T + 365
T +365
Coming back from the Philippines, I was ready for a fresh start at work and at life. I felt renewed and excited about everything that lay ahead.
Going back to work, we were given a date for the Annual Review of Competence Progression, better known as the ARCP, where the training programme committee would review our achievements over the year to see whether we could proceed with our training and thus progress in our careers.
Having finished everything before my departure, I wasn’t the least bit worried about it. In fact, I had managed to get all the necessary qualifications and dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s without so much as a hitch. The portfolio, the MRCEM Primary, the proposal for an audit, and an entire list of skills sessions, tutorials and simulations. It was a lot of hard work, but I had managed to compartmentalise everything in its own time, and I had done a fantastic job, if I can say so myself.
The Real Assessment
As much as I acknowledged and valued my training coordinators’ feedback, it was my clinical supervisor’s passing comment that made me reflect on the previous year.Â
He confessed that initially he thought I’d flunk out when I told him I’d do everything in my own time and that I wouldn’t rush my training programme like everyone else seemed to be doing. I had a life outside of medicine – one that could not wait for me to finish my training. I was living in the now and I wouldn’t compromise that for anything. Though he admired my approach, he didn’t think I’d be able to make it work. When he saw me on the shopfloor, he admitted that I had proved him wrong and that he was proud of me.
I guess I was too. I told him to hold his horses, though. I still had five years of training to go. God knows what can happen in the span of five years. At that point, my life was unrecognisable from the one I had envisioned for myself a few years earlier, let alone five. But for the present, I was done with the first year of my BST. I was happy and I wanted to go on.
Maybe – just maybe – that was the real win of the year. Not just passing an exam, completing a portfolio or surviving another stretch of shifts, but proving to myself that I could build a life where medicine mattered deeply without becoming the only thing that mattered. I could work hard, travel far, come back, keep going and still recognise myself at the end of it all.
Stay wild,
Marius
Post-Scriptum
Coming back from the Philippines, I had something else I had to deal with: a hookworm on my left foot. I named him Henry and showed him to all my colleagues – as a learning experience, of course. I was sure I had got it from my barefoot beach walk on Malapascua Island. One round of mebendazole and poor Henry was toast. May he rest in peace…