- [Ali] Hey friends, welcome back to the channel.
If you're new here, my name is Ali,
I'm a doctor working in Cambridge
and this is a day in my life.
It's a Saturday and I'm on call at the hospital,
so I get up at 6:30 and take half an hour
for general life maintenance,
Before setting up my camera stuff
to film a video before work.
From 7:00 a.m to ten past eight,
I stumble my way through this video
wishing that I'd scripted it better.
This 70 minutes of filming later
turns into a 22 minute video,
with the hopefully click-bait title
of 'How to Rank first at Medical School".
And then I rush out of the door
and drive 45 minutes to work.
During the commute, if I'm feeling productive
I listen to podcasts, or if I'm feeling lazy
I listen to audiobooks on Audible,
or if I'm feeling reflective,
I drive in silence with my thoughts,
which is what I do today.
I get into the hospital by 9 a.m.
and get a hand over from the doctor
who was on call over night.
She tells me there's a new patient who needs
to have a physical examination done,
and another patient who needs a blood test.
This is admittedly quite a light list of jobs,
so I'm happy and feel optimistic that I'll be able
to get some studying done that day as well.
We chat for a bit until 9:30 a.m.
when I get a phone call from the nurse
asking for a prescription for some medication.
While I'm on the ward I do a few other bits
of paperwork that needed doing,
and then at 10 a.m. I go and see one
of the patients to take their blood.
Because I'm a pro and she had good veins,
I get it on my first attempt.
After sending the blood to the lab for testing,
I head over to the hospital's
restaurant to grab some breakfast,
and while I'm there I run into a friend
who's very confused as to why I'm filming food.
She films me pouring ketchup onto my plate,
and then at 11 a.m. I head back to the ward.
I turn on the Bluetooth speaker
that I brought into the office,
I play my Spotify playlist from my first year of university,
and then get started on some discharge letters
for patients that had gone home that week.
At 11:30 I get two calls in a row,
one to see a patient with painful knees,
and another to prescribe various medications
for various patients on the ward.
Sorting this stuff takes around an hour,
and I get back to the doctor's office at 12:40.
I spend the next 20 minutes
continuing with my discharge letters,
and then head back to the restaurant
at 1 p.m. to grab some lunch.
I happen to run into colleagues from other
specialties who are also on call that day,
and so we chat for half an hour over lunch,
and then one of them visits my ward afterwards
and we play some cheeky table tennis
in the gym for about 20 minutes.
At 1:50 I head back to the office
to continue working on these discharge letters.
On psychiatry,
the discharge letters are super long and complicated,
and so I finished the first one at half past two,
and then popped down to the ward to rewrite a drug chart,
then take a toilet break where I scroll
through Twitter on my phone for a few minutes,
and finally I finish the second
discharge letter at 3:40 p.m.
At this point my day is looking reasonably free
and so I decide to do some studying.
I get started on lecture four in
the heart and circulation series in human physiology,
the subject that I'm supervising
some medical students in at Cambridge University.
I only manage this for around half an hour
before losing concentration,
realizing that the early start this morning
to film the video meant that I
only got around five hours of sleep.
So I head down to the on-call
junior doctor's room to have a quick nap.
I manage to sleep for a few minutes,
but at a quarter to five I get woken up
to review a patient who is having an anxiety attack.
I get back to bed but over the next hour,
every time I do a job and think
I'm finally done for the day,
I get called again to do something else.
Eventually I give up on the thought of having a nap,
and I head back to the doctor's
office to do some more studying.
I spend half an hour doing some
more cardiovascular physiology,
and planning out my teaching session
for the medical students.
From seven to 8 p.m. I grab dinner,
again at the hospital restaurant with some colleagues
who happen to be there at the same time.
I don't film anything properly here
because I don't want them to think I'm weird.
And then I head back to the office
and spend half an hour making a start on
the next series of cardiovascular physiology lectures.
Immediately I realized that the lecture
notes don't really make sense to me,
and so I bust out a pdf of a physiology
textbook and grapple my way through it,
while thinking damn, this is a really good book,
I wish I'd discovered it sooner.
It hits 8:35 p.m. and at this point I've got
25 minutes left in my shift,
and I'm pretty confident I won't get called.
So I decide to chill out and watch a
documentary about Alzheimer's Disease.
I'm actually on my old age
psychiatry placement at the moment,
and we see a lot of patients with
advanced Alzheimer's Disease,
which has actually made me really scared
about getting it when I'm older.
This documentary goes over the pathophysiology
of the disease in a very easy to understand fashion,
and discusses some of the ways that researchers
are trying to reverse the disease process.
I'm watching it on CuriosityStream,
who are very kindly sponsoring this video.
CuriosityStream is the world's leading
documentary streaming subscription platform,
founded by John Hendricks,
who is the founder of the Discovery Channel,
and they've got thousands of
documentaries across all genres,
from science and history, to technology and lifestyle.
I quite enjoy watching documentaries
as a form of productive procrastination,
so if you'd like to join me, you can sign up to a free trial
at curiositystream.com/Ali
and if you enter the coupon code ALI at checkout,
you'll get a free 30 day trial,
in which you can watch any or all
of the documentaries that you like.
Anyway, at 9 p.m. I hand over to the evening on-call doctor,
giving her the good news that
there's nothing else standing that needs doing
because I've done everything for the day,
and wishing her a pleasant night ahead.
And so that brings us to the end
of this day in the life video.
I hope you found it vaguely interesting.
I haven't really done one of these videos before
so I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Do you want to see more of these?
Is there anything else you'd like to see instead?
Let me know, but if you like the video,
then here is a playlist of some
of my other vlog-esque videos,
have a lovely day and I'll see you
hopefully in the next one,
Buh-bye.
(jazz piano music)