ALEX lee

LONELINESS

As a medical sciences student, if you ask me what I want to be, my rather unsurprising answer would be “I want to be a doctor.” I’ve been saying this to everyone since grade 10, but the truth is, I really had no clear idea as to WHY I wanted to become a doctor. Answering this question honestly became even more important during university, where my motivation to do everything from studying to joining extracurriculars depended on forming an identity that will last a lifetime. But eventually, it became a matter of why I was even trying hard anymore. Within the first year at Western, I noticed that my drive to complete an 8-year journey to a ‘medical degree’ was virtually non-existent and downright naive.

I had major problems with confidence in my identity. When I sat in NCB101 for my very first university lecture (which was Chemistry 1301), the “doctor” vibe was overwhelming left and right. Everybody wanted to be a medical doctor, just like me. Minding your own business felt virtually impossible when in the back of my mind, I knew that the competitive mood was seeping into my conscience. It was incredibly discouraging. In first-year, I don’t remember sparing myself a single ounce of optimism and I was only worried about how badly I would do on exams. I would regularly talk about a program switch with my parents as my insecurities grew larger, before I fell victim to more serious mental health issues. And it wasn’t until the end of my freshman year that I realized something was clearly missing in my university experience.

During the summer, I didn’t have a gameplan for my career, which led me to miss out on better opportunities like research or paid employment. So being out of options, I half-heartedly took a volunteer role at a geriatric inpatient unit. My job was quite simple: assist the nurses in taking care of patients. Every week, it was repeating the same tasks again and again, feeding them and tidying their rooms. An impactful summer was the last thing I expected. But as a few months went by, it became emotionally difficult to spend time with the patients. I vividly remember an elderly lady with dementia, yelling at me, “what else do I do?!”. I calmly explained that the physician will arrive soon for a check-up. “But what else am I supposed to do?!”, she yelled again but more sorrowfully; I couldn’t give her an answer. I was speechless. I merely stared at her, physically impaired, unable to do anything independently and left behind by her children and relatives who were too busy with their own lives. This is an unimaginable reality for able-bodied people like me. Yet I saw her reality. It was a painful revelation, staring at the devastation of loneliness in its physical form.

The human experience of the learning process is not academic, but emotional. And unfortunately, students are not quite properly taught how to deal with the emotional aspect of education. Although the human experience feels inaccessible during times of stress, it can be surprisingly found at the simplest places, such as spending time volunteering at a hospital. When I tended to people like the aforementioned lady, I genuinely felt her state of desolation while she spent her final years alone in an insipid place with some sickness that debilitated her livelihood year by year. The old cliché about “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes” was deceptive to me as a kid because it didn’t tell me HOW I should do it. But rather than imagining the situations in my head, I teared up in front my parents telling them how I would never want to watch old age take their livelihood as well and that I would do anything to be by their side. Reflecting on these feelings gave me a greater reward. Human connection gave me an identity, and an honest reason to continue my studentship.