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?