“Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.”
Lucky are those who have friends that always remain by their side. Whether you will find someone like that in college is a matter of chance, but medical college does indeed promise someone who won’t leave your side right from day one of college till the end of last year. And that would be the subject of PSM ( Community Medicine ). I remember my first day of college when we had a PSM lecture and were told that the exam of this subject would be three years later. Two years passed by in intermittent company of PSM, and the third one remained entirely devoted to it. Final year we parted for while, but now as an Intern, I am back to my old friend. My first rotation is in PSM.
So this month I have four different postings of one week each, in various places under PSM department. For the first week I was posted in Urban Health Training Centre (UHTC), which is located a few kilometres from our college. When I want there on the first day, I was mildly amused by its location. In a spacious ground, away from the traffic, with a small temple next to it and in the shade of trees sat the newly built building. It promised to be a very pleasant workplace. Because it is quite recently built, the interior was also modern enough to even be mistaken for a private establishment.
On the first day I was quite clueless regarding an intern’s role in the whole setting, but it became evident soon enough that we weren’t really an indispensable part of the show, hence our duties were quite limited. One of us had to sit at the BP machine, one in the patho lab, and two others in the OPD and we would keep switching places at regular interval. Even though BP measuring or patients’ registration were quite menial and repetitive jobs, I found them extremely enjoyable. It gave me a sense of purpose, a satisfaction in actually being of some use to the patient, a feeling one doesn’t really get when we are just a student in postings. In the patho lab all we had to do was observe how samples are taken and managed, it was interesting initially, but the charm soon wore off. So a few days into the posting, we requested the technicians there to let us take the sample once, and then we soon realised it isn’t quite as easy as it looked. Maybe I was just too edgy on my first try. So we were back to just being an observer, but with renewed curiosity now.
The OPD wasn’t the busiest one, but it always had a steady inflow of patients. I watched with great fascination how the doctors examined patients, talked to them and wrote prescriptions. After being a passive onlooker for a few days, opportunity did knock one day when some of the senior doctors were absent, so the J.R doctors took us under their wing and asked us to examine patients and write prescriptions too. In about an hour or so I felt significantly more confident and could dish out prescriptions on my own for all the basic complaints of patients. It was the most thrilling day of our posting there, but sadly also our last.
The seven days that we were in UHTC were some of the most relaxed and pleasant days of learning. It did vex us sometimes when we just had to sit with no real work at hand, but overall I enjoyed my time there. We had our afternoon entirely free so I would sit in the library until one or more of my friends would eventually come there, and then we would invariably go out for snacks or roam around in a nearby mall. Everyone had their own tales to tell from their postings, and their experiences varied greatly from mine. The first week of internship thus flew by and I feel quite happy with the way it has begun.