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Doctor Diaries.

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There are certain life experiences which come to us, courtesy our professions. Some of them make good dinner table conversations, some put a smile on our face years after they occur and some make us feel a deep pain inside. As doctors,  we see many incidents which have the power to move us beyond what we thought was possible. And such incidents make us richer, wiser and sometimes more cautious. I have always wanted to share a few of my experiences as a doctor first, a psychiatrist next, about how we see the good, the bad, the ugly and the hilarious as a part of our everyday life in the hospital. Hence ,the doctor diaries.

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Of when my idealism died.

Off late, medical professionals  have been viewed more with suspicion and wariness than respect and love. We often hear stories about how doctor so and so ripped off a poor patient, or performed an unnecessary surgery or followed some unethical practice.

As much as I know of most people in our profession, they seem hard working to such an extent that they have no time to even defend themselves in times of crisis. In a day and age, where most media bytes  go to a person who voices the highest decibel levels, we seem to have missed the bus by a mile. A lot of us are excellent clinicians, but poor communicators. Mostly, not our fault. We were never taught that our practice, would one day, turn out to be a war zone with land mines, which we had to gingerly tread through. Do not get me wrong. It is not everyday that we go to work like scared rabbits. We enjoy what we do, and how we do it. But on occasion, fear does seep into our bones. This was one such time.

It was a sleepy Sunday afternoon broken by an earth shattering cry, that would have woken the dead. All of us in the surrounding vicinity came out on the roads to see what had happened. What we saw was not a pretty sight. There were two people who had accidentally got electrocuted, lying on the road literally fuming at the mouth. There was this huge crowd gathered around. The stench of burnt flesh was overpowering. I live just across from the hospital that I work in. By the time I made my way through the crowd, I saw that two of our hospital staff had already lifted the victims bodily,and put them into an auto rickshaw.They drove on to a tertiary care center five minutes away for ICU care. The whole episode must have taken around five to seven minutes at most. I was impressed by the immediate action taken by our orderlies and was on my way to praise them, when I was in for a rude shock.

One of the people from the crowd asked us why we had not taken care of the patient. They started accusing us of poor first aid. We appeared confused at first. They must have taken it as a sign of weakness or guilt.

The cause for our confusion, was the fact that, apart from having a time machine to do the needful, we had been as fast as we humanly could. Two of our staff had rushed to find autos on a deserted road to ferry the patients, while two others had helped them into the vehicle and gone to the hospital with them. According to us, we had done all we could and more.Apparently not.

According to the leader of the mob, we needed to check the pulse of the patient before we put him into the auto. The other claimed that we should have done first aid inside our hospital premises before shifting him to an ICU.

We tried reasoning out that time was of utmost importance. That there was no need to check the pulse when the patient looked alive and was breathing. And we shifted him to a tertiary care center only because we did not, as a facility catering to mental illness, have an ICU facility and ventilator support.

Seemingly, all our explanations fell on deaf ears. The crowd kept chanting that we should have checked the pulse. On one level, I knew that they were just out to create a scene. Maybe the shock of seeing a person burn was too much to take. Maybe, they had no idea what to do in case of such a situation.

But on another level, we were scared. Upset that our good intentions were being slandered unnecessarily. Scared that they may abuse us physically.Are really really worried as to why understanding such a simple explanation seemed impossible to them.

Anyway, after a while, for lack of any other logical form of argument apart from the “pulse”, the crowd dispersed. But the hurt remained. That we, (especially our hospital staff who courageously helped the victims without a thought that they may have got electrocuted themselves too) were considered villains even after selflessly doing our best.

It did not matter that half the crowd was totally drunk, and had not moved a muscle to help all through the episode.What did matter, was that a scene was created. And that we looked like the bad people.

In the pat two years, in the small city that I live in, I have seen at least  four hospitals getting ransacked and damaged for some alleged negligence on the part of a doctor, which has later on been disproved. I have participated in rallies held to protect the rights of doctors. The district administration has given us a list of laws and provisions to help us protect ourselves. We now have cctv’s in our hospitals.Despite all of these, the sense of disillusionment remains.

Sort of like, when you have actually done your homework, but forgotten the book at home. The teacher does not believe you, but you want to be believed oh so badly. Standing in front of the class looking like the culprit pains you bad. The pain, that neither your teacher or your friends had the good sense to believe you.Submitting the homework book next day does not really ease your pain. The damage has been done!

And so also in this case.Life  moved on. Work resumed the next day. But every time I pass by the place on the road, I feel a physical pain deep inside me. One for the victim, who was a young man with small children. Two, for my idealism, which died a more cruel death that day.

Myths are my thing!

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The entry into Sirigere

Off late, I have been reading a lot of books on spirituality and mysticism. Probably, this is why I got thinking about how and why myths, legends, tales of kingdoms bygone are generated. Are these true stories? Or did they grow as tales of strength and valor passing from generation to generation,peppered with liberal doses of imagination of the people who had no better past times than story telling? Or were they trying to glorify these stories just to get a proxy ego boost? Somewhat like, “Though I have not done anything great, wait till you hear about my ancestors!”. The glory of past achievements trickling down into their blood, giving them the confidence to carry out with their mundane existence.

Which ever way it goes, the best part about these stories are that, they are interesting to listen to. And if you are like me, in a way that anything history and mysterious fascinates you, they can lead you into the past of your imagination so many hundreds of years ago, when levitating sages and magic potions were probably as common as roadside cows now!

I first had this feeling when I visited Hampi, in Hospete. The ruins of the Vijayanagara Kingdom, the plains, the rocky mountains, the silence and the fact that most of the city is so well preserved, make it easy for you to suddenly imagine those times when they would sell gold in bushels on roadsides, the swish of the King’s silks as he entered the Vittala temple and generally,the grandeur of those times.

The same with the fort in Chitradurga, where one look at “Obavvana Kindi”(the crevice in the wall of the fort named after Obavva ) is enough to push me into a world where Hyder Ali’s treacherous plan was spoiled by a soldier’s wife with a wooden pestle.

Recently, this feeling caught me when we went to an almost unheard of place called Sirigere, about 30 kms from where I live. What started as a long drive in the rains became a lesson in history and mythology.

Sirigere looks like any common village in the heart of malnad, with one road,a couple of houses,and a temple on the top of a hill.But what sparked my interest was this board:

The board which reads”Pandavas prayed here”

Which reads, “This is the place where the Pandavas(yes, the same ones from the mahabharat), prayed”. Trudging up the hill, we found a makeshift temple and an over enthusiastic priest. The temple consisted of a mound covered in red with a trident and some rudrakshis wound around it and another mound next to it.

In front of the temple on top of the hill

The priest explained that we were actually standing on the top of a temple which had been buried underground. He showed us a closed trap door entrance to the temple underground, which was not accessible to visitors, as they had seen and caught a lot of them trying to steal into the tunnel in search of treasure! (Only if it were so easy!). He claimed that this was indeed the place where the pandavas prayed last before their exile ended. And that there was a whole sect of people replete with a swamiji (Godman), who had grown on and into that belief.

A stream from up the hill finding its way out of a cow’s mouth!

He pointed to the other mound and said that this was the place that the swami took his Samadhi. In other words where he died. But the concept of this again, is part spooky and part exciting to me. Taking samadhi means that the seer would have known by divine intervention that his time on earth was coming to an end. At which point he would crawl inside a cave on a self imposed fast and meditate for days on end. There would be a lamp placed at the mouth of the cave, with instructions that, once the lamp extinguishes(which meant that the swami’s soul would have left his body), the cave would be sealed.  I had recently also seen Sri Shankaracharya’s samadhi in a cave of a hill in Kashmir! Again, this is impossible for me to imagine, but apparently happened quite often!History or fantasy?

Parrots in abundance

We become instantly suspicious about the fact that we can be in a place so famous and deep in history which no one has heard about, when he comes out with yet another explanation.” If we let the Archaeological Department into this secret, they would most certainly dig out the temple from underground and spoil its aura. Why do we need a scientific body to prove something that we know as true and believe. Hence all this secrecy!” Put that way, it makes a weird kind of sense. Who are we to burst the bubble, if it is giving solace to so many??

He went on to show us the weapons which were apparently used by the pandavas, hands us a visiting card of the temple, complete with a website, which some techie from Bangalore(who is also a devotee) has created with a detailed description of the miracles which have happened in the temple and tells us about a cave right on top of the hill in which Arjuna meditated, and is off bounds to visitors(but not to him) due to the divine energy it radiates.

Dazed and part unbelieving,we clamber down in the rain.One part of me wants to believe that I have indeed been living close to a very important, magical, mysterious,mythologically significant place.The fantasizer in me is glowing, and how!The rational side, plays spoilsport though. I wonder how the pandavas strayed so far from their course, in exile. Then again, fourteen years is a really long while. And they did not have GPS for sure!

I had once met a scholar who told me that most of the stories of bravery and valor recorded as history in our textbooks and the like had actually never happened in that exact same way. The people existed, and so did their brave spirit, but the story was, in fact blown out of proportion to impress upon the lay people, the strength of spirit! Being the emotional country that we are, any talk of changing the story would erupt into a fight or convert into threats for the scholar!

Hence, our myths and legends have stayed. And grown. And enticed me into their mystery. Fleetingly making me forget that there is a line between fact and fantasy. And that sadly,most times we need to boringly stay with the facts. For the rest of the time, there is places like Sirigere!