FOREWORD
FOREWORD
Welcome to my mind, all you crazy, beautiful people! Are you ready for round 4? I wrote this journal during my days as a Basic Specialist Trainee from 2023 to 2025, recounting my tales in and out of hospital.
It’s about night shifts, split-second judgement, and learning to think in uncertainty. But also about everything outside the resus room – the doubt, the growth, the exhaustion, and the quiet realisation that I was no longer just training… I was doing the job.
“Anyone can fall in love and be blindly happy! But not everyone can pick up a scalpel and save a life.”
– Dr. Ellis Grey, Grey’s Anatomy
Two years of pre-med, five years of med school, and two years of internship. That’s what watching one episode of Grey’s Anatomy got me. Well… that, and a monomaniacal obsession with surgery that became my raison d’être.
All those years, my goal of becoming a surgeon was the only constant in my life. I wanted nothing more than to become an extraordinary surgeon. “Happiness is for the mediocre,” I’d tell myself after declaring war on normalcy and a pedestrian life. I wanted none of the distractions that, in my mind, alienate normal people – no relationships, no hobbies, no other frivolous pursuits that would hinder my quest for excellence.
Until I decided to take a year off to pursue other goals in my life, that is. It wasn’t so much me wanting out as needing to experience more of life before continuing my training. And, predictably, after a year of travelling and exploring more of our tiny blue dot, everything changed. The world I had built for myself started to crumble. Not everyone can pick up a scalpel and save a life – but did that mean I had to?
It was a time riddled with uncertainty and doubt. The only thing I had ever been so resolute about was now under threat. The very thing that had given my life meaning was now wavering. Was I being fickle? Weak? Alienated, like all those other “normal” people? The foundation of my life was shaken at its core.
Over that year, I opened my mind to the idea that there might be more to life than the four walls of a hospital. Those walls came tumbling down the more I learned about life outside them. I had experienced happiness and freedom, and now it felt too late to turn back. I was no longer willing to waste away in a hospital doing the same thing over and over. I wanted so much more for my life than that.
And I was managing. I went from being a miserable workaholic who neglected everything else in his life to becoming a more well-rounded, generally happier person who appreciated what life had to offer. The previously dull life, which had been overtaken by medicine, was now a vibrant, rainbow-coloured one. I found a part-time job as a medical officer at a private hospital until I resumed my training, all the while implementing the things I had learnt over the past year into my new routine. Suddenly, my life in Malta wasn’t one I was stuck in and wanted out of.
I wasn’t just a doctor anymore. Maybe I wouldn’t get to pick up a scalpel, but I now had a new bike, a yoga mat, my own diving gear, and a subscription to my country’s heritage sites. Rediscovering Malta gave me a newfound appreciation of my birthplace – one that I had previously dismissed as being too small and limiting. Suddenly, I felt as if I had nothing to prove to anyone or even to myself. And I felt invincible.