Old school memories: Fun in MedSchool 1

If I imagined prior to setting foot in medical school that postgraduate students were a serious and no-fun bunch, I was wrong. Again I was wrong if I thought that medical school would reduce my hyperactivity and mellow me down. One thing that added to my attitude was the presence a dozen other guys who were also hell-bent in having fun to balance the seriousness of our undertaking. So while the rest of the class dug deep into their books, we dug deep too, but spewed a lot of color on our daily routine - figuratively, and on the pages of our books - literally. I wished that I preserved our textbooks or even some photos of the pages, because we practically colored the paragraphs which we thought were important with all the colors that gay pride wasn't thinking of yet.

There were about 7 of us boys who occupied the last row of seats in the room and our attentiveness to the lectures depended on who was talking. If it was Dr. A. Panuncialman you could expect us to be all-ears and trying to be less conspicuous, because he had the habit of calling students to the stage to demonstrate certain principles or procedures. If it was Dr. M. Dayrit who lectured on Epidemiology, you could expect us to be betting on the last numbers of the pages of a textbook that we opened at random. If we were not gambling, we were throwing pieces of crumpled paper, which at one instance went the wrong direction and hit the fiancé of Dr. Dayrit (also a doctor) who was seated at the back at that time. The outcome of our foolishness was only apparent at the end of the course when Dr. Dayrit gave 3 of us (the exact culprits in the paper throwing incident) a failing grade. The curly Lebanese, a chubby Maguindanaoan and the scrawny hillbilly. We had to approach him to ask for a reconsideration of our grades and he gave us some make up work to do. It was to submit a paper about the incidence of sexually transmitted disease in Davao city - a topic that required us to prowl the kingdom of pimps and hookers, which was not at all alien to us.

You could imagine the uproar caused by the whole gang when they heard of our misfortune and everyone promised to pitch in so this could be accomplished in the least possible time. Hargoon pledged his typewriter and expertise in drafting the results of our research while Khalil, Nasser and the Hillbilly plus some other helpful guys got to the act of procuring the data. In less than a week we were done and our grades adjusted. 

You bet that a sober and well behaved bunch sat at the last row when the next semester opened.