Paramedic or Doctor?

Right. I'll start of with a bit of background information. I was born with VSD, which stands for ventricular septal defect, in simple terms i had a hole in my heart, between the ventricles. I travelled hundreds of times to Great Ormond Street, and had surgery when I was 4. Anyway, the day before my surgery, it was discovered I also had Aortic Stenosis and Pulmonary Stenosis. What this basically means is I had 2 extra pieces of muscle at the end of my aorta and a narrowed pulmonary artery. As you can imagine, I was in pretty bad shape. My heart has now done the work of a 28 year old, despite the fact I'm 16. It will also take away 12+ years of my life. So they postponed my surgery due to them new discoveries and various chest infections I was getting due to my weak body and suppressed immune system. I eventually had the surgery in December 2001.

Anyway, back to the subject. Ever since I can remember, I've wanted to be a Paramedic, I even brought a toy ambulance on my way out of Great Ormond Street after my surgery. Today I had to go for a checkup on my heart, and it enforced the thoughts that I had been having for a while- do I want to become a doctor instead? I have been contemplating this for a few months recently. If I did become a doctor, I would of course specialise in cardiology, maybe paedreatric cardiology, and would want to work up to a consultant level.

So, in short, what I'm wondering is what would you do in my situation? What are your thoughts? What do you think I should do? This won't change my mind on anything, I just want other people's point of view.

I want to be a doctor, so of course I would say go for it.

It depends, do you want to make that life or death decision by the road out of the hospital, or do you want to see your person get better in the end.

Dark Wolf wrote:I want to be a doctor, so of course I would say go for it.

It depends, do you want to make that life or death decision by the road out of the hospital, or do you want to see your person get better in the end.

I'm not particularly fussed in all honesty. I can deal well in challenging situations and can make split second decisions easily. Strangely though, death isn't something that phases me, I could deal easily (I think, I've been to various emergency situations with SJA which didn't phase me at all, yet some of the adults were crying) with the death of patients. It sounds like I'm a bit of an emotionless freak, but there you go.

You need to have control over your emotions, patients will die, you cannot get too connected.

Dark Wolf wrote:You need to have control over your emotions, patients will die, you cannot get too connected.

I do. I'm various situations where others have cried and got upset about situations, I have not. For example, when I attended a patient who almost died. When we returned to the base and the adults had time to think about it, they both started crying, yet I was standing there thinking "what are they crying at". Or when (and this makes me sound really emotionless) my nan got cancer. Everyone in the family was crying, but I didn't. I couldn't see the good it would do, apart from make my nan more upset, yet I didn't really have the instinctive feeling to cry either. I don't know why, but I didn't.

Well, I don't think I could be a doctor. Especially in a hospital. When people die i well I'm very emotional. So...