Happy Vishu

I am finally beginning to like SPM. Before the whole lot of you disown me for crimes against medicos, let me tell you the reason. We have one professor (just one, mind you) in the entire department who is genuinely interested in the subject and can successfully impart his enthusiasm to students. SPM can be interesting, provided your teacher has enough imagination to transform something as boring as the national tuberculosis control programme into something a medico in stage IV NREM sleep can relate to. I have enough of gumption to be horrified the thought of specialising in SPM, but that might have something to do with the way internal medicine calls to me, to use a corny phrase.

The Department of Community Medicine is one of the few departments that owns a LCD projector, and so we are now slowly succumbing to that bane of the corporate world- Death by PowerPoint. Every single one of us is required to present a previously assigned topic. This means that in addition to my own, I am also ‘requested’ to make presentations for some of the hosteller girls, since they are ‘not computer literate anyway’, leaving me with plenty of free time. I made at least five presentations for the clinico pathological correlation classes in (duh!) Pathology last year, for people I barely know, and from the look of it, I think history is about to repeat itself. It is a pleasure to help out only people like Eli, who doesn’t wear a gloating smile, thinking “Sucker!” while I agonise over design templates.

Next weekend will be spent at the primary health centre in some rural area. I am so looking forward to SPM lectures at eleven in the night. (Yes, yes, that was sarcastic.) The department has also promised an Exciting! Trip! to apprehend mosquitoes, cultivated in the campus specifically for this purpose. Dengue haemorrhagic fever, here I come!

The bag I carry to college these days can hold an elephant, and still have space left over for the kitchen sink. I am expected to take the Park, and the freakin’ heavy SPM record everyday. My back is going on strike from Thursday. I wonder what they’ll say to that.

My senior, Vanilla Chechi* got engaged last week. She was one of the house surgeons we chummed up with during the third year Medicine postings. There is something about inserting a nasogastric tube at three in the morning into a patient who is screaming at the top of his voice that we are trying to kill him that cannot but make friends of the brave (and sleep-deprived) souls who are involved in the matter. She was radiantly happy, and we got to see many of our seniors we hadn’t met in a long time. And also her husband to be. Who seemed very nice. I hope you’ll be very happy together.

I googled my friend’s name (a long lost one), and I find her picture on the internet IN THE NEWS, people. Jealous Curious, I googled my own name, and found something about Henoch-Schönlein purpura. I didn’t know that I had done a research paper on HSP, or that I had tuberculosis. I eventually concluded (with a heavy heart) that it probably wasn’t me. This highly talented doctor from Delhi also seems to write poetry, and then moonlights as a nuclear physicist in her spare time. Just to cheer myself up, I googled Adorable Pancreas, and found that four of the ten results on the first page were about me. Ah, fame.

This google train of thought led me to the ‘peculiar google searches’ station. It’s been a while since I did that, don’t you think? No? All right, if you don’t want to know about “medico – long underwear” and “perineum impalement torture” (OWWW!) I won’t force you. Still no? Not even for “the technition did not have gloves on while looking for vains”? Perhaps “written sex stories by medicos” will do the trick. That one got me a number of hits. No? Well, your loss, I say.

Happy Vishu, all! I’m off to set the Vishukkani. Which means I will stand around making uselesssuggestions while Amma arranges the vegetables and gold in front of a picture of Krishna. My role cannot be trivialised. And I shall get lots of money tomorrow. Yay!

*It’s considered disrespectful to address older people by their name. Chechi is the term of address for someone old enough to be a sister, and original older sisters. We Indians have strong ideas regarding respect.