four

it occurs to me now that i have a blog, and i have a partial responsibility to keep it updated, if only to ensure my lackluster skills of penmanship do not deteriorate until i can barely string a sentence together. it's a little sad, really - when once this student would be encouraged to express themselves freely with joyful abandon, now this student has to write as succinctly and concisely as possible.

i've done a little over 10 weeks of psychiatry now in my fourth year (yeah, i know... who would have guessed i could make it this far?) and in this time, i feel a sense that the precarious blocks of knowledge i've haphazardly assembled over these four years have fallen over, filling the gaps of my knowledge, providing a solid base from which i can assemble anew. no longer am i perplexed seeing the words diclofenac or haloperidol, in fact now i am quite capable of predicting the effects of those drugs on the body, both therapeutic and adverse (painkiller and antipsychotic; epigastric pain/gastric bleeding and extrapyrimidal side effects).

talking to patients seem almost second nature to me now, when once i would have to summon the courage of seven lions to be able to speak to a patient. Mandarin doesn't seem so bad either - although i still avoid Chinese patients like the black fuckin' plague, simple conversation i can handle. i'm an expert at ordering "mongolian style chicken with two ringgit stir fried potato leaves".

year four has been, so far, a year of reaffirmation. i see now, clearer than ever before, the path laid out before me. i see the sacrifices and the hardships of the housemen and medical officers before me. i see the patients and their backstories, of alcoholism and poverty and unemployment and i rage on the inside at these little injustices of life, hoping i could do more.

this year, i understand, in my mind and in my heart, what it means to have the prefix "Dr" before my name.