S2E25: Looking Back at 3rd Year

Harjit: Chloe's Trello is like popping. As in one day I was like, "Let me go look if she did anything on here." It's like everything's on there. And I was like, "Oh, my God, I don't even need to ask her questions. I just need to look at Trello."

Margaux: I always forget that it exists. You just need to send a weekly message that just says Trello.

Harjit: Trello.

Bushra: A text message.

Margaux: Trello. And then we'll be like . . .

Chloe: Who wants to do the intro in?

Margaux: I will.

Chloe: Okay. Go for it.

Margaux: Okay. Hey, everybody. Guess what? It's our season finale of Season 2. And that means we're almost fourth-years too.

Harjit: That's so scary.

Bushra: Or that's so exciting.

Harjit: It's so exciting.

Bushra: You said that scared.

Margaux: Yeah. Anyway, we have all four of us in the studio. Woot-woot. I think it's been a long time since all four of us have been here.

Harjit: #Never.

Margaux: That's third year for you.

Bushra: Ending it with a bang though, right?

Margaux: We're wrapping up. You can tell we're all in a good mood.

Harjit: Actually, it was that one time we recorded on a Saturday. That was the last time we were all together.

Margaux: That was a long time ago. I can't even remember. Anyway, we've got an exciting episode.

Bushra: So now that we're seasoned professionals, I think we should take this opportunity to look back, kind of talk about all of our goals and expectations of third-year that we discussed in the Season 1 finale.

So let's go ahead and listen to what you had to say, Harjit.

Harjit: "In general, my entire life I've had low self-confidence and I wouldn't speak out. So I think I've been working in medical school and I see a growth in myself. I feel like I speak my opinion, and not only to my friends, but even to like people in our class that I don't have a deep friendship with, but I still feel like I express myself.

"I'm still a little nervous about that next year, is speaking out even if you're wrong, but you're at least saying something. Like, that's something that I'm nervous about, but I think I'm ready to grow in."

It was actually a really interesting hearing that. It's really hard for me to hear that reflection at this moment in my life because family medicine has been extremely difficult for me. And I think I went back into that place of, you know, feeling a really low self-confidence and feeling like I'm not smart enough or I don't know enough. Because family medicine is very fast paced and I'm a thinker and I need time.

But I will say, overall, I have been speaking my mind, and I actually really like that I said in there that I hope to say things even if I'm wrong. And what that meant to me is now when I give assessment and plans, I always put my dime on something even though I know that it will maybe be shot down and that wasn't the right assessment or the right plan, but I do say those things. So I think I have been working on that and I see kind of a growth in myself.

Margaux: Harjit, I want to add onto that. I have watched you grow into such a confident person over this whole year. I think in second year and first year, when I was first getting to know you, you used to say sorry a lot. A lot of comments about, "Oh, I'm sorry," or, "Maybe this is not right," and not be confident in your words.

And we always talk about when we were first in that test group together and how you were really unconfident then. And so I've had the privilege to watch you grow from that first-year test group all the way until now. Even though you're having such a hard time on family medicine, you're still such a brave, beautiful, confident person, and you've grown so much since that reflection.

Harjit: That's so nice. I think your reflection on my reflection is way cool.

Okay. Now that you heard my reflection on my reflection . . . I actually love saying that I think I'm going to keep on saying that. It's Bushra's turn.

Bushra: "You know, it's hard to go into a new place every four or eight weeks and find yourself in a new team and being expected to kind of gel with that team. That's a hard thing to do. The last thing that I want to do as a medical student is get in the way, do something stupid that will, like, derail the whole process for sure. And so I want to volunteer myself. If they ask for a volunteer, I'm going to put my hands up and say I want it to do it."

Harjit: I think that's so great.

Bushra: "Because learning by doing is so important. That's why you're in third-year, is so that you can have as many of those experiences as you can while you're a medical student and are under supervision and do those things. Is there a better way to learn than doing? I don't think so."

Harjit: Bushra, you're hilarious. The whole time she was listening, she was like, "Oh, okay. Interesting." That's literally all I can see. Interesting.

Bushra: That young lady sounds very wise and beyond her years, and I agree with everything she said.

Harjit: Who is she?

Bushra: Yeah. You know what, you guys? It's kind of interesting. I have a lot of energy in that clip, and now being at the end of my third year on my last rotation, two weeks away from being done with third year, I find myself being very exhausted because it's been a long year. It's been a hard transition from, you know, every rotation, and surgery is particularly a hard rotation.

But something that I can confidently say is that I did try my best to volunteer for stuff. I did try my best to get involved, kind of advocate for myself to do things that I'm required to learn, and to do procedures and to participate in patient care the best that I could.

But it's interesting to note that shift in energy a little bit. I wish I had that same energy now because I don't feel like I do. And I think that just kind of comes with the territory, but I hope to get that back and come in swinging for fourth-year, you know?

Harjit: We can talk about that one time you volunteered to intubate a patient and you actually intubated them.

Bushra: I've intubated several patients.

Harjit: No, the kid, remember?

Bushra: Oh, the trauma kid with the C-spine precautions?

Harjit: And they were like, "Oh, we don't know if you'll get it," and you got it. So yeah, you're volunteering all the time.

Bushra: Yeah. I think it's good to put yourself in hard situations, and it's good to know that you have backup too, because, you know, obviously you're still a student and you're still learning, but controlled situations are where you want to do practicing.

And now that we've listened to my little clip, I think it's time to see what Leen had to say at the beginning . . . or the end of the last season.

Harjit: The beginning of the end.

Leen: "So one thing I hope to learn going into third year is trying to get my social skills back. I feel like second year and first year just took those right away from me. I don't know. I think it's going to be kind of weird being placed into a whole new hierarchy, you know, and trying to get yourself to accommodate to that and not do anything stupid or say anything stupid. And not in the terms of, like, educational. I think that that's different, but I think there's a culture that I have yet to come in to interaction with and it's going to be a culture shock for sure.

"And I think especially with no medical background, that's one thing I'm going to have to get used to, but I'm hoping that my strengths in being put into a work environment will help me overcome that and make it easier for me to be okay with failing and the cultural shock aspect so I can learn from it."

Can I just say I'm psychic?

Harjit: You always say that, girl.

Leen: So I already knew this was going to happen. I know myself so well that when I get placed in tough situations, my personality seems to diminish a bit, especially new situations.

And actually, I was just talking about this with my resident. I was like, "You know, these last couple of rotations, I feel like I've been able to be myself a lot more than the beginning of third year because I'm finally understanding . . . I got the system kind of down." You never really have the system down. It changes. "But at the same time, I'm feeling a lot more comfortable being who I am and I'm a lot more comfortable seeing myself in that rotation than I was in second year." So I knew that my personality was going to go down and now it's like, "Okay." Now I'm like talking back to the attending and I'll get away. I'm just kidding.

Harjit: You got your vibe.

Leen: I got my vibe.

Harjit: You got your vibe back. I think one thing that you always say you don't have but I literally see in you is you're like, "Yeah, I don't actually talk to that many people," or, "I don't have a lot of friends." But it's like, "No, girl, you talk to a lot of people."

Leen: I've gotten better this year about talking to people than I was in the first two years, to be honest.

Harjit: So I think you have . . . your social skills are like 1,000%.

Leen: No, they've been better recently. I don't know. I just feel like I'm much more comfortable joking around, making my sarcastic comments, which I guess I don't know is really good social skills.

Margaux: It totally is.

Harjit: You're getting your vibe back.

Leen: Yeah, exactly. I guess a vibe is a good way to explain it.

Harjit: Because the thing is, remember, Leen, you were like first year and second year kind of took your personality out of you and I'm seeing it back, and it makes me so excited.

Leen: No, definitely. I definitely am seeing it back. Today, my attending the whole time was like telling everybody, "She's got spunky attitude," and I was like, "Wow, it's been a while since someone said that about me."

So who am I introing? Margaux?

Harjit: The best for last.

Leen: So up next is Margaux.

Margaux: "I think I'm most worried about the time constraint. Like, a lot of third-years, they don't get weekends. They are in the hospital for 36-hours shifts. So I'm worried about sleep because I value my sleep a lot right now. I'm worried about, you know, how much time I will be spending here and to not be able to have a lot of the same social interactions with you guys, with my husband, my family that I have enjoyed these first two years.

"So that's kind of what I'm worried about going into third year, but I feel like I can be a fly on the wall and watch what everybody's doing and then pick it up really quickly and see where somebody needs help or the line in the process that may need an extra hand. I'm really excited for that.

"But I do expect it will be a lot of hard work, it will be draining, and we will be tired, more so than we have grown to be tired this year. But I think it's going to be exciting and fun and nerve wracking and draining all at once."

Bushra: So, Margaux, did all of those things come to fruition?

Margaux: Most, except for the fact that we didn't have to work 36 hours. Thank God.

Bushra: Can you imagine? Jesus.

Margaux: Set your expectations really low and then you'll be surprised. The longest we had to do was a 24-hour shift, which was still kind of miserable. But yes, third year was incredibly exhausting and working six-day weeks is awful. But, you know, you get used to it.

So I would say my first couple rotations, I was tired in a whole new way. I was exhausted mentally, emotionally, and physically. I stopped taking care of myself. I stopped exercising. I was eating really poorly. But now that I'm in the second half of third year, I kind of got, like Bushra was talking about, that energy and that spunk back that I noticed in myself in that clip.

I kind of shifted. I became a little bit more confident like Harjit did along the way, and said, "You know what? Taking time to sleep is important." Taking that into consideration, learning that, having the confidence to be like, "You know what? I can be there right at 7:00 when they told me to be there and I can be prepared. I don't need to be there an hour or an hour and a half early. I can sleep."

I kind of rocked my surgery rotation that way. It was the one I was most afraid of in terms of sleep deprivation, and it was exhausting and I did put a lot of effort into it, but it was the one that I was finally the most confident to tell my resident, "Hey, you know what? It's 5:00. I've been here for 12 hours. I need to study. I need to go home and do things. Is that all right?" And you know what? They said it was all right. And that never came out negatively in my evaluations. So woot-woot to that.

But yeah, third year was exhausting. No 36-hour shifts though. So, nice.

Harjit: And we definitely made time to hang out. In the beginning, the first rotation . . .

Bushra: Was hard.

Harjit: We didn't see each other's face for like a whole rotation. And then now, we see each other all the time. And now I think back to it, I'm like, "What were we thinking? Why did we think we couldn't see each other?"

Margaux: I will say we've seen each other less, or at least I have seen you guys less because I think for me splitting time between being with my partner and then hanging out with you guys, I think that's the difference, is learning how to balance that time. So for me, personally, I feel like I didn't hang out with you guys as much, but I think you guys definitely made an effort to hang out. And we did. I think at least once each rotation, we all got together and we all celebrated at the end of shelfs and stuff like that. Because it was important, we made it happen.

And that would be my thing that I really learned, is that you have more time than you realize and you make time for the things that are important.

Does anyone else have a moment in third year where they just sort of changed their mentality instead of being afraid of the evaluations and your residents? You kind of got maybe a little confident and you're like, "You know what? I can do this and I'm going to do my own thing."

Bushra: I think I'm a confident person in general. So for me, I'll talk about the moment that my confidence was knocked and kind of getting back from that was on internal medicine during my subspecialty week on the first week of hematology. My confidence was shook to the core.

I kind of had a really tough attending, and it was just a bad week overall and I just didn't think . . . like, it made me think I was stupid, like I was dumb and I didn't know anything and I couldn't get anything right. And hematology is a hard specialty anyway, but after that one week, it kind of lingered. That knock in my self-confidence lingered for a while, and it wasn't until actually psych that I was kind of gaining that . . . I was healing myself during my psych rotation. It was just very interesting.

Margaux: As you do.

Bushra: What I think I learned from that is not to internalize a lot of the criticism that I was getting and not to internalize malignant personalities into myself and my being and who I am. So that was a terrible experience to go through, but I learned a lot from it.

Harjit: You guys, this was the best year of my life. Even though these past three weeks were kind of hard, but this has been the best year of my life.

I went into this year to build my confidence, and I think I have been doing that. I've been trying to put myself out there. I've enjoyed every rotation, and I think some of my most favorite moments were when I was in CT surgery and I got to see a bilateral lung transplant. It was like a 16-hour surgery and I was so excited.

I did a trauma shift for 24 hours. I have never stayed up for 24 hours in my life and that was the first time I did, and it made me really happy. In internal medicine, I got to, you know, work up a patient from the beginning who's never had any health care and seeing what their problems were like. In peds, working with an attending who was also a critical thinker, I really connected with her, Dr. Patel. Having that like, "Oh, this is a type of doctor I want to be. I love the way she thinks." And then every rotation was kind of like that for me.

I'm actually really happy that I'm kind of ending out with . . . even though it's kind of been hard for me, but ending out with this, because I was going through every rotation and I'll be honest, I was like, "What are people talking about? This is so cool. My life is so good. Why do people not like rotations?" And then we had neurology and then family medicine and I'm like,"Okay, I understand working in an environment that you really don't connect with or process with can really influence your mood."

And now I think I really understand when people say, "You should do what you love because that's how you're going to be happy." With that thought, I ended up landing on psychiatry. I didn't have a single aha moment in psychiatry, but I was happy every single day. My mind was turning every single day, and in the end, I felt content with the amount of thinking I did and the amount of patient interaction that I had. In that way, it was really, you know, a stabilizing rotation for me. So that's kind of been my journey this year.

Margaux: Harjit, I think it's really cool how you just described your journey through medicine, and I think our journey in "Bundle of Hers" kind of parallels that as well.

I think in Season 1 it was our first time doing a podcast. We were all getting a feel for it, kind of a little bit more raw I would say. I listened to our podcast as well after they've been released and I've been really proud of the way we've kind of evolved. And I think the podcast that we have now is something I'm so proud to listen to, but also to share with people. I just listen to it and I'm like, "Is this really us?"

And I think that when I was listening in first year, I was kind of maybe a little bit more critical, like, "Oh, we say this wrong," or, "Maybe we should do this next time." And I think we've really evolved in our style, and our personalities are showing a lot more I think, and we're connecting with people on social media and hearing really good feedback.

So I think it's really cool to kind of see how, even though third year is super time intensive and super tiring and draining, we've been able to keep this going and make it better, in my opinion.

Bushra: You listen to our first episode and we have shaky voices and it's clear that we don't know what we're doing. With every episode, you see growth. Every single episode, I can confidently hear the growth in our confidence, in our ability to communicate our thoughts, and our growth as medical students and future professionals.

I don't know. It's something that I'm really proud of and it's just an incredible feeling to know that you put your heart into something and it's turned into this other thing that you couldn't have even imagined. We didn't have a plan. We didn't know what would manifest from starting this.

Harjit: We just wanted to tell our stories.

Bushra: Exactly.

Harjit: The evolution that I've noticed is we're more confident in the topics we choose, where we would have questioned them if we did them last year.

Leen: I think, over the span of "Bundle of Hers," the more we get into it, especially this season, it's really interesting and it kind of gives me butterflies every time it happens. But I've had people approach us in the most random places saying, "Oh, we listen to your podcast. We love your podcast. The things you say, it's like a platform for voices that are unheard," and things like that. I don't know. I think we've done some great work, you guys.

I remember coming into this podcast at the very beginning and I was so skeptical. I was like, "Oh, no, they're going to tear us down on the things we say," or, "We're going to be shut down so fast," and things like that. And look how far we've come. I feel like we've definitely created a space for people to outreach to us and be able to find their voices.

Margaux: Yeah. I think that's so true, Leen, like how happy it makes me to know that not only are we doing this from our own passion and for ourselves to speak our truth, but that it is actually having a positive impact on people and helping other people come to the table and talk.

I'm just curious what of any of the episodes we talked about this year in Season 2 that you really hope resonated with our listeners.

Harjit: I actually have a couple of episodes. Our episode on diversity and tokenism is one that I really appreciated that we had a topic and we could have that conversation freely about. One that recently released that really, really, really I hope everyone listens to is about failing in medical school.

Margaux: I agree. And on that note too, I hope that our talk on rejection also really resonates. Knowing that medical school isn't all flowers and rainbows and hard work will get you what you want, that there are a lot of hurdles that sometimes you can't jump and you have to find a different way around and that will knock you down. I hope that message resonates with our listeners.

Bushra: You know what? I think our podcast, along with many other things, is almost like a journal of all the things that we've experienced, all the growth that we've gone through throughout medical school, all the thoughts, feelings, experiences, all the things that we've learned. We've kind of recorded and put it out into the atmosphere, the universe, if you will.

And I think it's important to continue to do that because we continue on this journey to become good doctors, competent doctors, aware doctors. And we're going to continue on with this podcast next year because we still have a lot of growing to do and we still have a lot more to share as we experience these new things. And as more things up, things that we don't even know . . . we don't know what's coming up next year because we haven't experienced it, but I don't think there's a better way to discuss and to kind of let out our feelings into the world other than this podcast and with you ladies.

Harjit: And kind of to add to that, I hope that we shed light to all those stories that have been silenced, lost, and forgotten, like we always do. So that's kind of a goal that I hope we continue to have next year.

Leen: I completely agree, Harjit. I think one thing that we are hoping to pursue in Season 3 is bringing identities together. We're going to start something called an identity series, and I think it's going to be a great way to show how we come from several backgrounds mushed into one thing, right? Well, one thing as a person, and how that affects us through medicine, how that affects our passions and our pursuits going through medicine.

And I think that's especially important during fourth year when we are going to be on the interview trail. We are going to be retelling our story of why we're passionate in medicine. And I think that's going to be very refreshing and it's going to bring our passion back out, especially towards the end of med school.

Margaux: So, you guys, that's a wrap.

Bushra: Bye.

Harjit: Bushra is ready.

Margaux: I think we've, as we just discussed, had a really great season and I'm so appreciative to all of our listeners. I love hearing from you in random, in person, like Leen was talking about, or on social media. It really helps us know that we're reaching you.

And we also are so open to feedback. If there's something you want to hear, there's an identity we've left out, a story you've had at your medical school that you think we should talk about, we want to hear it. We really want to know who you guys are and what your identity is. So please reach out to us at Bundle of Hers on Instagram or Twitter. And we just love that you listen to us and hope that you'll continue to listen next year. Thanks.

Harjit: So much gratitude.

Bushra: And until next time, ladies and gentlemen, bye-bye.

Harjit: Yay.

Margaux: I feel like we should have champagne.

Harjit: Pop-pop.

Bushra: Pop. That was me popping the champagne.