Medicine can be a hostile field.
For those whose lives unfold within fluorescent-lit corridors, the work can feel brutal — especially in the beginning.
When I started as a house officer in Perlis in 2018, the system, especially the shifts, was harsher than it is now.
I saw colleagues — more than a few — realise within weeks that medicine was not something they could bear for a lifetime.
I understood that feeling.
I felt it myself.
But today, as I reflect on the years since,
I realise that what carried me through was not just resilience.
It was the humanity that revealed itself in small, unexpected moments — acts of kindness, sometimes brusque, sometimes wordless, but always gentle in their intention.
In my first rotation in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, I struggled.
The transition from learning in comfortable lecture halls, or even in stuffy bedside teachings,
to working 12-hour shifts, that more often than not stretched to 15-16 hours workdays, in overcrowded wards was jarring.
One afternoon, while scrambling through discharge summaries in a short-staffed ward, a husband confronted me.
I had forgotten to prescribe his wife’s antibiotic when she was discharged the day before.
He was angry.
My medical officer — a gruff, perpetually tense woman — was beside me.
I panicked.
But she said nothing.
She took the prescription from him, calmed him down, told me to amend it, and sent him on his way.
When he left, she saw I was on the verge of tears.
She told me to sit, asked why I didn’t have water with me, and instructed me — gently but firmly — to always carry some.
She did not reprimand me.
She did not humiliate me.
I still carry a bottle of water to work every day.
There was an elderly security guard who worked the evening shift near the O&G wards.
On rare evenings when I finished work five minutes early, I would linger by his desk and talk to him.
Even long after I left the rotation, whenever I passed his station he would greet me warmly.
Once, during a busy on-call, I rushed past him drinking water too fast.
He stopped me and said,
“Don’t drink while walking. You might choke.”
It was such a small sentence.
But it felt like care.
There was a medical officer in the same rotation who found me still working after my night shift ended.
He realised I was post-call.
Back then, as house officers, we worked 6½ days a week.
Our only break was post-call day.
He told me to leave immediately — or he would demand an explanation letter on why I was still in the ward.
Then he reprimanded our team leader, a house officer himself, for not protecting the juniors under him.
It was a tall order in those days,
but he stood up for me.
He later left to pursue further studies.
A couple of years after that, just before I left the hospital myself, I ran into him in the lift.
He recognised me instantly.
He smiled and said,
“Look at you now — a medical officer. I’m proud of you.”
Simple words.
They stayed.
There was another medical officer — my appointed mentor as per the culture of the department then — who was one of the very few people in O&G who never threw careless or hurtful remarks my way, no matter how stressed she herself might have been.
Her kindness was quiet, steady, almost unaware of itself.
But it helped more than she will ever know.
When I became a medical officer in psychiatry, there was a senior psychiatrist we all admired.
One day, overwhelmed, he told me to find someone else to discuss a patient with, in a harried manner.
I apologised and left.
That afternoon, he sought me out in the ward’s common area, sat down, asked after the patient, and apologised if he had hurt my feelings.
He didn’t have to.
He was my superior.
I was just a junior doctor.
Yet he did.
There was another medical officer in internal medicine — a man with the soul of a psychiatrist.
He cared for his patients with a quiet, holistic tenderness.
He was exacting during rounds,
and even some specialists deferred to him.
Yet every day, he made sure the house officers under him ate lunch.
More than once, he ordered me out of the ward, walked me to the cafe, bought me lunch,
and only then allowed me to return to work.
And there was a senior house officer — someone still dear to me today.
During my first night shift in medical posting, the nurses had already piled five cannulas onto my list.
Among them was a patient with notoriously difficult veins.
My senior, who had dropped by after his shift ended just to check if I was coping, told me to handle the easier ones while he attempted the difficult one himself.
After two hours, I returned to find he had already finished. He hadn’t even waited for a thank you —just left quietly, a tiny blue cannula sitting neatly in the web space between the patient’s toes.
These are some of the moments of kindness that stayed with me.
Shaped me.
Taught me how to practise medicine.
They were the steady, soft lights in what often felt like endless miles of darkness.
For all our systems and schedules and KPIs, medicine has always been held together by its people.
Not the policies.
Not the protocols.
People.
The quiet humanity of those who notice our exhaustion, steady our hands, soften their voices when we crumble.
Kindness is the heartbeat of health care.
Everything else is scaffolding.
This is my reflection for World Kindness Day.
As my senior psychiatrist once told me, people never forget how you make them feel.
So be kind.
Always.
The author is a psychiatrist.
- This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of CodeBlue.
