The Downturn
the naivety
Well, I don’t know why I’m writing about this now. However, sometimes you need some retrospect and debriefing to understand what the hell happened. So.The timeline I’m writing about is March and April of 2021. However, I may be writing about this from 6 months to 6 years in the future. So some of the stories, situations, and experiences may be a little biased by what has happened afterward. Things may have turned out great. They could have become drastically grim. Or maybe I just winged it.
Moving along. There was a bunch of us who were trying to get into medicine in a different country, in a different system, to identify if that would be the place for us. A couple of people I was with were able to get to the US and secure rotations. I was just stuck in India, despite all my trying. But I was still able to get enough residency interviews to feel somewhat vindicated—that there was something in my application people were interested in. The interviews did go well, I felt like. However, there’s only so much you can do virtually. In my head, I am more of a person who has a better personality in person. It takes me some time to warm up to people, and for people to warm up to me, rather than having a stale, cold interview over the internet. Most of it, from my end, was me just being sleep deprived. But I think, since I was not working that hard of a job at Neurozone, I could have done the interviews in a better fashion. Still, I was able to pull them off without any sacrifice or crazy sleepless nights.
I think I had a little bit of hubris. Or maybe I was misguided by people around me. Or maybe I was misinterpreting suggestions from the glory of Reddit. Maybe I had stopped fighting, or looking, or had given up. Or maybe my lazy, procrastinating brain had just done what it does all the time—rest, and never plan ahead.
March 15th is when the Match results come out. I don’t know why I was so shocked at the time, but I did not match, which just resulted in me breaking down.
In retrospect, none of the decisions I made afterward were so drastic that I couldn’t walk them back. But I stopped talking to this chick and basically never responded to her. The only person I would talk to was my brother. I was intermittently very irritable, barely spoke to my parents, and only spoke to a couple of my friends. It took me about a day or two to realize that, hey, there could be an option with the SOAP Match. But it was the great scramble, and I was never able to do much with it.
I thought about doing the NEET exam. I did pay for the exam and study for it, but then I realized that medicine in India was becoming the thing that happens with everything in India—it was splitting into two parts: the haves and the have-nots. These haves and have-nots applied to both patients, doctors, to where you worked and ate and everything else in between.
You could be a doctor at a place where all the patients were the rich-and-famous types, but still barely be paid anything. You’d just be living like a bachelor on an entry-level salary that could barely afford even a modest lifestyle. On the other hand, the patients who had everything ended up in one set of hospitals, while the patients who had nothing depended on services that were often only truly accessible to the affluent.
That was the fear. The practice of medicine in India felt so dependent on luck and on the ability of an individual rather than on a system. The development of systems was never given much thought. There was always a fear of retribution, a fear of stolen credit, or the sense that improving a system might improve someone else’s life—someone they may or may not like. That kind of petty jealousy could have been one of the reasons I decided to leave.
So I don’t know if I have the time and energy to get into all of this. It was a tough time.
In hindsight, taking an antidepressant for five days and hoping everything would be fixed—how naive of me.
There is no one thought, no one lesson, no one piece of knowledge that can fix someone’s naivety.