Treasure Hunt

 

Have you ever played a game of treasure hunt, where you have to embark on a long journey of finding clues, all of which lead up to a much-awaited treasure in the end? If you have not but long for such an adventure, then welcome to the final year of MBBS- a year-long treasure hunt packed with surprises at every turn. One needs to rack one’s brain to understand and memorize the 4 heavy subjects, put in days of hard work to master patient examination in the wards. The clues are provided to you in the form of books and notes and good teachers, but finding them requires a lot of effort too. All this ultimately lead to the much awaited MBBS degree.

The search for clues begins on the very first day of clinical postings where one is simply given a bed number and the name of an unknown PGT (Post Graduate Trainee) whom they are supposed to visit for classes. The struggle gets real when you neither know where the ward is, nor have you ever seen the PGT in person. Awkward conversations follow, where you go on asking every person you meet, “Have you seen this particular PGT?” until someone replies with a laugh, “I am that person. You are asking me about me?” Or at times it gets worse when you think you have finally met that person, and you address him, but it turns out that you’ve got the wrong person. Same goes for finding patients, where you take at least 15 minutes to locate the room they are in only to find them sleeping, uncooperative or absent.

Throughout the first three years of MBBS one sees many staircases and passageways which lead up to unknown places. In the final year one ultimately gets to follow these passages and one finds out some really interesting places like AC classrooms with beds in them where you can study, or sleep. One also finds soothing balconies offering wonderful views of the campus. One is thus forced to wonder, “Why didn’t I know of this place?”

The search doesn’t stop there. One need to find the best and most concise study materials to study from, so that they can complete the syllabus in the end. Wherever one goes, one finds groups of people holding serious discussions about which books or notes to follow. But this search turns out to be so tiresome in the end that once you have finally got all the books and materials, you feel like resting a bit. Then at the end of this extended resting period, you are late to begin with your studies and in the end the syllabus anyways remains incomplete.

In this year, along with Medicine, Surgery, Obs&Gynae and Pediatrics another new subject comes into being. Some wise and fun-loving person named this subject as “KHEPOLOGY”. This subject is the one in which you get to search for PGTs in different departments and convince them to give you extra ward classes to increase your clinical acumen. Who is the highest scorer in this subject? The one who enrolls in maximum number of “khep-groups” under different PGTs or the one who learns maximum from any one of these groups? The answer is yet to reveal itself.

The treasure hunt of final year MBBS is exhilarating. But it is also a journey which you embark on all by yourself, because in the quest of this treasure of academic success one loses the treasure of friendship they once had. So do not be surprised if friends start losing touch, keeping secrets or turning their faces when they see you. In a treasure hunt everyone tries to win after all, not considering the fact that everyone’s journey is different and not everyone around is a threat to their success. Sometimes one wonders, “Is it all worth it in the end? To lose so much for this?” Who can tell?

 

The Right to elect

 

With the on-going Lok Sabha Elections 2024, the right to vote, the right to choose is probably the talk of the hour. While everyone goes on about importance of choosing your own leaders, medical college authorities quietly smile as they rob the students of their right to elect. Whether it comes to choosing your Students’ Council members or your elective subjects, there is no need to bother yourself, because there is always someone else to do it for you, while you happily go on pretending that you did it yourself.

The beginning of final year brings a special period of one month called Elective Postings. The idea is to allow the students to spend 15 days each in gaining some extra knowledge about 2 subjects of their choice. When one hears this initially, it sounds interesting. Some students look at this as an opportunity to learn new thigs while some others secretly exclaim, “OMG! I don’t even have a favorite subject! What do I do now?” But then, one fine morning, there comes in a roster which strips the students’ right to elect their "elective" subjects by assigning them random subjects roll number wise. Not only that, the students also lose the right to choose their government as the elective posting starts the very next day after Professional exams end and there is no chance to go home.

While attendance is compulsory in these postings, most students take leaves according to their own wish, which is probably their way of protesting against this dictatorial act of stripping them of their fundamental right to elect. The real fun of course begins when students actually start showing up in various departments apparently for some weird thing called “Elective Postings” which nobody seems to have heard of. The professors, interns, juniors and residents stare at you as you aimlessly wander through the wards and OPDs for the first few days hoping to find patients for conditions like Surgical Site Infection or Narrow Complex tachycardia or Acute Flaccid Paralysis.

In some departments one finds HODs who care so much about these postings that the students find themselves standing every other in the HOD’s office trying to enumerate and explain causes and complications of pancytopenia or answering questions like “Who was the father of the great Bengali author Upendrakishore Roy Chowdhury?”

 However, there are some other departments where HOD himself remains occult- you visit everyday with the patience of a saint waiting to meet God, but to no avail. Until, suddenly one morning, a couple of days before your posting is supposed to end, you see him appearing through a fog of insecticide spray in the ward, like a hero, and you realize that your prayers have finally been answered. He then gives you a simple order to go and visit another teacher for further details, with a sweet smile and the advice not to spend too much time on electives. Just when you think you are going to have an easy end to your posting you are handed with the responsibility to collect, compile and present different case series on various clinical topics. And thus, the struggle changes from finding your HOD to finding your cases!

At the end of the posting one wonders, what was the use of doing all this? Well, there can be various answers to this question. These postings teach you a lesson of patience, a small taste of what awaits you in final year, introduces you to some really helpful residents, and most importantly, it teaches you to work with a team where all members do not share your enthusiasm or your work culture. The art of making people work without allowing them to realize that they are working is the key to a successful project.

Many of you must be wondering, this entire entry talks about clinical subject postings only. What about the non-clinical subjects? Well, that is a story for another day.