I also intercalated in a non-science subject (but not HoM). The great thing about what you’re going to study is that there is so much scope – it is a massive field. You can do anything from a period in history, a speciality of medicine (e.g. the beginning of the hospice movement, history of anaesthetics...), a surgical technique, medicine during WW2 – you can fit virtually anything under the umbrella of history of medicine. My one piece of advice would be pick a dissertation subject that you find interesting – as you’ll have to spend a heck of a long time studying it and researching it. Ask your dept if there is a list of previous students’ dissertation titles that you can view. You have to be as motivated as you can, as so much of it is periods of several weeks of home study / reading / researching, and I found sometimes it was all too easy to get into a vicious circle of spending a lot of time under the duvet. Unlike standard medicine, if I didn’t feel up to getting up that day, to all intents it didn’t matter because there were no lectures for me to be at. And that was both a blessing and a curse at the same time – sometimes having the lecture or the ward round to get to was an incentive to drag myself out even on days I didn’t want to, and when there is nothing pressing to attend that particular day, it can be easy to not bother and stay in bed and do absolutely nothing for weeks at a time. And work-wise that caught up with me very quickly which was difficult. But somehow I got through and got a decent degree from it – although I was blessed with a particularly understanding supervisor who was good at reading between the lines sometimes which meant a lot was able to go unsaid (which was useful in terms of it not having to go on my record). Just one thing tho – be careful not to see the intercalated year completely as a ‘year out’. I know I sort of did the same, but it was a lot of work, more work than I’d bargained for. It is a final year level course and a lot is expected – and it will be a final year level course in a subject that you have no experience of. Not that I am trying to put a dampener on it at all – simply to say that I did have to do a lot of work to get up to the level that I wanted, and medicine doesn’t really prepare you that well for the skills of university level essay writing.
I am female, and I am the majority of my way through my clinical training now. I’m sorry but that’s as specific as I feel able to be. I understand the feeling of there being some days you just can’t make it in – I find the same thing too. As far as friends knowing – do you have friends outside of medicine / uni in general? Being alone with those kinds of feelings is an incredibly isolating and lonely experience. I have a couple of friends entirely removed from uni who between them do know most of the way I am feeling in general, and I trust them because they understand and respect my position with regards to my career. It took a long time to get to that point as I was very wary of doing so, but I’m glad that I did. Yes it is hard when you feel that your friends may freak out with what you want to tell them. Which is why somewhere like this is so good because aside from the fact of being able to be anonymous, it is a place where, relatively speaking, we are able to say things such as how we’re feeling, without everyone suddenly rushing around in a mad panic – people take it as it is, they understand, because they are contending with similar issues. It’s not the same as having friends in real life, no, but for me, the friends who I told were people from a place similar to this who started as just another username but who over many months became friends away from the internet. So they ‘got it’ in a way that few others would.
It’s ok to want attention – wanting attention is not a bad thing, we all need attention, and need someone to care. Someone to notice that we’re really not doing so ok. Wanting to self harm so that people notice is understandable – but I’m glad that deep down you recognise that it’s not the way to do it. I think in the same way that you feel your friends may be shocked or scared by you telling them how you’re feeling, they may react badly to finding out about self harm – in terms of feeling worried about you and telling someone. They may not, I don’t know. But there is also the issue of scars in medicine – remember that once you start clinical medicine you’ll be required at times to wear short sleeved theatre scrubs, and trying to explain things away is very difficult.
Well done you for making the decision to live, and to persevere with life – keep fighting, day by day. When the bigger picture becomes too much to take in sometimes, take it day by day, one day at a time. I know it can sound very clichéd to say that there is more than one way to get to where you want to be, and sometimes we have to take the scenic route or a different path to the one that we’d originally intended – but it is true. Whatever circumstances may be so very tough at the moment and before, even if they don’t work themselves out in quite the way that we’d like, if we search hard enough there is often a way to make them that little bit less painful and less damaging so that they are navigable day to day. Medicine is a difficult career choice, yet at the same time it is one of the most stimulating, rewarding things that there is. There are days you come home and want to pack in the whole lot and feel you can’t do it and it’s not for you and it's entirely overwhelming. Yet there are other days where you can come away knowing that you made a difference to someone, somewhere, and it is that feeling, and keeping those days in mind that gets me through the darker ones. And when the darker days come, something that I have found helpful is:
“Sometimes courage doesn’t roar. Sometimes, courage is the small voice at the end of the day that says, ‘I will try again tomorrow’ “
Hang in there, the system can feel very hostile sometimes and difficult to navigate through – but you are never alone.