FIRST YEAR MBBS: 2006
Ugh! The title sounds morbid, right?
Well, that’s how a first-year Medical student thinks. They make friends while dissecting those cadaveric bodies. They eye the one's they like more than just a friend by being in that room that smelled of dead and formalin. Trust me when I say more than half of my batch fell in love over the dead bodies. Like LITERALLY! When I could barely get myself to stand in that trauma room, people winked and smiled and stared and fell in love! That is how our first year started.
Anatomy was and still is a very important subject for someone who pursues medicine. Even if you don’t end up being a Surgeon/ an Orthopedician or even a medic at the end of it, yo still need to know what bones to break. Right? Aaah.. bad joke! Well, my sense of humor hits the snooze button at times.
So yes, Anatomy was one of the challenging subjects other than Physiology and Biochemistry (which I still hate). The whole dissection part and knowing the human body from scratch declared Anatomy the winner of the scariest subject!
The dissection hall was on the 3 rd floor of my college. It was a good college and the infrastructure and all but we missed having a campus. When we started, the only thing that counted as a part of the ‘campus’ was the cold coffee shop right opposite the main entrance of the college and Anna’s shop (read tapri) which sold the best omelet for breakfast. But the first years who, hardly had time to pick their options from the ‘’wide’’ range of options, usually ate in the mess. Not to forget, it was mandatory too. We hated how the food was only palatable for days when parents would visit or some hot shot university person was on the campus. But we also managed to survive on and like mess food when it would rain incessantly during the months of July and August and we could not step out of our hostel. Also the french toast on Thursday’s and nonveg once a week made us happy. Only a foodie can manage to talk about food In the middle of a dissection hall description. Ha!
Moving back to the 3rd-floor official slaughter room. So the dissection hall was like a big hall with wall-size windows, opening to the view of our hostel. We were so excited in those white aprons that we were supposed to wear during our time in the college. We were Future Doctors. We clicked pictures and lot of us had them as our profile pictures on Orkut for months! Yeah..Orkut was the Facebook back in 2006. Some of us also sent it to our parents to let them have another proud moment, especially the one’s with no existing doctors in their families till now. We wore the white aprons, with that holy mark on our foreheads (most of my batchmates had them) and paraded down the hall, with pomp and show. Till we could smell something rotten and dead! It was ghastly. The odor and the sight. Not to forget, a lot of fainted too!
Our initial 3 days of Dissection hours, which by the way were just before lunch and I had lost my appetite for almost a week, were designated for us to just sit around and get accustomed to the ‘feel’ of the hall, of the dead bodies on the tables, the rotten egg smell. It was Formalin, the chemical used to preserve human tissue after its no more viable. So we had to get used to all of that. I remember how Ankita could not swallow the gum she had chewing before this hour of accustomization. We sat on those cold revolving uncomfortable stools which were laid around the table which had a body on. For a lot of us, for me who had no idea what this was going to be like and had no family dinner discussions about the medical study, was pale. I was pale. I did not faint, though the smell was nauseous. But I was pale and numb.
The batch of 150+ was further divided into small batches for all practical purposes and I hated that I was not in one batch with my friends. Though thankfully, our dissection tables were adjacent. Ankita could see me sitting there and staring at the body with a dead look in my eyes. She came from a family of doctors so she knew what this whole thing was about. her elder sister was one herself and so she had come all prepared. So she came from behind and with no intentional reason to freak me out, actually freaked me out when she whispered ‘Nimbu, are you ok’ on my ear! I yelled! And my voice echoed. Everyone was looking at me and I was paler than before Ankita laughed out loud! Oh, she laughed real loud, she still does that. Freak me out at weird moments. And it's cute, unlike that moment when it wasn’t and I was stunned. Then she came over and apologized while she still giggled at my expressions and told me it’s a part of learning and we’ll be kicking ass soon! Aah, that was a relief. That we’ll be fine.
We skipped lunch, obviously. College got over at 5 and then the evening drowned in buying things for the room and finishing some first-day chores. We finally called our day at midnight and slept. Everyone slept but me. The smell of formalin was stuck in my lungs FOR CRYING OUT LOUD and I could not get it out of my system despite showering thrice in the day! And also, the moment I would close my eyes, the face of the body would appear. And I knew, my life was screwed! See dead people in the day and then dream about them too. yes, it was over! I slept after various failed attempts only to wake up to another day of accustomization and horror!
After 3 days, I kind of made peace with it. Such was going to be my life for at least this one year. And it started getting better. Though we smelled of formalin all the time! But now, it was part of us. The rotten smell and the bodies, they were part of us. They taught us to be what we are today.
Doctors.
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