Last month, I moved to Abu Dhabi for an assignment at a renowned hospital. My work in med tech can vary in scope, but for this assignment I was required to work at the OR suite and scrub into 2-4 surgeries every day. The working week was busy and so different from my everyday life, I couldn’t help but find my mind was occupying a completely new space. It felt lovely – refreshing, inspiring. I was captivated by everything I saw. I said very little, and I didn’t emote at all. I did my work, ate my food, slept like a baby and tried my best to document everything. Here’s a stream-of-conscious-y extract of the journal I kept during my assignment. I hope you enjoy this little trip with me.

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My alarm goes off at 4:30 am every morning, but I lay in bed in the darkness until 5 – and then I jump out, a little panicked, straight into an extra-hot shower. I don’t bother too much with what I’m wearing because I’ll have to change anyway, so I stick to my uniform of jeans and a collared shirt. No makeup, just some cover-up for my rosacea reds, and then I race down to the hotel lobby to call an Uber. I love driving, I even dedicated my third Editor’s Note to it – but boy oh boy, do I love being driven. I put on my headphones – I am alternating between Selena Gomez I Said I Love You First and Phoebe Bridgers Stranger in the Alps – and zone out, Serene Van der Woodsen style, until we get to the hospital.

“This place is a bit of a labyrinth” my colleague says repeatedly, and he’s not wrong. We have badges that access the endless, winding corridors which lead to wing after wing of entire departments hidden in corners of the enormous campus. It’s an incredible microcosm of various departments working in quiet, mechanical unison: nurses, engineers, IT staff, facilities, clinicians, researchers, cooks, baristas, the list goes on. No one ever looks lost (except for me), and they buzz themselves in and out of secret corridors at an impressive speed, appearing and disappearing out of sight like characters in a play.

About those characters – in Dubai, I feel like a main character in my own life (doesn’t everyone?) but somewhere across city lines, I become an extra. The schedule for the day is communicated the night before: I know what I need to do, and I am nothing if not a bit of a taskmaster. A taskmaster who can disappear into the background? Say no more, sign me up.

I collect my scrubs from a window that smells so much like dry cleaning that the dry smell permeates the air. I didn’t realize dry had a smell, but it smells distinctly void of moisture. Standing at the window under a neon white light, collecting an outfit I know will look horrible on me gives me traumatic school uniform flashbacks. I change in the women’s locker rooms, at its busiest there’s at least a hundred of us, and no one bats an eye in my direction. It’s great. There’s not a ton of mirrors around the hospital, so I start to forget what I look like – until I catch a glimpse in a mirror above the scrubbing station and vow never to do that to myself ever again.

During the surgeries, we have to make ourselves scarce: so I stand in the background to ensure everything is working properly and then slip out, and then the main characters work their magic. Sometimes I stay and watch. I am mesmerized.

Some surgeons play music while operating – it’s a thing – and during a complex, 7-hour procedure, a surgeon absentmindedly sings along to Ed Sheeran while operating a robot that’s operating on the patient.

“Baby now… take me into your loving arms…” he sings as I quietly leave the room. 

Sometimes in the middle of a procedure, I feel an unexpected twinge for all that could have been – I was pre-med at university – but I brush it off quickly. Extras don’t feel twinges – they don’t feel much at all. Onto the next task.

I was worried I would feel weak being on my feet all day, worried I wouldn’t be able to wake up so early, but I feel just fine: I guzzle sugar-free electrolytes and snack on medjool dates. I am intermittently fasting, so at my hungriest and tiredest, I feel somewhat invincible – just by proxy of brilliance and brains. I like existing in this comfortable realm between oblivion and osmosis.

I take a magnesium supplement every night and pass out before 9, like a baby. My mind doesn’t wander – it’s so tired – it’s nestled between my ears, precisely where it’s meant to be. Not leaking through crevices (crevices created by doing too much? Not doing enough? Who knows?) to places it shouldn’t be venturing to.

At the hospital, I find myself surrounded by people who speak in full stops (periods!) and exclamations, and as the DNA of my thoughts is hard-coded in ellipses and question marks, the confidence is infectious. This analogy makes little sense if you think about how DNA or infectious diseases works – but alas, I am extra. It doesn’t matter.

The next day, I take this newly-acquired confidence for a spin by taking a shortcut to the coffee shop via the imaging department. A lady from the facilities management team stops me and points at my face.

“Oh my god!”

What?

“Your face!”

My face, what? (I hate it when people don’t speak in full sentences)

“Miss, your face, what’s wrong with it?”

Nothing… I say, touching my rosacea reds self-consciously

“No miss, it’s so red. There’s a rash”

I start gentle-parenting her, explaining that I have rosacea, and she’s not my physician, she can’t help me, so why is she pointing at my face, it’s not nice to point at someone’s face and so on. And though I was feeling quite tough just a moment ago, I imagine in this exchange I look a lot like my nephew when he’s starting to lose a board game, lower lip trembling and hot, angry tears threatening to spill over.  

Day after day, surgery after surgery, I am amazed by how clear the deliverables are. What a strange and unique feeling it must be to channel all your energy into the work and not the existential questions around the work. Does that make it too easy though? I always feel like us normies think our anxiety and confusion means we have some special access to the secrets of the universe, but I don’t think this is the true. I think we tell ourselves this story to make ourselves feel better. What would it have been like to be so sure of your goals (AND the purpose of your goals) your whole life? What would it be to form an identity sans desperate longing, desperate aspiration? What fills up that large, vacuous hole? We tell ourselves the space is the same but frustratingly empty, but again, I fear we do that to make ourselves feel better. I suspect something better fills it up, which results in a more concrete identity formation so that time can be spent on better, valuable goals than answering questions like “who am i? where am I? what am I? why am I? am I from here, or am I from there or, …”

And when the problems are clearly defined, an opaque outline to dictate where they start and end, a line tracing every contour, then the solutions are just as clear in their definition.  Have I been confusing intellectual growth with the exhausting mental gymnastics it takes to fit into multiple, pre-defined, arbitrary molds? Uh-oh. Don’t go there, I remind myself.

For non-work-related reasons, sometimes I feel a twinge of grief too, for all that could have been. My grief is not outpouring, though but rather static: trapped behind my eyelids by acceptance and pride, and what’s that – maybe a little relief? That’s new. And that is a simple and accurate way to sum up how I am feeling by the end of the project: renewed, like when I give up on my Tamagotchi and just reset and start over again; I am at once myself and the pixelated egg bobbing up and down for chance #7 at ‘life’.

Another day, another list of tasks. The world feels incredibly sharp and in-focus, and I am focused, too. This single-mindedness has me feeling precisely the opposite as I usually do: one strong tether as opposed to a million weak ones. It’s equally exhilarating as it is grounding.

On my last day, I stop at a local pizzeria – made famous by Chef Raj who has worked under Thomas Keller at Per Se – to pick up a pepperoni, honey, and burrata pizza for dinner with my father. I drive back home with the pizza on the passenger seat, Selena Gomez blaring from my speakers at an absurd volume – tired, hungry, and eager to eat with him as I narrate all of this, and more.