Doctors to be: 20 years on

'Doctors to be: 20 years on' is a BBC production tracking down doctors from the time they had their interview to get into medical school 20 years ago until the present time. It's really inspiring to watch because I can relate to the character in the documentary. Particularly at times like this when exams is around the corner, when there's so much to read and take in that I almost always feel like giving up, wondering if there any point to even try to read through this enormous amount of stuff. And the bad news is medicine is a profession of examinations, pretty much at all stage until we get to the top. I do want to end up as a successful hospital consultant and it doesn't matter how much hard work it takes. But I'm far from there. Very long road ahead indeed, that it's just very difficult to convince yourself that all these effort will be all worthwhile after all. Watching the consultant on the documentary who went through exactly the same thing as I am facing now kind of put some perspective back into me.

I've also realised that medicine is truly a profession of lifelong learning. I've learnt so much over the last 12 weeks, and yet there are so much more that I don't know. I'm not alone. The junior doctors know a hell lot of medicine. I'm always at awe about how much they know when they teach us medical student practical medical. Yet there are always things that they are not sure of, and would need to ask their consultant about, and it's not uncommon to see junior doctors listening along as a consultant teaches the medical students. And the consultants - at the first sight you would think that they were just walking encyclopedias of the speciality. They speak so eloquently on their subject matter and command so confidently in day-to-day medical practice you would think that there's nothing that they don't know. Yet sometimes even the consultants get stuck. That's why there is so much research going on. Thanks to the complexity of the human body, the thirst for knowledge in medicine will stay alive as long as we are in the profession. One last thing about medicine being so unique is that everyone learn from each other all the time. Most of the time knowledge does get passed down from the seniors to the juniors, but that doesn't mean that the seniors necessarily know more than the juniors about everything. Although we endeavour to learn everything under the sun, we simply cannot, and we rely on each other to fill in our gaps of knowledge all the time.

Despite feeling that I was going to fail every time I sit for an exam, I've managed to pull it through so far. I hope the same will happen this time. Fingers crossed.