exposed us to patients from different ethnic, social and cultural backgrounds, most of them coming from underprivileged areas redirecting our vision to the holistic view of healthcare and health policy and strategy issues, in addition to refining our personality making us more flexible and more resilient in dealing with patients and their panicking mothers.During undergraduate years, I have kept the excellence of my educational merits and I’ve been honored several academic prizes but this make us not to overlook the importance of dedicating time to help the community, and hence we went into several therapeutic days in underserved areas and spent weeks of rural residency there helping the underprivileged communities and educating them about their health and the healthy practices. Moreover our insight of the importance of doing research as a support to the clinical practice has reached maturity during that time, and my first research work in the field of pediatrics was in the 5th MBBS year when I studied the risk factors associated with neonatal deaths in the NICU of a major teaching hospital ,and upon graduation I continued the research work by joining a neurogenetics research project which is based on the department of biochemistry, Faculty of medicine, University of Khartoum, where we dealt with large numbers of children with various inherited neurological disorders; this opportunity has empowered my research abilities and gave me valuable insight in the importance of team work.
I remember one of the families recruited for the research, has six children of different ages who were developmentally delayed since their birth and at certain age they became wheel chaired and no one was knowing what is going on , after taking cautious history and drawing a pedigree an AR pattern of an inherited disease has emerged and we falsely made a diagnosis of hereditary spastic paraparesis but fortunately after the genetic analysis was done it appeared that an Arginase enzyme was absent in those patients , and the progression of the disease was postponed and even prevented in the new family’s members just by dietary restrictions giving us a glimpse of hope in treating even the most complex and rare pediatric diseases in the future. .
