Man Vs Second Year

A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO SURVIVING SECOND YEAR
(Sound of a chopper droning away into the distance, 2 random guys materialise in front of you)
“Hi there! My name is Robbins, and this is Cotran and we’ll be your guide in 2nd year. Why are you making that face? You’ll need us you nerdy loser. You thought passing Anatomy was tough? Let us tell you what second year is like; It’s like walking the whole 5,500,000 square kilometers of muddy slush in the Amazon Rainforest. With a pulled hamstring. AND it’s completely dark.
Oh you had to pee? What’s that? It hurts when you pee? Add schistosomiasis to the list. Thats a pretty accurate description of what the next 3 semesters is going to be like”.

A very disheveled and sleep deprived second year med student opens a survival guide. He obviously doesn’t know what to do. Robbins and Cotran try to ask him his name, try to loosen him up, but all he can say is the Kreb’s cycle. Robbins keeps telling the kid that the origin of Iliopsoas doesn’t matter, that all you need to know in biochem was how to spell s-u-g-a-r-s.

It’s interesting to see the kid go through all the five Kubler-Ross stages of grief really quick, because he had to psych himself into studying more useless crap for second year- like the death receptor signalling pathway in Fas ligand mediated model of apoptosis.

“Here’s the survival guide, kid. We’re out.”
The following are the survival tips found in the guide, here’s hoping fresh first year graduate survives it. Will he make it? Won’t he? Stay tuned to find out.
1. Use your pathology textbook as a weight. This way you can bench press a few sets so your muscles won’t atrophy in the next five months.
No seriously, it’s not like you have any physical activity sans sifting through dusty copies of Forensic Med textbooks. For real though, who needs a textbook for Forensic Med when you have CSI?

2. That bitch lab assistant in Microbiology gave you the Albert’s stain?
No problem. Drop that slide really close to her face.
Who you tryna give Diphtheria to, you punk?
Not me that’s who. (drop microscope for effect)

3. Walk the fuck away from every resident who’s trying to push an NG tube into a wailing infant’s nose. The resident will make you do it and what’s worse is he’ll patronise you because he thinks it’s a ‘teaching experience.’
Re-read above point for Foleys too.

4. Don’t bitch and moan about how long the lab diagnosis of TB is. When you finally get to studying parasitology, just the word Diphyllobothrium latum will give you nightmares.
On the off chance you don’t read TB (because it’s too long and you think you already have it and your silence is taken as tacit agreement) write ‘green coloured sputum’ in delicate, cursive handwriting with curlicues a couple of times and that’s all you need to know about lab diagnosis.

5. Scrunching your nose during autopsy class in Forensic Med is a huge no no.
You don’t want to end up being asked only about unnatural sexual offences in the viva.
Don’t think you can file a sexual harassment suit. It’s in the fucking textbook. (Cue evil music)

6. Relationships? Bitch please.
That cute boy in class keeps asking to “borrow your notes on clear cell carcinoma”? Sucker punch him. He wants to go out with you.
Did that hottie just text you saying she wants to chill? Block her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And Tumblr, if you’re one of those people.
The time you will spend making out and holding hands is time you could’ve spent sucking up to everyone in the pharmacology department because so help me God, I have no fucking idea why a normal person would know what the mechanism of action of Denileukin diftitox is. I did a quadruple take just to check if i spelt that right.

7. The trick to giving your best in exams is sleeping in the library the night before, so you don’t waste time in doing peasantly things like waking up and showering.
Contraindication to this is sleeping with all your textbooks on your lap. We know you think embracing them in a cherishing hug will help you remember better through osmosis. But this will only give you neuropraxia.

Therefore running to the examination hall with neuropraxia will lead to tripping and falling and ACL tearing. You have to remember to man the fuck up and take that exam because even if you walk with a limp for the rest of your life, you can tell everyone the story about how you passed pathology inspite of passing out from the pain. (Cue bitch hair flip)

8. Make an important promise to yourself. If you ever have a baby, you will never love it more than how much you love your notes right now.
Your notes won’t scream and bawl in the middle of the night. Your notes wont say fuck off when you ask it why it’s texting that boy who’s stuck in junior year of high school since 11 years. Your daughter might ask you for a sweet 16 for which you need to sell a kidney and then some spare change, your notes won’t even contain the number 16. Only 15+1. It’s never 16 causes of hypertension in children. It’s 15 causes , plus one unnumbered cause scribbled at the margin.

9. It’s my birthday! Shots for everybody! (Quietly review Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome)
Merry Christmas! (Now’s the best time to memorise drugs used for Type-2 Diabetes)
Happy New Year! (You currently have a GCS of 3. Note to self: Study up GCS)
Exam week! (Quiz time : How much REM sleep do you need to juuuust avoid seizures?)
It’s results day! (Memorise flowchart of treatment of Status Epilepticus)
You passed pathology! (Note to self : Research opioid effect of passing on a stressed brain)
You barely made it in microbiology! (At least you passed. Drop a few more microscopes to celebrate)
Did you pass pharmacology? (2nd generation cephalosporins – cefaclor, cefoxitin, cefprozil….)
Step away from the books and enjoy sleep for the first time in a year and a half.
Forensic Med! (I can make your murder look like an accident)

10. Tell everyone you’re going to fail every exam even though you know you’re going to pass.
This ensures that everyone around you has really low expectations of you and when you finally do pass, you will seem like a huge dick.
Hey, being a dick is better than repeating 2nd year again.
So don’t mess with your mojo.
Repeat after me- “Dude my exam tanked. I’m going to fail for sure. Hold on I’m looking at Mc Donald’s hiring requisites.”
After your results are out, your friends asked you how you missed top mark by 1 point, you say -“The trick is writing ‘green coloured sputum’ really neatly. Bitches (pathologists) love green coloured sputum.”

Oh and for fresh first year graduate, he passed second year. Only because he stuck to the rules in the survival handbook.
Man Vs Second Year, now in a store near you.

STRESS + STRESS + STRESS SQUARED = RESULTS DAY

What is stress exactly? Why do we even feel stress? What is the need to be stressed out and take selfies for Instagram while we’re stressed (because #examstress is trending, duh?)

I have no idea what stress is even though I studied Physiology in first year, so let’s look at what Professor Wikipedia says.

Stress :Physiological or biological stress is an organism’s response to a stressor such as an environmental condition or a stimulus. Stress is a body’s method of reacting to a challenge.

Now that we know that stress means a set of words that make sense only to professors in Physiology, I’m going to modify this definition to the spectrum of emotions I felt today because of my results coming out.

Stress- Stress is a complex emotion of gut wrenching sorrow and madness mixed with an intense urge to eat ice-cream but immediately wanting to throw up after, and contemplating your entire life because you can’t even deal with the stress of an exam, what about the TB that’s hiding in your lungs because of that patient who won’t stop coughing on you? What then? Will you die from the stress of a positive ZN stain?

Okay I got a little carried away. I don’t know why result day has to be so fucking frustrating and anaphylactic.

I was sitting in front of my computer all day waiting for the damn page to load, but it wouldn’t. Because the university wouldn’t upload the results. Like what is that? Do I have to pledge into a brotherhood and spill some blood to know if I passed or not? Because I’d do anything to know my result.

Second year was such a blur! Because most of the time you’re going to the hospital to learn case taking so you don’t have to learn it in 3rd year like a loser ( I mean, come on). And most of the classes are bunked and spent at that shit ice-cream place nobody goes to but you don’t mind because you probably already have Rotavirus. What’s another microorganism ?

So, naturally, the last few months before exams are spent desperately making notes of Robbins so you don’t have to read that monster of a textbook again, plus just trying to remember the term ‘Flexner-Wintersteiner rosettes’ is spending half of the energy that your body stores as reserve fat.

Whenever I was studying systemic pathology,I’d always favourite a few organs like the heart, or the stomach. Because their pathologies are understood easily and I don’t need to rip my hair out in sheer perplexity. But there was a lot of hair ripping when I studied lung.

I absolutely hate lung. Cannot stand it. I mean I know I need it to breathe and produce my ACE, other than that the pathology of lung is a punk ass bitch. You can liken it to that shady guy at the end of the street trying to sell you a fake rolex watch when you’ve told him no on multiple occasions. In the pathology of lung, everything has cough as a symptom, everything causes goblet cell hyperplasia, everything causes stiffening/fibrosis of alveolar walls.

But that creepy dude at the end of the street got to me. Lung bitch-slapped me in my final exam and appeared as a case of bronchogenic carcinoma. I was quickly trying to trial run whatever I knew about bronchogenic carcinoma in my head before putting it on paper. It went like this :

“Okay, so bronchogenic carcinoma. Smoking is obviously a causative factor.
Cough?
Fibrosis?
Goblet cell hyperplasia?
I remember reading something about oat cell. What a bizarre name for a type of cancer. 
I think this will do. I will write the same thing over and over again.”
( Reads question again – They meant adenocarcinoma type of Lung cancer)

“Oh well I’m fucked.
I’ll just write the words ‘mucus’ and ‘glands’ and ‘secreting’ a bunch of times and then finish it off with tear stains.”

But I ended up passing pathology! In spite of writing the word mucus 19,000 times. I wasted my time worrying I’d fail so much that my hair started to fall out.
So heres a list of do’s and dont’s for second year :

Do- Study pathology of lung, even though you’d rather play Angry Birds.
Don’t – Don’t think you’ll only be questioned on Diabetes. Although this extra large donut with double frosting does look pretty good…

Do – Guess diabetes on every differential during hospital rounds.
Don’t – Curl into a ball to cry in front of the attending when he destroys your confidence, slowly back away till he can’t see you, then retreat to foetal position.

Do – Hit refresh every second on the results page of your university on results day even though you know the guy who’s supposed to uploading them to the website is too busy picking his nose.
Don’t – Write your obit already, you have time till 3 pm.

Do – Tell your parents you’re going to fail so they have really low expectations.
Don’t – Tell them “I told you so!” if you actually fail. Unless you want to get disowned or something.

Do – Cut some classes at least and go to that shit ice-cream place. You can graduate from utterly, extremely, pathetically depressed to a little fatter, but less depressed version of yourself.
Don’t – Forget to get that Hep-A vaccine!

Do – You should be studying right now.
Don’t – Hey, look! S5 of GoT is out!