Experience & Expressions of 1st Year Medical Student
SHEFALI GUPTA
1st year MBBS Student , ESI Medical College, Faridabad
Donors, are the ones who bridge the gap between the endless sea of theoretical knowledge and dissection forms an integral part of medical studies.
I wish to share with you my experience and how these people ( donors body ) have actually contributed in our studies.
It all started 6 months back, when I finally got admitted in MBBS. I could not believe it at first. My happiness knew no bounds. I felt like it was the best that could have happened to me. The feeling was out of the world.
After all it was the beginning of my journey of becoming a doctor. Being a doctor means that you are always looked upto and the immense respect that comes along is just inexplicable.
You get to wear the prestigious white lab coat, which in itself is an achievement as it is a reminder of who you are and the amount of responsibility that you are bestowed upon with.
So amidst all this excitement, our classes finally began and suddenly things started to swirl out of control when one fine day Anatomy entered the scene. The subject is no doubt, interesting but it’s vastness is what haunted me for months to come and I’d say it’s still quiet haunting.
And then one day our teacher said that you’ll have to learn the course and supply of each and every single nerves and vessels. It seriously kind of blew away my mind.
But I had to do this because this was my dream ever since I have learnt to dream. Then came in another surprise and that was the dissection. I never knew that we’ll be dissecting real human bodies. We entered the dissection hall filled with whole lot of emotions. It was anxiety, disgust, excitement, confusion, apprehension and what not.
4 cadavers lay on the dissection table in the four extreme corners of the hall. The aura disturbed me but it was something else that was bothering me even more – the smell, the smell of formalin.
Before this I had heard people say that they had fainted on their first day. And Ialways thought what are these people worth for? Can’t they just see a human body being dissected. Why they are even here then?
But never in my faintest of dreams had I thought that may be one day I’ll be one of them. And in 10 min inside dissection hall and I was lying on the floor cold and weak, surrounded by my friends.
Yeah, within a while I got better and went back to department head where I came to know that it was just me who had fainted and that made me feel even worse [because I always seek company and the thought that there would be nobody to share Ms. Fainter title was too much for me].
Apart from all this, those cadavers also seem to b a bit mystery to me. There were many questions revolving in my head about these bodies which now lay there dissected, like where did they come from? Like who were they? How come their families agreed to donate their bodies and why! Were they okay, going against the social norms and depriving the deceased of their last rites. Because I am sure many of us would not be ready to give away their bodies. For once, even if they agree, their parents, their relatives, the society won’t agree to it.
But everything said and done without them I don’t think we could have sailed so far. I hope my batchmates would agree to this. Within few months they have taught us so much which no book and no writer can ever teach.They are the greatest teachers.
Many people argue that we can do without these bodies as we have books, diagrams, internet videos, our mentors and what not. But until and unless you get to see things practically, to feel them to touch them it’s not at all easy to remember everything.
These people have not only taught us about anatomy but have also somewhere down the way taught us the lesson of life the lesson of living even after death. They showed faith in us, that we will take good care of future generations. At the end I would like to say one last thing that after your death, don’t take your body to heaven because even God knows that we need them here.
