My Interest And Experience In Healthcare
Disease can deprive you of every blessing of life: performing tasks yourself, doing what you love, and pursuing happiness. Observing people in my family not able to do the same for themselves - my grandmother could not express her thoughts into words due to a stroke and was also fighting cancer; my grandfather cannot even move without support due to Parkinson's Disease - was really disheartening and made me cherish these blessings. Medicine could not return these blessings to them, but proper healthcare gave them a chance to fight for a better life.
Although healthcare has a vast scope, what steered me towards medicine is my curiosity for science and answering these problems. Throughout my study of O and A level Biology, my teacher, Dr Fauzia, complemented the theory with medical case studies like sickle cell anaemia, Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and Huntington’s disease. This approach not only fueled my fascination for the whys and the hows, but also made my studies more relatable to medicine. In addition, books such as 'Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table' and 'Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery' helped extend my interest in cardio thoracic surgery and neurology past the bounds of my A Level syllabus.
As a result of my innate enthusiasm for science, I secured a spot at a summer research project at Centre of Applied Molecular Biology (CAMB), University of the Punjab. In Dr. Farooq Sabar's lab I am investigating the genetic basis of asthma in Pakistan's population. I am trying to find polymorphic variants of genes associated with the disease. In this practicum, I learned valuable laboratory skills like running gel electrophoresis, setting up Polymer Chain Reaction (PCR), and sequencing DNA and analysing its sequence. In the future, I will be publishing an article about my findings in an online journal for high school students.
In my work experience, I shadowed doctors, nurses, and administrative staff at a local hospital for a week. This provided me an opportunity to observe their work ethics and practical assessments. In addition, I demonstrated my own communication skills by having conversations with patients and consoling them. My goal was to be as optimistic as I could without giving them false hope. At another internship, at a pediatric physician’s clinic, I got involved with children and learned how to care for them. I was allowed to interact with the toddlers and take their temperature, heart rate, and examine them under supervision. Children respond extremely well to positive attitude; however, parents get worried easily, so the key strategy I learnt was to keep the parents calm throughout the course of treatment.
