I have my exams in 1.5 weeks and I still cant manage to sit down and study like I should be doing by now. Nobody who has not been to a medical school can ever understand what the pressure inside it is like. You cannot pass medical college without being burnt and blistered yourself. I stand, facing a future so unfamiliar that it frightens and withers me from the inside. I was never studious all my life, but somehow always could manage good marks, as I found a proper meaning to everything I studied then. But now, I study because it has to be studied and not because I want to study it. I have been poked in my eyes and shown several times how mismatched my study plans, schedules, viewpoints are. Its not how logically your grey cells can work that matters now, but how well your hollowed eyes can gobble up the contents of the text books without even understanding them in actual practice that counts here. Its not that I don’t like studying or I fear competition, but the ruthless selfishness of things is what hurts me the most. Emotions always take a backseat is what I found here, quite contrary to my belief that compassion is what the very fabric of a doctor-patient relationship is made up of. There are failures and humiliations stuck like left over pieces of chicken between my teeth, the aftertaste of so much unlearning and re-dreaming just refusing to let go of me. How earnestly I wait and wish for the coming-soons and next-attractions of my college life to disenchant me further, hopeless hopefulness being my only antidote for all the hated yesterdays and dreaded tomorrows of this stethoscoped rebirth of mine.