It always starts small – like a ripple – before slowly welling up inside. You know what’s coming next, so you brace yourself.

 They’re all just temporary feelings that will pass right?

The tachypnoea, chest pain, palpitations, vision changes, paraesthesia, depersonalization, flight of ideas, and that sense of impending doom. No amount of knowledge can prepare yourself for the wave that comes. It surges through every fibre in your body, filling every nook and cranny, relentlessly striking at every insecurity with more precision than a stressed medical student trying to cannulate a delirious dehydrated patient while trying to decide whether to call a code grey amidst a cacophony of beeping alarms. Its icy grip tightens round your chest, clinging to every breath as you struggle to maintain focus. Through ragged breaths you use every rational thought you can muster to counter your worries and overvalued ideas. And just when it seems you’re not going to make it, you do. You remember to breathe. The waters finally recede as you shut your eyes, inhale deeply and shake it off before ‘resetting’ and picking up where you left off.

 

Five years have passed in a flash and with the end of medical school in sight comes a barrage of different emotions: Joy, relief, sadness, dread. I would be lying if I said it was easy. “Peaks and troughs”, they said. Yet that one line cannot surmise all the obstacles one faced: Mental health issues, challenging colleagues and supervisors, social isolation, insomnia, 4-hour sleeps at night to study for the VIA, the list goes on. One that I found particularly troubling and persistent was anxiety. Here are some tips I found helpful.

 

Seek Help When You Can– You are never alone. Sometimes mates are good and all, but there are times when things can get too overwhelming. There are always avenues for help like Headspace and getting a mental health care plan from your GP. The student services at our clinical sites are also very understanding and always have our best interests at heart. Knowing when we are in over our head and seeking help is a good step in a positive direction. No matter how big or small your problems are, there is nothing wrong with saying you need help.

 

Take Time For Yourself– Never underestimate the power of taking some time to focus on you. Take a break from the books, get out there and take some time to relax. Exercise, treat yourself to brunch (not UberEats), hang out with your friends, visit a familiar haunt (or somewhere new). Remember to pace yourself and not burn out. So… Treat yo’self! J

 

Surround Yourself With Friends and Family – It’s easy to get caught up with work and rotations and lose contact with friends and family. Try and make it a point to spend some time with them. Grab a coffee, have brunch together, share your troubles, or just kick back and binge on Netflix. If not, drop them a call. Sometimes all we need is just for someone to talk to or laugh alongside with.

 

Mindfulness Works– We have all spent time savouring that tiny piece of chocolate, trying to focus on every taste bud as it slowly melted in our mouths – I wouldn’t know, I practically inhaled mine. A chocolate fondue fountain with strawberries would’ve worked better, but I digress. If you ever feel tense and unable to relax, meditation has been a great go-to for me. Taking a couple of minutes to regulate your breathing and doing a ‘body scan’ is a good way to reset and start over. If you’re like me, lacking imagination and would rather not type ‘relaxing music for stressed out medical students preparing for final year exams’ in YouTube search bars, then I would recommend the Smiling Mind app which is completely free and has several pre-set programs to select from (no, I do not have shares in the Developers’ company).

 

I hope these tips are useful for those who need it. Good luck for the rest of the year everyone!

What do you want to be when you grow up?

By Rav Gaddam

As a child, people used to ask me “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, and my answer use to differ every time – from a detective palaeontologist, to a ballerina firefighter, there was never a time I would be content on settling for a constant straightforward answer.

So, when I was awarded the opportunity to attend the National Leadership Development Seminar (NLDS) by AMSA, I was beyond ecstatic – an opportunity to hear from a dancer doctor, or a lawyer doctor, or an actor doctor? BRILLIANT, all I needed now was to find that Kathmandu jacket to brave the Canberra winter.

Each day at NLDS was based on a different theme, but every day we got the opportunity to listen and to learn from inspirational and extraordinary people who have done amazing things in their life. From having coffee chats with A/Prof Ruth Stewart to discuss rural health, to listening to Michael Bonning talk about his time in the ADF, or attending a breakout session with Jessica Dean (#monashpride), these people reminded me that doing medicine does not mean that I have to finish medical school and only become a doctor (and if you want to be just a doctor, that great too!).

However, the session that left the greatest impact on me was a plenary session by Dr Emily Isham. Though it has been nearly four weeks since the event, I find myself often pondering over her speech. Emily is an amazing rural GP, who despite having lost her son to cancer less than a month before NLDS, stood in front of us and delivered a speech that made me brawl. I spent the afternoon on the phone to my mum as I was reminded that life is short, and I need to embrace the people, the opportunities and the dreams I have.

In summary, everyone’s journey at NLDS (and life) is different, but my time there reminded me to reflect on my life thus far, the people around me, and on my childhood dreams. So, if anyone asks me now “what do you want to be when you grow up?”, I guess my answer is quite simple really:

I want to be a detective-palaeontologist-ballerina-firefighting-doctor.

 

NLDS Experience

By Bowen Xia

AMSA NLDS has been one of the highlights of my year and I highly recommend it due to the skills, experiences and networks that I have gained from it.

 

My favourite experience at NLDS was the opportunity to interact with and befriend medical students across Australia. We can often be trapped in our own bubbles surrounded by people and opinions that sustain it, so it was refreshing to have paradigms shifted, beliefs altered and the opportunity to see unique and diverse perspectives from presidents of medicine societies to future presidents of medicine societies. I can safely say that when I returned to Monash from Canberra, I carried NLDS souvenirs in my bag, countless photos on my phone and new ideas and perspectives in my mind.

 

NLDS Projects was also a great experience. Everyone was allocated into various project groups that worked on finding a concrete solution to a current issue in medicine. My project was ‘reducing burnout in medical students’. We worked on it for a good part of NLDS and had great mentorship from speakers and members of the AMSA Executive Committee. We got to present and view all the projects at Old Parliament House at the end of NLDS. The result was us winning the award for ‘best project’ but the real prize was the fun that we had by working together.

 

The social activities were also great fun. The ball was an excellent time to socialise with other participants of NLDS over some EtOH and food. The trivia night was a great opportunity to discover that nobody knows anything. Finally, the end of NLDS party at Mooseheads allowed us to celebrate and farewell a memorable experience and then get late night maccas after making closing time.

 

I have always been the kind of person who prefers not to talk about their struggles or worries. I prefer to listen to and help other people with whatever is on their mind. Despite this, for a long time now I’ve struggled with my body image and my relationship with food. I have downplayed it because I know that I do not have a serious eating disorder, I am of a healthy weight and I have in a way liked being that “healthy friend” that people know not to bother offering the sweet snack to and that prefers to take the stairs over the lift. But it’s time to out my hidden struggles and recognise them for what they are.

 

I cannot pinpoint when it all started for me but for years, I have been very invested in nourishing my body and only consuming foods that I deem to be healthy. If I was in a situation where I felt obliged to eat an “unhealthy” food, I would be riddled with guilt for hours and this is definitely something that I still struggle with even to this day. I would secretly judge other people for their food choices and in fact very openly judge those closest to me. I would try to convince them that their diets were completely wrong and that they needed to adopt healthier behaviours and follow my strict rules around reading the food packages to ensure that there was no added sugar, no preservatives and that the foods were low in fat and salt. I saw my behaviours as being the right way to live and that everyone else was doing it wrong.

 

These strict rules and restrictions allowed me to justify eating extremely large portions of food and going back for seconds and thirds as long as it was healthy. This led to an unhealthy cycle of binge eating to the point where I felt over full and unwell. This would happen on a daily basis – sleep, overeat, rest and repeat. I had the all or nothing attitude, that: I would either have a good day and eat well and if I failed to meet that standard then I would give in for the day and eat anything and everything and my strict rules would restart again the next day. My days would be consumed about thinking about food and worrying about my body, feeling that I would never be happy in my body no matter how well I ate or how much exercise I did.

 

The world we live in today is a mixed bag of dietary advice. One day we are told that the keto diet is the way to go and the next day we are demonising meat and opting for a plant-based diet. No wonder we are all so confused about what to eat. Societal views on food have definitely impacted my attitudes towards my diet but on reflection so have my perfectionist personality traits. I am constantly striving to be better and do better and one way I thought I could do this was aiming to be as healthy as possible. This sounds simplistic as I know that overall health is not just about what you eat but is related to a whole number of things including lifestyle factors such as exercise, sleep and stress levels but it is easy to get caught up in obsessing over one thing and for me that was and  sometimes still is, food.

 

Over the course of about a year I have begun to realise that my behaviours and thoughts have negative impacts on my life and my relationships. Although the thought of seeing a psychologist about it scared me, I thought it was time that I did something to help myself. I went to my GP who also thought it would be a good idea, however after that conversation I managed to find every excuse possible to avoid seeing a psychologist. Then on another visit to my GP and after conversations with my friends I decided to bite the bullet and book in to see someone.

 

Even though I would have probably been okay continuing the way I have been for many more years, I found sitting down and talking to a complete stranger a beneficial experience. After seeing patients on placement and asking them to talk openly about their mental health struggles I felt that it was important for me to do the same and feel no shame about it. I spoke to my friends about it – something that I wouldn’t have done a year ago and now I have written it down for more people to read and hopefully I can help someone else out there who may be struggling with their own battle.

 

We all have our own struggles and it can be easy to deflect them but the sooner we identify and talk about them, the sooner we can start to heal and realise that we are not alone. I am now a lot more content with myself and have started to focus more on the positives including how amazingly functional my body is. Slowly, I am overcoming my obsession with healthy eating and focusing more on the shared experience of a good meal with loved ones and the power that food has in bringing people together