SEIZE THE DAY!

A hospital is a well of opportunities. When you are a resident in a referral center, you enter a tunnel from which you are bound to get out some years later, after becoming a proficient specialist or an average physician with some heterogeneous knowledge about Gastroenterology. “Seize the day!”- This is the best advice a clinician can give you with the perspective of time. You have to make each moment unique, in front of every patient, during every procedure, reading medical and non-medical books or making yourself questions not only about science, but also about life and death, health and disease, destiny and consolation. I strongly recommend you to get involve in some research, ask one of your staff physicians, be persistent, try to publish case reports or short series of cases, an try to search whether there’s and answer to the questions that arise from your clinical practice, because this is the first and unavoidable step towards clinical investigation, and this can be achieved by anyone like you. You have only a few years, a years that will never come back, so, don’t hesitate in spend extra time at the hospital, to stay late at night studying, researching or attending patients. You don’t have such a horrible thing like a working timetable, you are a resident, and you actually live at the hospital because you need to be there to become what you always have dreamed, an outstanding gastroenterologist. This is your opportunity, if you let it go you will regret it for your entire life.

Eduardo Redondo-Cerezo MD, PhD