Therapy?

I’m going to go off the beaten track for this post and write about something fairly recent. This post felt like a natural progression from the previous one anyway, so here we go.

Being in the medical line you have to be mentally prepared for a few things, most involving sacrifice. And although everyone who’s been there before can tell you time and again what to expect, only you and you alone will are capable of calming yourself down, giving yourself the pep talk, and eventually face up to the unrelenting blow of reality once it comes.

What I mean is, some of the things are a given. Yes, we will watch all our other friends graduate, work and start families before our very eyes, while we still slog away in 4th year. They will tell us, what a wonderful life it is to be working, making money, free from assignments and leery lecturers who hasten to fail you at the slightest human error. And how they can finally afford the holiday they’ve always dreamed of. Enviously I watch all my friends’ announcements over MSN… "Redang trip… who’s in?" "Last call for Genting trip today."

Not for us.

The whole of last year I’ve had only 3 weeks of holiday. One week intersemester break, one week Raya break and one week Christmas break. Otherwise it’s "work, work", like the typical grunt in Warcraft. A typical day for us involves ward work and clinic work from 8am to 5pm normally. Within that time there would also be classes, seminars to prepare, learning issues to discuss, and always looming over our heads, the next exam. Exams are the bane of our profession capable of stifling even the foolhardiest medical student. It sends us to our basements, our inner sanctums, our tortured psyche, as a means to complete our studies, we all have to go through them without question, and like it.

Not that we’re complaining. We knew what we had coming when first we signed up for med school. We knew that there would be no turning back from the pantheon of geekdom. And, I can safely tell you, deep into the 4th year of med school, the reason we came here is becoming more and more vague. Gone are the ideals of saving the world and helping the needy, it is more of a tale of survival on our part and not being able to fit into any other profession. Nonetheless, we knew how to take our blows, and take blows we did. "Suck it up", we tell ourselves.

But sometimes the university throws you a curveball, a sideswipe, a low blow, and a backstab all at once. For ours it was depriving us of a Chinese New Year celebration, for the simple fact that our academic calendar is arranged so that our yearly finals will always fall around the time of Chinese New Year. It has happened in nearly all my years in medical school.

2004 was the year I nearly went crazy. Faced with the choice of taking a packed bus through a 4-hour traffic-jammed journey home for just a simple meal and to see some relatives and exchange pleasantries; or to stay in KL and get a few extra days’ preparation for the exam that has the highest failure rate in my university. The latter seemed obvious, and easy. And so I stayed in KL, my first Chinese New Year away from home. No more worrying about racing for time to complete my revision. No more anxiety.

How wrong I was.

On the first day of Chinese New Year, in an empty apartment (since my housemates went home), I studied and crammed, surviving on delivered pizza. As the day wore on, I felt more and more lonely, spiritually empty, desperate, and in total lack of human contact. Up to that point in that day I had not talked to a single soul. The crazy started kicking in, and I took out my phone and proceeded to call nearly everyone on my list unil my credit ran out.

Spiritually empty. What a way to feel on Chinese New Year.

So earlier this year I was faced with the same dilemma. To go or not to go home. Weighing out the difference between a few extra hours of study and being able to see your old friends and relatives again. Once again I debated and once again I thought I was going to stay back, this time in Seremban. "When the crazy kicks in, just suck it in," I thought.

But all it took was one afternoon in the library to find out what I was really missing. It was the day before our Chinese New Year/study break. Literally everyone was saying their goodbyes in the library before going back home. Everyone was in the New Year mood and dammit they were going to enjoy it, exam or not. Deep inside I wanted to join them, be like them, and silence the inner kiasu, but it was hard. Then a friend came to me and said.

"Do what’s right for the heart."

And I did. And although it was no Robert Frost-like departure from the oft-travelled road, the trip back home… made all the difference. Where my thought’s escaping, where the music’s playing. Home. It’s hard to point out exactly what seeing old friends and relatives does to you, but it really did the trick. Like Freddy Mercury says, it’s a kinda magic. The 3 days I spent in Ipoh I would not trade for anything else… and when I came back to Seremban my batteries were charged and ready again to immerse myself in work.

So to the people who were with me in the library, particularly Sarjit, Jill and Prakash, thank you. Your words made all the difference. And so there shall be no story of me going crazy for the second time. Not this time. I did what’s right for the heart, after all. And as for the exam? It was fine.