retalien

There’s nothing more valuable than forthright feedback, especially on a research project. When we started our project on drug use and abuse among secondary school students, we spent over a week stuck on the topic. We kept debating different ideas while others pitched theirs too. That’s when someone reviewed all our topics and gave us a brutally honest, no-sugarcoating assessment. I’ll be honest — I was shocked by how direct it was. But it helped. The whole indecision was solved in a week. If we hadn’t gotten that forthright review, who knows how long we’d still be arguing over a topic.

The era when Ronaldo and Messi played with pure temerity is one no football fan will ever forget. You couldn’t stop them. You couldn’t leave your post open for even a second. These guys were averaging 30+ goals a season — for 8 years straight. For 8 years they kept shattering records, turned the Ballon d’Or into a two-man race, and carried all of La Liga on their backs. Man, those were the good old days. I’ll always be glad I lived through that era. I can’t even explain how much I loved football just because of how beautifully and relentlessly they played.

I have a friend who keeps his tools and equipment in pristine condition. It’s just who he is. His PS3 game discs still look like he bought them yesterday — so neat he sold them for almost the same price he paid for them. I asked him how he does it, and it clicked: this guy loves neatness and a well-organized lifestyle. Everything has a place, arranged to avoid damage or chaos. I won’t lie, I envy that. I’m getting there someday. Just wait on me 🙃

Most of the time, the best scientists are the inquisitive ones. Not just scientists — anyone who masters an art. Imagine if Einstein, Newton, Tesla, Shakespeare, and all the greats hadn’t been inquisitive. 90% of the breakthroughs we have today probably wouldn’t exist. And the wild part? We’ve still only explored maybe 10% of Earth’s marvels. I’m a huge fan of that trait, and I catch myself being inquisitive all the time. Don’t give me the surface stuff — tell me the why and the how. Let me know how it works. The more questions we ask, the more we learn, and the further we push life forward. I genuinely don’t think I’d be half the “brainiac” people say I am today if I wasn’t inquisitive.

I have a friend who loves her dresses to be ostentatious. That’s just her. She doesn’t care about the occasion or who’s there — she wants to be the star of the room. Everyone needs to know she came, she saw, and she conquered. But that habit came back to bite her. On that fateful day, the dress was something else: exposing, strapless, hugging every curve. She showed up to the party to own it, and I was just there for my friends. I’m not the star, I’m not trying to be. I won’t lie — the dress had everyone’s attention. We were all awed. But then it got cold. Really cold. She started shivering while everyone was still distracted by the look. I noticed first, so I gave her my sweater. Long story short… she still has that sweater with her today 😂

Finals as a med student demanded real diligence, and it was worth every bit of it. Midnight candles, grueling days, back-to-back classes, and stressful weeks that always ended in study group meetings. Some days I was completely wiped out, so I’d dive into what kept me sane — volleyball and anime — just to get a breather. It was exhausting most of the time, but all that effort paid off. A medical student is now a medical doctor. Looking back at everything I pushed through, I’m glad the diligence paid off.

That’s how I found myself in a deep quagmire with no clear escape route. But if you know me, you know I’m resilient to the end — and I always find a way out. So what tactics didn’t I try to beat those guys in volleyball? I played permanent setter, two-setter systems, no setter, everything in the book. Nothing worked. To make it worse, I had no proper shoes and my jersey still hadn’t arrived. Then I kept hearing it: “Tolu isn’t going to play. He’s the second-best player on the team, if not the best.” And honestly? I loved hearing that. I wasn’t about to let them down. So I grabbed my old pair of shoes, put on my last jersey, and went to that court to warm up. No one — and I mean no one — saw that solution coming. But I did it.

I’ll never forget my first pediatric surgery posting. We had a child with a real medical conundrum. It started as an annular pancreas, then a barium meal and follow-through pointed to a gastric outlet obstruction. Later, it turned out to be an inflamed gastric mucosa. But after surgery, the confusion doubled. The child started losing weight, developed ascites and muscle pain, and ended up with prolonged hospital stays. It was frustrating. What made it worse was how bright and smart the kid was. Some days medicine feels beautiful. Other days, it feels like a disaster. This case was heartbreaking, but all we could do was keep going 😔

I really struggle with inscrutable teachers. You can never tell if you’re doing something right or wrong, because you can’t read them or figure out what’s actually going on. We had a lecturer like that. If you answered her question correctly, you’d only know because she’d hit you with a follow-up question. Anything else? Just a blank face. No emotion, no reaction — just a flat “meh.” You’d leave feeling like you were wrong, even when you were on the right track. She was a pain, but I pushed through. Guess what? I’m a doctor now, and I passed her class.

In psychiatry, we’re taught that one of the key presenting complaints is the dissonant thoughts patients experience — the major symptom most people know as third-person auditory hallucinations. My last patient in psychiatry was a textbook case. This person genuinely believed they were ‘God’. Not part of the Trinity, but the fourth — the one who “completed the seat.” Alongside that, they were convinced they were a superhero. The thoughts were so *dissonant* and incoherent that I couldn’t piece any of it together. It was a stark reminder of how poor the prognosis can become at that level. I really hope something changes for them soon, because they can’t keep going like this.