My First Year at VMMC, Safdarjung Hospital

“I had secured a good All India Rank. I thought the battle was almost won. Little did I know that the real battle was just beginning.”

When I reached Safdarjung Hospital to begin my MBBS journey at Vardhman Mahavir Medical College (VMMC), Delhi, I carried more than a suitcase and a folder of admission documents. I carried the pride of having secured a good All India Rank, the dreams of my family, and the conviction that I was ready for whatever medical college had to offer.

I had worked hard to get there. The entrance examination had been a long, exhausting race, and I had crossed the finishing line with a sense of achievement. I imagined that the next five and a half years would be demanding, of course, but manageable. I would attend lectures, study sincerely, make friends, play games and eventually become a doctor.

On my first day, as I heard the name VMMC repeated in conversations around me, I felt a strange excitement.

“So, this is it,” I told myself. “I have made it to one of the country’s respected medical colleges.”

A senior passing by smiled at us freshers.

“Welcome to medical college, juniors! Enjoy yourselves while you can.”

We laughed.

“Why? Are the examinations really that difficult?” someone asked.

The senior grinned.

“Examinations? My dear fellow, first learn how to survive an ordinary day!”

We laughed again. At that moment, I thought he was exaggerating.

Within a few weeks, I realised that he might have been offering the most honest piece of advice I would receive that year.

The race I had not prepared for

The first year of MBBS did not merely challenge me. It shook my confidence.

There was too much to learn, too little time to learn it, and an unrelenting stream of information that seemed to move faster than my ability to absorb it. I had entered medical college with a good rank, but my rank could not answer a single question in the anatomy laboratory.

The first great adversary was anatomy.

It was not simply a subject. It was a strange, sprawling city whose map I possessed but whose streets seemed to have been renamed overnight. Every turn led to another unfamiliar structure. Every answer opened the door to three more questions.

I would sit with my textbook and think, I understand this. I have read it. I know it.

Then I would enter the dissection hall, look at the actual human body, and discover that I knew far less than I had imagined.

My day began at 7:30 in the morning.

The alarm would ring, and I would open my eyes reluctantly. The body wanted another hour of sleep; the timetable had other plans.

“Come on,” I would mutter to myself, pulling the blanket aside. “You wanted to become a doctor. Nobody forced you to come here.”

Sometimes, I would sit on the edge of the bed for a few seconds, staring at nothing in particular, gathering enough determination to stand up.

By eight o’clock, I had to be in the lecture hall.

The ceiling fan revolved overhead with the weary persistence of someone who had been attending the same lectures for decades. Around me, students opened notebooks, adjusted their bags and prepared to take down the day’s information.

Then the lecture began.

The professor stood at the blackboard and started explaining the subject. Chalk moved across the board, diagrams appeared, and anatomical terms filled the air. One structure led to another; one nerve branched into several; one artery supplied an area that I had barely managed to locate in my imagination.

I wrote as quickly as I could.

Brachial plexus. Median nerve. Ulnar nerve. Radial nerve.

The words entered my notebook, but I was not always sure they had entered my mind.

I would look at the board, copy a diagram and tell myself that I would understand it properly later.

Later, however, another lecture would begin.

And then another.

By the time the morning lectures ended, my notebook was full, but my head felt like an overcrowded railway station where every train was announcing a different destination.

During a brief break, a classmate turned towards me.

“Did you understand that last part?”

I looked at him hopefully.

“Which part?”

He laughed.

“Exactly my problem!”

For a moment, we both laughed. It was comforting to discover that I was not the only person struggling. Yet, beneath the humour, a quiet anxiety was growing.

If everyone is studying this much, how will I ever catch up?

Entering the dissection hall

At two o’clock, the practical session began.

The moment I entered the dissection hall, the smell of formalin struck me. It was sharp, pungent and slightly sweet, a smell that seemed to cling to the air and follow me long after I had left the room.

There were bodies laid out on the tables. The atmosphere was serious, almost solemn. The human body, which had appeared so orderly in the coloured illustrations of my textbook, now presented itself in all its intricate complexity.

This was no longer a neat diagram printed on a page.

This was reality.

I stood beside the table, put on my gloves and picked up the scalpel. I looked at the structures before me, trying to connect what I had memorised with what I could actually see.

Where is the median nerve?

Where does the ulnar artery run?

Which muscle am I looking at?

I knew the answers—or at least, I thought I did.

But the moment I began to examine the structures, certainty dissolved into confusion.

The muscles overlapped. Nerves travelled between layers. Blood vessels appeared where I had not expected them. Everything seemed connected to everything else, and I struggled to understand how the individual pieces fitted together.

A demonstrator approached our table.

“Tell me, where is the median nerve?”

I stared at the dissection.

“It should be somewhere here, sir,” I replied hesitantly.

“Somewhere here?” he repeated, raising an eyebrow. “The median nerve cannot be somewhere here. You must know where it is and how to identify it.”

I felt my face grow warm.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then look carefully. Identify the structures. Don’t simply memorise their names. Understand their relationships.”

He pointed towards the specimen and began explaining.

“This is the muscle. Now look at the nerve. Notice where it passes, what lies beside it and what structures you must distinguish from it.”

I tried to follow his finger.

For a few seconds, everything seemed clear.

Then he moved to another structure.

“And what is this vessel?”

I hesitated.

The demonstrator continued explaining, using the language of anatomy with the fluency of someone who had lived with it for years. I was still trying to locate the first structure when the second and third had already been discussed.

By the time I understood one thing, I had forgotten another.

I looked around. Some students appeared confident. Others were equally confused but concealed it better. A few seemed to identify structures with an ease that made me wonder whether they had been born with anatomical knowledge.

I certainly had not.

After the session, I walked out feeling defeated.

One of my classmates asked, “How was your dissection?”

I gave a tired smile.

“Excellent. I have discovered that every structure in the human body knows exactly where it belongs. I am the only person who doesn’t.”

He burst out laughing.

“Don’t worry. One day, you will identify everything.”

I wanted to believe him.

But that evening, I returned to my hostel with a troubling thought: What if that day never came?

The tyranny of the timetable

By four o’clock, the practical session was over. By five, I would reach the hostel and collapse onto my bed.

I did not always fall asleep because I wanted to. Sometimes, sleep simply took over.

Between five and seven, fatigue would pull me into a deep, almost irresistible slumber. It felt as though my body had been collecting exhaustion throughout the day and had finally decided to demand payment.

At seven, I would wake with a start.

For a moment, I would not know whether I had slept for twenty minutes or several hours.

Then the timetable would return to my mind.

Homework. Revision. Notes. Tomorrow’s lectures.

I would sit up, wash my face and open my books.

My phone would lie beside me. Sometimes I would check a message, talk to a friend or glance at something unrelated to studies. Those little distractions offered a brief escape from the pressure of medical college.

But the moment I returned to my textbooks, the anxiety returned too.

There was always more to learn.

I could spend an hour reading a topic and still feel that I had not understood it properly. A diagram that looked simple in the textbook became complicated in the dissection hall. A structure I had confidently labelled at night seemed unfamiliar the following afternoon.

Occasionally, I would close the book in frustration.

“What is wrong with me?” I would ask myself. “I worked hard enough to get here. Why can’t I understand this?”

The question hurt because it challenged the image I had carried into medical college: that of a capable student who could succeed through hard work and intelligence.

For the first time, I began to understand that being good at examinations did not automatically mean being prepared for every challenge that followed.

A good rank had opened the door to VMMC. It could not walk through the door for me.

The badminton court: my temporary escape

And then there was badminton.

At around ten o’clock at night, I would head towards the court. It became a small refuge from the world of textbooks, lectures and dissection tables.

Under the floodlights, the shuttlecock flashed through the air. The sharp sound of racket meeting shuttle replaced the unfamiliar vocabulary of anatomy.

For a little while, my mind became quiet.

I did not have to remember the branches of an artery or the relations of a nerve. I had to watch the shuttle, move my feet, judge its trajectory and return it across the net.

Here, I understood what I was doing.

Here, I could react without searching my memory for the correct answer.

A friend would serve.

“Ready?”

“Always!”

The shuttle flew towards me. I returned it, and the rally began.

“Good shot!” he shouted.

“Don’t praise me yet. The match isn’t over.”

We played, argued over whether a shot had landed in or out, laughed at our mistakes and challenged one another to another game.

Sometimes, after a particularly exhausting day, I would reach the court with my shoulders heavy and my mind full of unfinished work. Yet, after a few rallies, something inside me would loosen.

For those hours, I was not a struggling medical student.

I was simply myself.

Perhaps that was why I kept returning.

On the court, progress was visible. If I practised, I improved. If I made a mistake, I could try again immediately. The feedback was clear: the shuttle either crossed the net or it did not.

Anatomy offered no such immediate reassurance.

I could read a chapter twice and remain confused. I could spend an afternoon in the dissection hall and still struggle to identify a nerve. Improvement came slowly, sometimes so slowly that I could not recognise it.

The badminton court gave me something that the classroom had temporarily taken away: confidence.

The games often stretched late into the night. Sometimes the court would remain lively until around one in the morning. Eventually, I would return to my room, tired but calmer.

Then I would see my books waiting for me.

The next morning’s lectures would come whether I was ready or not.

I would lie down thinking about the day that had passed, and the day that awaited me.

Tomorrow, I will understand it better, I would promise myself.

It was a small promise, but I kept making it.

The crisis of confidence

Days became weeks, and the routine continued.

Wake up. Attend lectures. Take notes. Enter the dissection hall. Struggle to identify structures. Return to the hostel. Sleep from exhaustion. Revise. Play badminton. Return late. Begin again.

The hardest part was not simply the amount of work. It was the feeling of falling behind despite trying so hard.

I had imagined that a good student would understand things quickly. Now I was discovering that some subjects demanded a different kind of patience.

Anatomy required me to move beyond memorising names. I had to understand three-dimensional relationships, recognise structures in different orientations and connect what I saw in the laboratory with what I read in the textbook.

I was trying to learn a new language while standing in the middle of a city whose geography I did not yet understand.

One day, after another confusing practical session, I found myself thinking about my entrance examination rank.

What was the point of that rank?

It had brought me here, certainly. But it could not help me locate the median nerve. It could not tell me which structure lay beneath a muscle or how to distinguish one vessel from another.

The rank belonged to yesterday.

The dissection table belonged to today.

And today, I was struggling.

For the first time, I wondered whether I had mistaken the ability to clear an entrance examination for the ability to become a doctor.

That was a frightening thought.

I could have asked for help more often. I could have compared my understanding with that of students who were coping better. I could have changed my study methods sooner. But, like many students who have been successful for years, I sometimes felt embarrassed to admit that I did not understand something.

I had become accustomed to knowing the answers.

Now I needed to learn how to ask better questions.

That, too, was part of medical education.

Learning to see, not merely to remember

Gradually, I began to realise that I was approaching anatomy in the wrong way.

I had been treating it as a collection of facts to be stored in my memory. I wanted to remember every name, every branch, every attachment and every relationship.

But the human body did not present itself as a list.

It presented itself as a living arrangement of structures, each related to the others.

The answer was not to memorise harder alone. It was to look more carefully.

When I read about a nerve, I needed to follow its course rather than merely repeat its name. When I studied a muscle, I needed to understand where it originated, where it attached and what lay around it. When I entered the dissection hall, I needed to connect the textbook diagram with the actual specimen.

The map and the territory had to become one.

I began to understand why the demonstrator had insisted that we study the relationships between structures.

A nerve was not simply a line in a diagram. It travelled through a particular region, passed near particular muscles and vessels, and supplied particular structures. Its position mattered as much as its name.

Anatomy began to make more sense when I stopped asking only, “What is this called?” and started asking, “Where is it, what is around it, and why does it travel this way?”

It was not an overnight transformation. There were still confusing sessions, difficult topics and evenings when I felt that I had learned too little.

But the questions were changing.

Instead of asking, “Why can’t I remember anything?” I began asking, “What exactly have I failed to understand?”

That was a better question.

It turned frustration into a problem I could work on.

I also began to recognise the value of repetition, drawing diagrams, discussing difficult topics with classmates and returning to the same structures more than once. Understanding did not always arrive during the lecture or the practical session. Sometimes it arrived later, when a familiar concept finally connected with another.

The human body was not becoming simpler.

I was slowly learning how to read it.

The lesson beyond anatomy

Looking back, I realise that my first year at VMMC was not merely a struggle with a difficult subject. It was a confrontation with my own expectations.

I had arrived believing that achievement would make the next stage easier. Instead, achievement had brought me to a place where everyone around me had also achieved something extraordinary.

For perhaps the first time, I could not rely on being among the best in the room. I had to become comfortable with being a beginner again.

That was a humbling experience.

Medical education requires intelligence, memory and discipline, but it also demands perseverance. It asks students to tolerate uncertainty, admit what they do not know and return to a problem even after repeated failure.

A future doctor must eventually learn to say, “I don’t know yet—but I will find out.”

There is no shame in that sentence. In medicine, it may be one of the most important sentences a person learns.

The same principle applies to anatomy. It is difficult not because the student is incapable, but because the subject requires a new way of seeing. What appears tangled today may become comprehensible after repeated observation, practice and guidance.

The body does not reveal all its secrets at once.

Nor does medical education.

I still remember the exhaustion of those early days: the morning alarm, the crowded lectures, the smell of formalin, the dissection table, the hurried notes and the late-night badminton games. I remember the frustration of knowing that I had worked hard to reach medical college and yet feeling unprepared for the work that awaited me.

But I also remember something else.

I kept returning.

I returned to the lecture hall, even when I had not understood the previous lecture. I returned to the dissection table, even when I had struggled to identify the structures. I returned to my books, even when the pages seemed to contain more information than my mind could hold.

And I returned to the badminton court, where I could breathe, laugh and remember that I was more than my examination results.

Perhaps perseverance does not always look heroic. Sometimes it looks like getting out of bed at 7:30 in the morning when you would rather sleep. Sometimes it means admitting to a classmate that you did not understand the lecture. Sometimes it means opening the same textbook again, or asking the demonstrator to explain a structure one more time.

Sometimes, it means giving yourself permission to be a learner.

The map and the territory

Today, when I think of anatomy, I remember the city metaphor that haunted me during my first year.

I had the map, but I could not recognise the streets.

The textbook gave me the names, the diagrams and the relationships. The dissection hall showed me the structures themselves. Between the two lay the distance I had to travel as a student.

I had to learn to observe, compare, question and try again.

The map had not been useless. I had simply expected it to do all the work.

Medical college taught me that knowledge is not merely the possession of information. It is the ability to use that information to understand what stands before you.

And perseverance is not stubbornly repeating the same mistake. It is returning to the challenge with a better question, a different method and a willingness to learn.

My All India Rank had brought me to Safdarjung. It had earned me a place at VMMC. It had opened the door.

But beyond that door, there was no rank that could spare me the effort of becoming a doctor.

There was only the daily work of learning.

The human body would not surrender its secrets because I had performed well in an entrance examination. It would reveal them gradually, through observation, practice, patience and the guidance of teachers.

I had entered medical college wanting to prove that I deserved to be there.

I was beginning to understand that the more important task was to learn what it meant to be there.

And perhaps that was the real beginning of my medical education.

The next time you meet a doctor, remember that behind a calm smile and a confident clinical examination may lie countless hours of confusion, repetition, self-doubt and perseverance.

Before the doctor learned to recognise disease, the student had to learn to recognise the human body.

Before knowledge became confidence, confusion had to become understanding.

And before the student could call himself a doctor, he had to discover a simple truth:

The first lesson of medicine is not that you must know everything.

It is that you must be willing to keep learning—even when, at first, nothing seems to make sense.