Jeopardy

 

MBBS exams always bring a plethora of emotions. Probably no other field of education offers you the splendid opportunity to toil through a month-long examination process in the scorching month of April in a tropical country. The bed or chair on which you sit down to study feels like a burning pyre while your head feels heavy with all the information you just crammed. Yet while you break into a cold sweat in the air-conditioned exam hall on the final exam day, you ask yourself, “All that work and what did it get me? Why did I do it?”

Festivals take a back-seat, faces of family members grow blur as one stays on far from home fighting for a seemingly lost cause. The number of phone calls from home keep growing incessantly, as parents ask you, “You have a break between exams. Why don’t you come home?” But a student knows for a fact that no breaks are allowed, because even with continuous studying for 3 days the night before exam hardly offers you 4 hours of sleep.

On the day of the exam however, you get your sweet surprise, sweet and deadly as aconite. The question paper doesn’t test your knowledge per say because with the very first question you realize that you are in for a creative writing contest. The exams apparently designed to test your understanding of health and diseases and your clinical acumen, ultimately just test your patience, perseverance, ability to make up stories to fill pages, your hearing and multi-tasking powers as you keep one ear open to hear discussions while writing with the hope that you might pick up an answer and most importantly, your ability to continue fighting till the end even after knowing that you are probably writing all hopeless answers.

At the end of the day, you wonder, “Why did I study? None of it came up in the exams. How will I pass?” The answer to this question probably is the fact that the true utility of medical knowledge is not for the sake of answering horribly made-up question papers, it is more about patient care, of finding solutions to people’s health problems. The spirit of learning medicine does not lie in remembering which IPC to apply, or which magistrate to call for recording a dying declaration when a young woman with burn injury comes up to your emergency. It is more about trying not to let the woman die in the first place.

But while these thoughts help you find justification for your hard work, they don’t necessarily help you bear the emotional burden that such an exam brings. What this does for most of us is creating a life long hatred for an interesting subject, which was meant to be enjoyed. One only wonders that are some doctors this unsatisfied with their fields that they plan to reduce the number of post graduate students in their subject, by inducing an unforgettable fear and dislike for the subject? Probably so that no one else has to suffer the doom of studying and practicing that subject throughout their lives?

Only Almighty knows the answer to this question. So, all one can do is keep asking Him to reveal the answer to this all-important question and also bless us to make us pass while He is at it.