Something to look forward to...

Last night I lay in bed for a couple of hours trying to fall asleep. I kept thinking about Glasgow (where I used to live) and how everyone there was doing. I was experiencing these great visceral memories - I could feel myself riding the tube, smell the rain in the air, imagine opening the door of my little flat to Ben waiting at the end of a long day, walking through the graveyard I used to go searching for old/neat gravestones in. It was almost better than dreaming.

When I first got to Glasgow and knew nobody, I started out my adventure living with 5 other students. They all went to Glasgow University (I went to Strathclyde) and 2 of them were in medicine. I watched my friend R go through their equivalent of clerkship, come home absolutely knackered at the end of the day, and graduate and move to London to start out his life in a big city hospital with his girlfriend B. My friend P had failed a year so was graduating a year behind R. She knew how to party and introduced me to the sport of white water kayaking and the paddling club she was a member of. She was my first real friend and we're still friends to this day. P is the kind of person who can go out, drink 8 pints of some weird alcoholic concoction that includes beer, vodka and black currant, or even worse, alcoholic orange juice with extra shots of vodka, and convince herself she'll be ok to go to clinic the next day. Yes, she failed a year, but she didn't give any of it up and she learned to keep up despite her weekly 3 days of partying.

Last night I decided to write P an email before I went to bed asking how things were going. She graduated this summer and just started her first real doctoring job (they don't really do residency there... it's more a series of jobs you apply for and just move up the ranks). I got an email back this morning and two lines stood out:

"Being a doctor sucks ass and I'm not going to recommend it" and "It is like being a well paid secretary with worse hours".

It's funny but I haven't had a single friend yet who went out into the big bad world of medicine as an actual doctor and had great things to say about it. They should tell us this before we go through all that work to get accepted to medical school.

But, for now, I'm just going to hope that it's going to be better for me and enjoy the time I have left in the shelter of the university. I'm going to try to get back to Glasgow too, I miss it.