The Educated Drug Dealer 🫀🫁🩺💉🩻

The Fellowship of the College of Anaesthetists (FCA) is, for many of us, the mountain at the end of a very long climb. It is consuming, and at times …. unfair. Basically, it demands from you to be a jack of all trades and a master of none. Anyone who has prepared for it can attest to the iatrogenic fatigue that slowly creeps in your bones. Registrar training is relentless: nights blur into days, days blur into calls, and somewhere in between you try to revise ethics, laws, protocols, newest guidelines, and remember to eat something other than coffee. Yet even in the exhaustion, there is purpose. Each shift teaches you something the textbooks can't. The training is demanding, but it transforms you — slowly, quietly, and permanently. Registrar life becomes the reason for your Stockholm syndrome. And yet, I often say, life is not only about exams and training. This message is especially for those who did not pass this sitting- your worth, your intelligence, your compassion and...

As an anaesthesia registrar entering the final year of training, the world can feel like a blurry, caffeinated dream—one that gets blurrier each time you must wake up at midnight for yet another reading and study session. For me, four years in a Registrar post has been a great experience (Ah don’t feel ‘that’ much sad for me dear friends, I knew the rules when I engaged myself, so whining about it would be definitely hypocritical! And well, we are here to be ‘hippocritical’ – pun intended to the guy that decided the Hippocrates oath should be our motto). Tiring, interesting, nerve wrecking on some days but well, South Africa is the place you want to be if you want to grow exponentially. In all fairness, the proverb ‘What does not kill you makes you stronger’ applies here- You will be out of here, good enough to manage most scenarios and the cherry on the cake- you will have one white bead follicle for every day that almost went wrong. Hopefully, the massive weight ‘upgrade’ from a ...

And nopes, it is not the anaesthetists. I am here casually inferring to surgeons, the Lords of the operating theatre (as per their own flawed concepts). Do not get me wrong, I have no issues with surgeons. They are great at their job, at least most of them. Yet I can count on my fingers if I was asked- Who would you want to work with in private practice some day? If intelligence were measured by fine motor skills alone, surgeons would rank among the highest forms of human evolution—perhaps even higher than concert pianists or master watchmakers. Yet, the surgical mind is a paradox: razor-sharp in the operating room but occasionally bewildered by the most basic concepts like – Why do I need an ICU bed for a patient with baseline Sp02 of 80% on room air? (The normal being 95% on room air)? One of the best ones I had ever was on one of the night shifts: The patient is fine, we will just clean the wound on the leg. In comes the patient- some 150kg 60 years old gentleman with a short ne...

That shadowy figure lurking behind every exam, presentation, or procedure… the Dementor that spikes your panic, or the invisible gremlin that whispers, “What if you mess this up so badly that even the neighbour’s cat starts judging you?”(Cats do judge! You can infer that from those eyes! LOL). Well, the fear of failure, they say, is what stops most people from trying. If you’ve ever flubbed something so spectacularly that you wanted to change your name and move to a deserted island, don’t worry. You’re in very good company. The greatest minds in history have all failed, and many did so with the flair of a Broadway performance. Take Sir Alexander Fleming, for example. He discovered penicillin—one of the most life-changing medical breakthroughs—because he forgot to clean up his workbench. Had he been an obsessive neat freak, like most our South African Morobatsis, modern antibiotics might still be a distant dream. Then there’s Thomas Edison, who famously said, “I have not failed....

[Don’t worry, I’m not writing the whole article in Hindi, mainly because obviously I cannot write in my ancestor’s language now for the past twenty-five years.  And yes, that's how your seat in the exam hall looks like figuratively.] In the Ramayana, अग्निपरीक्षा - Agni Pariksha, is the fire ordeal that Sita undergoes to prove her chastity and innocence to her husband Rama. In the case of the final fellowship exam, it will be the fire that might burn you to the ground, Constantine style! (Anti hero in DC comics and also a great movie featuring Keanu Reeves.) Examinations The noble tradition of testing whether you’ve absorbed knowledge—or if you've perfected the art of last-minute cramming. Let’s take a brief stroll through the history of these cruel and unusual practices. The initial format was the oral exam. Ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, and Greeks used this format to test a person’s knowledge of their sacred texts. The "exam" was delivered face-to-face, with ...

Yeah, that was a hell lot of S. Anyways… ‘What are you?’ followed by a mini awkward silence (for me), to define my approach to the question. Finally, true to the witty and delightful parasite inside me, I went for- Ahemm, I am still classified as human I think. Obviously, laughter ensured before I addressed the underlying question- I am Mauritian and what you just heard was Mauritian Creole. The usual answer ensued- Sounds so poetic (huge inner snort in my mind to that) and so French! Well, why so (Why French I mean!)?- Mauritian Creole can be thought of as an amalgam of languages. So, let’s stroll down memory lane! The Mauritian Bouillabaisse- a delightful pot of cultures, languages, and just a dash of simmering identity crises. Being an Indo-Mauritian (by that, I mean myself, my dear Lord) gives you a front-row seat to the Creole conundrum- where history, colonization, and modernity swirl into a complex narrative. Let’s start with "Creole," a word as versatile as Ma...