Those enchanted four and half years

Chapter 19

While we were busy celebrating and having fun our syllabus was also progressing rapidly.

In Pathology, we were taught the changes occurring in the body during the progress of various diseases. We had to observe the gross specimens of various infected organs, study their microscopic features on slides, and diagnose various diseases. This was much more tough than it sounds. To me, all infected organs looked alike, and all slides looked the same under the microscope. My opinion was that all pathological terminologies, supposedly visible, such as 'necrosis, 'caseation', 'spindle cells' etc etc..., were all imaginary. Of course nobody valued my opinion, and I had to mug up all these terms. Another observation I made was that the pathologist are obsessed with food. They would always compare the appearance of some infected organ to some delicious dish. They even gave such nomenclatures to that disease pathology for e.g., pus in amoebic liver abscess was called 'Anchovy sauce appearance.' The cut surface of fibroadenoma, a disease of breast tissue, looked like 'cut-cabbage' to pathologists. Hydatidiform mole, a disease of female reproductive organ uterus, was described as 'grape – like'. Endometrial hyperplasia, another disease of the uterus, was described as 'Swiss cheese appearance.' One day during Patho practical, Arun placed a diseased liver specimen in front of me. "Tell me what does it look like?"

"I don't know," I said. "it looks yuck!"

"Doesn't it resemble chocolate cake?" From that day, I lost my appetite for cakes.

I was, of course, not the only one who was so bad at identification of organs and their diseases. Pavan was worse. One day, during a tutorial, the tutor brought an infected brain specimen. Though it looked very different from normal brain, the basic brain structure was still identifiable. However, I don't know how or why, Pavan identified it as 'kidney'. The tutor was so angry, he said, "Right, this is what you have in place instead of your brain!"

Microbiology was even worse. We had to learn 'n' number of bacteria, viruses, parasites, the structure of each, their living habits, how they survived, how they died, how they caused diseases and the details of these diseases. We even had to identify the micro organisms from the appearance of their colonies grown in growth media in petri-dishes. Still worse, we had to mug up characteristics of various such growth media, their colour, which organisms grew in them, blah blah blah....! The list was unending. And worst were the names of the micro organisms. I still don't know why they could not simply name them as 'bacteria A', 'virus B' and so on! How difficult it is to remember names like 'Rickettsia Ptsutsugamushi', 'Wuchereria Bancrofti', 'Clostridium Welchi', 'Escherichia Coli', 'Salmonella Paratyphi'!

One day, in microbiology practical, we were taught stool examination. We were given stool samples (God knows whose!) and we were supposed to prepare slides of these samples, and then search for the eggs of parasites under microscopes. Sneha had brought her microbiology journal which was neatly covered, which she had completed through the night. It was placed on our working table, as we had to make entries about which parasite eggs were visible and their number. God knows how he did it, Ravi spilled the entire stool sample on her journal! Poor Sneha, she was so furious; had the tutor not intervened, she would have strangulated Ravi!

Pharmacology was the father of biochemistry. In Pharmacology, we had to learn zillions of drugs, their chemical structures, mechanisms of action, what effects they had on various body systems, how they were metabolized, their side effects, interactions with other drugs, their indications, contraindications...And all of this was so volatile, it would just fly off from the brain! It was very difficult to remember all of these characteristics of each and every drug. So we had collected some common features of all drugs, to bluff whenever we forgot specific characteristics of that drug. For e.g. almost all drugs cause nausea and vomiting as a side effect. So whenever we could not remember any specific side effect of a given drug, we would end up writing nausea, vomiting!