Stress is all around in medical school. Everywhere you look there is something to stress about. You can stress about picking a specialty, your next exam, your early morning lecture, your weekly assignment, your loans, your fading youth, your lack of social life or even stress about how you aren’t stressing as much as your […]
To Sleep or Not To Sleep
There is a huge party going on outside. It’s actually not that close but I can still hear the music blasting. It’s the much anticipated concert for the new school year. The Israeli students start school in October because of all the Jewish holidays. This quite, dull and dusty city suddenly transforms itself with the […]
Surgery, surgery, surgery.
During my surgical clerkship, I have come to understand that surgery is a task of endurance. I had a few cases where surgeries lasted more than 6 hours, and while being scrubbed in, it is not easy to use the restroom, have a sip of water, or have a small snack. If you do have […]
The Cancer Patient
He was sitting in a coffee shop. He had driven there from the hospital. He had cancer. That is what he had been told, stage 1 testicular cancer. He had reacted very calmly to the news, so much so that the doctor had asked if he knew what cancer was and whether he understood fully […]
“What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.” – Mother Teresa
6,392 miles. That is the distance that separates me from my parents. Add a couple more and that covers the length between my brother and me. My parents are living in Malaysia and my brother is studying in Korea. There are times when all four of us are in different countries. 2002. That was the […]
Special Delivery
These past two weeks have been “Women’s Health Weeks.” We have been learning about illnesses that affect mostly women. Along with illness, we were taught some physiology pertaining to females only. The most exciting thing we talked about was delivering a baby, something only a woman can do. It is easy to get bogged down […]
The Long White Coat
Stanford does a funny thing. Most medical schools ascribe to an old tradition: medical students get white coats up to their waists, residents to their thighs, and attendings to their knees. It’s a quick way to maintain a hierarchy of experience and knowledge and a shorthand for who in the room bears the most responsibility. […]
The Battle is Not Yours…
After hours of prayerful studying for the last 5 days, 73 hours to be exact, I can say that I am officially done with my first anatomy exam and I not only passed it, I aced it! I think the major reason why students have problems in medical school is not because they cannot get […]
All In My Head
In many medical school curriculums, the first year is typically normal anatomy and physiology and the second year is mostly pathology. So far, in each theme this year, I’ve had at least a passing concern that I had some condition that we were studying. For instance, in our pharmacology theme back in July, I worried […]
Friends in Strange Places
I have friends in very strange places. It’s a bit deliberate: throughout college and after, I’ve tried hard to make and keep friends outside of my premedical and medical education. Why would I ever do that? As a premed — and especially as a med student, it can be very tempting to make friends with […]
