Fresh, Till You Rot

- Jawad Haider

The moment I stepped into KEMU, I – like many others – felt myself half a doctor already. Imagine my feelings when a teacher asked me to leave the class, saying “Doctor Sahab get out of the class!” Heck, I wasn’t even sure if I was supposed to be embarrassed on being thrown out of the class, or act jubilant on being called a Doctor Sahab. Such a jumble of sentiments, all too vague and mixed but I felt assured in residing myself in the territory of “Doctor”. Therefore, that’s what I did during the first few ignorantly happy weeks of my medical-studies-life.

Vision and perception changes once you put an ignition to your post-admission life. You see a man with his legs apart and you suddenly start thinking if he has Coxa Vara, Valga, Rickets or something else without even considering the possibility that he might have pooped his pants. Within a blink of eye, you launch yourself from the level of Bashir Ahmad to the level of Socrates. You sit down in a lecture and draw things in the air with your pencil depicting a “Dr. House during his student life”. You walk by others with a Gray’s Anatomy in your hand just because B.D or Moore is too mainstream. The most funny spectacles are the ones in which you go back to your “abai gaon” and all the paindu neighbors rush towards you like “Doctor sahib has arrived” and then one of them approaches you with his cuffs rolled up for you to check his pulse and diagnose ‘if’ they have any disease at all. Doctor na ho gaye, pooray k pooray hospital tests ho gaye.

Ignore the ignorance of those villagers. Fun comes when you join them in their game and ask if they have a headache or not. Noting that they do have headaches sometimes, you become all Sherlock whole of a sudden and ask them if brain tumor has been in their family history. 

It’s a nirvana of a few months, which subsides and eventually you return to your former ‘you’ again (thank heavens). That’s the experience of being fresh in the market (Fresh, till you rot back to being a proper Kemcolian). Sometimes you never take the trip back and content on being called a ‘theeta’. Whatever the route you take, the departure remains the same for almost every student.

I remember this one time when I, along with some of my friends, was sitting in the bus and we somehow touched the topic of “Blood Clotting”.

“Heparin is an anticoagulant, right?” asked one of my friends.

All of us nodded back, to which he said: “What if we inject a person with heparin at the site where there is blood clot? Will it break down the clot?”

These were the days when I too was blinded by that vision-perception-sherlock thingy. With mind opened to all possibilities and Dr. House’s brilliance in mind, I replied: “Well, no! But I think we can give a person frequent heparin doses if his blood has a possibility of forming a clot.”

And everyone nodded in approval. But that’s not what I noticed. What I noticed was the remark I heard from a Baji sitting across me.

“Banday marain ge ye!” she said.

Never again did I try to show-off.