#haem

FREE haematology webinar aimed at medical students and new doctors, coming up next week (19th)!

I just sort of slowly realised it would be the best fit for me! It took a while though - through most of medical school I sortof assumed I'd be a GP. It's the most common specialty and I didn't really have much calling to anything else, plus I was a below average med student and sort of assumed I'd have to go for one of the 'easier' options (not that the actual job of being a GP is easy in the slightest, but it's less competitive to get into).

Then I got more confident in myself when I did really well in my gastroenterology exams and thought maybe I could do gastro. So I did my whole Masters on pancreatic cancer and tried to get a gastro placement for my medical placement in final year. However, I got a haem placement instead! Which I really enjoyed, in fact out of the whole of med school it was the placement I enjoyed the most. I loved the fact that you got to know the patients on the wards as they'd often be in for weeks at a time, and found all the medicines and stem cell transplant stuff fascinating.

So then I was like, hmm it'll be haem or gastro, so I got myself a F1 job with both of them as rotations. I started with haem and LOVED it, again loving the rapport with the patients, finding the conditions and the new treatments fascinating (CAR-T was just coming on the scene and the registrars would teach me about it), although it was incredibly sad at times. And then... Covid hit, so I never got to do my gastro job. Maybe it was the universe telling me to do haem? I also realised when working as a doctor that I don't like procedures, so that ruled out gastro and a few other things like cardio, anaesthetics.