Sunday, September 18, 2005

Tales from medical school part II

So the friend has come home after a long time, and there is a lot I have missed blogging about. He is so bloody hungry for home cooked food, but could not eat much of it. Apparently, a few cockroaches were discovered in the mess in their hostel, which was actually a good thing because they got good food for a few days after that. I don;t see what the problem with cockroaches is, and neither does he. everyone has cockroaches in their kitchens athome. even the bloody ambanis cannot escape roaches, so whats the BIG deal if it shows up in a mess. Anyway, the food from the mess made everyone go down with diarrhea, but now everyone is used to it.
There are too many cadaver stories to relate, but basically, full of formalin, and bodies hanging about all over the place, where they do weird things on the first few days with the cadavers. Like, a pretty common dare was to grab the dead guy's genitals. The genitals are pretty withered and shriveled, so it's grosser than doing that to live people, which is also, somehow, a common trend. A lesser dare perhaps was to shake hands with dead people. Apparently, the palms, having a thicker skin than the rest of the body, dries up and flakes out, so it is a VERY disgusting thing.
Also, those who get female bodies are exteremely unlucky because of the excessfat that leaks out everywhere, and you can see basically nothing of what you are doing. body parts (mainly the skin) are taken away for weird dares, pranks and bets, that are best left unexplained. All such activities are to be kept under wraps, because if word gets out on what people actually do with dead bodies, then very few would donate themselves to the noble cause of science. For example, you would not want your dead body to be an experiment which culimnates in the fact that folded up skin lining up the insides of your shoes is likely to make your feet feel more comfortable.
I asked him if they treaded the bodies as those of actual people. He looked scared for a moment, and the next second he was relating even more gory stories. So i knw his answer. Basically, you need to be dehumanized to study medicine. That's why it is so difficult to be a good doctor.
The funny thing is the system of division of the course. We have a semester system, where each semester is for six months, and we have to live through six sems and three years in BMM. System is slightly different in Med school. For example, we have first years, second years and third years, or your FY, SY and Ty. They have things like thrid-fourth and second-first.
So they have what can loosely be termed as semesters, but aren't actually semesters, lets just say parts. So the first... first year has... three parts of six months each, although the first year is not a year. The second year, has three parts, and the third year has four. Each part is six months long, and is termed as a year. BAsically, all units are termed as years, in spite of the fact that none of them are years. So you can be in third-fourth year or the third-third year and not be a year behind your classmates, but only six months or so.
The good thing is that if you fail a year, you don't lose a year, you only lose a year.

There is also this thing known as saturday night syndrome, where the arms get temporarily paralysed. There is a long winded explanation for this. The syndrome is named after those who party on a satruday night, get drunk, sit down on a park bench with their arms over the bench \, Sitting like this for long can lead to the saturday night paralysis.
Cool eh?

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