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RIP

Hey man hope you and your brother come back some time. I've kinda gotten back into anime and manga recently so I'll be waiting for you :)

Nice profile picture mate

dont goooo

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday! ;(

Did you stop watching anime or is it just a break?

Came off the back of my hardest semester of chemical engineering and now I feel like I can finally rest a little. I wasn't mentally too good either as over the last few months I kinda felt depressed and all but recently I have felt better. So yeah I've been alright. Oh I see med sounds hard as shit so that's really fair. It's also good to take a break from things you like, i learnt my lesson the hard way lol.

How have you been dude?

That would be now to reply to such a wonderful comment!

Thanks, I had a great time with friends and family. The GIF(t) from you was very fitting as well!

You're welcome and thank you for your kind words. As for looking at them, I don't mind at all. I'll add them to the old request queue.

Figure 17 is definitely a hidden gem. I really enjoyed it all the way through for the most part, better than most of the stuff I've seen. lol

Also I'm not really sure the best way to describe it, but I felt like the sci-fi elements were kinda out of place at times, like its all slice of life and then boom, sci-fi alien battle lol, but I think they tied it together by the end pretty well.

I started it a while back actually, but had to put it on hold for a while cause at the time it was kinda difficult to sit down and watch 48 minute episodes in one sitting, glad I finally got back to it.

Cheers! lol

Work and family deserve to be prioritized (and rightfully so)! I take no offense in later replies so don't worry about it and feel free to just respond at your convenience. You'll have to excuse me for what I anticipate will be quite a lengthy response to your questions because I'm quite passionate about medicine and any subjects pertaining to it haha. For the record, don't feel pressured to match my message, but if anything I said piques your interest I'd gladly go into more detail. You seem like a humble, sincere, and well-mannered person - someone that I would find pleasant to work with should we ever meet as colleagues. It's my pleasure to share my intuition, whatever its worth, and I'm content just knowing that my thoughts are read!

When it comes to choosing a specialty, I believe ethical and workplace standpoints should come secondary to your inherent interest in the nature of work. To put it simply, you're effectively deciding on what you're committing yourself to for the rest of your life and if it's not something you feel truly passionate about, then work will feel miserable regardless of how easy/hard the work is. That being said, most specialties offer a lot of flexibility when it comes to ethical and workplace considerations depending on your practice setting and patient population. Take anesthesia for example - pain specialists can work in outpatient clinic-based settings whereas critical care anesthesiologists spend the vast majority of their time divided between the OR and ICU (gross generalization, but humor me). Not surprisingly pain specialists can have relatively regular schedules (e.g. 8am-5pm, 45 hrs a week). Personally I can't tolerate such a regular (if not monotonous) workflow - I find myself working well under stress, especially in situations that require swift and confident judgement. To that extent, I'd fit much better in the OR or ICU where I have every drug and tool at my disposal to manage/resuscitate medically-complicated patients - it becomes a matter of choosing the optimal combination of what to use, when to use, and how to use them. Sure I'll likely be carrying the trauma pager every few nights responding to cardiac arrests or anaphylactic patients at 4am in the morning, and sure I'll probably want to shoot myself at the news of an incoming emergency despite having already worked 24+ hours, but that to me still sounds much more interesting than working in a clinic where you are effectively a humanoid drug dispenser. And then there's the entire spectrum in-between like general med anesthesiologists that handle lower-risk patients in relatively less stressful settings (e.g. just do appendectomies, colectomies, etc. all day). I guess my point is is just to reiterate there's a lot of variation in every specialty and choose one base on your interests. Neurosurgery is a special case, as is with all surgical specialties. For them their day ends when their last operation ends - if a complication arises in the middle of their operation, they stay until either it's fixed or the patient dies. They can end their day at midnight and just sleep in their car or the on-call room because it's not worth the time wasted to commute home just to come back the next day at 4:30am. I'm sure every surgeon, if you ask them about it, has such a story - it rarely happens, but definitely not unfathomable.

As for how I'm finding medical school, it has definitely been quite a rollercoaster despite being only in my 2nd year out of 4. Our curriculum is designed such that our first two years are classroom-based dedicated towards learning the basic science and fundamental principals of disease and then our last two years being hospital-based where we work actively in the hospital managing patients. We also have to take the USMLE, our multi-step licensing exam the first of which happens the end of our second year (next April). Though designed with well-intentions, it marks an incredibly high-stress, high-stake milestone because our scores are the primary determinants for what specialties we can apply into and the quality of the hospital we practice at. Not only that, but our scores are normalized against all exam takers, so it doesn't matter if you're a student at Harvard med, student at bottom-of-the-barrel shit-tier med school, or a foreign physician who has already been in the field for decades but just taking this exam as part of their process to practice medicine in the US, you're all fighting in the same battle royale. Understandably this stresses many students out, and hence why we often joke that as medical students we literally can't afford to do much other than slaving our lives away to the books.

>can you see yourself being capable & confident enough to deal with patients as required
Yes, and no. If I were to put it bluntly, physicians (for better or for worse) have no expectations for medical students to do anything correctly. As part of our third and fourth year curriculum, we spend 5-8 weeks in major specialties (internal med, pediatrics, surgery, etc.), the aim of which is to get our feet wet and decide for ourselves whether such specialty is one that we find worth committing ourselves to. Consequently, we are not expected to know how to manage or treat patients. That being said, there are certain aspects to patient care that we need to prefect, the most important of which is to learn how to properly take patient medical histories and perform physical exams. For example if a patient comes in with chest pain, we need to construct a differential list of the most possible causal reasons - is it a heart problem? lung problem? psychologic problem? This requires the integration of what we learned in our 1st/2nd years with our clinical expertise developed in our 3rd/4th years. As doctors, we can't treat what we don't know, and what we know comes from what we find out through a well-executed history and physical exam. So yes, we are expected to be competent, but not in the sense that we be capable of running the hospital ourselves.

Funny enough, I actually heard Moonlight Sonata when I was very young from an episode of Detective Conan that featured the piece. I instantly fell in love with it and dedicated years afterwards to working on the 2nd and 3rd movements - yes I can even play it on agitato haha! If you love playing Moonlight I would highly HIGHLY recommend, if you haven't done so already, that you check out Welheim Kempff's interpretation of it on youtube. Although Valentina Lisitsa's is arguably the more popular (and modern) one, I don't agree with her more 'trigger-happy' approach in contrast to Kempff's mellow one. Watching Kempff is a beauty in and of itself because the passion reflected in his eyes as he plays Beethoven is so apparent that it's almost tangible. He was my motivation to learn Tempest (I've included the video, it's a very old performance god was it good).

Nowadays I don't have that much time to practice anymore because of school and everything, so I've been more lenient about songs haha. Recently I've actually been playing a lot of anime songs, notably from Violet Evergarden. Though I say play, it's more of just googling the melody of the song and then improvising the rest on my own - I'm not very good at it but I enjoy improvising. Piano has become an invaluable asset for me in the form of a much needed emotional outlet and I found improvising music a great way to unleash creativity into what otherwise would just a fixed piece of music - somewhat reminiscent of our inherent desires to feel free despite being burdened by life's ongoing stressors.

Again, apologies for the super length post (oh god I went back and read all of it just now)! Some of it was kinda a word salad but hopefully you find it helpful xD
If you have anymore medical school/career questions, even in the future as they pop up, I'd be happy to answer them.

OMG MY REACTION WHEN I READ ANESTHESIA I'm seriously considering the same specialty (more on that later)


Ahhh yes Op.9 no.2 is always a classic. I love it because it's a relatively more mid-level, non-intensive piece yet still emanates the beauty in classical music. I used play much more actively, at my 'peak' I consider my best feat memorizing Beethoven Op 27 (Moonlight Sonata) mvts 1, 2, and 3, which also happen to be my favorite classical music pieces. Beethoven's Op. 31 (Tempest) mvt 3 is a very close runner-up. Not sure if you've heard of those pieces? c:

I go to medical school in the USA - there are definitely parallels. We start as undergrads (aka premeds) with B.S. degrees in whatever we want and apply for medical schools where we study to earn our M.D. After graduating from med school we apply to 'residency' to specialize (e.g. internal med, peds, surgery, anesthesia, etc.) and get board certified (so we effectively 'skip' the junior doctor phase you go through, if I understood you correctly). Those who wish to subspecialize (e.g. critical care anesthesia, pediatric anesthesia, cardiac anesthesia, etc.) can apply for fellowships after residency before they become formally trained physicians in their respective fields.

As for my interests, I'm currently considering anesthesia with a subspecialization in critical care medicine. I like the fact that anesthesiologists, if operations go well, are effectively out of sight and out of mind. But if shit starts hitting the fan, they are the most trained to acutely manage the patient and apply damage control measures to preserve the patients' lives. You can kind of think of it as the surgeons are treating the problematic area while the anesthesiologists are keeping the rest of the body alive. If you're curious about anesthesia, might I recommend the following reddit thread - it provides insight to reasons about why or why not pursue anesthesia at the bottom (you can ignore the US-specific training info in the beginning)
https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschool/comments/8t4lvl/seriousresidency_why_you_should_consider/

Also if you're into CNS anatomy, neurology might be another specialty option. They deal a lot with patients that come in with specific issues (e.g. eye droop + facial numbness + loss of pain/temp sensation in body) and, with their knowledge of neuroanatomy and pathophysiology, can pinpoint the exact problematic area in the brain/spinal cord/peripheral nerves/etc.
Just in case you're interested, I'll leave you with the compilation of 'why you should consider [specialty]' threads
https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschool/comments/8tcxyn/serious_residency_a_consolidated_list_of_all_the/

Cheers!