I was very hesitant to write this article but I haven’t been able to think of much else to write on as this keeps pushing its way up front. I might take it down on a later date.
I hope the article doesn’t scare you off and that it just gives you a perspective into every doctors life. (There will be a lot of anecdotes from personal experience and from people around me. For the sake of privacy a lot of details will be changed. Sometimes there will be more detail than you want to know, I apologize in advance, I’ve forgotten what is the line between normal and what is not )
1) When food and sometimes water is a concept.
I remember in my surgery posting when everyday consisted of asking the patients who underwent surgery about their bowel and bladder habits and whether they are eating enough. There was once when a patient asked me, ‘you ask me everyday, what about you? Have you eaten?’ Honestly I couldn’t tell him when I had eaten last coz it was either the day before’s breakfast or the day before that, dinner. Two months into my internship, I’d lost about 10kgs. I wasn’t trying to, in all the effort to get the patient better sometimes we forget that we aren’t superhuman. I’m working on it.
2) When we are called to play God.
Being on duty especially at night is really terrifying sometimes, especially when you are just starting your career. Decisions that literally affect the patients chance of living is based on a millisecond decision. Especially when someone comes in with an unrecorded BP or when pulses aren’t palpable. Theoretically there are protocols for them. When to give CPR, how long before you stop and declare that the patient is no more. But the practical is never as easy as the theory. Once I was shifting a really sick patent from a primary health center to a tertiary health centre and we had enough facilities to manage one patient, but right when we were shifting the patient another patient needed to be transferred too. Both equally sick but facilities for only one.
3) When your mind lives in a bubble.
Do I wait to repeat an ECG even if the first one is normal? Can I send this patient back home with these medications irrespective of their side effects? Do I over investigate something this minor? Did I under investigate my OPD patient? So many constant questions. I think with time and experience these voices will hopefully go down.
4) When you deal with death more than what should be considered normal
I remember when the first patient I was closely involved with passed. I remember her name, her diagnosis and how I felt. I spent over a month doing her dressings, talking to her, examining her and building a rapport with her family. She had a lot of close calls and was constantly in and out of the ICU. The day she died I cried and tried to continue working. I messed up orders, forgot to follow up reports and a whole slew of mistakes I can’t even remember now. My senior sat me down midday and told me I can’t react like this with every death I face and gave me the day off. She wasn’t lying. 2 years down the line from my first death, I worked in an emergency department, now they don’t perturb me and I’m not sure if that’s a good coping mechanism or not.
5) What’s a work life balance?
This one may be since I’m just starting in my career but a work life balance doesn’t seem to exist. Even if I’m not physically with a patient, I’m thinking about treatment plans, reading up new topics, looking at other information and it’s hard to stop. It’s hard to explain to someone who isn’t in the field that you can’t leave your work completely and pick it up the next without expecting any change or to come prepared for the changes. Or maybe that’s just how it starts and I’ll eventually learn how to handle it better, I can only hope so.
6) Is it is any use?
A century ago germs weren’t known and if you lived into your 50s then you were lucky. Medicine had jumped leaps and bounds since then. Something that I learned about 10 years ago is completely changed now and has new protocols. Sometimes I think to myself whether there was any point going through the whole process of college if everything will change in a few years. I think covid is a good example of how fast medicine moves, right at the beginning we know absolutely nothing and in 2 years they’ve developed a vaccine for it! If I don’t want to keep myself updated, then I’m not doing what’s best for the patients.
I know a lot of people especially in my place go into medicine because they watch shows like House or Grey’s anatomy which potrays such glorified aspects of the job, or because of the respect that come with the job and while that is okay, it is also good to know that it isn’t easy.
Signing off from this rant,
D
A millennial travelling without the internet.
Travel anxiety is more common than we know, and sometimes more so for introverts. Last semester, I was able to travel to Europe through a semester abroad program (pre-covid times) and life has changed completely ever since. A couple of months ago, I had decided to travel over the weekend with some friends from another city. I was to go earlier and join them in our decided location. I was ready, packed with all my tickets on my phone. After getting off the plane, I realized that I didn’t have my SIM card pin with me. I was in a new country all by myself, where people did not speak English and I had almost managed to lock my phone containing all my tickets and emergency contact numbers.
I managed to use the airport WiFi to contact my family and download my tickets. I had less than an hour to catch a train, so I could do nothing about my SIM card and had to quickly rush without thinking too much. That train journey for the next couple of hours was something I could never forget. As a millennial, I realized how much I relied on my phone and the internet that it comes with. Google has completely changed how most of us travel in the 21st century. I always google the heck out of the places I go to, map out my routes from Google Maps and look for recommendations for site seeing, food or experiences of the city. I couldn’t imagine myself travelling without Google Maps or asking for directions in a foreign language. As scary as it seemed, God made my realize how little of the day’s events were in my hands or control. My anxiety soon turned into a strange and counter-intuitive sense of excitement. I remembered the line from Jo Franco‘s journal that said, “I’m out of my element, and I love it”. That’s exactly what I was feeling at that moment. A mixture of fear as well as excitement for the unknown.
I felt like a true traveler that day. I had to rely on my wacky sense of direction and the kindness of strangers to get where I was going. After over three hours of overthinking, I worked up the courage to ask an old Italian couple sitting next to me for help. They did not speak much English but understood my predicament and gladly helped me. The next couple of hours passed by like a dream. My phone was in my bag, my face was elated and my heart was full. I sat by the window, now truly enjoying myself, watching the lush green landscapes, the rolling hills and the blue Mediterranean sea. The sunset painted the skies in pastel hues and life was beautiful. Till date, that train journey was one of my best memories. Because I was truly out of my element and loved it!
– A from TAD
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Why introverts rule the world.
Our lives are shaped by our personality. Our personality affects almost everything, from our life choices, friendships, career paths to our taste in music and hobbies. I’m often curious about the introvert-extrovert spectrum.
In my heart, I’m always a happy introvert but growing up, sometimes I’ve felt saddened that we got the shorter end of the stick. There sometimes seems like a lot of things I would love to be a part of but I simply feel too anxious or stressed out to be able to do it. This is probably why I’ve always loved ‘Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani’ and deep down feel like I could relate to the character of Naina Talwar. As much as I’d like to say I’m trying to be more self accepting and let go of inhibitions, I’ve found that self acceptance, like many other things in life is an ongoing process. I’m learning and growing but slowly.
Around two years ago, one of my professors wrote me a letter of recommendation where she mentioned that I’m soft spoken. It was a well written recommendation but that sentence worried me to no end. In a field like architecture, that sort of thing doesn’t exactly make the cut and I’ve often found myself worrying if I would ever be good enough to make a career out of it, in a world where extroverts are the cultural ideal.
Social media and the stereotypes set over the years have conditioned us to believe that we need to be bold in order to be great or be highly sociable in order to be happy. Extroversion is made to seem appealing, like be the ideal way to be, whereas introversion seems the opposite; like there is something inherently wrong with it.
I’ve recently been reading Susan Cain’s ‘Quiet: The Power of Introverts’ and I came across the beautiful story of a woman, Rosa Parks. I’m quoting the story directly from the book here:
Montgomery, Alabama. December 1, 1955.
Early evening. A public bus pulls to a stop and a sensibly dressed woman in her forties gets on. She carries herself erectly, despite having spent the day bent over an ironing board in a dingy basement tailor shop at the Montgomery Fair. department store. Her feet are swollen, her shoulders ache. She sits in the first row of the Colored section and watches quietly as the bus fills with riders. Until the driver orders her to give her seat to a white passenger. The woman utters a single word that ignites one of the most important civil rights protests of the twentieth century, one word that helps America find its better self.
The word is “No.” The driver threatens to have her arrested.
“You may do that,” says Rosa Parks.
A police officer arrives. He asks Parks why she won’t move.
“Why do you all push us around?” she answers simply.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But the law is the law, and you’re under arrest.”
On the afternoon of her trial and conviction for disorderly conduct, the Montgomery Improvement Association holds a rally for Parks at the Holt Street Baptist Church, in the poorest section of town. Five thousand gather to support Parks’s lonely act of courage. They squeeze inside the church until its pews can hold no more. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses the crowd. “There comes a time that people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” he tells them.
He praises Parks’s bravery and hugs her. She stands silently, her mere presence enough to galvanize the crowd. The association launches a city-wide bus boycott that lasts 381 days. The people trudge miles to work. They change the course of American history.
I had always imagined Rosa Parks as a stately woman with a bold temperament. But when she died in 2005, obituaries recalled her as soft-spoken, sweet, and small in stature. They said she was “timid and shy” but had “the courage of a lion.” They were full of phrases like “radical humility” and “quiet fortitude.”
The United States Congress has called her “the first lady of civil rights” and “the mother of the freedom movement”. Rosa Parks inspires me, because we’ve been conditioned to think that introverts are synonymous with soft, feeble, and shy but that’s not all we are nor is it always true. Her autobiography titled ‘Quiet Strength’ challenges us to question our assumptions. Why shouldn’t quiet be strong? And what else can quiet do that we don’t give it credit for?
Rosa Parks was an introvert, truly soft-spoken and quiet but with the courage of a lion. Not only her, but some of the other great ideas, arts and inventions of these world have come from the quiet, the silent and the lone thinkers (Eleanor Roosevelt, Al Gore, Warren Buffett, Gandhi etc). These people have not achieved in spite of being introverts, but simply because of it. (Read that sentence again)
Introverts, most certainly rule the world in our own ways! You do you, boo! ♥
– A from TAD
PS: Do read the book, if you haven’t already. It is evocative to an introvert like me, and if you are an extrovert, it would certainly help you understand us introverts better.
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A sense of detachment. Good or bad?
That sentence probably sounded wrong. But sometimes detachment is good. It’s midnight right now, I’m packing again… For the third time in the past 1.5 years. Moving to another city, again. I first moved in July 2018 when I left for college. I flew across the country, moved away from home for the first time. Had my many ‘firsts’ which are probably the perks of living without parental supervision.
Looking back; i realized I’ve grown more in the past year, than i have in my entire life! The first time i moved out of my house, i was feeling so weird. I was feeling out of place but oddly relieved. It was hard to pack your entire life of 22 years into a suitcase and pretend you are happy to move on. For most people, a sense of homesickness slowly develops. For me, i felt like i was finally free, finally out of my cage and honestly it was a nice feeling. I do go home every couple of months, but it no longer feels like I’m getting back to the old or coming back from an extended vacation. It feels like a short visit to my loved ones.
I realized many things that i held dear had started to change. As an undergrad, i spent a lot of time getting dressed, perfecting my hair and making sure my shoes matched. These days, I find it hard to get out of sweats or tie my hair when I need to go to the college. I usually find the first clothes i find on top of my pile and just change quickly. I don’t feel as ‘attached’ to my clothing or looks. I realized i was more concerned with what i was doing and where i was heading, which frankly matter more.
Now as I move to another city, this time across the globe for a semester exchange program, I pack lesser than I did when I first started. I realized letting go of stuff is easier with every move. My bags aren’t filled to the brim and overflowing like they used to. I stopped packing every pair of jeans i own and every top that I couldn’t let go of. Packing light somehow made me feel lighter. Like I’m not tie to or attached to something.
Living out of a suitcase for the past year and a half has thought me how little I actually need and how materialistic hoarding can really clutter my thoughts and my life. Detachment does not always need to carry a negative connotation. Purging unnecessary belongings feels like purging away the bad from life itself!
– A from TAD
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Are you settling for less?
This thought has been eating my head for the past couple of months. Am I settling for less? And is that completely okay? Yes and yes! Who defines what is considered ‘less’ anyways.
I was recently speaking to a junior friend of mine, who was going to attend campus recruitment/placements in order to get a job. For those of you who don’t know, I’m an architecture student currently doing my masters. This junior was in his undergrad final year and was looking for a job. The trend I see in most undergrad students these days is to simply look for the highest pay package when it comes to jobs.
Most of my juniors would be applying to software companies where they would be doing nothing related to architecture. They themselves know that they find it boring and are not one bit interested in the work they would be doing. Why? Because they would be earning a pay package of 12 to 15 lakhs a year, maybe even more; and architecture companies pay less than half of that. (The pay scale in architecture field is really poor, but that’s a topic for another day).
The millennial debate is to do what they love or what pays more. So, some of these students who actually like architecture are in a big dilemma if they really ought to pursue it as a viable career option. The dream-job question also puts a lot of pressure on people who don’t know what their dream job is.
In such a situation, the only thing I would ask myself is if working in that area would make me happy even 10 to 15 years down. I know my answer and I was pretty happy with the choices I had made. In some ways, success and significance are complete polar opposites. ‘Success’ or ‘achievement’ in life is not necessarily counted in monetary terms.
Sometimes we have families, responsibilities and other monetary issues that make taking the high paying job seem like the viable option. And other times, your passions maybe outside your line of work.
It reminded me of a conversation with one of my professors I had while choosing a college for my masters. His advice to me was simple: Follow the thing you are good at, and you will be rewarded. He told me not to take the college I was talking about, if it was only because of the career scope or the trend ahead. He took environmental planning in a time when that wasn’t even a subject of importance. Now he’s been working in the field for around 30 years, worked hard and brought a name for himself in that area.
I realized that following career trends or highly paid jobs may not be everything in life.
The world may call it settling for less money but why settle for a position you don’t want?
You owe it to yourself to find a job you would be happy doing. If you don’t love what you do, it may be a waste of your time. Nothing comes easy in life. So don’t take a job you would hate, make your work something you would love and turn it into a career that you work be proud of!
What is your take on the passion-job dilemma? Do you think from your head or listen to your heart?
A from TAD
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A Pressed Flower
I love books, everything about them, the feel, smell, touch, sight. It gets my heart racing, makes the world look brighter, sound sweeter and there are explosions all around. More specifically, I love old books. Infact the older the better.
Have you wondered what happened to all those books that you loved as a child but gave away when you grew up? Where are the now? Books that you held in your grubby hands, that has little bit of stain from the juice that you spilled, that has the name that you wrote in the front page coz you swore that book was yours and you would never give it away. Where are those books now?
My most favorite thing to do, is to go secondhand book shopping. Most secondhand bookshop keepers in my area know me and keep the new boxes that arrive till I come.
You know how people say that books take you places you would never have gone otherwise? Well here is the thing about secondhand books… No one who ever reads a book closes the last page without leaving something old behind and taking something new with them. That’s the beauty of the second hand book. It’s not just a story, it’s a story within a story. The story of a person who read this book and went on a journey.
I have collected a lot of books in my scavenger hunt for books and I’ve gotten so many stories before I even read the book.
1) Mr Vogel – Lloyd James – the actual story is about an odd man who wins a lottery and decides to tour Wales.
On the first page of the book was a note written by the gifter to the giftee, wishing them well in their travels and hoping that they would remember each other no matter how far they were. Beautiful right?
2) Notes from Ida Scudder
There was a handkerchief kept inside with a neatly done colourful embroidery saying grandma with a few flowers around it. It was kept safely and neatly within a plastic cover. I imagine a granddaughter sitting learning to sew from her grandmother, listening to her talk about her past, and then painstakingly sewing it for her because she loves her grandma
3) Charlotte’s Web – E B White
A boy (coz he’s addressed himself as Mr.) wrote down his name, multiple times, throughout the book. In the front page he’s written ‘5B rocks’. It firstly makes me nostalgic for my school days and then secondly makes me wonder why his class ‘rocks’.
Then there are those countless books that have (sometimes against their will) been underlined. A phrase, a sentence, sometimes just a word. I find myself stopped in my pursuit of my story to understand the mind and situation of the person who owned the book before me. Sometimes I understand why that sentence touched them, mostly I don’t, but it always leaves me with a satisfaction greater than just the story.
Sometimes the reason I buy a secondhand book isn’t for the actual story at all. The idea of a story imagined as opposed to a life actually lived, that’s the essence of a secondhand book.
Signing off,
D
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Surviving or thriving?
This thought has been running in a constant loop in my mind for the past couple of months. I don’t know if this was just all in my head, but lately I’ve been feeling uninspired. Being in the 21st century millennial world doesn’t really help much. Instagram is filled with people that seem to be passion fueling them, their work and in general; they seem to be living their best life.
Most of us are comfortably uncomfortable, stuck in a routine that’s kind of working but certainly isn’t making us happy. There’s a nagging sense that you’re running out of time as if a Divine alarm clock has gone off signalling: “Get your shit together now and make something of this wonderful life before it’s too late.”
Being an Indian girl certainly doesn’t help either. I feel like that nagging voice is always at the back of my head. Society puts so much pressure on us to be a certain way, dress a certain way and achieve certain things by a certain age in life. There have been a million instances where I’ve just felt like taking a break from everything and heading off on my own to experience life in a new way. I’ve been studying practically all my life… school, then UG and now PG. And most likely a job by next year, because ‘gap years’ are a nonexistent concept to Indian parents.
Psychologists have often answered these thoughts by saying that we have to welcome new challenges or increase our positivity, but such things are easier said than done. In this current time and age, where there is so much stress and competition in this world, sometimes finding joy in anything can be tough. As opposed to childhood, where we all ‘thrived’ without even knowing what that means. Simple pleasures were much more enjoyable when we were younger.
Sometimes, I feel, to thrive in life, we need to experience it like a child does. That’s when I came across this Instagram post by Emily Baldoni:
Let’s all thrive in our own beautiful way like Maiya does.
– A from TAD
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The Pebble Castle
She went around gathering pebbles.
From beaches and rivers,
From lakes and ponds.
Smooth ones and strong ones,
Round ones and long ones.
Blue and white,
In red and yellow.
She placed them all atop each other.
And a beautiful castle of pebbles was built.
She went in.
She stayed.
But then one day,
Fell one tiny pebble,
Onto the book that she was reading.
Then down came another and yet another.
She lay there as her beautiful pebble castle,
Caved in on its maker.
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Midweek Motivation
There are some things in life that we can never forget. Yesterday, during a design discussion with my boss for a new project that we are working on, she was talking to me about work ethics and work passion. She told me something that I would never forget for the rest of my life. She said, “Now I am 50 years old and I have achieved everything I wanted to”. She said this to me so casually but it kind of struck a cord in me. The ease and confidence with which she said it.
Over the past few months, I was worried about life in the architecture profession. The field of architecture may be growing and thriving all around but the scope of the job market keeps reducing. People are desperate to get jobs and work for minimum pay. Most offices take the life out of their architects with long work hours and stressful project deadlines. This made me look into the future and question if making a career choice out of passion and not sensibility was the right thing to do. I was feeling so uninspired and I was slowly losing my confidence. I started to wonder if I even had the passion for my field anymore.
It was during this moment in time when my boss’s words were like water to my dry, thirsty mind. She was talking about one of her old projects, her dream house project which had been envisioned, designed and executed solely by her. She spoke about it with so much emotion that I could almost see her eyes light up looking at the old pictures.
That was when I realized. Her confidence did not come from the number or scale of architecture projects she had work on, but from the passion she put into each of those projects. This was where she belonged and she could not help but be confident about it.
“Confidence is a by-product not of achieving but of belonging. True confidence will not come after you’ve crossed a certain threshold or a certain place of status or of human acceptance. True confidence comes in the moment that you believe you belong” – Steven Furtick
I was so inspired just looking at her that I realized it wasn’t about having a great career scope or a lot of fancy projects to work on. It was about pouring my heart and soul into each project that I got, doing my very best and that’s where the job satisfaction comes.
What mattered was to work with so much passion and not be too concerned about if there is scope in the job market or if I’ll be paid highly for it. Because those things surely come along when you work with your heart. ♥️
– A from TAD
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Summer breeze and laundry thoughts
There’s something about the gentle chilling breeze that just lifts our mood. The past month has been one of alternative ups and downs for me. I moved to a new city for an internship. I stayed at a paying guest accommodation for the first time (It was more of a glorified hostel at the most)… Over a few days, I soon grew increasingly unhappy with my situation. My accommodation was small and not very hygienic….This was definitely a downer for a claustrophobic clean freak. I was literally sharing a kitchen-turned-bedroom with someone. It was tiny and windowless (a tiny window at lintel height doesn’t count in my defense)… What I didn’t think of was how it kept out the summer heat and provided a pleasant cozy room at night.
Another of my problems was a tiny broken down 18th century (not exactly but it was pretty old) washing machine that I had to stay next to for 45 minutes to rinse, repeat and get my laundry done. Not to mention, I climb four floors to the terrace for it.
What I didn’t realize was how this gave me time to think in between the cycles. Not just wonder what I would be eating for dinner or how annoying my coworker could be sometimes…
But to simply look around the terrace I was standing in. To look at the skies, the beautiful clouds and the suburban city around me.
I realized I was so caught up with the complications of life that I failed to pause and enjoy the simple joys that life can bring.
I realized how I was eager to try my hand at ‘adulting’ and deal with whatever life throws my way but I was forgetting to literally stop and enjoy the moment.
Over a few laundry days, this soon became my favorite spot in this new city. I would just sit on the steps overlooking a double height open balcony and just let myself get absorbed by the breeze and the moment.
I now sit here as often as I can on late evenings, with some light music and Oreos to ‘chill’. It is definitely a beautiful place to be in, just looking at the city lights, the trees swaying with the wind and the clouds dancing to their own tune.
This is a picture of my spot in the daytime. It is even more magical at night but with a phone like mine it’s hard to capture the essence of the place, but you get the idea. This is my ‘me’ place and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Happiness isn’t in the big things. It’s in the open terrace, the gentle breeze, beautiful music and of course, Oreos.
– A from TAD
TAD tooo much 
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