk to ..... freedom! Part Three : Reaping Rewards

To top it all off, med students are burdened with volatile subjects like Biochemistry and pharmacology. Doing biochemical tests on urine samples is disgusting as it is, but what really puts the drain on the mental faculty are all those biological cycles of all the metabolic fates of carbohydrates, proteins and fats in the human body. Its one helluva job memorizing them and another recalling them in the examination hall. Besides you forget them all after the Professional examinations.

Courtesy: chemistry.tutorvista.com/biochemistry/metabolism


The hardest part of this saga are indeed the professional exams, which hang like a sword over the heads of students all through there student life. The whole administration seems out to get you. You have to be mentally tough to take the pressure of it all. But once you are through, you feel you can take on anything in life.

Somehow the years roll over. While first and second year seem to take ages and the end never seems in sight ( o why have I landed myself in this mess?) , third and fourth years seem like a whirl wind (which is so ironic because you really start getting the hang of things). Either the studies get easier or you have grown immune to the stresses and strains by now, but somehow life becomes more tolerable. And after two years of beating about the bush and studying what they call the ‘normal’ we come face to face with the diseases themselves- the ‘pathology’, our real enemies. This is the domain all doctors strive to conquer- the real basis of medicine. The medical student uses the eyepiece of the microscope to stalk down this enemy.

Courtesy:/dehradunlive.in/search/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Goyal-Pathology-Lab-Dehradun



 But this is no combat situation. We just view these dead, diseased tissues which have been stained with Haematoxylin and Eosin- the ‘pink’ and ‘blue’ one sees under the microscope, that adds color to these dead and dull-looking tissues and makes slide viewing a tolerable experience.


Courtesy: http://amida13.isi.uu.nl/


The real battle is fought in the wards. So clinical rotations are an important part of this training programme.

Although there is nothing really glamorous about going around hospital wards taking case histories and doing ‘general physical examinations’ (GPE), but moving around with seniors on ward rounds is exciting. You get your share of flattering remarks and disapproving looks from Professors and patients alike.But amongst the many faces of life in a hospital a familiar one is the face of helplessness. It screams at you as you go past the waiting area, or go down those dimly lit corridors. Rows and rows of patients, grieving , in pain, helpless- and in contrast to all those dead bodies in the dissection hall-alive.
And it seems almost as if someone has strapped a heavy load onto one’s shoulders. The sense of responsibility weighs one down. By becoming part of a few moments in the lives of these patients, doctor and patient are bound in a sacred trust that transcends all barriers of cast, creed and social status and one becomes accoutable to one’s own conscience.
Regardless of all the degrees, medals and years of experience, a new patient is always a new challenge to a doctor. All tall claims finally boil down to the basic relationship that a doctor has with his patient. an impression left by any doctor in the mind of his patient reflects upon the whole profession. Once let down, he will never trust his life with any doctor. The jinx of the doctor being a ‘Messiah’ shall be broken forever. Because there is no room for errors in the medical profession, and to the common man ‘people in white coats’ are all the same.

View full article published in healthmad.

 Visit :

http://healthmad.com/medicine/in-white-coats-2/


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Long walk to.... freedom! Part Two: Hitting the books.

Getting admission into a medical school can prove to be a great launching pad but only if you take full advantage of it. Whether you were a straight-A’s student or someone who slid through High School with minimal effort (and marginal results), medical school is a new platform to start from- a new opportunity to show you’ve got what it takes to be successful.

    But nothing in the world can prepare you for that dreaded encounter with the Dissection hall. It’s here, in the dimly lit hall, which reeks with the pungent smell of formalin that the dry, boring facts of Anatomy come to life. A few weeks in the Dissection Hall and you become emotionally immune to the dreary surrounding. Among rows of dead bodies draped in cotton swabs drenched in formalin, students watch as the mysteries of the whole miracle of creation unfold under their scalpels and forceps.Surgeons are said to be born here.

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courtesy: http://www.aimst.edu.my/faculties/medicine/images/anatomy.jpg

What medical students owe to dissection halls for the study of Anatomy, they owe it to frogs and rabbits for the study of Physiology. ‘Stunning’ and ‘Pithing’ are just technical names for knocking them unconscious and bashing out their brains. Lying in glass troughs with their chests opened up and their hearts suspended in mid-air, they present a pitiable sight. A lever assembly converts the feeble contractions of their hearts into oscillations of the pen, which transfers them onto graph papers so that medical students can use these cardiogram recordings to study the functioning of the heart and the minute details of heart blocks.

Coutesy: http://www.sci.utah.edu/~macleod/bioen/be3202/labnotes/l1-frog/descrip.html

To top it all off, med students are burdened with volatile subjects like Biochemistry and pharmacology. Doing biochemical tests on urine samples is disgusting as it is, but what really puts the drain on the mental faculty are all those biological cycles of all the metabolic fates of carbohydrates, proteins and fats in the human body. Its one helluva job memorizing them and another recalling them in the examination hall. Besides you forget them all after the Professional examinations.




Courtesy: chemistry.tutorvista.com/biochemistry/metabolism

The hardest part of this saga are indeed the professional exams, which hang like a sword over the heads of students all through there student life. The whole administration seems out to get you. You have to be mentally tough to take the pressure of it all. But once you are through, you feel you can take on anything in life.

View full article published in healthmad.
 Visit :
 
 http://healthmad.com/medicine/in-white-coats-2/

Please don't forget to like, share and comment on the website too.

Getting started

Going to hospitals can be a daunting task for most of us, especially if we don't know any doctor personally. The maze of corridors, the long list of medical, surgical and allied specialist doctors' clinics, and the multitude of labs and specimen collection units can boggle the mind easily. Seated in a dingy office, behind the receptionist and technicians' area in this hospital lab,I learned to explore the mysteries of blood, and the diagnosis and treatment of various disorders of blood cells. This blog is an attempt to unravel that zest for knowledge and promote study techniques in the approach to haematology.

I hope this journey is educational and entertaining for all you budding haematologists.

Peace for now and bon voyage..

Courtesy: daranichole.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/live-your-dreams/