Coming Full Circle

This was initially posted as a thread on Twitter, but I decided to add some context and expand it more on the blog.

I guess the universe has its own way of correcting itself Whenever someone asked me if I want to change one thing in life, or what is the thing you regretted doing, My answer always has been deciding to do medicine.

I know there are many out there who like to be a doctor, who wish the perks that you get from being a doctor but not me. I won’t go in to details but I have written several blog posts in the past why I hate working on this field.

I have even thought and said to friends that there were people that I know who deserves to be doctors, who were better than me, passionate than me, who didn’t get the chance because of our education system.

After I graduated I found out that there is a new sub-speciality in our field called Biomedical informatics. Since it has some parts to do with computers, mathematics and some critical thinking I decided to give it a try.

And now that I’m about to complete one year into my course I guess it has been the most satisfying year of my carrier And recently when someone asked me the question again “what would you have done differently if you had the chance to undo what you have done?”

I gave it a thought, and I haven’t thought about that in years… And the answer was nothing. I guess at that time I felt what inner peace really mean. Life has come a full circle

There is nothing that I want to undo.

To add more context for the tweets, first of all being a doctor is a stressful job. You have to stay away from your family, loved ones, forget doing the things you love, work on weekends and holidays. And what’s worse is even if you work like that at the end of the day there is very little satisfaction for you as a person.

You may ask, well what about curing a patient or helping a patient, isn’t that satisfactory? Well that’s true, but that’s not as simple as it sounds, and I don’t want to go into detail about it.

Yes, there are perks in being a doctor, you have respect, you get a decent salary, but personally I feel that the sacrifices you make in life can’t be compensated by the salary that you get.

Anyway I knew that if I continued in this path, I was sure to have a breakdown, depression or even worse. And I was looking for an exit, and that’s when I found out about the BioInformatics MSc. It has to do with mathematics, computing, information systems, etc. Since I already had some prior knowledge in computing I decided to give it a try.

After selecting BioInformatics, life has been good for me. Yes I’m not getting the salary of a doctor, yes people don’t consider me as a doctor anymore. But, I’m happy as a person, I spend more time with people I love, I have time to do things that I love doing (playing soccer, working on side projects etc), and also do something I love for a living (coding, information processing etc). I have time to meditate, follow Buddhism.

Isn’t that what you need as a person?

When I was asked again what I would have changed in my life if I had the chance to go back, which something I thought regularly when I was working as a doctor, and I couldn’t think of anything I would have changed, it was truly satisfying.

However, there is something that I always keep on the back of my head since my childhood is the fact that, whatever you have achieved today in life, can be taken away from you quickly than it took for you to achieve it.