Life Inc. - part II

Exposure to such realities is bound to change a person. For me who has been unexposed to the Med School life, health is taken for granted. I’ve lost count of the times, that I’ve disregarded health in pursuit of my goals. Be it exams, college festival preparations, stage play organization, job and so on. Even now, if I tell someone that ‘be thankful for the health you’ve got’, I would be scoffed at.

Commonly, we do not think of our health as our asset, but instead take it for granted and continue to crave for our goals, and aspirations. But my friend held a different view altogether. I guess, seeing people fighting for their lives every single day, fighting disease and battling death for every single moment, seeing patients crying in pain or their loved ones holding prayer beads at night makes you rethink your views.

You begin to realize that your physical and mental health is in fact, your biggest asset. You thank the Almighty for simple things like the air in your lungs and the blood in your heart. A realization dawns slowly but surely that many in this world are unfortunate enough to not even have those very basic things like a healthy mind and body to live with. As you see people borrowing and craving for money just so that they can pay for medicine to cure their beloved, or to get a bed for their loved ones, you learn that poverty, illiteracy and population combined together are even worse than a hydrogen bomb. And under such circumstances, the doctors toil and adapt to harsh realities of the situation.

And even then, even when you have put in hour after painful hour of your relentless toil for a patient, is there a guarantee that you are doing what is “right”? What if you just spent 4 hours of Herculean efforts in saving a man’s life, and then his own wife and family or acquaintances walk up to you and say “Why did you save this horrible drunkard? He does it every time. He gets better, starts drinking again, steals every penny from his wife and family, gets drunk, beats his wife and robs his children of every single happy memory till he winds up in hospital where again, his wife has to somehow pay the bills. It would have been better if he had died.”

Then when you look up to the sky in utter frustration, you realize, that there was this other patient who also needed your time and attention, and who was in fact, a good person, but whom you could not help, because you were trying your best to help a man live who is going to make everyone’s life miserable, the moment he walks out of here. How does the oath you took make your conscience feel then?

As a doctor living in a country with a colossal population, you are faced with such patients every minute. You have 400 patients entering your hospital, whom you have to face with your team of doctors. Within half a minute, you have to quickly diagnose their illness from their primary symptoms, and then direct them towards the correct departments and doctors. Your diagnosis is hindered by the fact that many of these people are illiterate and do not know how to explain and tell their actual illness quickly. So what is going to happen if your prognosis is incorrect? Many of them are going to spend precious hours bouncing between departments and doctors trying to get to their correct specialist. How does one justify this lost time? On the other hand, if doctors start taking several minutes to correctly diagnose each patient, who will look after the deluge of patients coming in?

Real life throws such things at you. Questions you don’t want to answer, dilemmas you have no idea how to handle, moral conundrums you never thought you would be faced with. What we choose to do at such times can affect more than one life. As they say, “What we do, echoes in eternity.”

Under such pressure and trauma, our doctors are truly doing the impossible. They are making choices and fighting situations beyond the scope of others like me. They are showing that God truly does not play dice with the world.

Here’s doffing my hat, to mankind’s most noble profession.

Life Inc. - part I

“Welcome to Life Inc. We here at Life Inc. process lives. At approximately 400 lives in 3 hours, we are the fastest in the industry today. From orthopedic to pulmonary disorders, our team of professionals cumulatively processes any ailment at the rate of about 2 lives a minute. You… are in safe hands.”

Does this sound like some advertisement in a science fiction movie? Or may be advertisement for some company in a fictional galaxy far, far away in a twisted world? Well, sadly, it is not. I just described a normal Monday at government hospital for you in today’s real world in a developing country reeling under population explosion. Today’s real world – more unbelievable than a science fiction novel, and more shocking than an imaginary horror story. As Morpheus says to Neo in The Matrix, “Welcome, to the real world.”

Now, I must comment here that not all Mondays are as described above and make no mistake; I’m not bad mouthing or condemning the hospitals in these places. On the contrary, by the time I conclude this article, I will have done just the opposite. But, I sincerely believe that it is time, that the harsh reality of this profession be brought to the people like me who only know these people by one generic term – ‘Doctor’, and who know little of what it takes to be one.

I’ve been in hospitals more than once for injury that required surgery. On each occasion I was in so much pain that I had little time to be worried about the doctors themselves and the pressures they deal with. For me, as an 8 year old kid who had his leg broken, these doctors were magicians who were just expected to heal me. What we forget though at such times, is that these guys are humans after all.

Just recently, I made friends with a doctor. We got talking one evening over dinner, about his experiences and hearing them one after the other, just shook me up. A whole new view of the world was brought in front of me – a view that totally defies textbook rules and generally accepted norms of life, and is yet truer, more real and more undeniable. Life after all, is not how it seems, there is more here than meets the eye.

As I spoke with him that evening, I realized that the process of becoming a doctor is not just a five year study of books, procedures and symptoms on how to save someone’s “life”, but also a process of understanding what “life” actually is, understanding the forces at work that are beyond a human being’s control and finally realizing how enormously difficult it gets at times to abide by the oath they take at the end of their course. He spoke that evening as a man worn by the cares of a person for whom death is just another occurrence in a day. But yet, he had the smiles and the good natured banter going. And I was thinking to myself, “a human mind can truly adapt to anything”. When a person trains to be a doctor, his way of looking at life and death completely undergoes a transformation. To see how this change happens, a simple thing to do is to see how the approach and outlook of these trainees towards a diseased body changes. What I heard from him about this, was both chilling and yet hugely educating in a way.

With a deep look in his eyes, he said, “On day 1 of the clinics, every patient for you is a “new case”, you are eager, it’s your first day in apron and stethoscope and you want to learn as much as you can. By the time you are halfway through with the training, every patient for you is a “life” which you are trying to save, and it’s a challenge to your knowledge. And by the end of your training, when you have gathered all knowledge that the place could give you, every patient for you is “just another patient”, and at times, you know that there is nothing you can do to save his life, and many a times, by the time your mind registers that the patient is dead, you are looking at the next patient in queue eagerly waiting for you to clear off this “body” from the bed so he can use the bed and get some medical help.

Rarely has any other single dialogue changed my view of life so much. There are scores of people on this planet who go through this metamorphosis every year. They perform this journey starting from a “case” to “just another patient” going through a “life” in the middle until a patient becomes a “body” which you do your best to cure and put in all your sincere effort, but if it fails, there is another waiting to take its place on the bed.

Somewhere along the way, you change. You change from being a student to someone who understands a little of this juggernaut they call life – because it too like a juggernaut, goes on, without stopping for anybody of anything.

2303 Champion Court

Has it ever happened to you that you are driving down a road on which you drove many times in the past and you see all these sign boards and turns and bus-stops and infinite memories from a long lost time gaggle your mind? Words spoken long time ago, the inside jokes with your friends, the memories of times when you ran like crazy to catch that bus, all these tender memories throng your mind and in that cacophony of memories, voices, events and sights, a single thought shouts out loud and clear – can I get those times back, if only for just a day?

This happened to me a few days back. Driving down the I-440 beltway around Raleigh, North Carolina, I saw an exit sign that said “Crabtree Valley Mall”. And it all began. With every exit sign I saw, with every intersection, the K-Mart, the University bus-stop, the labs, the Burger king, and finally that signboard that my eyes had grown so accustomed to seeing: “2303”, every signboard had a story to tell, every landmark had been an event marker. That Crabtree Valley Mall sign I had seen. It brought to my mind the first time in Winter break when we all roommates went to this mall for an evening out. Visiting a US mall for the very first time had been a memorable experience. And this mall had been plush, filled with the best well-known American stores (“stores” were still “shops” for us then). We used to walk about a mile from our house to catch a bus to go to this mall and then return with the same exercise. It seemed like a pain, but with all 4 of us together, even that evening out in the mall was something we looked forward to. Then there was that exit I saw which took us to Cary, the place where we all went to buy Indian grocery. This place was so far away from our house, that it took us a half a mile walk to the bus stop, then a bus ride, and then again about a mile long walk to get to the actual store. All of our other friends used to take help from people who had cars to go to this place. But we four refused to do this. Maybe because we saw this trip as a means to be out together, a break from studies and a simple excursion that we could afford to do. Now, living a working man’s life, I’ve visited many many malls and have been to many Indian grocery stores, but the simple fun and the good times we had during the grocery trips executed with military precision (we even used hand symbols and military time J), the long walks and bus rides, cracking jokes on the way, pulling each others legs, that’s what made those trips special. Having each other’s company is what made us almost not miss home at times. And even when any of us got homesick, we all would cheer that guy up, and make the whole atmosphere so homely that we felt like brothers.

As I drove on towards 2303 Champion Court that day, everything spoke to me. Every street corner, every piece of land had a memory attached to it. Like that bus-stop near the university where we waited one evening after dark for hours to catch a bus. It wasn’t that far from home, but as it got dark, we started scaring each other with mugging stories. Such simple memories too now seem to touch the heart every time they come up from the ocean of memories that was 2303. My evening and morning walk routes, the computer center where we spent countless hours solving projects, the Blockbuster outlet we used to frequent so much that the staff all knew us by face, the many group cooking experiences, they all burst out into my mind as I parked my car outside the familiar board of ‘2303 Champion Court’.

As I sat there in the car that night outside 2303, overwhelmed with memories, I kept thinking, that two years ago, I was this naïve and ‘scrubbed-clean’ guy from India who had just come to America for higher education when I moved into 2303. I was moving into this house with 3 other guys all of whom also had come like me – fresh into this foreign land. One of these guys I had known for about 9 years now and my equation with him was good, but of the other 2 I knew barely little – that is, to say just their first and last names. That night sitting in the car, as I looked back in time, I thought, “with just that kind of knowledge about these guys, what was it that made me decide to move in with these people”? It’s a question to which my gut knows the answer but not my brain. Little did I know then that this house into which we moved in on that bright morning in August, ’04 would become my most favorite place in all of America.

Sometimes in our lives, there’s a place from where we started as novices and which we get to re-visit when we are atleast ‘somebody’ on the map of the world – atleast a blimp on the radar of achievers. One such place in my life is “2303, Champion Court”. This is the only place on the face of this earth that I wouldn’t hesitate calling “home” apart from the home I grew up in. It was a happy place. A place filled with friendship, laughs and sweet memories.

As I sat there that night looking at that condo numbered 2303, I thought:

“Friendships were made here, Here bonds of brotherhood were forged;

Home was here once for all of us, but “Now move on” is what Time urged.”