My First Ophthal OP

Dad fell ill, and I had to cut 3 days of posting. Bunking isn't a hardship, even though I like the subject. The only subject I hate bunking is Medicine. Ah, there's nothing like Medicine. The air conditioned lecture hall, bed allotment, our veranda committee, sneaking off to the canteen, meeting the entire unit there, from chief to the house surgeons, taking cases, showing off the stethoscopes, case presentations... God, I enjoyed myself so much. It isn't gonna be the same in final year. You know, I strongly suspect I was rambling.

Wake up at 7-30, ablutions, dressing, posting breakfast, and yada yada yada later, I'm in the Ophthal lecture hall, which, by the way, looks like a schoolroom, complete with charts on the wall (Anatomy of the Eyeball). I was kinda nervous, since I hadn't seen a single patient (10 seconds staring at Bitot's spots on the first day does not count).

Anyway, the PG student who took the class (Anatomy and Diseases of the Pupil) had the same name as me! She was stunningly beautiful too! ;) Must be the name.

I decided to pay attention, and got slightly lost. 3 days of absence does matter. Physiology was never my strong point, but it was better than my knowledge of Anatomy. I still maintain I passed the bloody subject due to Moore (he certainly gets my vote for entrance to heaven, if they take votes for that). Anyway, the class wasn't too tough to follow. Light reflex, near reflex, pathways, abnormalities in pupillary shape, size, number. Yeah, number. I was quite surprised to hear that one eye can have more than 1 pupil. That's abnormal, of course, and fortunately, quite rare.

Skoda, Arch, Lotus (Lotus is a guy, for those of you who aren't batch mates) and I went into some specialty clinic only to get chased out because still-wet-behind-ears on their 1st Ophthal posting students don't know enough basics to understand the specialty, and were advised to move to the OP, where they were all apparently awaited us with eagerness. Yeah, right!

At the OP, we were ignored by everyone. Really busy place, with a lot of doctors sitting behind a small table, about a couple of feet apart from each other, and a large crowd of patients. Most of the doctors were surrounded by our batch mates, the half that has posting in the OP today.One sir, a madam and the unit chief were the only ones who were free. The unit chief was out of the question, we were too scared. We hesitated between the sir and the madam, and finally moved to the sir, who I thought I'd once consulted for my headache. Turns out I was right, but thankfully, he didn't remember me. The four of us stood behind him, and standard medico OP procedure (bending over, straining to catch what the prof is saying, craning our necks to get a look at the patient and the lesion) followed. Most of the patients had hardly sat on the chair and described their illness when Sir made a quick diagnosis and sent them off. The guy's a genius!

Our moment arrived when a patient came with pterygium. Seeing our blank faces, he made Arch get her text and read out the bit about pterygium. I finally know what it is. And that's not all, I know the causes, the clinical features, the pathology, and the treatment. Yay for me!

We saw lots of conditions today, apart from pterygium, but didn't go into as much detail as pterygium. Chalazion, pterygium, cataract, hordeolum, mucus fishing syndrome, and GOK what else.

At 11, we said we had class and went off to the lecture hall. A presented the case, iridocyclitis. We And then we heard there was to be no theory class in the afternoon, so we all went home. Ans so ends the tale of my first day in the Ophthal OPD.