Photo by Severin Höin on Unsplash

It has been about six months since I first started working in the hospital. Honestly speaking I am still trying to get to get the hang of everything that is going on around me. Even after working as a second posting junior doctor, I realise that there are still a whole lot of things that I simply do not know or even heard about them.

Gone are the days whereby I could say that I am a first posting junior doctor and being excused from the mistakes or things that I have missed sometimes. Now, I am expected to know most of the things, if not all of them.

The only thing that I know for sure in medical field is in fact the uncertainty of it. There is totally nothing that you can be sure of 100%, be they the effects of your managements on patients or simply the workload that you might have on daily basics.

For instances, not every patient will react to the same treatments that they have been given similarly. Some might recover completely from the conditions that they are having while others may succumb to death despite all the efforts you have put in order to get them healthy.

I can clearly recall one incident that happen in the ward that I was taking care of previously. Martha was a 60 years old lady who was diagnosed with blood cancer in early of 2019.  She was then admitted into the hospital for multiple rounds of chemotherapy.

Initially she responded pretty well to the treatment, albeit losing all of her lustrous locks day by day until she was completely bald, needing wig to cover her head. Nonetheless, her condition started to deteriorate and during her admission to the hospital for fourth chemotherapy, she became unconscious and passed away despite various attempts to bring her back to life.

Same thing goes to the workload. You can never be sure of the amount of work you have everyday. One day you might be free for the whole day and the next day you may be as busy as a bee, running around requesting for scans, tracing blood results, clerking new patients and the likes.

All in all, some might see the unpredictability as a beauty of working in medical field. Others, might beg to differ. I certainly, belong to the latter group. However, the only way to deal with uncertainty is to go along with it and try not to be too stressed over things that are unforeseeable. Life is after all unpredictable it self. Cheers.