There's something I need to tell you... | KharmaMedic Life Update

What is up guys? Caramedic here and welcome back to another dose. This is a very long and overdue video uh giving a bit of a life update as to where I've been over the last I don't know year or so that I've been pretty MIA on this YouTube channel and kind of what's been going on in a lot of different aspects of my life and a bit of the reasoning and logic and feelings uh behind all the decisions that I've taken and where I've been. Fair warning, this is going to be probably quite a rambly long talking video. If that's not your thing, uh then, you know, please feel free to to skip this one and come back to the next. You're not going to learn any study tips or anything super uh useful that you can add to your life in this probably, but hopefully if if you're interested, you'll find uh some of my thoughts and feelings uh relatable maybe and uh applicable to your own life as well. I'm going to split up this video into quite a few different sections that should be listed all over here on screen. something like personal life, my masters, medicine, YouTube, just a bunch of different uh sections kind of compartmentalize all my thoughts and feelings. I've got some notes and bullet points here on my computer on the left, but most of this will be uh just feelings that that come out as we talk. So, the big elephant in the room is that I've been gone/ MIA for several months, maybe even a year, depending on when this finally gets uploaded. And I think most of the reasoning behind that and kind of the big picture explanations for it are explained in a YouTube video up over here which I made when I hit 1 million subscribers. And the long story short is I kind of explained that I had achieved more than I could have ever possibly imagined with this YouTube channel. And I felt like I had had a really significant impact on a large number of people and that you know that was what I set out to do with the YouTube channel and I achieved and accomplished that goal and I felt like you know there was nowhere else to go. There was nothing more to do. I kind of like closed the ribbon uh on the box and put that chapter away you know saying that I had completed the goal of making a YouTube channel to help people get into medicine and succeed in their uh university and medical career. And although the YouTube channel was in a like very good place by all kind of measurable metrics and means in terms of like views, subscribers, AdSense revenue, growth, that kind of stuff, that incentive alone wasn't enough for me to keep making videos. You know, the reason that I had made videos all this time was from a like true sense of passion and care for the creative process and for the idea of sharing and publishing this stuff online and getting feedback and helping others. And once I felt like that part of the process had been taken away or completed, the kind of other more financial or rigid incentives of keeping around a YouTube channel just weren't really enough to to keep me going. And so, as you guys saw, over the last several years, I've slowly slowly made less and less videos here on the channel up to now where we're posting something like once every 3 to 4 months. My last video was 10 months ago. Oh my god, that is crazy to look at. Since I finished medical school and hit a million subscribers, I've only uploaded a handful of videos for a 12, 16, 20, 22 videos in that time. It's been almost three years or maybe even over 3 years, which is really kind of crazy, but that's that's where we've ended up where we are now. But over the last kind of 3 years or so, a lot has changed uh in my life and I feel like you guys are long overdue. A bit of an update. So, let's start with the first kind of big chapter of this video and we'll start with medicine. Okay. So a little bit of a recap is that I you know I finished medical school here in the UK and I worked as a doctor for two years here completing the foundation years of the UK medical training system F1 and F2 and in that time I rotated through three surgical specialties and three medical specialties. I honestly really and thoroughly enjoyed my time as a doctor. Obviously, there were plenty of very difficult periods, times, moments, individual shifts, but overall, I found a lot of satisfaction and happiness in the work of being a doctor, and I really, really enjoyed my time, and it didn't kind of dissuade me or throw me off from a career in medicine. On the background of that, I've always known that I wanted to do surgery. Surgery is something that I've been interested in since I was in high school, doing work experience and shadowing in operating theaters. And then this theme has kind of progressed throughout my time during my undergraduate degree medical school and then when I started uh working as a doctor as well. And although I always knew I wanted to do surgery, I didn't quite know what surgical specialty I wanted to do. But as I gained more and more experience, I realized that I didn't really want to do anything scope based or uh laparoscopic based. I kind of narrowed down the surgical specialties that were options for me. And ultimately after rotating through orthopedic surgery in my F2 year, I feel like I really found kind of my people and the area of uh surgery that would be a best fit for me. And so I've decided that I'm going to pursue orthopedic surgery and I'm going to be starting uh surgical training in a couple of months in an orthopedics themed uh training program which I'm extremely excited about and we'll talk about a little bit uh more later on. But yeah, I'm on the path now to becoming an orthopedic surgeon, which is super super exciting and kind of what I've been working towards for the last god knows how many years. Finally kind of coming into fruition. Now, it's important to note that I didn't kind of sail through the process of getting into surgical training. After my F2 year, you apply for this exam called the MS, medical specialty recruitment assessment exam. And depending on your score, you get an interview for surgical training. And if you do well in your interview, then you get a uh place. The first time that I applied for this exam, I did not do enough studying as much as I should have and in fact I was very distracted by other kind of aspects of my life and I ended up not uh scoring well enough in order to get an interview for surgical training and so I had to retake that exam the next year which left a gap in my kind of like medical career or or training pathway where I needed something to do. And a lot of people during this year they kind of take out time from medicine so that they can explore other aspects of their life or take a little bit of a break from the very intense workload that we have. And a lot of people tend to work uh what we call locom shifts or locom jobs where you pick up jobs here and there in different hospitals in vacancies uh typically paid at a higher rate than you would be paid if you were in a training program. And people kind of just do that for a year or take up longerterm posts, JCF posts, we call them here, junior clinical fellows or teaching clinical fellow posts which gives you something kind of useful to do for the year whilst you also maintain your kind of clinical skills and then you can apply for training again the next year. Now me personally when I was deciding to what to do in this year out I really strongly felt that I didn't want to do any clinical medicine during that time. I know that when I start surgical training in a couple of months, I'm going to be really in it for the next six to eight years. Very difficult, non-stop uh training program. So, I know that I'm going to be very overwhelmed and consumed by all things surgery. And I wanted this year to be something a little bit different. My primary goals for this period of time was to take a break from clinical medicine to learn some new life skills that I don't didn't necessarily have before and also to just kind of get that feeling of relaxation and being able to breathe without feeling that constant pressure and stress from being in a training program. And I really feel like I achieved all those things primarily by doing a master's. Oh, that was a nicely timed ding. I did a masters at the University of Imperial College London in uh medical robotics and imageguided intervention with a focus on clinical robotics and AI that we'll talk about in the in the master section. But I very briefly want to talk about how I got accepted into surgical training. So like I said, the first time I applied for that exam, the MSR, I didn't study enough and I did not do well enough uh to get an interview for surgical training. The next time around, I decided that I was going to do way more studying. I think I did three times as much studying as I did for the first one. So instead of doing half of a single question bank, I did two entire question banks. I did a lot more kind of solid theory revision and understanding of all the different aspects of the exam. And uh thankfully I ended up performing really well and securing myself um an interview spot for core surgical training. I've actually filmed an entire vlog about preparing for this exam, which you'll see hopefully in a few weeks or months time. So I'm not going to go into too much detail uh over here. Long story short, I studied much harder and ended up performing much better. again securing the interview for surgical training. Now, when it came to preparing for the interview for surgical training, I was actually in Japan on a like 3-week trip. I'm going to Japan and then Australia with my girlfriend. You know, it came it came not at the best time cuz, you know, I was abroad trying to have lots of fun and gain all these new life experiences, but needed to study and prepare for this exam. So, for I think it was about 2 weeks whilst in Japan and in Australia, I woke up every day at about 5:00 a.m. and studied until about 7:00 and then before I went to bed at about 11:00 p.m. until midnight or so. Again, did some more studying so that I could both enjoy this new country and experience that I was having, but also make sure that I prepared for this exam and did well enough uh to get myself a surgical training job. And this is something that would have been absolutely, you know, unthinkable for me a few years ago. The idea of, you know, not just sitting down in my room studying for 10 hours a day to ensure I would ace this exam and this interview is would be like such a foreign concept. But I've really come a long way over the last few years in being able to better like manage my work life, studying life, mental health, friends and family, you know, other passion projects in my life and things. I've come a really long way from where I used to be in terms of the stress and pressure that I would put on myself to perform and to study and do all these things. I'm in a much kind of much happier and more relaxed place now. Touchwood. So, long story short, I did my interview in Australia at about 10:00 p.m. or something like that. Um, and thankfully thankfully thankfully managed to secure myself a London surgical training job, which is quite a difficult task. So, I guess I just have to check now. Um, so yeah, I'm nervous. God, please, please, please, please, please, please just let me be good. Oh my god. Here we go. Let's go. Let's go. So, I'm really, really, really proud of the work that I put in, the performance that I had, and I'm extremely thankful and grateful that I now have a London surgical job. So, I don't need to leave London and go, you know, further out in the UK in order to do my surgical training. And I'll be here for the next 2 years. So, I can continue to be close to friends and family um and in the place that I've become comfortable in and built my life and my social support networks in for the last 7 years or so that I've been in this country. So, yeah, I think that's pretty much the medicine update. If you have any questions about something specific or you want me to make an entire video about some part of this process, uh definitely leave me a comment down below and I will be reading every single comment and uh I'll take all of that into account. But without further ado, but let's just move on to the next section which is my masters. So, like I said, uh I I'm currently doing and finishing up uh my thesis for a master's degree at Imperial College London in uh medical robotics and imageguided intervention with a substream of uh clinical robotics and AI. And you know, I've met loads of people at Imperial who have watched the YouTube channel and who recognize me walking around campus from so many years of doing, you know, UKAT exam prep and medical school exam prep and all of that. So, if any of you are watching this video, hello. Very nice to meet you. But yeah, but back to the masters, I did this masters primarily for two reasons. Okay, one is that I wanted to learn more about surgical robotics. I want to be a surgeon and the future is moving towards robotic surgery and I want to be in kind of the best possible position to learn about and train on robots for performing surgery and it's something that I'm super interested in moving towards for my career. So building this kind of foundation and specialist knowledge in robotic surgery is going to be extremely helpful for me. And then the second thing I wanted to do is to learn how to code. I did a coding class in 2013 in my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto back before we had Chad GPT which was a completely different story and you know I obviously have forgotten all of that but there's so much kind of real world application and day-to-day activities where coding is extremely helpful and so I wanted to learn how to code and learn you know how to do projects on my own with the help of Chachi and a bunch of other resources but be able to take this skill and use it moving forward in a medical and surgical setting and absolutely both of these kind of main things that I wanted to achieve have very much uh been achieved over the course of this year. I've had a great time on this masters. I think it's been absolutely fantastic both from a personal development and learning perspective, but also in terms of kind of the practical uses uh that I'm going to be able to do with what I've learned moving forward. We've been able to do loads of really cool projects. Um a lot of what I've been focused on is medical image segmentation uh both for blood vessels in the liver and now my thesis project is on medical image segmentation of anatomical structures in the knee. Bit of a mouthful but yeah doing that automatically using AI which is really quite incredible and applying it to a novel MRI machine and you guys probably don't care. I'll publish my thesis at some point you can read it. But yeah honestly it's been such a fantastic year. uh touch word. I've been able to perform really well on all my assignments throughout the year. And now I'm finally done with all the assignments and exams. The last thing to do is this thesis, which is oh my god, it's I've avoided doing the thesis my entire kind of uh university career and time. And now it's finally it's finally come. I finally need to write a thesis. It's quite a challenging uh quite a challenging task, but I'm working my way through it. And again, like most of my thesis project is coding. It's about 99% of my time I spend banging my head against the wall, but 99% of my time I spend uh coding. So, I feel like I'm really kind of developing this skill and really getting to grips with it. And I'm sure I'll be able to use it in very useful ways in the future. Now, on top of that, another very important part of being able to do this masters is the free time that you get along with the masters. The masters is a full-time masters, but it's not like working a full-time schedule as a doctor. you know, I don't work weekends, I don't work nights, and I don't work 9 to5 every day. You know, all of our class commitments that we have are not 9 to5. They'll be for a couple of hours on a couple of days a week. And then now, even during our thesis project, yes, I I do spend loads of time working on the thesis and coding. But again, it's not the type of, you know, 8 to 8 work Monday to Friday. So, you get a lot of free time that I didn't have when I was working as a doctor. And I have taken full full advantage of this time. And this has been kind of one of the biggest benefits of taking a year out uh from my medical career and and doing this masters is that I have regained so much time for myself for you know my own personal mental space and happiness my own development with projects outside of my you know direct career uh in medicine and just being able to spend that time with friends and family gain new life experiences that I haven't been able to do travel see the world you know do all these fun things that I normally wouldn't be able to cuz I'm working or I'm too busy, etc., etc. I'm just going to read uh off of this list cuz there's no way I'd remember it all. But I've done so much traveling this year. I've gone to Jordan, Belgium, Switzerland, and Japan for skiing, Australia, Germany, Greek island, Capalonia, Prague, Austria, Athens, and then even in the UK, uh Wales, the Cotswwells, Norfolk, and just some other places in the countryside. I mean, so just like an absolutely insane amount of traveling that I would never have otherwise been able to do. I've also been able to have a solid gym routine during this time. I've been able to spend lots of time with my girlfriend, you know, exploring new parts of London that I didn't necessarily uh feel like I had time to do before. And it's it's been amazing, you know, and all of this whilst performing very well uh in my masters and being able to strike this work life balance that is sometimes so so so difficult to do when you're a doctor. It's been extremely refreshing, honestly, extremely wonderful and I'm so thankful for this time that I've been able to take out. It's exactly what I wanted to do this year. You know, take a year out from my medical uh path and do something useful. So, did this master's degree whilst also having time in my life for all of these other things to fully rest and recharge before I start the next part of my career in surgical training for the next, you know, 6 to 8 years or so. So, yeah, that's everything about my masters in a nutshell. And now, let's move on to talk about YouTube. Okay. Now, YouTube is a very difficult one uh for me to talk about, for me to kind of process, for me to think about. Honestly, I feel like I have a lot of kind of internal built-in trauma uh about about YouTube. It's it's been a very weird relationship. So, since I finished medical school and I kind of slowed down doing YouTube, I've constantly had this voice in the back of my head telling me, "You should do YouTube. You should make more YouTube videos, you should get back to scripting, you should get working on YouTube, etc. etc., etc., and it just will not stop. It's like this constant constant pressure that I feel to keep making videos. And I think a lot of that pressure arises from a lot of the kind of comments that you guys post on my videos saying, "Naser, where are you? Nasser, we want more videos from you. You know, give us a life update, etc., etc." Also, from myself, just knowing that, you know, the videos do have a, you know, positive impact on a lot of people. And if that's the case, why would I not continue making videos? Why would I not continue trying to have that positive impact? And also actually it's worth mentioning the financial incentive. I mean there's a very big financial incentive to keep making YouTube videos to you know supplement my uh income from working as a doctor and even surpass my income from working as a doctor. So there's a lot of pressure coming in from you know all kinds of angles and sides uh to keep making YouTube videos. But this all of this pressure comes in the form of you should be doing this, you should be doing that as opposed to me wanting to do this or that. And I think that very kind of succinctly explains why there's been so many less videos on the channel. There have been videos on the channel when I have wanted to make a YouTube video. When I have felt that this is something that I actually want to do, that I am inspired about and that I'm excited about. You know, the times where I feel like I should, I just don't. And that's largely, I guess, to preserve my kind of happiness, my mental health, and my relationship with this YouTube channel and with my online social media presence. I want it to be a positive thing. uh not only for other people who watch the videos, but also for myself. I want it to be something that I look forward to, that I'm excited about, and that I feel I feel good about for, you know, lack of a more of an interesting way to explain it. And really, I I just I burned myself out so much over the 4 and 1/2, 5 years that I was making uh content every single week. I took on too much. I needed to be in control and have oversight over every aspect of the channel. And looking back, I think there's a lot of things I could have done to help ease that workload and that stress for myself, do a lot more delegation and outsourcing of different parts of the the kind of job, but ultimately I ended up where I am, which is I really burned myself out and I felt like I achieved my goal and it's it's been really really hard to to get back into. But over these last you know 2 and 1/2 years 3 years when I have uploaded a video there have been these pockets of inspiration of excitement of um you know getting that feeling back like I want to produce content and I think progressively over the last few months whilst doing this masters and coming back into surgical training I've been getting more and more excited uh about the the idea of doing YouTube again and I've got all these lovely ideas that I want to build on and take part of and make videos about. So, you know, I feel like that passion is slowly slowly building. Again, I'm not going to make any promises or exclaim that I'm coming back to YouTube. Sorry uh if anyone was hoping for that. Um but, you know, it's a it's a long process. It's taking its time. Uh but I feel like we're moving in the right direction. I've still got all of my equipment. I've still got all my cameras, my lighting, my microphones, even though the microphones has not been working for this video. So, sorry if the audio isn't uh up to scratch like it normally is. Um, but it's just a matter of me sitting down uh to film, but I have I have some good ideas of how I can make this work. So, stay tuned. Okay. And then the last section of this video is a little bit about my personal life or a more personal uh update of what's been going on over the last few years. I think probably the biggest thing that a bunch of you are wondering is where's Alexia? And you've probably guessed by now, but Alexia and I are no longer together. And it's actually been almost 2 years now, which is kind of crazy to say out loud uh and think about, but it's been a long time and I have no animosity or bad feelings towards her. We had a long, healthy, and honestly really great relationship, and I wish nothing but the best for her. You know, please do keep watching her content. I'm sure you guys have seen her channel before. Please do continue supporting her. Uh she's a a fantastic person and I wish her all the best. In terms of the house and this place where I'm currently sitting, uh, if you've been watching this channel for a long time, you probably recognize this room. This is actually No's room uh, from the first house when I started making uh, YouTube videos. My room was just over there. And you're probably wondering why it's so empty and barren, not like my usual backgrounds when I film videos. Uh, but it's because I'm moving. I'm actually moving out uh, in a couple of days and I'm not going to come back here. So, this is probably the last you're going to you're going to see of this room. Uh, and we're both really really excited. Um, I can't wait to kind of show you that house and uh make videos over there. Yeah, it's honestly really exciting. I'm so sick of packing and unpacking boxes. So, I'm glad that I won't be doing it again uh for a long time. But uh but yeah, new house moving and uh just say goodbye to this place, the the original karma house. Originally, you'll remember my sister and I moved out of this place about a year and a half, two years ago. Um, I think cuz we just needed a bit of a bigger place to stay. We were both, you know, 28 or 29 at the time and we needed a place to, you know, sit down and eat with our friends to host people when they come over and also we were just getting loads and loads of stuff. So, we outgrew this space. I needed somewhere to move. We did move somewhere and after about a year and a half, we both wanted to move in with our respective partners. And so for the first time in a very long time, uh I'm not living with my sister anymore. We've been living together for the last 7 years or so uh in London, which has honestly been wonderful and amazing, and I wouldn't change it for the world. I'm very sad uh to be leaving her for sure, but it's, you know, it's time for the next kind of chapter of our life, the next period of our life to begin. So that's kind of exciting, but also sad. I definitely miss her all the time, especially our late night video game sessions together. But it's okay. On to on to new things. And yeah, I mean honestly other than that, life is pretty good. Um, Touchwood, you know, I'm I'm really happy with how things are going. I'm super busy between my master's thesis, publishing research, you know, getting myself ready for starting surgical training in October, doing all the exams that I've been working on, um, my my girlfriend, my gym, my friends, traveling, all of that. Life has honestly been really good. um can complain touchwood and yeah honestly I'm I'm excited to start sharing a little bit more of that with you guys. I know I've been gone for a long time and there's loads of uh loads of updates to do and only so much I can fit in a single video, but hopefully this has kind of given a good recap and explanation of where I've been and how things have been going. If there's anything you're particularly interested in or want to hear more about in a video, uh definitely leave me a comment down below down over there and uh I'll read them all and uh and yeah, maybe I'll I'll make a video on that. Anyways, uh thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. If you did, don't forget to leave a like and leave me a comment down below. And I will catch you in the next one. Peace.