By Anu Dev
“I’m coming home… Tell the world I’m coming home” –I’m coming home by JCole featuring Skylar Grey
Well, the deed is done! I can finally say (shout?) that I’ve survived my first semester at med school. I’ve persevered through their gruelling exams – which are obviously designed to test one’s endurance more than anything – and lived to tell about it. It hasn’t been easy, I’ll tell you.
But I got through it by keeping my eyes on the prize. The prize being of course, home-cooked meals straight from mom’s kitchen, back in good, old Guyana.
But now that the semester’s all over, I can look back and reflect on what the last four months have been like.
What hits me first is; it really doesn’t feel like an entire four months has gone by. Einstein was right and time is relative.
Four months loomed ahead like an eternity at the beginning of the semester.
But now, I think that I can amend the saying “Time flies when you’re having fun” to something more along the lines of, “Time flies when you’re having mountains of arcane medical minutiae continuously flung into your face for four months straight”.
It’s less catchy I know, but it has that lovely jaded ring to it, which I think I’ve earned. The Hallmark people probably won’t be calling me up any time soon, though! But it hasn’t been all “burning the midnight oil” and having our noses “pressed to the grindstone”.
They have proper lighting in our dorms and there are more devious torture methods here than grindstones. Like sitting though PowerPoint presentations with over 150 slides. The mind wanders, I’ll tell you.
But in all seriousness, the semester has had its fun mo ments as well. It’s been incredible.
From attending the spectacular Diwali play by students to spending hours in the kitchen (I cook to relax) with my flat-mates just talking, I’ve enjoyed everything immensely.
And so, I’ve managed to settle into a routine. A campus that seemed so large and strange in the beginning is now home to me. I have different routes I take to class depending on my mood or the weather. If I’m running late and I can’t make my coffee run before classes, I’ve perfected the art of making a quick dash to Rituals in the little break we get in the middle of a lecture to ‘stretch our legs’. And I can tell you, I tend to take the act of ‘stretching my legs’ a bit more literally than I’m sure my lecturers intended – I’ve clocked in some of my best sprint times on those quick dashes for coffee. See, there are ways of keeping fit in med school!
But it was a strange feeling on Friday, locking up not only my dorm room, but the entire flat as well, since my flatmates from the other Caribbean islands had all decamped. Checking to make sure the lights were switched off, the windows were locked and that nothing was left plugged in. It felt very adult, actually.
And then, while driving away, while my mind was frantically checking and rechecking to figure out whether there was something I had forgotten to do or to pack, I finally understood why my mother gets so anxious about leaving the house unattended when we go off on vacation.
I can see I have nine gruelling semesters ahead of me, but this is where I want to be: exactly what I want to be doing with my life at this point in time. I did get those moments, even in the height of my pre-exam tensions, where I was just so enthralled by how complex and intricate (and delicately balanced) the human body is.
They were the moments where I was truly happy to be learning the things I was learning. And I hope to have more of those moments – with increasing frequency and duration. It’s those moment, I guess, that make it worth going through the grind med school is shaping up to be – those moments of clarity where I remember all of the reasons why I chose to do medicine.