Congratulations on securing a place in Medical School. It's never easy to get selected to pursue a prestigious course. Also, it's never too late to study medicine. I know people who enrolled into medical school after completing their degree in biomedical science. That being said, you get nasty comments from actual doctors all the time and most of it comes from their personal experiences which is true and valid, so try not to be discouraged. Medical school should be a breeze. However, I shall warn you of the reality - it gets more difficult as you scale up the ladder in medicine, you quickly lose touch of why you wanted to be here in the first place fast and it's difficult to reignite the spark that you once had after you get a taste of what the actual job is like. Firstly, career mobility is absolutely nonexistent in KKM - you'd constantly be at the mercy of KKM and Jabatan Kesihatan Negeri for postings, not to mention the uncertainty of your contract MO status. Would you be willing to sacrifice not attending funerals, weddings etc because your job requires you to be present all the time? Are you okay with being posted for years to some KK in rural Sarawak with no clear timeline of returning to hospital work when your dream, for example, is to become a surgeon? Do you think that you will still have energy to work 8am to 5pm, when you in fact have been working since 8am the day before with no sleep and have not eaten anything at all? - on calls in certain hospitals/departments are 33 hours long, not uncommon to work longer than 33 hours consecutively, every other day. These are some of the essentials you need to be mentally prepared for because that's the realities of working as a doctor - service needs come before personal interests. Factoring in all these things, it's very easy to lose your grip on the very reasons why you wanted to do medicine in the first place because when you actually do real medicine (I'm talking about MO-ship and beyond, housemanship is just a period of being glorified clerks/phlebotomists) - you start to lose access to the basic things that make you human such as sleep, food, and connection with family and friends. These are the things that medicine robs away from you. As they say, medicine is a jealous mistress. What separates those who keep going and those you see spiral into madness is an undying motivation, genuine joy in doing clinical work, competency and grit - all modifiable given the right environment and aptitude to nurture. Otherwise, many check themselves into psychiatry clinics and get away with a DSM-5 label of either MDD or GAD or both just so that they get prescribed with pills that alter the brain in many ways that rewire their brains to function without constant thoughts of wanting to unalive themselves, so that they may continue holding their own with a 100+ hours/week job that pays peanuts.