The Third Milestone - Becoming a Doctor

If I were told to list out the 10 happiest moments in my life, one of them would be entering medical college and another would be exiting medical college. Qualifying for training at a premier medical institute filled me with happiness and anticipation. Exiting the said institute after qualifying to be a doctor filled me with happiness and relief. It was five years of hard study and hard work sprinkled with a lot of fun and frolic. Allow me to narrate an incident that occurred right after I joined the course.

I had missed a few classes due to illness and the day I rejoined, it unfortunately happened to be an exam. There were 5 questions in all and I answered every one of the five questions, using my imagination and creativity. One of the questions was “Write a short note on the Umbilical Cord”. My answer went thus: “It is a cord -like structure that connects the front of the fetus to the backside of the front part of the mother. After birth, a cruel cut of scissors separates the child from the mother by cutting the umbilical cord. This separation is what causes every newborn to cry loudly. The umbilical cord then persists in the adult as the belly button”.

Unfortunately, imagination and creativity is not encouraged in the medical field- and rightly so. I was given 0 out of 25 in that exam paper. To add insult to injury, the answers were read out loud in front of all my classmates. I laughed as loudly as the rest of the class, pretending hard it was not my handiwork. Until the lecturer pulled a dirty one on me by announcing my name and asking me to come to the front of the classroom and collect my answer sheet. I had to do the walk of shame from the last bench to the front of the class with my classmates tittering in the background. Of course, once I recovered from my illness, I kept up with my studies and achieved my goal of becoming a doctor.