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- 🌍 This Patient Changed My World View
🌍Hey guys! I hope you all had a fantastic week.
Firstly, welcome to all the new subscribers of the newsletter!
This week I was on-call clerking patients and got to see a variety of clinical cases. How it works in the UK is that when you are seen in the ED department, once the ED doctor decides you are unwell enough to be admitted to hospital, he/she contacts the on-call team who come and see that patient in ED. It is for the on-call team to take over the patient’s care and ensure that their transfer to the wards and ongoing treatment is safe and appropriate. This means that although the specialty I'm currently working in is geriatrics at the moment, when I'm on-call I see anyone who is admitted to the hospital and therefore get to see a wide breadth of medicine.
I met one patient in particular, who reminded me of something so important. Let's call him John. John was in his early thirties, not many years older than myself, and was on the way home from work the night before. He then began to have a seizure in the car and very fortunately, his car slowly came to a stop without injuring himself or anyone. Passers by called the ambulance and on arrival to the hospital, we ordered a CT head for him. When I saw him, he was yet to see the results, which were very sad. On reviewing his scans, I could see that John had a brain tumor and I knew when I saw him that I would have to deliver incredibly sad news to him and his family that would change the course of their lives forever…
Over the next few days whilst being on call, I would pop to the wards and follow his case for my peace of mind. Although my remaining on-calls were overwhelming and exhausting, I was constantly reminded of how lucky I was. How lucky I was to be healthy. How lucky I was to be able to return to work everyday. How lucky I was to be able to help people at their best and worst points of their lives.
It's really at these points in life where our whole worldview can change in an instant. It is so easy to forget, especially in the difficult times, how fortunate we still might be. If you are reading this, I hope you are healthy, have food/water, electricity and a family. If that is the case, you and I are extremely fortunate. A healthy person wants everything, a sick person only wants 1 thing (their health).
So this week, if you face adversity, I encourage you to bear that thought in mind. No matter how difficult the day gets, if you make it to bed at the end of the day with the above things, smile. 🙂
👍🏾 Things I’ve enjoyed this week
TickTick habit tracker & Pomodoro timer (app) - I’ve been using this app for years as my to-do list, but had no idea they had a habit tracker and Pomodoro timer too. It’s great!
My free reading list (gift) - this was a big project but I can finally use it. It is an e-book with all my top 101 books I recommend anyone to read in their lifetime with short summaries of them. It’s completely free. Enjoy!
Opal (productivity app) - so good I had to mention it twice for the newcomers (not sponsored). This is an app that allows you to set schedules to block certain apps on your phone. I have it to block my social media and email apps from 9pm-9am everyday and it’s been a gamechanger!
Spider-Man Remastered (game) - I recently downloaded this on my Steam Deck but you can get it on PS5 too I believe. I was a big fan of spidey as a kid and this really allows me to relieve my childhood after work. Highly recommend if you are into games!
📹 The latest video in case you missed it:
📚 Highlight of the week
A traditional, salaried job is a collar: the cost of protecting against downside risk is limited upside. Think of your entry-level salary at your first job in corporate America as the second floor of the building, and your total comp as a high-level VP or director as an apartment on the eighth floor. Your worst possible outcome, a career that fails to advance, still pays well enough to cover the basics. Meanwhile, a home run career pays handsomely, but it won’t propel you to the upper echelons of wealth. Like Mark Cuban’s Yahoo shares, your career is collared. The potential upside and downside outcomes are range defined. Working for yourself, on the other hand, is like purchasing call options. If you succeed, the upside will outperform the “normal” career by a magnitude, but if you’re wrong, no one is there to save you. The cost of admission for unlimited upside is the potential for absolute failure. Maybe you become a millionaire, maybe you go bust. Who knows.
Millennials Need to Ditch Their Parents’ Outdated Career Ladders and Embrace Job-Hopping Adam Poswolsky
Let’s start treating our careers as a lifelong experiment instead of a preordained slog. Find experiences that allow you to quickly test assumptions about your career interests. Every job, every experience, every place you travel, is a chance to learn something new about yourself, what interests you (and just as importantly what doesn’t), what you’re good at, what types of people you want to surround yourself with, and what type of impact you want to have on the world.
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson
One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous. Once I came to that realization, jealousy faded away because I don’t want to be anybody else. I’m perfectly happy being me. By the way, even that is under my control. To be happy being me. It’s just there are no social rewards for it
Resurfaced to me by Readwise
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🛠 My favourite tools 🔨
📚 Listen to my favourite book of all time (or any other) free on Audible
🥼 My daily hospital scrubs: HappyThreads
🎒 My everyday and travel bag from Menos (use KENJI10 for 10% off)
📝 My favourite iPad screen protector: Paperlike