Ikaneng Yingwane, fourth year medical student at Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University, looks back on his studies so far

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My medical school journey began in 2021 after accepting the offer to study medicine at Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University. Three years later, I successfully completed the first half of medical school. Looking back now, one word comes to mind to summarise my experience: exhausted. 

Don’t get me wrong, I am happy and proud to be at this point, but more so tired because for the past three years the workload in each year has been increasing. The clinical significance of the work has been following the same trend too. As a result, I was constantly overwhelmed with the feeling of a greater burden of responsibility to remember everything I learned for use during my future years of clinical practice. Feeling overwhelmed turned into guilt, depression, disappointment and anxiety. The hardest thing during that time was not learning medicine but how to deal with my emotions. However, my priority was passing each year with the best marks I could attain and avoiding repeating at any cost (of course, the cost was negating dealing with my emotions but repressing them instead). 

My emotional weakness really showed through in my third year because from the first year up till then the content to be learned had almost tripled. The year started off well enough: I was ahead of my lecturer’s teaching schedule, I was organised, I was up to date with all my assignments and tests. After we entered into our first cycle of tests, I began to notice a few changes about me. I was increasingly more apathetic about attending lectures, getting up and studying felt like a burden, I began binge watching movies and television series. All I felt like doing was staying in bed the whole day. At first, I was very surprised about why I felt that way, but I later realised that it was a manifestation of how I respond to stress. I had seen it before when I got very stressed, but never paid attention to it. This became the biggest lesson in that year. 

From the first year till the third, there was a component of communication and counselling skills that was taught. It was about being empathic and kind, listening more than speaking, and taking patients' emotions seriously rather than focusing on pathological disease. It was through this that I began acknowledging my own emotions. Working around them wasn’t going to work. Changing my perspective had a far-reaching impact on my emotional wellbeing and improved my academic performance. 

Besides acquiring medical knowledge in the first three years of medical school, I believe I have grown as a person more than anything else. Learning myself was the biggest lesson of all. I now appreciate the importance of being kind to oneself and being my number one patient. I am now looking forward to my last three years of medical school so that I can extend the care I have learned to give myself to patients.

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