Nostalgia
Paresthetica.
S.
Bhattacharya, MD
It
has been a long time since I have visited my alma mater. Despite many a visit
back to India, I never seemed to find time to plan a trip to Pondicherry, where
my medical school is. At times, I wonder if a small part of me is reluctant to
go back to Pondy. I don’t think so but then, one never knows! Maybe, one day I
will visit a therapist to explore "the hidden fears of revisiting ones alma
mater".
Oftentimes,
I think back longingly to my days at medical school, especially those as an
undergraduate. Just as often I find myself wondering what would it be like, to
visit after all these years. The longing for my undergraduate days is all the
stronger when I teach the second and third year medical students. They are good
kids, these students, but nowhere nearly as adept at clinical skills as I
believe we used to be.
What
wonderful days the clinical years were. Having emerged formalin drenched from
anatomy and stained with soot from the physiology "nerve muscle
experiment" recorders, it was a pleasure to deal with live human beings
rather than with cadavers and bits of dismembered frogs! However, a few weeks
into our clinical work it soon dawned on me that just being in the wards was not
enough to learn clinical medicine. There was a certain magic needed to be able
to ferret out the important bits of the history, to divine that unique sign on
physical exam or to be able to reach a clinical diagnosis and find yourself
proven right.
How
I envied certain post-graduates and senior residents in the wards who seemed to
have more than their share of these gifts! Some of them had a Sherlock Holmes
like skill in finding diagnostic clues, which to us trainees in the clinical
sciences, were often invisible or unnoticed.
Looking
back, I now realize that in certain areas I had achieved nothing more than
articulate incompetence; articulate enough however to get me through exams! This
was until we did our neurology rotation, in our final year, as part of the
general medicine clinical rotation.
There
was something almost mathematically fascinating about neurology. A
neuroanatomical lesion could explain the basis of almost all neurological
conditions (or at least the ones that we saw the most) very elegantly. For the
first time, it seemed to me, there was a correlation between what had been
learnt in the pre-clinical years and what we were seeing here. I enjoyed
examining and working up every neurological case that I could find.
My enthusiasm those days perhaps had me overlook the rather incurable and
progressive nature of most neurological diseases in the patients I examined. I
guess those days furthering my learning took precedence over patient despair.
Very
well, that is, until I came across my first case of meralgia paresthetica! What
a wonderful word this was – meralgia paresthetica! Well, just as there is this
exotically named neurological condition without much by way of definite cure, I
believe that most of us at some time or other suffer from a similar emotional
disease which I call "nostalgia paresthetica" – or to put it in
plain English, nostalgic memories that leave us hankering for the past and
sometimes unable to enjoy or appreciate what is there in the present. Like
meralgia, this condition too, often has a limited cure!