A Singaporean doctor's winding, five-year fight to break into US medicine after graduating from a UK medical school. Three failed attempts, a pivot away from surgery, to a specialty almost no one back home has heard of (Interventional Pain). Part 1 of our two-part conversation with Dr Ruan Qing Zhao.

Faith and Isaac sit down with Dr Qing Zhao, a Singaporean who took the well-worn "study hard, serve, come home" script and quietly rewrote it. What started as a choice between NUS and a scholarship-free gamble on UCL turned into a decade-long odyssey across the UK and US healthcare systems — three attempts at US residency, two rejections, and a five-year stretch where nothing felt certain.

In this first part of the conversation, Qing Zhao gets brutally honest about the year he stopped believing surgery was for him, the phone calls with fa ...