so i was being a little nostalgic

and re-visited this post.

it feels like life before medicine was a different life all together.

i've never been more fulfilled and it's crazy just how amazeballs clinicals have been. i spend most days overwhelmed with gratitude that 1) national experts take time out their schedules to teach us the basics 2) people with golden hearts come in on their own time to let us poke and prod them. just this morning we met a gent with acromegaly. he had taken leave to tell us about his condition and the long road to diagnosis, in hope that when faced with similar presentation in the future, we'd come to the diagnosis earlier and spare future-patient years of not knowing what's up. how public-spirited is that?!  

also, maybe i'm a little slow on the uptake but now i feel compelled to skim over the sylllabus in advance so come 9am start i'm all prepped and ready to see the conditions we're learning about live. the theory is slowly coming together and it excites me to see pathology in person (sorry patient!). but what makes it even better is when i go home and catch the mister youtube-ing things i've whatsapped him about in the day. we did gastro-intestinal last week and while i was decompressing, the mister was watching videos on ileostomy care and ascites drainage. i mean, how sweet and supportive is he! then we curl up on the sofa and guess the diagnosis while watch embarrassing bodies. so nerdy, and i'm moved beyond words by how the mister shows an interest in what i do. when we were both lawyers, we hardly talked about the files we were on. in a way it was nice how we could discuss them in shorthand and half-sentences, before soon moving on to more interesting things.

some one asked me recently why i got married "so young" and while i'm no child bride, it was hard to answer without sounding smug / vomit-inducing. but the honest answer is i've been so very fortunate to find the mister early. having spent five years trying to find something wrong with him, and failing, i realised i better marry him before someone else snapped him up. i'm no commodities trader, but i felt he was under-valued, and i was definitely over-performing by conning him into going out with me :) the immense benefit of being young and married is we've the luxury of time to enjoy this amazing season "just us" while pursuing our independent dreams. through it all, i've someone who has my back, who sees only the very best in me, and inspires me every day to be a better version of myself. he gives me plenty of space and ironically i feel more 'free' as a not-so-old married woman than i ever did when i was single many moons ago. 

in fact, the mister was instrumental in my applying to medical school and if i hadn't met him, i don't think i'd have had the courage to turn my back on a perfectly good legal career. but he signed me up for the medsch entrance exams despite my protestations (same time as the bar exam, hooboy!) and wouldn't let me settle for convenience. being a silly girl, i know that if i'd been single or with someone less encouraging at that point, there was no way i'd have about-turned into medicine at that stage. i wanted to eventually get married and have kids, and pursuing a graduate degree would have made it infinitely harder to do all that. plus the little problem of meeting a nice (preferably yellow) christian boy while at it... so it's all academic now, but every day i'm grateful for the mister, and this opportunity to being doing exactly what i want to do :)

exciting times ahead!