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A prejudice overcome

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Does education make us better? It makes us cerebral beings, analytical beings but does it make us ethical? With all the knowledge it imparts to the otherwise peurile intellects, does it make us good people?  Well, this is a story about a prejudice. The beginning of this episode goes back to 9 months from the time of writing.  My wife was expecting our second child. Our first one is a daughter who is 3 years old now. She is the best gift I have received in my life. She was such a bundle of joy that my friends literally wrapped her in satin ribbon and presented to me in the maternity ward. As the excitement of our daughter caught hold of us and shaped our entire lives, some in our circles were not happy for having settled for the second best. Now, my daughter is not diseased or ugly or retarded to feel so. Only that she is a daughter. I am a post graduate doctor and my wife also is equally qualified. Both our families have received western education and have taken up res
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Of Doctors, violence and entrances

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"There are only two kinds of doctors. Those who practise wtih their brains, and those who practise with their tongues."- William Osler.   I am an anesthesiologist. My job is to drug people to unconsciousness, as surgeons cut through muscles and vessels, correcting the diseased process. Most of the days I am happy with the specialty, I have pursued. Being an introvert, I do not find listening and talking to a patient, my forte. My lack of this envious skill is compensated by putting the anxious patients to sleep. As they begin pouring out their avalanche of concerns, sometimes even unnecessarily, I inject medicine into their blood stream numbing their senses to deep slumber. The process is quick and effective antidote to my reticent demeanor. As the patients open their eyes, they are already in the recovery room, under the able care of post anesthesia personnel. The certainty of pharmacology to some extent, helps my poor soft skills. In other words, it is
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Patriotic intolerance

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“Prolixity is not alien to us. We love to talk at length”- Amartya Sen, the Argumentative Indian. “ How do we make somebody love us? Welcome to my world son!”- Bruce Amighty(2003) Hospital is a very professional place. It has personnel super specialised to do just what they are trained to do. Sometimes I feel they must be winners of the notmyjob.com annual award. The staffs are just concerned about their own aspect of care, in some instances passionately complying with protocols, than common sense. The anesthetists want to leave on time. The surgeons just want to operate without optimising other issues with the patient. For the bone doctor the only thing that matters is a fracture. Once during an emergency, the anesthetist, only as a futile exercise, enquired about the patient’s chest. ‘We are orthopedicians doctor! We don’t listen to the chest,’ came a sincere reply over the bleep. On another occasion, the anesthetist curiously asked about the general condition of the
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Demonetization- My story

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“The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and a wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of dart in the pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden-that is what the state is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc. are simply a waste of time.”- C.S.Lewis. The Cath lab at my teaching hospital is a state of art facility practicing cutting edge medicine. Through real time X rays and microscopic catheters, holes in the heart are patched up, adamant, unrelenting skipped beats are brought back to rhythm and obstinately narrow blood vessels are dilated to infuse current of life. For an anaesthesia registrar, it is an out of ordinary posting. With a slightly delayed start of the day and an occasional coffee break in the sun, it offers respite from t
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Of Mops, abdomens and lessons

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“An anesthetist has hours of leisure, minutes of horror and seconds of terror”. - Unknown “A professional is one, who does the thing he knows best, on the day when he does not have the mood to do so.” The operating facility in the centenary building is nestled in the second floor. Set up exclusively for women and children, this place can be an anesthetists’ nightmare. Unlike its elder cousin, the main operating complex, that resembles the British TV show, the crystal maze, it is well built and technically advanced. Only that her virtues are compensated by its appalling emergencies. Its walls of glinted marble have seen it all and the medical personnel within it have done it all. With Women rushed in with babies stuck in their pelvises and naughty kids aspirating a peanut or two, the moments for the duty-on- call are no less than a Hollywood suspense thriller. It was one of those days when I was on call, during those hours of leisure that the obstetrician rolled in a g
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