Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Med school bloopers...

Since i couldnt really think of any happenings in the recent past worth blogging about and i am not imaginative enough to think about biographies of psychopaths, i thought i'll just put up some bloopers which r famous in the college...this being a mini india and thus having ppl who r not familiar with the mother tongues of their patients results in the origin of a zillion language jokes..some of them may not even have happened but they r still quite entertaining and r always the favourite topic in gassing sessions especially if u cant think of any other interesting stuff to talk about...

The thing abt these bloopers is that they r handed down batches but as years go on the name of the person who made the blooper changes..for eg,there was this one about the guy who used to bunk almost all the physiology pracs in his first year and then finally turned up for the exam without any clue about the experiments...he got a question on demonstsration of reflexes..the smart ass made friends with the guy on who he was supposed to demonstrate the reflexes on and told him to lift his leg when he hit him below the knee.Having struck the deal,our hero was so excited and happy and he looked around at the lesser mortals around him who were dumb enough to have actually attended the classes..finally,the examiner,who looked like he was going to fall asleep any moment, turned up and repeated the question which he had already asked half the class......."Demonstrate knee jerk,please".Mr.Smart ass took the knee hammer in his hand,gave a look of disappoitment for being asked such a trivial question and gave a small tap below the subject's left knee...i would give a fortune to see the expression on that examiner's face when he saw that right leg going up...the funny thing about this story is that when we joined college,this one was atributed to one of the guys in final year batch..i later found out that they used to believe that this was done by one of their seniors and one week back,one of the lecturers shared this with us as a heroic act of one of his batchmates...so i guess ppl just come with a story and put in the name of someone in college at that time just to make it more interesting...
Coming back to language jokes,there is this one about the paavam south indian medical stud who had never heard a bit of hindi taking the history of a patient who came with some stomach upset.This chap asked the patient courageously,"Jab aap toilet jatha hai, janvar aatha hai kya?"All that he wanted to know was whether the patient passed any worms in his stool.I dont know whether the patient was being very smart or he was feeling a lot of sympathy for the poor guy.He just said,"Nahi bhai saab,me toilet jaane ke samay dharwaza baand kartha hai!"(now i know my hindi is not that great but i think i've put together the last sentence kinda ok..i didnt reall bother abt the first one 'cos its anyway supposed to be screwed up :) )
Actually i dunno why i started the post with this joke.After all,i am also a southie and sometimes i am slightly bugged with those morons from up north who make fun of the south indian hindi accent,make those stupid hair oil joes and think that they are really cool.On top of that,the zillion language jokes which i mentioned earlier comprises mainly of the molestation of tamil by punjabis,delhiites,biharis,etc.I think one of the very famous one is the one which happened in one of the opthalmology exams.Having learnt some of the important key words in tamil including the translation of "I am a medical student","Please look this side",etc. our protagonist was feeling a bit of self-confidence."So what if I dont know the language?",he told himself."After all a lot of communication is non-verbal.."since he had half an hour more to wait for the exam to start he tried to boost up his spirit by remembering all those heroic stories of doctors who went and worked in Africa,how one of his seniors from Kerala worked for two years in Bengal."Also there isnt much of histoty taking in opthal...its mostly exmaination only..this should be a cakewalk for me." At last it was his turn and our all the initial intro and some how surviving through the history taking(the survival bit mainly applies to the patient..)he was so happy to just start the examination.So he confidenly raised his index finger and told the patient.."Inge ukarungo.."I can only imagine what that guy must have felt at being ordered to sit on somebody's index finger.All that our doc-in-making wanted was the patient to look at the tip of his index finger.I guess the exam tension and the relief of having finished the history taking bit must have mixed up all those funny-sounding tamil words which he crammed the night before exam.May i should once write a post about the possile thoughts that the patient would've had on being asked to sit on an index finger.There any more language bloopers which had been handed down batches....I think for the time being I'll stop with this one.


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