Garments

So alhamdulillah my brother got married on Saturday. Even though I was told some time ago that it would be happening in December, I was pretty surprised when I saw it written on the calendar last week. The kid that I grew up with, finally becoming a man. The nikah was held in Regents' Park Mosque, straightforward, with the small room packed with family. The imam of the mosque gave a small reminder about marriage and repeated the beautiful analogy about spouses being garments to one another. Later that evening we integrated our weekly circle with a celebration, where loads of old childhood friends came down and we ate mountains of lamb (leftovers of which we are still feeding off now!). But what struck me were two things; first, how quickly we grow up. The two witnesses my brother brought, I can remember running around and playing football in the same primary school playground as me. Now, standing tall and mature (well, kind of), one of whom is already married himself and expecting a child inshaallah (not him, his wife ¬_¬). The second thing that struck me, and this happened both after dhuhr prayer when a funeral prayer took place, and when we went outside to take photos and witnessed a child's coffin being carried in to the mosque. This life is temporary, and marriage is only a vehicle for us to reach where we want to in the next life, where we can be reunited with our partners and live happily ever after, literally. What a marriage that would be.

Chapter 3

Alhamdulillah last night I finished memorising Surah Aal Imraan. Despite it being half the length, in some ways it was more difficult than Al Baqarah, because it didn't have many long, flowing stories that could be memorised in one chunk, but this Surah is amazing with the number of 'famous' ayahs it contains. Memorising all this is actually scary, because you have to make more of a commitment to revise previously memorised pages as well as keep up with new material. Anyway, onto Al-Nisaa' now. Bismillah.

Perspective

Wednesday: Took part in research comparing non-smokers (me) compared to shisha smokers (a lot of my friends), went to Teddy Bear Hospital and felt good not needing to properly run things any more, attended the steering group meeting for TBH, went to Mile End station and helped out some amazing people with tube collections for Charity Week.

Thursday: Lectures, dissertation meeting to generate a research question with our supervisor, met an amazing person in the library, saw them again at the protest in High Street Ken.

Friday: Jumuah, randomly bumped into two good friends on separate occasions on the tube, get given a chocolate as a thank you gesture by a first year medic, share a hadith with a first year dentist who puts it on their phone, work on the quiz for our CW Big Event, go to the Shaam Under the Wings of Angels charity event, more amazing people.

All the while, Gaza gets bombed again, Syria massacres are ongoing with over 40,000 dead, and Burma...

2:1-286

To the untrained ear, beautiful Quran recitation may not be all that beautiful, technically speaking. Yes, a person may have a melodious voice and put emotion into what they are reciting, but they could be completely off with the rules. Although I was taught by a teacher as a child for a few years, and was aware of the basic rules of Idgham, Ikhfaa' etc, it was only until I started lessons a year ago, did I realise that I had a lot of work to do. We started from Chapter One: Al-Fatiha, and spent a week perfecting our pronunciation of every letter, every rule. Then we started Surah Al-Baqarah, memorising only a few verses at a time, and for around half a year, our teacher (from Saudi and studying a phd here) recited half a page to us; we recited back, having multiple mistakes corrected, and by the next week we'd have memorised it perfectly (or that was the idea). Then the memorisation gradually increased, and we'd be tested from anywhere in the surah before we'd be allowed to continue with that week's Quran. When Ramadan came around, and we took a break for a month, I thought I'd take advantage by memorising as much as I could, and then after Ramadan, he thought I'd be able to memorise more, so he gave me 3 pages to memorise every week. Today, alhamdulillah, I finished memorising Surah Al-Baqarah, the longest chapter in the Quran; and only a few months ago, I thought this task was impossible. As per tradition when scholars celebrate their memorisation of this surah, I have a cake waiting for me downstairs. Alhamdulillah.

But now the biggest challenge is trying to remember what I've committed to memory, as well as memorising more, and apparently this is where most people fall short. My advice to people wanting to memorise Quran? Don't feel disheartened if you can only memorise small chunks of Quran, because small chunks add up to bigger chunks, and with patience and a LOT of revision, you and I could memorise the whole thing one day inshaallah :)

Also, it's useful to have a teacher as kind and as patient as mine. Jazakallahu khair Hamid.

Laparoscopy

This is the first blog post composed entirely on my new phone. Yep, after 3 years of being with BlackBerry, and although I still love its keyboard, I couldn't stand the lack of functionality any longer and switched to Android. No, I didn't fork out a fortune for the latest Samsung Galaxy; instead I ordered a 5 inch touchscreen phone from China. It looks exactly like a Galaxy note, does exactly the same thing, but for a quarter of the price! Best purchase ever alhamdulillah.

Anyway, yesterday was special in its own small way. A month or so back I signed up to take part in trying out 3D laparoscopy as part of research comparing it to conventional 2D laparoscopy. [Laparoscopy is basically key hole surgery, where a camera and various instruments are inserted into small holes in the body to minimise damage]. The research was conducted by a nice Omani lady, and pretty much all the researchers were Muslim (including a very friendly Algerian lady; yes I was surprised too, not because she was friendly, but that she was an aspiring surgeon; good on her). 5 tasks were to be completed; you had to reach 'proficiency' for each one to progress to the next task; so you had to complete the task within a certain time and with no 'errors'. Not a simple feat, especially when these times have been set by consultant surgeons. You had 80 attempts to reach proficiency before you move to the next task anyway. Oh and did I mention, you need to do it twice I a row? Yes, celebrations were short-lived when I found out.

The first task involved transferring rubber pegs using two instruments, and whilst I saw my 2D colleagues in the other room doing better with both this and the second task, reaching proficiency, I had to do mine in 80, spanning several sessions. On my 80th attempt, I got my best time, but still not good enough. Apparently 2D was supposed to be much easier for the 'non-medical' tasks, but this did not do my self-esteem any favours. The second task was probably the most frustrating, having to cut discs out of pieces of gauze, with only a 2mm error margin. So whilst I was still on the 2nd task, I saw my 2D friends whizz through to the 5th task. Around 6 hours of pointless cutting later, I reached 80 and I was glad to be rid of it.
The third task was using an 'endoloop' on a mock appendix, basically tying a knot around it, which I managed in a few attempts. The fourth task was 'extra-corporeal suturing' where you had to stitch up a small vessel, bring the needle out, and introduce external knots which you had to feed in. The 5th and final task was the same but you had to tie the knots inside the 'body', which was a bit fiddly with the instruments and on-screen. I managed to get proficiency on my second attempt, but couldn't get two in a row, and this continued several times. One of the researchers standing by told me to move aside and let him have a go, saying that I should never go into surgery. Ok then. The lady supervising me (and whose research this belonged to) said she was going to go home, and the guy who had just dashed any dream of me wanting to do surgery said he didn't mind supervising.

I couldn't have that. Just as she was getting ready to leave, I get it within the time, no errors. Come on, I need to do this! Start the clock. Pierce vessel through the dots twice with the needle, pull string through, now transfer to other instrument, wrap around twice, now pull tight. Transfer needle again, wrap once, tighten, and transfer a final time, wrap once, tighten, introduce scissors, snip. Stop the clock! Boom, 1 minute and 12 seconds, a new record for the task! I felt elated. No more sessions needed to be booked, I was free. And I learnt that sometimes harsh criticism is just what's needed to bring out the best in me. Either that, or just not wanting someone breathing down my neck all the time. :P

Yes, it's the small victories in life that matter the most.

Just Say Yes

Opportunities are always coming your way, whether you're aware of them or not. It may be tempting sometimes to tell yourself that you're not really in the mood to do much today, but I've found, and I enjoy talking about this whole 'Yes Man' thing, that you feel much better about yourself when you say yes to things rather than stay home and do nothing. The feeling of regret you may feel from having not 'participated' far outweighs any small chance of you feeling bored or 'out of place' or whatever. Take this week for example, I went to participate in my usual laparoscopy research booking (testing out laparoscopy in 3D basically), and in the few hours I had to spare afterwards (not that I'm particularly surgically-skilled or anything), I had to decide whether or not I wanted to go to an 'iftar with the homeless' event I was invited to via facebook. Meh, I thought why not, so I walked around London for a bit (awesome in itself), then shared some food with some homeless people, made some really cool friends, and was interviewed for a documentary for the main TV channel in Finland! And to think I could've just gone home. Then a similar event happened a couple of days later, where there were even more cool people! In fact, this past couple of weeks, I've been invited to things left right and centre by different friends, resulting in me having iftar at a different place (Birmingham included) every day, and I've enjoyed every moment alhamdulillah. I haven't even let fasting get in the way of playing football with complete strangers (Football Beyond Borders people), in amazing weather, three hours every week.

So I'm basically writing this to the future Yasin. If you're reading this, which you probably aren't, because you have this thing of feeling really embarrassed by reading your old stuff, just flipping say yes. Doors are opening all the time for you; it's just up to you to realise they've opened for a reason, and walk through them.

Post-exams

All done! The second OSCE day was more fun than the first as we pretty much knew what was coming up and had some time to prepare. It involved taking a 'funny turn' history, giving advice about heart failure drugs, trying to get a diabetic patient to comply with medication and sort out his personal issues, the standard resp and abdo exams, a lower limb PNS, and a really cool emergency situation station where you have to assess the patient (the whole ABCD shabang), give oxygen and put a drip up. The last exam of the week (and year) was what everyone was dreading, data interp, with no-one having any real ideas of  what was going to come up. In the end it was quite straightforward., standard diagnoses and treatment with tricky questions here or there, pictures of tumours we were supposed to identify and some random ECG strips that weren't the usual heart-block picture. I think I passed all of them inshaallah :)

Anyway, post-exam time has already been eventful; straight after the exam/prayer, we went to eat, where a friend quite valiantly accepted the 'eat 6 extremely hot chicken wings within 20 minutes and get a free meal' challenge. The problem is that we weren't aware that you couldn't have any water during the challenge, and so 2 wings later, he had to give up, poor guy. The video probably won't make it into the public domain anytime soon. Saturday I had to wake up early to be a participant in laparoscopy research, where they are trying to compare 2D and 3D laparoscopy. So I basically stood there for 3 hours wearing 3D glasses, trying to transfer rubber prisms from various pegs within 48 seconds (impossible). I've done 40 attempts, another 40 to go before I move onto the next task. I find it quite fun, and it's definitely stimulating the hand-eye coordination bit of my brain! After that I had to rush off to North London to help out with a 'getting into medicine' thing that the BMA were attending, and in the evening I waited around for my friends to finish watching spiderman so I could bid farewell to one who was going abroad the next day.

Sunday was when I was supposed to meet another friend to say goodbye, for which I turned down VIP access to the British Grand Prix (I know!), and it didn't even happen in the end! So instead I watched Andy Murray attempt to be the first Wimbledon champion in 70 or so years, and we had to miss the end of it to get to our last Quran lesson before our teacher goes away for Ramadan. And now currently I am sitting here in my uni library, after having a meeting with a professor (surgeon who I've been on a couple of post-night on-call ward rounds with) who wants us to collect data for neurogastroenterology research and put it into a database. The location of this data is all around the country and abroad, which could mean expenses-paid trips around Europe! I do vaguely remember replying to an email asking for help with research a few months ago, but this came out of nowhere, so inshaallah this all works out! And then a friend came out of nowhere asking to be a participant in a nausea trial, for which I've been thinking about it for a while; getting paid to feel sick is a bit iffy in my books, but I watched the screening film, felt a bit sick, and now I'm waiting to see if I'm eligible to be a participant (but I've already said no to an NG tube being put down me; traumatic past experiences in the clinical skills lab!). And I still feel a bit nauseous typing this, but I think that's about it so far.

I haven't been writing as much on here as I'd have liked to in the past year; with all the things I'm doing and the weekly MMD newsletters I'm typing the spiels for, all my writing energy is sapped by the end of the week. But I have got 'lessons' I've taken away from the year, and I definitely don't want to forget everything that's happened, so welcome back into my life blog! (until October when I resume my newsletter duties)