The Educated Drug Dealer 🫀🫁🩺💉🩻

The Fellowship of the College of Anaesthetists (FCA) is, for many of us, the mountain at the end of a very long climb. It is consuming, and at times …. unfair. Basically, it demands from you to be a jack of all trades and a master of none. Anyone who has prepared for it can attest to the iatrogenic fatigue that slowly creeps in your bones. Registrar training is relentless: nights blur into days, days blur into calls, and somewhere in between you try to revise ethics, laws, protocols, newest guidelines, and remember to eat something other than coffee. Yet even in the exhaustion, there is purpose. Each shift teaches you something the textbooks can't. The training is demanding, but it transforms you — slowly, quietly, and permanently. Registrar life becomes the reason for your Stockholm syndrome. And yet, I often say, life is not only about exams and training. This message is especially for those who did not pass this sitting- your worth, your intelligence, your compassion and...

As an anaesthesia registrar entering the final year of training, the world can feel like a blurry, caffeinated dream—one that gets blurrier each time you must wake up at midnight for yet another reading and study session. For me, four years in a Registrar post has been a great experience (Ah don’t feel ‘that’ much sad for me dear friends, I knew the rules when I engaged myself, so whining about it would be definitely hypocritical! And well, we are here to be ‘hippocritical’ – pun intended to the guy that decided the Hippocrates oath should be our motto). Tiring, interesting, nerve wrecking on some days but well, South Africa is the place you want to be if you want to grow exponentially. In all fairness, the proverb ‘What does not kill you makes you stronger’ applies here- You will be out of here, good enough to manage most scenarios and the cherry on the cake- you will have one white bead follicle for every day that almost went wrong. Hopefully, the massive weight ‘upgrade’ from a ...