Med Life: A Song of Ice and Fire
By Muhammad Mohsin Ali
Time is perhaps the greatest contender of human intellect.
We pit ourselves against time, only to find that it has already defeated us.
And reading Zeno’s paradoxes in a quantum mechanics book does not help when you
are supposed to be studying Guyton and KLM. These things just happen, all by
themselves. Like you get up at 6:30 to the sound of a trilling alarm, snooze it
and flick the sheets over yourself only to get up 5 minutes later to find it is 8 o’ clock. There is, as Patras would
have said, no human or extraterrestrial explanation for this phenomenon.
There is a strange feeling (giddiness maybe) when you stroll
to the classroom only to find that a diligent and punctual teacher, acting on
the advice of some equally diligent specie belonging to the students
subcategory, has closed the doors for latecomers. You try to get in, but the
door doesn’t budge; it has got stuck due to years of rust. So you resign
yourself to fate, and make a beeline for Piccadilly to get at least a hot cup
of coffee.
Life is not bed and roses for a med student (at least). You
finish your cuppa at a slow, leisurely pace and stroll to join your mates for
the next lecture, only to find that a bunch of sophomores have (almost
spontaneously) taken a liking to you, and would like you to entertain them for
the next frustrating 25 minutes with activities you can’t tell your mum about
(probably because she wouldn’t listen anyway). Life is not bed and roses for
the freshman (at least).
So you ultimately get to your class, and find a droning,
bored conglomeration of future professionals seated—crammed would be a better
adjective—in rows and columns (you might now start thinking of whether rows are
horizontal or whether columns are vertical or whether it is the other way
around, and get totally confuzzled. So move on.), listening to the delightfully
delirious ravings of a person who has been commissioned by the university
administration to drill into your minds the fundamentals of what you would be
practicing on real, living people in the next few years. And unless you are
going back and trying to trace the fact that the parts of the sentence before
and after the parenthesis bit are actually one whole, I think it is time to
move on.
You find a seat for yourself, and feel a huge tidal wave of
monstrous enormity sweeping over you. A tirade (it seems at times) of
unfamiliar anatomical terms, physiological definitions and biochemical concepts
is hurled at you with full force, while you sit, half dazed, occasionally
nodding the region containing the old bean, not because you have understood a
major concept and done your nation the greatest service possible, but because
that forbearer of tidings grave is looking at you expectantly, half-hoping that
you would (or should) acknowledge an understanding of what he/she/it has been
droning about for the past 25 minutes or so. Again, there is no limit to the
deceptions of time.
Life suddenly seems sweet and fresh when you move out of the
class and take a whiff of the fresh air, perhaps to clear up your brain clogged
from lack of use (and perhaps flu). You find everything refreshing. But there
is always this characteristic of life that makes it so unbearable: whenever you
feel fresh and budding, life always has to offer some blot that spoils the fun
and tells you it’s time to report to the GHQ, often mockingly called the
“dissection hall.”
The dissection hall is one place where you do everything
except dissection. You chat with your friends, sharing the latest gossip in
town, you text someone whom you loved/hated in the past and now never/always
want to see again, you watch as some brave Earthling with shaking hands tries
to separate a lymphatic plexus and what-not from some unidentifiable and
obscure region of the cadaver. And to top it all, there are a few minds which
work best in the vicinity of the remains of the dead, flipping page after page
of a voluminous tome you wouldn’t (should be couldn’t, don’t you think?) carry
for your life.
From potential surgeons exposing the arteries/veins/whatever
in the some specific region of the upper extremity to barmy nerds gazing
absentmindedly at some elevated tuberosity
or tubercle (about both of which
you are blissfully unaware), you have got everyone there. Wait, we missed out
one guy. The Robert Burns of the class.
There is in every school a Hermione Granger. These lines,
had they been reproduced in Rowling’s Harry Potter, would have (I’m sure)
caused a pandemonium with a plethora of people carrying identifying marks being
inoculated—or even better: massacred. For there is always a person who, when
you are feeling somewhat depressed and low, makes you even more so by
enumerating, in a highly satisfied and Stentorian tone, the highly effective
functional bearing of some thingummy called the Hydrogen/ATPase pump (don’t ask
me, I’m clueless). And the inexplicable enigma encountered in med school is
that there is not one, but several of these kind of fellas who make you feel
like Johnny Bravo falling at his mom’s heels right in front of someone he was
supposed to be impressing (try it. You’ll feel a lot better). In my
vociferously sounded opinion, such people are a threat to local sanity, and
must be eliminated soonest.
After braving through all this—and other potentially worse
and somewhat unexplainable experiences—one feels like that bloke—Genghis or
whoever he was—who fought a lot of battles, only to be defeated by someone whom
he hadn’t given a damn (must be lamenting about that now, poor bloke).
Med school is not an easy nut to crack. It is one of the
toughest places out there, where enter finely dressed gentlemen, and Exeunt
disheveled and scattered herds of docs, running hither and thither (as if they
have nothing better to do) to save one life.
But in the end, it is that one life that matters.