I'm a Medic -- Get Me Out of Here!

Aaron Singh -- Making the decision to become a doctor is easy. It probably happens one lazy afternoon, when you're sitting in front of the television watching one of those hunks or supermodels playing doctors on TV burst through double doors, white coats billowing behind them in slow motion as the theme music plays. You see them save patient after patient whilst having time to form lasting relationships, sleep with one another, get into and out of prickly situations, and still show up on time for work the next morning. And you think to yourself, "Hey, that looks like something I'd like to spend my life doing." It is one of life's great sadnesses that at that moment, an angel does not appear in a glow of heavenly light and smack you on the head with a mallet to bring you back to your senses and make you choose a different career.

In my case, this particular tale took a surprising turn. After going through all the years and years of school, after sitting through all the exams they could throw at me (and there were quite a few, as Cambridge makes you endure quite a drawn-out application process), and after burning enough midnight oil to single-handedly raise the global temperature a few degrees, I found myself finally in university. After the senior medics had taken us wide-eyed eager beaver freshers on a tour of the medical school, I realised something was wrong and piped up.

"Um, excuse me, but -- when do we get to the hospital?"

A blank look. "What hospital?"

"Well, we're medics, aren't we? Where's our teaching hospital?"

They looked at me and blinked. Then the sniggers started. "Hospital? Riiiiiiight." Full-blown chuckling now.

See, my university is one of the last bastions of a purely traditional medical course. This means that while other universities hold lectures in hospitals and their students get patient contact in the first few weeks, we spend our first three years sitting in lecture theatres having obscene amounts of scientific detail shoveled down our throats. In fact, we enter the local hospital a grand total of about two times a year (barring any serious accidents, of course, and there are few serious accidents associated with lugging around huge textbooks from room to library and back again). I knew I was giving up some clinical contact when I applied here but I didn't appreciate the full extent of the sacrifice.

A few weeks ago, I was on first-aid duty at a sports carnival at Nottingham University. I was the only first-aider there not from Nottingham. I received my first hint that it was going to be an interesting day when I dabbed a bloodied gauze into my bottle of antiseptic. "What the heck do you think you're doing?!" came a shrill cry from the senior first-aider next to me. "Don't they teach you sterility where you come from?!" A very basic mistake, and one that, in retrospect, makes me cringe, but one that I simply hadn't been taught about.

For a while after that I felt sorry for myself. I felt as if I wasn't getting out of medical school what I'd gone into it for. Then came a chance meeting with one of those passionate genius book-toting medics that we all want to kill at some point in our careers. She was in the year below mine but knew stuff I was still learning in my lectures. In the midst of pummeling my self-esteem into the ground, she told me why she chose to come to Cambridge to read medicine; to her, the traditional system was a safeguard, a way of ensuring that when she came into contact with patients, she really knew her stuff. Everyone who enters the medical profession has some desire for excellence and hard work, and to her this meant knowing her stuff inside out, even if it also meant she'd know needlessly obscure molecular details about how the drugs she was dispensing were acting.

It made sense. It didn't immediately solve my crisis of confidence, but it helped. The University Prospectus warns you that there are many ways to learn medicine and that "by choosing Cambridge you have declared your choice." Personally, I'd like a little more blood on my shield before I go out into the arena that is the medical profession, but hey, every method of learning medicine has its pros and cons, and I get some reassurance that at the end of the day we'll all be on even keel. Even those of us from PBL (Problem-Based Learning) universities.

Theoretically, at least.