T.S. Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month, laying between the warmth provided by winter and the suprise of summer. I feel like deja vu all over again. Twelve years ago (2012), I had just finished med school and was waiting to start my house job (mandatory year-long internship). I had finished near the bottom of my class (125 out of 127 who passed), owing to various reasons. For house job, there were 123 paid spots at the hospital our med school was affiliated with. Our class was 150 strong, but 23 students had failed the first attempt at the exam so they were ineligible for the spots. I knew this was going to happen. Among the aforementioned reasons for my poor performance were my increasing disinterest in medicine as a profession, and my perpetual underperformance in exams (possibly because I have ADHD, which I didn’t know at the time). As soon as I saw my result, I knew it was going to be a tough ride. Between March 24th (when the result was announced) and April 21st (when house job positions were to be allotted), I tried my best to forget what had happened or what was coming.
I was busy writing, acting and recording in a satirical podcast on Pakistan’s political history, a project that is captured on some videotapes that I left in Pakistan, but which never saw the light of day. I was also reading and writing for various publications with a fervor. Some of my work had made it on the then-popular blogs pages of Express Tribune, and I was contributing to a progressive e-zine ‘Viewpoint online’, and acting as assistant editor for another e-zine, ‘Pak Tea House’. I also had my own blog on blogspot, which I was updating frequently. I wasn’t making any money from any of these efforts. In this interregnum, there was also a laptop distribution ceremony, a flagship program of the then Punjab government, which I found shortsighted and incoherent. Nevertheless, since I was in Lahore and the ceremony was a short walk away from where I lived, I went there. There was a lot of pageantry associated with the occasion and the Chief Minister at the time (Pakistan’s current prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, who was the face of the laptop program) didn’t even show up. On April 28, 2012, I wrote a Facebook status, “Life pretty much fucked up. but I ain’t givin up, not yet at least”. Yes, I was pessimistic about my house job prospects but defiant at the same time. It was also during this time that I saw an opportunity that someone had posted on twitter about a “fellowship” (essentially an exchange program) that Atlantic Council in the United States was starting for young leaders in Pakistan. I applied.
Once it was clear that I was not going to get a paid house job placement, I scrambled to get an unpaid job at the same hospital, and after some good old ‘Sifarish’ (‘recommendation’ is the closest english counterpart to this urdu term), I got an unpaid job in Internal Medicine. I went in on Thursday, May 3rd, 2012, to the hospital to join the department and was immediately drafted to do an overnight call. I didn’t get home until Friday evening. That day, three articles that I had written for different news outlets were published. I ended up doing eight months of unpaid house job that year. Almost mid-way through that year, I visited the U.S. for the first time as an Atlantic Council fellow. I was part of a doctors strike that shut down E.R.s in public hospitals across our state as a protest against government brutality.
Move forward twelve years, I have finished four years of residency training, one year of fellowship at one institute and nine months of fellowship at another, landing in California to start a proper doctor job. But the Medical Board of California works as slowly, or slower, as the bureaucracy in Pakistan. I am rotting away at home, eager and hungry to start my new job but I can’t even go to the hospital until the board gives me the license. I am admittedly in a much better position now than I was twelve years ago. I don’t have to scramble, I didn’t finish at the bottom of my class and I have grown-up responsibilities. However, there are financial pressures and a lack of structure that is detrimental to my physical and mental health. The good thing about time is that it passes, but what does a restless soul do while it is passing? Ann Patchett once wrote, “We will never know all the things other people worry about.”