Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.
Assalamualaikum wrt.
"First
i was dying to finish high school and start college,
And then i
was dying to finish college and start working,
And then i was
dying to marry and have children.
And then i was dying for my
children to grow old enough for school so I could return to work.
And then I was dying to retire.
And now, I am dying.. And
suddenly I realized I forgot to live"
Submitted
by Nicole Zablocki
I
remembered the first day i set my foot on this piece of land of
Russia, that adrenaline rush, of starting a new life in a foreign
land. The first few weeks of discovery; cold weather, tongue-twisting
language, fast underground trains, new people, and of course the ever
fascinating big books of anatomy and histology from the Russian
authors. I've always been a person of adventures, and so new things
do have big effects on me. Adapting to the metropolitan life of
Moscow took me quite a period of time, until i found my momentum,
walking according to the rhythm beat.
But
as the days progressed to months, and months progressed to years, i
realized that the routine got predictable. Classes were the same, the
grocery shopping stayed as it was, that urge of looking forward to
weekends rather than weekdays somewhat became more unbearable as the
schedule of classes grew tighter.
I
remembered my days of first years where we studied to get that '5' or
'отлично!'
from our teachers, but learning how the system works and that
language barrier that grew harder by time, i merely lost that
interest to compete anymore. What is the use of it anyway? My seniors
survived just fine by doing it this way, just surviving, and they
became doctors after all. The easy and breezy medical life in Russia,
when you choose to have it that way.
Besides that, the cold weather
do have those turn-off effects, it gives that feeling of pure
laziness and the reluctance to get out of the room and to just spend
the time snuggling under that thick duvet with that heater turned on.
I started to find a group of friends to make movie-night marathons in
the weekends, something that i looked forward for every week.
Searching for new movies, shopping places and food became the
favorites in my google engine.
"Home
is where the heart belongs"
Summer
break is that 2 months holiday during summer in which we are given
the choice to spend in Malaysia or just stay in Russia. During this
period, we also have to fulfill our university's requirement of
hospital practical. Oчевидно,
we chose to do the practical in Malaysia, and of course, at the
nearest hospital in our area. As we were not under any supervision of
doctors or nurses, we always ended up lingering around the hospital
floor, the canteen, or the better ones amongst us, they could be
found in the hospital library.
We fulfilled the requirements as
minimum as we could most of the time, we were not allowed to ask too
much as the doctors are busy with their work, and the nurses are
caught up with the amount of patients, and as inexperienced
undergraduates, we could only help but little. I became more
frustrated and decided to finish the practical as fast as i could,
get that doctor's signature and ciou!
As
summer holidays finally finished, we got that 'rejuvenation' of
spirit in finishing our studies as medical students. That was all in
our heads, to just survive and finally graduate.
Years
passed and here i am, facing my final year in Moscow. I've heard news
of my seniors who are now fully licensed doctors, how they had a hard
time adapting to the system, how they were always 'marked' whenever
they mention that they graduated from Russia. Many of our seniors get
these funny and hurtful remarks whenever they did not perform the
procedure correctly. I went through the internet to find some
resources about the current cases of Russian graduates, only to find
some of these articles.
"At
present, hundreds of medical graduates from Russian and Ukrainian
universities especially CSMU are out without a leash in our
government hospitals.
Most
of them don’t know pharmacology or physiology.
Most
can’t perform simple clinical procedures like urinary
catheterization and intravenous cannulation.
Most
can’t deliver acute care to a patient in distress.
They
are not well-versed with common medical terms and classifications.
In
short, they are a different breed altogether"
I
searched for more, and all I found are the same as these. I always
knew about Russian graduates being less skillful compared to the
local medical graduates as the lack of exposure here, but never to my
horror, this alarming extent.
Questions
started to arise in my head,
Why
are these doctors so angry at us? They write these articles full of
emotion and anger.
Do
we need to stop studying medicine now?
How
do we stop the government from sending us here anyway?
Are
we doomed to this curse, forever ‘инвалидов’
as a proper doctor?
I
searched for what is wrong in this picture and I think I found it. We
lost that spirit, enthusiasm, passion, interest, or whatever you call
it, to our dream and ambition. We forgot the purpose and intention
coming to this piece of land. We got tired with the system and
language and decided to just follow the flow and choose not to
respond rightly to these challenges.
When
we were kids we dreamt of being that perfect doctor/engineer/teacher,
imagining that we will be that hero who will save lives just like in
the movies, helping with full of responsibility and sincerity.
Somehow,
that dreams just remained as dreams. Clouded and maybe bit by bit,
became impossible in our minds.
I
do not deny that external factors here in Russia do poll on this
account.
Maybe
it’s just the system here that we can’t change.
Or
maybe it’s due to our reluctance to get out of our comfort zones
we’ve created, avoiding the reality that we’re actually going to
face. Miles away from Malaysia, breezy and enjoyable life here in
Russia, it’s not so hard to avoid the reality.
How
could i be so ignorant? Here I am in my final year of medical school
and finally realizing this reality. But the reality has always been
in front of me the whole time. I just never took the time to
acknowledge it till now.
What
is the purpose of my existence here anyway?
I
can’t be here just to ‘survive’, what kind of doctor will I be?
How can I be of a good use to my society? I can’t stay in this same
state if I want to be a contributor, just like every object created
in this world, all of them have their own purposes. My purpose is of
course to be the best doctor that I can, to be able to contribute and
make improvements in health care of my people and maybe if I try
harder, I can do researches and find cures for taboo diseases that
people thought to be incurable.
I
can’t change the reality but I do know a change in my actions now
can improve the reality.
That
red self-help suddenly gleamed in front of me, that book that I
bought for 25% off in a jumble sale during my holidays in Malaysia.
The book is entitled “How to Get from Where" You Are to Where You
Want To Be”,
these first few words caught my eyes
Waking
up and progressing.
That
willingness to progress will of course, involve risks. Risks to get
out of my comfort box, my circle, habits and the daily norms.
We
are always scared of going outside of our circle because it feels
comfortable inside the comfort box we created, we are scared to
progress because we tricked ourselves that we are doing fine, when
the fact is, the world outside is revolving and we’re actually at
the back of the line.
We are scared to take risks because we are
afraid of exposing our weaknesses, but if we do not try to expose and
expand ourselves, we would not be able to maximize our capabilities
and be the best that we can be. Each of us are individual, and a
group of individuals make up a society. As we progress to become
maxed-out individuals (in terms of highly capable professionals), we
form great societies. Great societies form a remarkable country and
vice versa.
“Product
of the system”
Practically,
here in Moscow, we say we are the product of the system, that the
government who were responsible to send us here, that the agents did
not blurt the truth about the real study life here, but are we
going to continuously blame the system for what we have become? Where
do we head then, after blaming?
To
blame is much easier than to take full action or to respond correctly
to the situation.
The
definition of responsibility is
the
state or fact of being responsible,
answerable, or accountable for something within one's power, control,
or management.
“You
weren’t an accident. You weren’t mass produced. You aren’t an
assembly-line product. You were deliberately planned, specifically
gifted, and lovingly positioned on Earth by the Master-Craftsman”-Max
Lucado
In
Islam, we believe that all beings are specifically created for a
purpose, not an act of accident. Muslims believe that we are created
to be Caliphs on earth and a servant to the Master-Craftsman. Caliphs
in terms of giving the best conduct to other people (building trust,
enlarging network, harmonize the earth) and also as a servant to the
Almighty; Allah subhana wa ta'ala.
As
far as i remember during my summer practical in Malaysia, I notice
that housemanship is a period of crucial torture where these young
doctors are always pressured as being the ‘losers’ of the
hospital.
At these period of time, these doctors are expected to know
every single procedures in that particular department, despite the
fact that they are new and maybe lack of some skills as they are not
fairly exposed during their student years. When these doctors are
done with their first 2 year period of work and have progressed to be
medical officer, they forget the fact that they were once housemen
too, and they treat these new housemen with the same treatment that
they were once treated or more likely to be called as the period of
true vengeance.
The vicious cycle starts again and again, hospitals
which were supposed to be the place of saving lives, become just like
a prison, only learning to survive the housemanship, and continue
their journey to become ‘great’ doctors. Especially for the
graduates of Russia, where we become especially wounded with this
journey of hardship, we tend to be more frightful medical officers to
the junior doctors, misusing the wise concept of ‘learning the hard
way up’.
There
is some corrections of value that need to be buffered back here. We
can change this reality of sorrow in Malaysia into a new realm of
hope if we try hard enough from now, how? Let’s start with some
exposures.
“During
medical student life, your source of stress is your studies, as you
have to memorize the whole bookshelf to merely pass. Being a doctor,
the stress comes from having the enormous responsibility, as your
mistake can cost someone his/her life, your carelessness may cause
someone pain, your ignorance may delay someone from getting the right
treatment.”
Learning
the fact that we have an enormous responsibility, we as undergraduate
students here in Russia, have to make a resolution to fill our chest
with adequate knowledge and skills. Potentials are within us, we just
need to direct them to the right way.
Being
a doctor does not mean that we are only involved with the medical
problems of our patients, but also their social science and social
economy problems as we are saving human lives, not gadgets.
“In
the event of cardiac arrest, in the midst of panicking and crying
family members outside the door, we must be able to recall the steps
that we learn in the Advance Cardiac Life Support course that we
attended last month/year, and act accordingly. Practice makes
perfect. Experience is of course, the best teacher.
On
another occasion, a frail looking 25 year old man with a newly
diagnosed leukemia asked,
“Doctor, what’s wrong with me? Will I die?”.
Think.. think.. Choose your words wisely before answering, doctors!”
Do
you know that right now, the statistics of drug addicts among our
youth in Malaysia has recently increased. On 19th of February 2014,
Prime
Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak has called on families to unite
to propel the fight against drug addiction among youths. He said the
Government was concerned that drug abuse problems had commonly
resulted from a breakdown in the family unit. In this case, let’s
say we encounter a drug addict patient, we can’t merely mark that
this is his problem, an individual problem, assuming all the typical
thoughts that we busy doctors are stereotyped with, but can’t we
see that this is actually a social problem.
Prophylactic steps
outside the range of medicine need to be taken in order to cure this
problem of our society and it starts with the doctor to detect the
root of the crisis. Treat the disease, not the symptom, if we doctors
really heal the roots of the problem, it will not be a surprise if we
can not only cure diseases but also the social problems that our
society is facing.
Having
said this, we as the future doctors/engineers who are going to be a
part of the society, have to master social skills, and that could not
be achieved if we choose to just linger with the same group of people
who are only interested in catching movies, who are only interested
to ‘chill out’ or just stay in the room under that duvet sleeping
comfortably avoiding the big pang of reality in which we know, will
surely take place once we end our studies here and start with our
working career, the development and cultivation of care in our
society will not fruit in just one day, nor will it make a sudden
appearance once we touch down in Malaysia. I know we do care for the
society deep inside us, but we must not layer it with atherosclerotic
plaques of ignorance with our state of being here.
People
call me a perfectionist, but I’m not. I’m a “rightist”. I do
something until its right, then i move to the next thing.
James
Cameron-Oscar winning director of Terminator series
We
have to stop having the ‘victim mentality’ as our past seniors
have experienced. Its just not right! Let us make some changes
starting now and when we do start our career, we are ready to be
contributors, not just feebly taking that grand account of being a
doctor/engineer, when we are not actually making improvements but
repeating the same mistakes. Let us become the subject of history of
the past, we have a changed mentality and a new vision for a better
environment and we are involved in this change.
Last
but not least, let’s rekindle the spirit of nationalism. Do
remember that all of us are the future Malaysians, the new generation
who will shape our beloved country into the country that we dream to
see. The power that is within us must be molded from now, not when
we’ve reached our father’s age or when we have ‘settled down’,
but the plan of becoming a real contributing
human being starts now. We have to rebuild that big ambition of ours
in our mind, putting actions into it.
The young and the
creative, the fast and comprehensive, the skillful and competitive,
all of these capabilities or characteristics lie within the youth,
especially youth who are currently on a higher education like us, or
as Russians call it, люди
с высшим образованием.
Youth who are ready to take challenges and reclaim our dignity
as future graduates and professionals from our very own study
place, Russia, we not only big on words but also big on actions.
Let’s turn those hospitals (for doctors) into somewhere that we
wish to be in, let’s make Malaysia the best country that we are
always proud of.
Yeah, i’m talking about us because it starts
with us. We are all here for a bigger purpose. So what are waiting
for?
Despite the different backgrounds, different religions and
different culture of origins, we are all citizens of Malaysia. We are
all going to be part of the society in Malaysia. The future is us!
Hand in hand, we can aspire the nation for the betterment of
the society, country and the world.
Together we are stronger and
unbreakable.
The
secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting
started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small
manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.Mark
Twain
Wallahua'lam.
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