Med Reg Blog #2

Hey guys, hope you’re well. This snow is quite something eh? In primary school I remember being taught that January – March was Spring but the cold weather just seems to be eating more into March and April the last few years. At least Dundee is the sunniest city in Scotland. And they say Edinburgh is the most windy, Glasgow is the rainiest and not sure if anyone says anything about Aberdeen…

13 months of registrar training has already passed in a blink and only 47 months are left in Dundee. Minus the 11 months of general medicine and 3 months of ICU experience, I only have 33 months of respiratory left.

One thing I’ve learned over the past year is to really embrace the struggle and hustle of every day. If you’re good at guitar for example there must’ve been one point when you couldn’t even play a single desired note. After some practice you could start playing some tunes and by the time you became adept and able to play songs you began to enjoy guitaring more. A LOT more. The more you practice the more adept you become and the more you begin to enjoy, and consequently you practice more.

A recent career example of this was a rheumatology clinic I really did not want to attend. I enjoy medicine a lot but like all of us, we tend to avoid things we know little about because it’s hard and uncomfortable and makes us feel bad etc. You might notice specialists go into a lot of detail within their own specialty when they review patients but when it comes to other systems they barely touch the surface and this represents a knowledge gap. I ended up staying to see a couple of rheumatology patients and the act of speaking to the patient, reading for 20 minutes and discussing with the rheumatology consultant afterwards actually taught me things I never learned during my MRCP revision. This book documents this phenomenon very well and for you FY1 and FY2 readers, there’s certainly a very convincing argument to pursue a career you’re “naturally talented” at rather than following your “passion”.

Outside the hard grafting, I want to spend more time traveling this year and plan on visiting Manchester for a few days, and also Hong Kong for a couple of weeks so I can enjoy better food than this, which I had in Glasgow recently:

The purpose of Hong Kong 2018 will be to sample the night life and also obviously eat everything in sight. I’ve only ever traveled to Hong Kong with my parents and brother so I’m very excited about this trip.

Although the next couple of years will be filled with hustle i.e. putting in the work other people don’t want or are unwilling to do, I’m going to spend more time on properly lifting, meal prepping and traveling when the registrar years come to a close. At first glance my first few consultant years will be spent 10 months at work and 2 months traveling every year.

Life is good at the moment.

If you enjoyed this blog post and would like to see more, feel free to comment below and check out the med reg book where I detail how to become the best medical registrar you can be.