Life cycle of a Med Student

Current Af(Un-)fairs

Politics. I never really understood much of it. And if I realised that something was terribly wrong with the state's political scene, just imagine what magnitude of ugliness it must have been in. But like they say, something good comes out of everything. Something good came out of this too. I realised I'm not alone in being a political ignoramus. I realised I had all these politicians on my side. I'm pretty sure they have no idea what their job description is too. Anyhoo, so after all that drama, we have a new chief minister now. And just for the record, I want to add that we all feel perfectly safe knowing that he was elected based on religious back up and not based on his thoughts for the state's progress or any such crap. Thank god. I was worried.
The Times Of India featured an article a couple of days back called "Drought be damned, ministers focus on vaastu compliance". Apparently our new chief minister, a self-proclaimed atheist, spent the whole of his first day rearranging his room according to vaastu and numerology and performing rituals. Yes, we are a patient lot. When we've waited through all your drama, whats another few days? Take your time please. We're not in any hurry for progress. So what if those roads need to be fixed and the metro still seems like a distant fantasy? We can adjust. So apparently, according to the vaastu of the Vidhana Soudha, rooms facing west are most in demand, rooms facing east are the second best, followed by those facing north. I bet I know what's last on the list. Rooms facing the drought-ridden villages!

Olympics is round the corner. The only two people who have managed to put India on the world map in a sport other than cricket (which I think is supremely admirable. Respect.) have been in the news for all the wrong reasons. They've been fighting ugly, like a bunch of school girls, about who they want to play tennis-tennis with. Paes wants to play with Bhupathi. Bhupathi wants to play with Bopanna. Paes got mad, so they gave him Sania. Sania got mad, so they made her mother the team manager so she can accompany her daughter to the Olympics. (Team manager? Really?) Wow, talk about ass-kissing! Anyway in the middle of all this Paes was asked to play with a 300-odd ranked guy Vishnuvardhan. Paes got wild and said "I don't even know if he has grass court shoes." To which Vishnu replied "Yes, I do have grass court shoes. May be he wants me to be ready, equipment-wise, before the game. I think he is just concerned." Right. I'm sure that's just it. Either this guy is his village idiot, or a genius at sarcasm. I just can't figure out which.
Anyway, I, like the billion other Indians want Paes and Bhupathi to play together too, in the name of the country. So team up. Or not. Either way, don't wash your dirty tennis whites in public!
More on Olympics, Karan Johar who said "If i was asked a few days back whether I would go to the Olympics, I would have said "No Way"" got a pass to go, while the family of the players- badminton,squash,wrestlers,rowers, all of them- get no pass. Why do they have to go all the way to London when they can watch their children on television from the comforts of their home? Fair enough.

#If you don't like something, change it. If you can't, whine about it.

Medicosapien

Consider this. You are travelling by bus. A mother and her child walk in. Her child has an obvious disease, with atypical facial features- say a broad forehead, a large protruding tongue, head tilted to one side, ears set wrong, a saddle nose, bent elbows or knees, missing a finger or two, with obvious behavioural abnormalities. They find themselves a seat and they sit down. Now, everyone in the bus stares at the child. It's just normal human tendency. But there's always going to be that one guy or girl who stares more than the average person. And that, my friend, is how you identify a medico. Our intentions are not wrong. But we can't help but look at the features and mentally go through the volumes and volumes of different books that we have studied,  trying to remember all those colourful picture palettes in the books that we spent hours staring blankly into, the tongue-twister-esque names for those diseases that we learnt fighting our sleep ( these diseases will be referred to as weird-named syndromes hereafter for the purpose of keeping it simple. If you are a medico, you will understand why), all in an attempt to diagnose what condition the child is suffering from. It's not a requisite, it's kind of an obsession. Especially because it's a real challenge. Most of these weird-named syndromes have the same features with the differentiating feature between two being a crooked little finger in one or an absent palmar crease in the other. Yes, we look for palmar creases too. Sometimes, we are just glorified astrologers. When the average layman wants to go talk to the mother and lend her his sympathy, all the medico is itching to do is ask the mother whether her child's urine smells like maple syrup or fishy. What does maple syrup smell like, you ask? I have absolutely no idea either, but I need my patient to know it so i can clinch a diagnosis of some weird-named syndrome. It's funny the things we could use for diagnosis. It reminds me of an episode on Scrubs, where JD and Turk sing a song. It's called Everything comes down to poo, where they go on to explain how, and i quote, "from the top of your head to the sole of your shoe, we can figure out whats wrong with you by looking at your poo". They have lines like "Our No.1 test is your No.2" and believe it or not, "All across the nation, we trust in defaecation". If you haven't seen that episode, watch it today. It's hilarious. Season 6, Episode 6. And what do you know, it's a musical too! Must watch.

So I came across this word somewhere- Medicosapien. And I thought it was just perfect. We are a different species. For instance, our sleep-wake rhythms (called circardian rhythm) has nothing to do with whether it's day or night outside, our stomachs learn to go long periods without food, our threshold for disgust is quite high- a layman gets disgusted to look at his child's poo when changing its diaper, we put our finger inside random people to manually evacuate their faeces. And we have lunch right after, too. We talk differently, we walk differently, we even think differently. We torture ourselves, mentally and physically, and weirdly, are happy to do it too. We've definitely been wired differently. I guess that's what makes us us!
To all the insomniacal psychomegalomaniacs a.k.a doctors out there, Happy Doctors Day! (I know it was a couple of weeks back, but in my defence, my blog didn't exist then.)

Stay hungry, Stay up. You're on call.

Happy feet

Yesterday was a big day. My Bharatanatyam performance was broadcast on television. I have been learning for the past 15 years, so all i can think of to say is It's about time! I don't know if watching myself on television constitutes the definition of an out-of-body experience, but it definitely did feel like one. All I could think of was how much I have grown. And I also realised something else. Once a performer, always a performer. It doesn't matter how many years you've not been in practice, but put some lights and some audience in front of a performer, and their face automatically lights up, and their legs begin to move.

 Dance is neither my profession nor just a hobby. It's my passion. It's one of those things that gets your adrenaline rushing through your body like there's no tomorrow. It's that which makes you physically beaten, sweat more than your deodorants can handle, your heart beat at a rate faster than you can count, your breath shallower than Hugh Hefner, and yet amazingly give you a sense of calm, peace, content and true happiness.


Why do I like Bharatanatyam? When you dance, you live in a different world. As used and misused as this phrase has been, it is, in fact, about becoming a different character. It's all about the sense of escape. For the one hour that I dance, I'm not the average person struggling through the personal pressures of creating a career and the societal pressures of creating a family. I'm the only daughter of the King whose beauty can only be described as divine, or the ardent devotee of the Lord who spends all her days in His worship. For that hour, my biggest worry is why my lover won't talk to me despite my best efforts of trying to reach out to him, and not whether i will get a good subject to pursue my post-graduation in. A gift for my loved one would mean some hand-made garlands and sandalwood paste, as opposed to emptying my father's bank accounts for the latest gadgets or jewellery. An outing with friends would mean going to the forest to collect water, and not fighting with the rickshaw-wallas to get me to the mall. Yes, it is just this false sense of escape from the true world that I really enjoy. Dance makes me schizophrenic in a socially acceptable way. It is a peaceful, albeit transient paradise. Because I know that once I step out of my dance class, a gush of thick, black smoke will hit my face from a moving bus and bring me back to reality.

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

And so it begins again...

I am a 23 year old girl. A doctor by profession. Currently unemployed. By choice (not that i tried any other way to know what could have been). I have an opinion about everything, regardless of whether i understand the topic or not. I am not the kind of person that sees the glass as half empty, neither do I see it as half full. I am the kind that wonders what the hell the argument is about and drinks what's in the glass anyway. If you get high, awesome. If not, move on to the next couple of fools arguing over their half full/empty glass and drink that! Life's too short to be wasted in argument when you could be drinking and feeling ecstatic. Pun totally intended.

Writing and I have an on-again, off-again relationship. We are like Ross and Rachael from Friends. All I can hope for is we too end up together finally. Every story needs a happy ending. I just hope I don't get too lazy or too busy to write ours. The last post on my previous blog was written 3 years back. Now that's one long writer's block! That blog was called Frozen thoughts. From Frozen thoughts to Loaded diaper, I think I've grown a lot. Doesn't it show?  

Yes, I decided to call my blog Loaded Diaper. It does not mean I'm full of shit. I repeat. It does not mean I'm full of shit. It just means that I have some unloading to do, which I'll be doing here. Mostly, of the aforementioned shit, but hopefully something more too. 

Here's to writing, to all the lazy writers in the world, and to the term "writer's block", our saving grace.