'Never fret over an OSPE afterwards,
only before”
Great words said by a great person, my elder sister. :D
The panic I experienced while diving
for my cell phone as it fell into a pool of mud, or while running for
the last free sandwich, or even while running away from the
Dissection Hall for my precious life...(rewind and imagine all in
slow motion :| )...was nothing as compared to the panic that enjoyed
a roller coaster ride to and fro in my G.I.T. ONE DAY BEFORE MY
ANATOMY OSPE.
For the sake of a few minutes that we
would spend in front of scary specimens, trying to make wild guesses,
we dedicated an entire day to exploring the world of Anatomy. From
morning to night, “Have you had something to eat?”, “NO”...
“Do you want a sweater?”, “NO”... “Have you brushed your
teeth?”... “NO...wait, what?”
The night brought no peace with itself.
I jerked around in bed, finally deciding that I wanted to revise the
gross part again. The atlas seemed to be playing games with me,
hiding the very labeling I wanted to check. Before I finally found
sleep in a corner of my eye, I wished for a miraculous photographic
memory.
It was like a dream. The voices around
me were fading into thin air with every minute, a sense of
derealization was slowly taking over, carrying me in its heavenly
arms and shielding my eyes from the sharp golden daylight that
illuminated half of my face. I was staring right into the Sun. My
body was numb. I reminded myself that my theory exam hadn't gone
quite okay. It was do or die for me. And as a matter of fact, I
already felt like a corpse, feelingless and expressionless, staring
blankly through transparency into my scary thoughts.
I was the third one to go. The bell
rang and my mind instinctively pushed me forwards to the first
specimen. Then the second, the third. It was a queer feeling, this
was quite like the first OSPE of my life. Yet, the feeling of
derealization was new. The feeling of walking over a cotton-cloud and
life suddenly losing track of time...two minutes were two hours when
I had to wait to go to the next specimen, and the same was two
seconds when I was still struggling at a station. Life had turned
into an unskilled wizard, swishing its wand this way and that, not
knowing what the consequences were to be. Life was rash-driving and
not knowing where it's going, depending ninety nine percent on sheer
luck. The wheel was out of hand. That wheel, a Force had taken in its
command. And I was a puppet to my luck.
I came out gasping from the same door I
had entered through. However, this was not the end of suffering.
Level Two was still to go. It started after a one hour torture of
sitting silently on the provided stools. My butt was frozen and I
shifted about awkwardly in my seat, hoping to get some warm blood
throbbing. The girl beside me turned to give me a skeptical look. I
cheesed her a big, toothy smile. I couldn't understand how everyone
could be so stiff, so silent, so patient a few minutes before an
exam, I had imagined two dozens of fat chickens puck-pucking and
flapping about in a pen haphazardly. THAT was my idea of a scene
before an Anatomy OSPE. Here, even crickets were silent. Even
coughing was going to get attention. The ironic part is, I always
have the urge to cough when the air is still and silent. Oh, destiny.
The bell rang. It was a race of memory
and time. And so far, time seemed to be winning. I would just stare
into the microscope, wondering whether I'd seen something like that
before, trying to recognize the ever so tiny spots as some kind of
epithelium. I mean, SERIOUSLY?? I wanted to turn the objectives to
power x40. What IS wrong with x40? I think they just don't want the
poor kids to pass. Evil, despicable paper-pattern-setters.
One minute, TRRING. Another
minute, TRRING. Come on people! Throw away the microscopes and
LET'S PLAY MUSICAL CHAIRS. I'd be luckier at that than
guessing the names of the pink brides in sixty seconds.
My long slide was Cerebellum...I
couldn't really think of a suitable viva related to it. I asked a few
girls around. By the time a short, sophisticated examiner entered the
room in a crisp, royal blue formal suiting, my heart was pumping
blood like a maniac. Every hair of his beard was in perfect place,
and classy silk rested in the breast pocket of his American style
coat. Nevertheless, he was a poker face. As he came to me, with the
same glassy expression that he'd put up for the previous students, I
decided to face him boldly.
“So what is cerebellum?” He asked
in a low, smooth tone.
Damn!
I thought. I didn't see THAT coming.
“Ugh...”
I gazed at him, he gazed back. I gazed at him, he gazed back, I
gazed...okay, enough :-/ . So I slowly started to tell him all I
knew. “It is a part of the CNS...” and
I decided that was all I knew. The awkward gazing game started again.
He smiled at last, and asked me an easier question and let me go.
Whew...that was close. I ran back to the hostel, deciding I couldn't
breathe until I'd get back.
Yes, there is truly a Force. A
Force that had made the utmost strict examiner smile. A Force that
had made me guess the names of at least half of the pink brides
correctly. A Force that was running through my veins and writing my
answers for me. I had felt the presence of the Present, the might of
the Almighty, the power of the Powerful. And I decided that there was
God above, and I ran my arms under a gush of water to perform
abolution for a prayer of thanks.
