“Beyond the White Apron: My Journey with Lex”
Dr Madhav Bansal, MBBS Intern,
Sum Hospital, Bhubaneswar, Odisha
“Medicine is not just a science; it is a story of lives waiting to be understood.”
When I entered medical college in 2019, I felt like a small boat on a vast, uncharted sea adrift in a tide of cadaver dissections, histology slides, pharmacology drug names, and an avalanche of information. Amidst the chaos, writing was my anchor, a quiet rebellion against the relentless grind of medicine.
I joined Lexicon in my first year, thinking it would be a creative detour, a side street I could escape when medical school felt too rigid. I didn’t realize I had walked into a universe of ideas, a place where words didn’t just describe medicine, they transformed it.
Lexicon wasn’t just an editorial board. It was a think tank, a forge where ideas clashed, merged, and evolved into something greater.
The people I met were more than writers; they were architects of thought, weaving creativity into the rigid framework of medical knowledge.
In a world obsessed with precision, Lexicon embraced the abstract, the poetic, the profoundly personal.
Lexicon taught me to see stories in places I had overlooked, the silent strength of a patient, the unspoken exhaustion in a colleague’s eyes, the poetry hidden in pathology. I learned that medicine isn’t just about saving lives, it’s about understanding them. Writing became my way of bridging the gap between clinical facts and human experience.
With each edition I wrote for, I evolved. I went from a first-year student searching for meaning to someone who understood that words have power, the power to heal, to connect, to make sense of the seemingly senseless.
Now, as an intern, life is a blur of early rounds, endless case sheets, and moments where exhaustion weighs heavier than my stethoscope. Some days, I feel more like a machine than a person. But then I return to Lexicon, to the words, the stories, the creative pulse that reminds me of who I am beyond the white apron.
It is my constant, a place where time slows, where I can breathe, where I am not just a doctor-in-training but a storyteller, a thinker, a dreamer.
Looking back, I realize Lexicon didn’t just shape my writing, it shaped me. It gave me a tribe of like-minded souls, a canvas, and a reminder that even in the most sterile of hospital corridors, there is room for art. It taught me that ink and intellect are not rivals but companions, and that a well-crafted sentence can carry as much weight as a well-placed suture.
I am grateful for the people who challenged me, for the stories that changed me, and for the ink that now runs through my veins just as surely as medicine does.
As Hippocrates put it, “Cure sometimes, treat often, comfort always.” Writing gave me that comfort, a way to make sense of the chaos, to find meaning beyond the clinical.
Lexicon for me is more than just a magazine, it is a testament that even in the starkest clinical settings, stories still find a place to breathe.
