Digressions on Chakwas
Thank you to Agin, over at Archive of Our Own for the opening sentence, which is 'Chakwas was dreading the next 24 hours.
Exams
Chakwas was dreading the next 24 hours. At the tender age of 23, she was only two weeks out from the end of her medical training, before heading off into an internship. And the next two weeks were chock full of exams, some written, some practical… but the one this afternoon was the kicker. It was her surgical exam. The subject she had struggled with all semester, despite extra tuition, despite pushing herself through late night study sessions, despite her steadfast desire and determination to become a fully qualified doctor.
Perhaps it was because, in surgery, her patients were all unconscious. She was a people person, delighting in talking to her patients, listening to their concerns, explaining treatment options. Surgery just lacked that one-on-one interaction, and so her enthusiasm for it had waned quickly.
Perhaps it was the way her lecturer has reduced the human body to a jigsaw puzzle of bits of muscle, bone and connective tissue. To Chakwas, the human body was a miracle of intricacies, a flawless machine capable of self repair, of defending itself from invaders, of damage control, shutting down some systems while others took over in emergency circumstances. It was a wonderful, awesome and terrifyingly complex miracle, not a lump of meat and tubes that one could hack and stitch up at will.
But whatever the problem was, the fact remained that she had less than two hours until her exam started – four hours long, a marathon slog of essay writing, remembering drug interactions, emergency protocols and the tiny details of anatomy, and then a practical exam, a test of the steadiness of her hands as she stitched up a wound, and of how well she could maintain sterility during a delicate operation.
Tomorrow was her pharmacology exam, and by the time she walked into the hall for that one, all this would be behind her. God willing, she would pass, and go on to begin her new career.
Or, if the fates were against her, she would be back here next year, re-sitting the exam and hoping to pass the second time around.
She stared down at the notes on her lap, glanced around at the students littering the hallway around her, all of them with their heads down, desperately trying to cram a few more morsels of information in.
Chakwas closed her eyes and let herself relax for a moment, knowing that she had done her preparation to the best of her ability. Having a clear head would help her more than an extra revision of which blood vessels supplied the kidneys or how many different layers the stomach was composed of. So she closed her eyes and let her mind go blank. And she wondered, in that quiet moment, what her career would look like in twenty years time. The places she would go. The people she would meet. It was going to be a grand adventure, she just knew it…