Toxicology

In the early hours of a Cairo morning ☀️, at a dim café tucked inside the tertiary care center at Sheikh Zayed 🏥, a young cardiology resident sat alone. The coffee was bitter—unbearably so ☕️—and the cigarette smoke spiraled into the air 🚬 like a signal flare of distress.

He was the kind of doctor who saw more than most: not just disease, but details. Molecular details 🧬. He could trace the path of nicotine molecules as they slid into his bloodstream 🩸, triggering the dopamine surge that fought back against despair 😔. He could feel the caffeine slipping past the blood-brain barrier 🧠, blocking adenosine, sharpening focus—but not silencing pain 💥.

It was one of the worst days of his residency. The kind that leaves bruises on the soul. The kind where the wrong word from the wrong colleague, delivered without care or conscience, could slice deeper than a scalpel ⚔️. In a world obsessed with protocols 📋 and performance, no one seemed to care about how words feel, how injustice weighs, how deeply a highly sensitive mind can drown in the unsaid 🕳️.

He imagined—yes, imagined—what a quarter dose of heroin might feel like 💉. Not because he desired it, but because his neurochemical mind couldn’t help the curiosity:
What would it do to the limbic system? How would it silence the storm? 🌪️
And somewhere, just below that thought, floated darker questions… questions about escape, about stillness, about ending.

His thoughts raced like Michael Phelps 🏊‍♂️ through an Olympic pool—powerful, relentless, barely breathing.

Then… the door opened 🚪.

A patient he had diagnosed just yesterday—a man with an inferior STEMI ❤️‍🔥 he had caught in the emergency room and rushed to the cath lab—walked in with his family 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦. The man looked different. Alive. Awake. Grateful.
He took the resident’s hand and said, with a sincerity that cracked through all the chaos:
“You’re an angel 😇. You saved me. You must be sent from paradise.”

And just like that, the spiral stopped.

That moment didn’t erase the bitterness, the pain, or the science—but it brought meaning. It reminded him why he chose this path, and why he would one day build Osler Notes 📚✨: a place for students and junior doctors like him—those who see deeply 👁️, feel intensely 💓, and think in layers 🧠.

Those who need a new kind of textbook—one that doesn’t just teach medicine, but
feels like medicine lived.

📖 This book is for them.