The Balance

I think one of the most important characteristics of being a doctor is the ability to recognise your own faults, and I'll admit that this year I got the work-life balance completely wrong.
Applying to medicine has become increasingly competitive, and so the need for good grades has become more important than ever before. Although I don't regret the amount of work I've done this year, in reflection I approached the challenge in an incredibly unsustainable and almost obsessive way.

At the start of the school year I quit netball, rowing and started to run less often, thinking it would give me more time to revise, more time to mould myself into what I believed to be the perfect medical student, but in reality I had removed all outlets of stress. From September onwards I was revising for 5 to 6 hours after school each night and for 11 hours each day on the weekend. In hindsight, typing it now, it sounds absolutely ridiculous. Yes, as I doctor you need to work hard, but at the end of the day we're humans, not robots.

The stress began to increase steadily, not that I would admit it at the time. Any sign of weakness would be supressed and hidden away. I put so much pressure on myself to do well that I lost sight of what's really important in life. As a result, I ended up having a panic attack in my first exam for maths. However, in some ways, it was almost a rather positive experience, it was the wake up call I needed to show me that I couldn't keep up the intensity of work forever, or else I would just burn out. After the experience, I was able to reflect on what I had done and what I needed to do to improve my work-life balance. My exams have finished and  I've made it my goal to try and get that 'work-life balance' which is so essentiel when perusing a naturally stressful and high pressure career.

Book Review

In between revision it's been quite hard to keep on top of extra reading for the past few weeks. However, I found this book in my school library on Thursday and from the moment I opened it I have been completely unable to put it down. In Stitches is a fantastic book for any student hoping to study medicine, Dr. Nick Edwards, an A&E junior doctor, writes  with a refreshing honesty, exploring the highs and lows of working for the NHS. His brilliant sense of humour features throughout the book as he delves into the weird and wonderful cases he has witnessed during his career, but he also manages to approach truly heart-breaking incidents with a sensitivity that makes them feel all the more real. The book is separated into multiple short chapters, each one detailing a new patient experience, the misconceptions of medicine as a glamorous lifestyle, the reward of working in such a high pressure environment and his ever increasing frustration with the rise of middle management. I absolutely loved this book, and I am sure I say this for almost every book I read, but it was by far one of the best medical related books I have read!

January Book Review

Hi everyone, with my As exams fast approaching, I haven't had much time to write any blog posts for the past few weeks, however I recently read an article in New Scientist which has given me an idea for a future post which I look forward to sharing with you. In the mean time, I've decided to write another book review.                          


What is Life - Erwin Schrödinger

                                                             
Before I begin to discuss this fantastic book itself, I would like to start by introducing you to the author, Erwin Schrödinger. Schrödinger was an Austrian, Nobel prize winning quantum physicist who, through his work, undeniably changed the way we view the connection between physics and biology. He developed the basis of wave mechanics, and had a strong fascination for philosophy and theoretical biology, Schrödinger's cat .

In 1943, he began a series of lecture in Trinity College, Dublin which led to "What is Life?" being published in 1944. The book is an absolutely fascinating read which I would strongly recommend to anyone wishing to study Biology, Physics, Medicine or even Philosophy. Through his work, Schrödinger interlinks physics with biology, explaining how living things defy the 2nd law of thermodynamics ( entropy only increases in a closed system but living matter maintains positive entropy in an open system).Further explanation

Furthermore, he defied popular belief by suggesting that hereditary information is not passed on by proteins but instead by a "code script", leading him to introduce the idea of "aperiodic crystals". This fundamental idea acted as the foundations for Crick and Watson discovering the structure of DNA, arguably one of the most important scientific findings of the 20th century.
In the final chapter, Schrödinger takes a more philosophical approach, giving the book great variety.