hello, misa! i am the freshman premed who asked erbiumspectrum for advice. on that post you responded with your own insights, and you mentioned your father as well. thank you so much for your advice!
sleep is often highlighted as the most foundational, crucial aspect to learning effectively or being the most efficient student possible. as you have read, i tried to see how far my body could push itself but this ended up backfiring as i would fall asleep at random points of the day, and when break rolled around i was sick for half of it đ
i genuinely just feel like it is unavoidable to lack sleep in medical school and beyond. even the most high performing, efficient medical students and practicing physicians say that it is an inevitability anyone who wants to pursue the profession should get used to. i thought that by exposing myself early, i would be able to adjust, but again it has just massively backfired and my performance dropped. in the field i want to pursue, surgeons are working 70-110 hours a week. i am sorry to bother you with this but i really am lost and i dont personally know any doctors in my life. i really do want to prepare myself as much as possible, and grit i have realized is a quality i am lacking. i am trying to reach out to as many people as possible and today i thought of your dad, among others. how did he perform at such a high level while running on little to no sleep, especially during his residency? thank you so much :)
I AM SO SORRY!!! I DON'T KNOW HOW I MISSED THIS ASK I AM SO UTTERLY SORRY I JUST SAW IT TODAY!!!!
So I asked my dad and a few of my friends and cousins who are in the medical field, and I have slightly varying responses. My dad did his residency some 30-40 years ago, so he doesn't really remember anything from it. This post will be slightly long and disjointed because I am not necessarily the best one to talk about this, and I have my personal biases, so please take what I say with a grain of salt. I will try to mention all the places my biases play in, but in general, too. AND TW Suicide and depression. Please proceed with caution.
My dad had no choice but to study. He came from a farming household, and was actively encouraged to drop out of school at the age of 9 so he'd help in the fields. He ran away from home at 9 years old and thankfully, he received good government education free of cost. He studied enough to get a scholarship for university in a bigger city and he chose medicine. So he had to work hard, because failure wasn't an option for him. Once he finished his studies, he wanted to go home and start his residency there, but he couldn't because of political unrest (which I don't want to dwell into further cause my country's political situation now is essentially hopeless and I don't want unnecessary trouble for my dad at the age of nearly 60). He managed to get scholarship for his residency in the big city, but he had hardly any spending money, and the stamp of coming from a poor household is difficult to erase when everyone around you is rich. At that time, he obviously did not get to sleep well, take care of his health, nothing. He had no choice but push through and persevere for his future.
His side of the story cannot help you a lot, because his biggest motivator was to be able to make a living, not work in a challenging field. His cases now are generally not on the difficult side, and my dad prefers that. We make enough that he gave his only child private education and now higher education in a foreign country. I suppose you want to go into the field with noble pursuit, and I again, commend you for the efforts you are putting in for it.
But if you burn yourself out before you even reach the point of your residency, how will you be able to achieve what you want? Also residency is inherently different from studying. You can go about in a sort of autopilot after you have been there for a while, what you cannot do as a student. Being a student requires active mental participation which exhausts you in ways that is difficult to repair from. I'm not saying residency is only physical work, but it is slightly more of repetition than studying is, and honestly? When you are at that point, there's a sort of "well, we'll have to get through this one way or another" which helps you get past that sleep barrier. Is it healthy? Hell no. Does it work out? Yeah.
The other ones I asked were my friend and cousin who are more...GenZ? They've had horrible sleep schedules since their high school days, and they both also told me the same thing. It helps in a way that they're used to their body being active at unusual parts of the day, but it doesn't mean it necessarily helps with the exhaustion which follows. What I have gathered from this is that residency is difficult, regardless of if your body is prepared for it or not. When you're at the stage, your body has already made mental preparations for it, and it's slightly easier to get through it.
My dad says that had he not followed a strict sleep schedule during his teens and early 20s, his body would not have been able to handle the residency days. While I suppose this was my dad using a backhanded way of telling me to sleep on time, his words do sort of hold weight. This was also a horrible time to ask my dad this, because his colleague's son, who was admitted to essentially one of the most prestigious universities in the country, committed suicide a few days ago. All we know is that he could not handle the pressure that comes with being the top 200 minds in the country. In India, to get to these universities you have to study continuously for 3-4 years for 16-18 hours straight. I am not lying when I say that if you don't do this, you will essentially never get in. No amount of intelligence can get you to these universities, it is a matter of sacrifice of youth, happiness and a sense of self. This is where my own biases fit in, and I have never considered these institutes noble, or the amount of distress and effort it requires to get into these institutes praise worthy. It is commendable, and I applaud these kids, but in the end I will mourn for the childhood they lost over this even if they don't.
This brings me to my next point and again, these are my own opinions and they are heavily biased, but do not waste your youth away for something that you will have to face in your future. I am not saying you shouldn't focus on studying and doing your best, but it should never come at the price of your health. You cannot save lives if yours is at risk.
I'll make an analogy with my life and my mother's, which are vastly different from residency, but I have a point, I promise. My mother comes from a farming family herself, however she did not have the opportunity for education the way my dad it. She had to take up the job of an elementary school teacher in her mid 20s, in a village different from hers, and had to live in a rented room. My mother is extremely clean, and has very high standards of hygiene. The only washroom available to her and the other women living in that house was a shared washroom with the people who worked in the paddy fields, which had a thick layer of mud and debris in the bathing area (obviously because people working in the fields are also using the same bathroom). They had to fill water from a tap outside in a bucket, take the bucket in the makeshift tiny bathroom, with a pigsty attached to one of the walls. It was disgusting, and my mother said she does not even want to imagine what it felt like at that time. As for me, I was raised in comfort, if not luxury, and wouldn't even step on my bathroom floor without slippers on (I sound so spoiled, no? haha). During my internship, I had to live in a room which was humid and damp, in 40 degrees of the summer with mosquitoes, which is fine, I had been through it when I was a child. What was unbearable was the washroom which had cobwebs so thick they made up full fabrics, centipedes and millipedes always entering my room, and cockroaches which flew into my tshirt on multiple occasions. I almost wanted to quit. But I pulled through, I survived that place. And I know having a roof over my head and especially knowing that that life was temporary is one of the biggest motivators for me being able to push through, and again I know people live worse lives than that.
But my point is what my parents usually say, "when it happens, you'll adjust." And they were right, if you had told me a year earlier that I would have to go through that, I'd probably stress the fuck out of it. But well, it's over. I did cry myself to sleep when the first cockroach flew into my tshirt, by the second time I had the killing spray in hand and didn't even yell. You will get used to it, it will work out.
I think this was my extremely long winded way of saying, don't push yourself to the point of your body breaking down. Stressing yourself out from this stage will only hamper and dim your motivation to excel. Do enough to get to the next stage of your dreams, study for applying to unis, study in the unis to get into your field. Once you get to your residency, well- it will suck. it will be extremely difficult, but you will get through it. When you're at that stage, you'll push yourself through. ALSO REMEMBER, that if you feel like it's too much, step down. NOTHING is more important than your health. And not reaching your dreams does not make you a bad person, or a failure. It just means you know where to draw the line, and where to prioritize yourself, which is a very important quality if you want to live your life. You have one chance at life, don't give the joy of it up for something impending in the future. Go out, hang out with friends. Hang out with your family if you're close to them, trust me. It's these memories which will get you through the difficult times. Your career does not define your life, you do.
