AFTERWORD

Going over this journal, I realised I had barely written about medicine – or at least not nearly as much as I used to. I guess that shows how much I’ve changed over the years. 

Medicine had gone from being my one and only monomaniacal obsession to just one of the many things that made my life so beautiful and colourful. I often tried to convince myself that it was just a job, but despite how well I had learnt to compartmentalise it, I knew it was still far more than that. Partly, this was because it occupied so much of my time – whether through the long working hours, the studying or the endless requirements of the training programme.

There was also the fact that, unlike during the two years of the Foundation Programme, I no longer spent most of my time rotating through different specialties. Aside from a few months here and there, I was in the emergency department every day, working in the same place with the same people. The caseload varied constantly, of course, and every shift brought different patients with their own clinical problems and stories to tell. When the work was so varied, where did one even begin? Despite how many weird and unbelievable things we encountered, most of the weird and unbelievable eventually began to blend together.

Although I didn’t focus too much on medicine in this journal, one thing was certain – my two years working in the emergency department had shaped who I had become. The lessons I learnt along the way had spilled over into my personal life and made me a better person overall, or at least I liked to think so.

If there was one lesson that stood above everything else, it was this: the more I learnt, the more I understood how much I still didn’t know. Much like my mentor had once told me: “The best doctors are the ones who remain curious and humble throughout their careers.”