AMEN Australia 2019 Conference: Witnesses Unto Me

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Joy Akrawi

Life as an intern and a Christian/Ministry in the small things

How many of you have actually been interns?

Okay, so This is kind of a portrayal of what an intern is like.

Internship is the first year after graduating from medical school where you're now allowed to work in a hospital under supervision of a more senior clinician.

It's also the year that you transition from full-time study to full-time work, potentially 12 hours a day, 5 days a week, completely different to your non-med friends who are working 8 hours a day.

You can no longer use the excuse, oh I don't know, I'm just a med student.

You can no longer go to all your friends' outings because you miss out on the birthdays and Christmas parties because you're either working, sleeping, or pretending to be working since you've lost all ability to socialize in a normal environment.

People say internship is 1 of the most difficult years of your medical career, mainly because it's such a transition from being a med student to a doctor with responsibilities and a heavy workload.

Some enjoy their internship, Others drag their feet along their way.

My experience has been a little bit of both.

I've been blessed to attend a few Amen conferences in my med school years, and I think it was such an encouragement.

I was able to see what it looks like to be a witness before I started.

I even wrote down all these notes on my phone of what I would do if I was a clinician.

And I would put up posters, and I would talk to people about Jesus, and I would pray in my clinic, and da, da, da.

And then I was like, oh, wait, you don't get that as an intern you got to go through the public system first.

So I had this life thought out for me but it wasn't an immediate thing that I could get to and I was like kind of confused God how do I how do I do this then?

How do I be an intern and a witness together in a public system?

I quickly realised that this experience of becoming an extremely junior doctor could turn out to be not only an experience where I can witness to people by talking about Jesus, but mainly how, like, by showing them who Jesus is through my character.

So we've talked about being a witness this whole weekend, and I just wanted to go through some definitions.

The definitions of being a witness is having knowledge from observational experience, so having knowledge of who God is.

1 that gives evidence or proving through your life that God exists and that he is love, and to testify to, so telling others about your experience with God.

I found that directly telling people about my experience with God wasn't the only way of witnessing, and it was quite difficult to do that to people when your doctors are kind of like watching over you.

And 1 of the verses that I found really summed up my experience this year is this.

A new command I give you, love 1 another.

As I have loved you, so you must love 1 another.

By this, all men will know that you are my disciples if you love 1 another." So I started my internship without any big plans for witnessing, just a plan to keep on going, take God with me wherever I went, which is Acts 1.8, and love whoever came in my way.

January this year I started out on a cardiology rotation.

I was keen to learn, do my best, you know, make friends and da da da, but cardio is really intense guys.

You get 30 patients a day, maybe, you might have to discharge 10 of them in a day, you have no idea what's going on because you just graduated as a med student, You've got multiple nurses contacting you, paging you throughout the day.

You can't even go to pee without taking your pager with you because someone will contact you.

It's intense, like I found it really hard.

I mean others might find it pretty easy and breezy but it was difficult for me.

I got to the point where I was like you know crying in the first week because I couldn't answer all my pages and the nurses will ask me all these random questions and I'll be like I'll just pray to God, God just shut my mouth because all I want to say is, did you not read my documentation?

Or I would say to them, or I'd want to say to them, trust me, I'm not going to go home till my discharge summaries are done.

You don't need to page me every 10 minutes.

I needed God to remind me that even though the consultant who yelled at me for asking for a neuro consult, which my boss asked me to do, was only human and that I didn't need to be offended by what he or she said and I didn't need to tell everyone else about how rude she was to me.

It was quite difficult, but despite this frantic mess, God shaped me into a person that, though wasn't the smartest or quickest intern, was kind to both patients and nursing staff.

My advanced trainee spoke to me afterwards and 1 of my colleagues as well and said, I've heard so much feedback about you 2.

Out of the 4 teams here, so 8 JMOs, the nurses think that you 2 worked best with them, always answering pages and being kind.

It would be a pleasure for me to give you a reference to any of your future employees, so please, please do it." And I was like, oh cool, I'm in with the big guys!

But honestly all of that came from God and after that rotation, they knew that I was a Christian, they found out I was a Christian and I really hope and pray that they put together that the kindness in my character only came from God himself.

Once that first month of craziness settled, I turned from praying for myself mainly to praying for my patients.

Oh there we go, sorry, be kind is the first way to witness.

So initially I was like, oh I can't pray with the patients, like people will be judging me, I don't know, I'm a little bit scared of what people think of me at the moment, or I was.

So I'd drive in my car on the way to work and I'd keep it quiet.

And I was like, okay, God, let's do this.

Like, God, can this patient please get through the angiogram, all right?

Lord, may this person please get their pacemaker.

They've been waiting for 3 weeks in the public system.

Just pray God please, please leave these people.

And just praying for the Holy Spirit to come into your life as well as you talk to people as you shine God's light to them is so important and it uplifts you, brings you closer to the patients that you speak of as well to God and it just really prepares you for your day.

Now I did have 1 opportunity where I was able to pray with a patient and that like I've only had 1 this year but it was emotional and it was crazy.

There was this 1 50 year old lady, she had congestive cardiac failure and she came into CCU and she had multiple complications, all these issues going on and she was a cute little Islander lady and I went in and I saw this like whiteboard that had a verse of Isaiah written up on there.

I was like, oh, that's such a nice verse.

And so we started talking about church, started talking about all these different things, and then I had to go and see the other patients and whatnot.

But I'd come in every 3 days to redo her cannula, because of that risk of infection, apparently.

So I'd come in every couple of days and do her cannula.

And you spent, don't underestimate the time that you spend with someone residing a cannula, because you can say so much and learn so much from them.

So yeah, I put in her cannulas a few times and we grew our relationship together.

And at 1 point, it came to a time where I was in a family conference, not related to her, but for another patient.

And my pager went off, and I look at it, and I was like, oh, no.

It's a Met call, and her bed is on this pager.

So I prayed and prayed while I was in the family conference and I thought, God, my reg will go see them, I know, that's okay, I'm the most junior person, I can't do anything anyway, I'll just finish this conference and go.

So I prayed and finished the conference and I respectfully ran out.

I went to go see her, and I just saw 5 doctors walk out of the room.

And they were all talking, and she had hypotension.

And so it was a little bit worrying, but not too much.

And I was like, oh, what can I do for you?

I mean, everyone else has done medical stuff.

Life as an intern and a Christian/Ministry in the small things

Transcript

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