To every medical student working 36-hour shifts for a salary that barely covers transportation: you're not suffering. You're learning. I know it doesn't feel that way when you're exhausted at 4 AM writing notes in a crowded ward. But every patient you see is a lesson that no textbook can teach. The case volume in Egyptian university hospitals is frightening — and that's your advantage. Doctors trained in Egypt see more in their residency than many abroad see in a decade.

Let's be honest about the numbers. A trainee doctor in England earns roughly 3,000 pounds sterling per month. In Egypt, a doctor at a comparable level earns about 3,000 Egyptian pounds. At current exchange rates, that's a gulf so wide it swallows careers. In England, school is free, healthcare is free, public transport works. The salary stretches further. I won't pretend money isn't the main reason doctors leave. It is. Denying that is dishonest.

But here's what I'd say to my younger self — and to every young doctor listening: travel. Get your equivalency exams. Go abroad. Be as good as or better than your foreign colleagues — because you will be, the Egyptian training guarantees it. But remember your country. Come back. Not out of guilt or nationalism. Come back because the impact you can have here is irreplaceable. Because being a name in a London hospital is comfortable, but being the doctor that three generations of one family trust? That's something no salary can buy.

My favorite sentence in all of medicine — the one that makes me say I would take this career path again a thousand percent — came from a patient after a complicated reconstruction. She looked at me, still groggy from anesthesia, and said: "You were the tool God used to heal me." I carry that sentence in my pocket every single day. No salary, no title, no hospital name can compete with it.