My medical school struggles didn’t start at the university. While preparing for JAMB, panic overtook my learning. Comprehension flew out the window. My fears stayed. My mom, exhausted from trying and failing to calm me, said, “You had better not mess this up. Not after all I spent on your JAMB lessons. Don’t step into this house with anything less than 300.” The pressure, as they say, got werser.
Months later, I got admitted to study medicine at a university, far from home. A choice influenced by the stable academic calendar and a fancy for exploring new horizons. I was, however, unprepared for the change. Back at home, I had a community. Strangers helped without question. Here, however, everything came with strings attached. I board cabs, keke, and okadas with the anxiety that I would be extorted for being alien, or be harassed to pay complete fares, even when I was dropped short of my stop.
My first year had me trekking to class as early as 6 am. Students were many; seats were few. It was either I trek to class that early, or spend the rest of the day dealing with the cold from the window and the floor.
A year later, my school joined ASUU and joined a nationwide strike. The strike met the COVID-19 lockdown, and with that, the academic stability I left my home for became a mirage. We resumed almost a year later to a hostel heavily infested by rats to write our exams.
God abegs and tears echoed in the hallway. Where do I start from? The air smelt of doom and rats. I could barely sleep. I ran on an hour of sleep per day, for exams spanning five days. I remembered resting my head from the exhaustion (or so I thought) during a paper after being halfway through. How my consciousness slipped away is still baffling. I raised my head to the sound of “pens up.” I quietly submitted and made my way to my room, where I wept bitterly over my stupidity.
The preparation for my last paper was a battle. My brain was already knocked out from days of sleeplessness. My head ached. My eyes were heavy. But I still had to read. I could make sense of what I read only when I walked while reading, which was exhausting. Eventually, I somehow made it to the next class. But not without leaving behind friends who had to resit the exam, retake the class, or move to other departments because they had been withdrawn from medicine. That caused me another heartache.
In the new level, classes and slides did not come on time. They were luxuries you get only a few weeks to exams. The level became unbearable when I fell ill. Hospital appointments stole my time away from the few fixed classes. I sought help from my colleagues, hoping for an academic comeback. However, everyone was surviving. I longed to be carried along whatever mode of survival they were on, but it was every man for himself. My illness later got complicated, and for the first time, the loneliness of lacking a community stung! I had to navigate hospital appointments alone, until much later when friends volunteered to help.
The clinical aspect was a different ball game entirely. I had so many materials to read, many concepts to understand, and so little time to do either. I wrote exams every month in 400 level. In that class, one would never wish to have any form of deficiency, whether physical, emotional, or financial.
Unluckily for me, all of them reared their heads. I struggled to keep up. Self-doubt slowly replaced my confidence. I felt as though I was in a free fall, so I tried to read to break the fall. My life revolved around books anyway. Books and exams. Any form of break looked like a threat. A weekend break felt like luxury, but was never enough to make one feel rejuvenated. I couldn’t even properly mourn the loss of my loved ones or heal my wounds. There was simply no time or place for that here. I was broken, until help came. I may have survived that class, but the trauma still lingers.
I made it to the last lap, thankfully. But I am exhausted and scared. The losses have drained me, but I keep on holding on to the hope that I will soon graduate and forge my way to becoming the doctor I am fighting so hard to become.
As narrated by: Aisha Ameerah (Ilorin, Nigeria).
This snippet is published as part of the series, Surviving Medical School.
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