A Family Doctor's Tale

IN THE BEGINNING
I have never planned on becoming a doctor.

I was looking forward to a career in mathematics or chemistry. Those were my favorite subjects. I like solving mathematical problems and I look forward to experiment with the chemicals bought from the drugstore.

Then one day I came upon a Reader Digest condensed novel ” Not as a stranger”.
It was all about a poor medical student who became an assistant to a Family Doctor and eventually took over the family doctor’s practice.
It was inspirational.

Then came medical TV serials such as Marcus Welby M.D
Ben Casey, Dr Kildare , Doctor in the House.
I resolve that I would try to be a good family Doctor.

My mother whose older brother was a doctor in China encouraged me to take up medicine.


So it was at the tender age of 18 years, I entered the medical faculty of the university of Singapore.

The first day was a nightmare. Entering the dept of Anatomy, I was presented with a large hall of corpses and the strong smell of formaldehyde.
Suddenly the dream of being a doctor became a nightmare of looking at & cutting up of a dry preserved corpse for the next 18 months.


In the meantime there were the endless lectures of anatomy, physiology and biochemistry.
Life became rather rushed. Unlike other undergraduates, we were studying through out the whole year with 4 semesters instead of the 3 semesters in the Arts and Science faculty and 2 weeks break in between.

There were daily taking notes of complaints of patients and examinations of patients. There were also procedures like drawing blood from patients, watching surgical procedure done by eminent surgeons, doing minor surgical procedures like removing small lumps and bumps, stitching of cuts and cleaning of wounds.

The most important assignment was the “catching” of 20 babies at the Kandang Kerbau Maternity Hospital (the biggest baby factory in the world in the 1970’s) or the delivery of 20 babies in the hospital by natural birth.

So it was after 5 years of tutorial and practical medicine that I finally graduated as a medical doctor. 
Even then I had only 1 month rest before being called up for
my housemanship - a compulsory year of working in the hospital before becoming a fully registered doctor.