From the Frying pan into the Fire

Imagine how a blob of butter (me) fresh out the cosy cool fridge (Kodaikanal) feels when it’s dumped onto the hot pan (Med school) and then mixed with coconut from Kerala, mustard from Punjab, curry leaves from Tamilnadu and other random ingredients from the gulf, metropolitan Indian cities and Mizoram, which by the way, are all originally from Kerala (Sanadors – Batch of ’11). The ingredients are tossed and sautéed together for a while (five and half years, no less), with the heat varying from a slight simmer in summer (college fests and class trips) to high flame (profs) till finally you are presented with a dish so delectable, where the ingredients have blended and infused so well together that you couldn’t tell them apart (except for a few exceptions, like the clove or tez patta which is always going to taste terrible if you bite into just that!) Then, of course the heat is turned off and the dish is left to cool (internship) and then transferred to a serving bowl. Well, this is where the simile ends, because in my version the entire dish falls bang into the fire (bond). And this isn’t a tame home kitchen burner, it’s the road side burning furnace which rises with tongues of heat to devour and blacken the bottom of the kadai.

Whether you’re from a family full of doctors or a first generation medico, nothing, let me repeat, NOTHING prepares you for what medical school has in store for you. Swimming through the sea of syllabus we triumphantly arrived at the shores of MBBS only to find ourselves marooned on an island full of unforeseen monsters which, Physics, Chemistry and Biology never prepared you tackle, namely – Anatomy et al. But one must never lose hope, as my good friend once said, ‘God got us in and He will definitely get us out!’ They say time flies when you’re having fun, and sure enough, these years have flown by in a blur. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that these were some of the best days of our lives! Finishing college and leaving my safe bubble in CMC Ludhiana was one of the saddest things I’ve gone through.

After five and a half years of studying with the same people and living within the protected confines of a teaching hospital one is not prepared or willing to voluntarily ‘jump from the frying pan into the fire’ so to speak.

It was like learning how to swim, being unceremoniously pushed into the deep end, except instead of a swimming pool this was a vast swirling whirlpool of real life, with its troubled deep blue waters, complete with rollicking crests, humbling troughs and spaces of inexplicably calming, still, beautiful waters reflecting the brilliant fire in the sunsets above. In one word this is called – Adulting. Suddenly I was using words like independent and earning in sentences to describe myself. While such glamourous words do describe my new life the stark reality is that now I have to wash my own bathroom (no hostel), manage my money, treat patients, manage the emergency, do on call duties, talk to Biharis, keep my ID cards and certificates safely and think about whether I need a maid (this is my mother’s job, I tell you!). I also have a PF, I mean come on, that is the stuff of LIC ads!

Another thing about being a completed dish is that soon it is not good enough on it’s own, you need to garnish it (PG seat) and serve it with an accompaniment (husband). My facebook newsfeed is now filled with either pre wedding photo shoots or stories of which PG course my friends are getting into. You know when you start a blog, you have to select a template, and all your articles, pictures and links are laid out according to that template. Many tutorials on how to have an amazing blog say that it should be thematic, which is disappointing because everything I have to say is random and scattered. But sometimes, I feel like I’m stuck in a thematic template.
I feel like a food blog.

Cooking time: 24 years.

Ingredients: Versatile genes, Years of study, lovely people, beautiful places and mostly God’s grace.

Recipe: Refer to the rant above!

Serves: I guess this part makes the difference. The serving part. How many will I serve? And who will those people be? And how will that experience be? No one cooks without a reason, and the same goes for us. We weren’t created without a reason.

Maybe I will be the curry leaves which reminds someone of home.

Or maybe, I’ll be the clove which soothes someone’s aching tooth.

Maybe I will be the butter which fattens a malnourished child.

Maybe I will be a tava roti which when thrown onto the fire, becomes light and fluffy, soft and cooked to perfection. Ready and willing. To serve. Of course in the process you might get eaten up, but who would want to be a rotting chapatti?

I Study in Med School

What I’m writing about is no different from what most of us have probably realized at some point or the other while having stayed here, in a Medical College. It is not a new, sudden or remarkable realization, different from anything that has ever been thought. Here, is a leaf out of an non-descript medical students life, 9 days after joining and almost 2 years after having joined. 

9^th August 2011: A Bone in the Common Room                         Written by, The NAÏVE First Year

My hostel room consists of a few oddities, a bag of bones, scalpels, forceps, and surgical gloves, all of which I am very proud. As of now the bag of bones is sitting next to me on my bed. I am alone in my room, my roommate is out for dinner, yet the bag of bones is now sitting next to me on my bed. The remains of another human being, are sitting next to me. A human, a person, maybe a father, mother, sister, friend, flesh and bone, ligament, tendon, fascia and periosteum, vascular supply and nerve fibres, once upon a time innervated and gave life to these set of bones. Yet here they are in the hands of a first year medical student, as tools of learning, all 17 of them; fibula, tibia, femur, vertebrae, radius, ulna, humerus etc. I got them on loan for Rs 700. The remaining legacy of a person(s) who once lived, who was conceived and born, who lived and grew, who spoke a language, who had beliefs, for Rs 700.

I received my ‘bones’ in the Dissection Hall today. It’s a long white tiled hall, with metal stretchers arranged across its length. The tube lights are a bit too bright, like you’ve walked into an incandescent, florescent world. There are skeletons hanging in each corner, like morbid watch guards. It’s funny, I thought it was morbid the first day, but that’s also the only thing that’ll be left of me once I’m dead and gone. Maybe I will end up being an unclaimed body which ends up hanging on one of those hinges. Life is so transient. Life, a word I have come to reconsider in the last 2 weeks. A cement washbasin lines the wall, the dull grayish hue of the mosaic pattern, giving it a primal bare aura. Add to the whiteness of the room, our newly bought, well ironed, and spotless lab coats and you realize with a jolt to the gut that you’re in Medical College. Mind you, it’s been way different from what I thought it would be, like discovering the little asterix saying ‘conditions apply’ on a clearance sale poster. And that brings me back to the very ‘odd topic of this discourse, the bone in the common room.

Yesterday I was making maggi with my friend in the common room. It’s this room with a hot plate and a wash basin. Oh, and it has a dustbin. Pretty much. While cooking the maggi I started shuffling the stuff on the counter around, uncooked dal, long expired black pepper powder, used greasy pans and dismal looking rags, I was thinking about how people could be that dirty when I saw it. The bone. The scapula. In the common room. On a basin. Probably long forgotten by a medical student very much like me. Maybe I shouldn’t think it unusual to find a scapula just lying around the place, but I did. And I’m writing this down because when I’m a year into this course and I forget the awe that overtook me every time I thought about where I am and what I’m responsible to accomplish, I would read this.

24^th February 2013: The Babaji                                      Written by, the still NAÏVE Third Year

Talk about getting demoralized. If ever someone needs a check on their bloated egos, they don’t need to go any further than, Clinics. And I mean this not only for the poor student, but also for that ‘patient’ patient (pun intended) whose dignity and pride is slowly bartered off to all of us aspiring ‘doctors’ willing to percuss and prod him. I wonder where all those lofty ideals of ‘treating the patient as though they were your loved ones’ went.

I think my version of today is so very vastly different from what it’s supposed to be. Today I met a babaji, Ajaib Singh in Ward 2. He was a man slight in demeanor, with jolly twinkly eyes and laugh wrinkles on the edges of his eyes, like crinkled up butter paper. He had on an orange turban, a clean crisp off-white kurta and sheet pulled up to his waist. As I approached him I noticed under his bed a series of urine sample bottles and by his side was sitting his wife, knitting and chatting away with great agility at express speed. As I proceeded to get a ‘good’ history and find some of the ‘findings’ which always seem to elude me, he told me about how he’d been a shopkeeper till ‘peshap mein problem ho gaya’… his wife gave me an incessant backup of the details about how life changed after ‘peshap mein problem ho gaya’. I think I spent close to 40 minutes chatting with them completely forgetting to go and present my case, and therein lay the problem. Needless to say, I stuttered and stammered through the whole ordeal once I did get back to class, and received mirth-filled looks from the rest of my class mates, for the show had begun.

Now if I’d done things the way I was supposed to have, my day would’ve consisted of having worked up a patient, Ajaib Singh, male, 60 years old from Ludhiana who was apparently well till 5 days ago when he came to OPD with complaints of frequent and painful urination. End of story- teacher happy, student happy and patient? Well, who really cares right?

Note: Although the incidents may seem unrelated, and well, not that big a deal, slowly, ever so slowly, our consciences are getting blunted out and shaped. At the end of the day, it’s still in each of our hands to decide what shape that’s going to be.