The moment I left my house to go to my college on the first day itself, I decided to sit back and enjoy the show i.e. First year of MBBS. Even when they showed us our table cadavers for the year, naked embalmed bodies, I never panicked and took my first pit-stop sportively. It took me an entire year to be thorough with the terms, ‘medial-lateral’, ‘anterior-posterior’, ‘proximal-distal’ and ‘coronal-sagittal’. I knew heart, brain, muscle, eye, leg, hand, lungs, stomach, liver, blood and air. New terms like: pectoralis major, acromion, clavicle, pollicis brevis, pancreas, haustra, ligament, sural, peroneal, sciatic, tibia, fibula, femur – almost every other word, was like learning some sophisticated new language which I hadn’t signed up for. Every day, I questioned my fate and had no idea what the hell I was doing, learning this crazy language.
As far as physiology was concerned, for a student like me who prepared for IIT-JEE, it should have been interesting because it’s just like physics, but with stupid terms like cardiac output, osmotic pressure and blood volume, I lost interest! To top this all, my physiology practicals teacher was a real-world doppelgänger of professor Trelawney. I was not in a nerd-mood to read Guyton, so I read AK Jain and my interest for physiology was on the far negative side of the learning scale. Sitting for my third internals of physiology, I looked around and couldn’t understand how everybody was writing stuff in the paper; I was blank regarding the subject. That is when I knew that my strategy had to change regarding the subject and took up the challenge to study physiology. So, for the first time when I realized the beauty of physiology it was 1 month before my finals exams!
Biochemistry: the only reason why I read this subject was because I liked it. I loved organic chemistry in PUC, so this was the only subject without crazy unknown words. I knew carbon, oxygen, bonds and reactions. Not that it was any great, but it was like home for a year. Even then it was vacation time for me, so I did not study this subject also, until it was a month for finals.
While I struggled to adjust to this new world, I never left a chance to dissect my table cadaver, filled with ascaris lumbricoides(another lunatic word) from oral cavity till large intestine! One among the many ‘first-time-in-my-life’ things, pricking my finger by myself for hematology experiments was super cool. It was incredible to look through the microscope to see my own red blood cells, leukocytes and platelets. 2 hours of biochemical reactions to test for urine glucose, ketones, proteins was refreshing but the viva which followed sucked the life out of me by the end of the day. All these beautiful experiences gave me hope, that MBBS might be better than I envisioned it to be!