Nobody in my family had a stethoscope or a drill. My father ran a business. My mother taught zoology. But somewhere between Class 10 and PMT prep (you know what it is if you’re old enough lol), the message was clear 
‘become a doctor’. I didn’t make it to MBBS. I got into BDS.
I told myself it was fine.
It wasn’t. Not for a long time. (ooh, that rhymes!! 
)
Hostel life in a new city, food I couldn’t stomach, rules I couldn’t question. I’d worn glasses since I was five, spent most of childhood as the quiet, studious one & hostel didn’t suddenly fix any of that. I was more alone there than I’d ever been at home.
Third year was the worst. I lost my grandfather, the person who had largely raised me while my parents worked, in the middle of exam season. I didn’t go home. I couldn’t miss my viva preparations. I sat in that exam hall two days after his death and answered questions about tooth pathology while everything in me was somewhere else entirely.
In 2018, I had my first panic attack. I didn’t know what it was. I thought I was dying. I ended up in the emergency department of a hospital I rotated through as a student & suddenly on the other side of the stretcher, terrified, alone. I broke that night.
I resisted help longer than I should have. Eventually therapy, then medication, then a visit to NIMHANS Bangalore in 2019 to finally get the right support. By that point I was a BDS graduate who seriously wondered whether she’d made a catastrophic mistake.
The pandemic, oddly, gave me back to myself. Home, quiet, with time to read and journal and just sit with the question & I started seeing dentistry differently. I saw it as the foundation of something I hadn’t yet figured out, not as the thing I was trapped inside.
I went into MDS Orthodontics. The environment was frustrating. Faculty who weren’t interested in guiding, exams that kept getting delayed, a system that sometimes felt designed to exhaust you into giving up. But somewhere inside all of that I published research. I started teaching students. I began working with dental AI companies- annotating X-rays, validating clinical responses and slowly realized that the diagnostic eye I’d spent years developing had value far beyond the chair.
I discovered clinical research, medical writing, health-tech, digital dentistry. Paths I couldn’t have named when I was that panicking intern in the ER thinking my life was ending.
The career didn’t break me. The version of it I’d been handed by other people’s expectations did.
The version I built for myself is something else entirely and it took years of very unglamorous falling apart to get there.
If you’re a BDS student reading this feeling suffocated or stuck or like you made the wrong call, you might be right about the choice that was handed to you. You’re probably wrong about what’s actually possible within it.
What was the moment you realized your degree could be something more than what you first expected? Or are you still waiting for that moment and what’s making you wait?
MBH/DB