The Serious Tale

'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.