About me
How does one begin to write an “About me” section? There can be a million different explanations and yet none which is adequate.
Short Answer: I’m a 20 something year old female doctor, British by passport, Pakistani by birth (and heart), Russian by geographical upbringing who loves books and travel! U
Long Answer: I suppose I can begin with saying I am an Internal Medicine Trainee at Guys and St Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust. I started pre-clinical medicine at the University of Cambridge and completed my clinical training at Imperial College, London. Being a doctor is a vocation I truly rejoice, but it also one which makes me want to scream and resign to a little rabbit hole for days on end. But mostly, I do love being a doctor – no feeling compares to the adrenaline coursing through your veins when the cardiac arrest buzzer goes off or the immense satisfaction in watching a sick patient recover and finally walk out through the hospital doors. My life outside medicine is infused with family and friends, travel, languages and books. As a child I have lived through many cultures, nerded out in the Harry Potter section of the public library or hung around in the pretty stationery aisle as my parents did their usual weekly groceries. I painted landscapes the day before my exams to “relax” and as to reasons why I wanted to start this blog, well here goes:
Why this Blog?
The start of the COVID pandemic heightened my resolve in this vocation and it was during the delta wave in Britain when I started making this blog. It was a time of tumultuous emotions, a rollercoaster ride of highs to lows. From the the sheer compassion and gratefulness of the public to watching our colleagues battle on the ventilator as they themselves fell victims to the disease caring for the patients. The exhilaration we felt giving standing ovations to our brave patients as they recovered and were finally wheeled out of their tremulous ITU stay to the families who we stood by, striving to make their loved ones as comfortable as possible even if their illness was too far past the point of cure.
Above all, what really pushed me to start this blog was the confusion, anxiety and to some extent helplessness of families and friends in trying to understand what was going on around them. As a doctor, I take some of the complex knowledge about health and our bodies for granted. I was trained to be an expert on “us”. I realised how much of my knowledge I take for granted is annoyingly specialist and inaccessible despite being very applicable to all of us. This isn’t just limited to how COVID affected us but in all aspects of human life – how we co-ordinate our movements, how we make memories to why we get addicted. I wanted to unlock this knowledge, try and de-mystify medical terminologies and hopefully give you something simple, but interesting to read and discover the inner working of your own marvellous self!
My thoughts and perceptions, interests and boredoms will undoubtedly permeate into my writing was shaped by my weird and wonderful life story. How did a little baby girl down in Pakistan, raised in Russia ended up as a doctors in England? Its been a thrilling journey, the yo-yoing of my social high to the academic downs, the laughs and cries, the friends made and the friend lost. It has been one momentous journey to achieve my name change from “Miss Komal Moqeem” to a ridiculously long “Dr. Komal Moqeem BA (Hons) Cantab MBBS MRCP (UK) MRCP (London)”. It’s a journey entwined with culture, medicine, books and travel that I hope to share with you.
