Friday, September 24, 2010

Patched person



Something happens and shatters the heart… and the soul gets wounded. We survive and collect the pieces hoping to patch up the injured mind. They fit in each other, as we suture them… but they never form a person who we were before getting injured… leaving us like a patched piece of cloth.
…but remember, at least sometimes the patched piece is better than the original.

diary as an intern

I write, I dare to write… indicating the height of my shamelessness, when in fact I should keep taciturnity. Who gave me right to write about my laid up acts, when I don’t stop them… when I’m too weak to stop them? Is there any benefit in vomiting out my pains in the form of this typed moaning, when I fail always to reduce the pains of others? Do I have any right to attempt to reduce my own sorrows… when I, like a blind, deaf, and senseless stone, evidence grieves of innocence? I don’t know… but I think the answer is no, and still I do it… as an attempt to keep my all time loser life from getting lost in a failed death.

Here, in my hospital, everyday, I evidence rape of humanity… and do nothing. In contrary sometimes I assist in the raping to the rapists… no! It’s my virtues, those are getting raped… traumatized, mutilated… exposed to high grade violence. And I like a victim; forlorn… weak, unable… survive, and try to come out of one shock only to get shocked once again at the next moment, only to get victimized for one more time. I survive, to find some hope, to find some meaning in my meaningless mundane guilty life, to search some purity in my dirty world, where my dream world seems to be a dream of a drunkard, dreaming a heaven while lying motionless in a ditch containing sewage water.

I see patients coming with injuries gifted by human violence, I see victims of fights coming with bruised cheeks, broken lips, fallen teeth… I see wives with hemotympanum due to the slaps from their life partner husbands… I see innocent train travelers with ear injuries because of stones hurled by some nasty unknown humans… I see patients who’re in hospital only because of careless family members. I want to stop the violence… want to halt the negligence. But do nothing other than observation. And I see doctors who look as patients as valueless dirty nasty insects. I see major rules of hygiene getting violated; I see false clinical notes being written and drugs being prescribed without proper examination. And to sensitize them I do nothing… when in fact I too am supposed to be a ‘doctor in my dreams… or to offer some healing’.

But sometimes I do succeed in making them to smile, my advice works sometimes, I feel that I can do at least some little changes in those painful lives… I feel I will succeed at least to some extent to make this world a better place to survive… and that’s why, and that’s how I dare and manage to continue this life of mine without any life.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

ideal vs reality

How easy it would be… if I were not a doctor. Life would be worth living, I could help in the living of others… I would call myself as a human, and not a demon. If I were not a doctor, then I would consider it’s a deity who offers treatment to the ill… no matter how expensive the deity is. I would consider then, I know at least something about health… and I would be eligible to help others.

But I’m a doctor… alas! I work as an intern in a government hospital… alas! And I know now that every trust people possess for a doctor is nearly always ‘the myth’. And almost every doctor has to be a robot… to work in a government hospital.

Professionalism is different from this rat race of money making and of avoiding troubles… they work here because they’ve to work, because it’s compulsory… and they work as factory workers who love to strictly follow the worker’s laws of maximum work and maximum work hours… if patients think of doctors as government workers, then the doctors say, they must act as government servants… and not as humans.

This leads to carelessness, malpractices, negative attitude towards the patients… they look at each and every patient as a pile of file work… and not as a chance of getting some blessings. They never work for the smiles; they work for getting their completion signed, to get the money, to get the degree… to get higher authority… I don’t know where in this list the satisfaction stands… whether it stands?

Why does this occur… why we lose touch with humanity when we become adult humans? Is this natural only… or is this something pathological… something like a social psychological epidemic, of which we’re still unaware.

I’m inadequate at this stage to find out the cause of this tragic happening… I can do nothing except guessing, and moaning and suppressing my own screams… and hoping that at one day or another, the pool of my unuttered cries will flow out, and wash away all the negativity form this world…

Till then I’ve to survive.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

intern diary

With my eyes open, I see the pain… with eyes closed, I feel the pain. I’m not on land, but immersed in an ocean of pain… my heart is nothing but a moan of pain.
In my final year, ulcer was a ‘Short case’, or a short note for four marks. It didn’t deserve more than ten pages in my notes book, or more than two pages in my standard surgery text book. It was painful at that time, now it’s a synonym of pain. It’s debilitating, distracting stimulus that elicits moans… my heart was moaning when I was doing the dressings. There was pus, or blood or mixture of both… and the eyes were oozing pains.

And I’m in a government hospital, cheep, where the table on which the patients sit for getting their wounds covered with dressing, is always covered with the discharge from the wounds of the patients sitting on it before that patient, and with the foam formed by reaction of hydrogen peroxide with the naked tissues. The room smells as if it has been painted with pus… thankfully flies are absent.
The injured, ill, infected patients form a queue for that table, with noses open, and their eyes, and their ears to the screams of others. And one after another they reach that dirty table and we do the dressing, without changing the gloves… sometimes the pads get dirty, sometimes the solution… all it depends on the luck of the patient. For each and every patient we’ve to use the same scissors.

I try my best avoid contamination, but what to do… I’m just a human. And I live in a primitive era, which is far away from my dreamed future.

And I hear, this dressing helps some patients to get completely cured… no matter what quantity of time the patient has to spend as debilitated… it’s not fixed and ranges between days, weeks, months… or infinity… where amputation serves as a solution.
I want a solution… something that’ll heal these wounds immediately, without causing this disturbance… I beg the destiny to give me strength and luck enough to find it, or to send some angels who’ll build that magical thing, and construct my imagined world… without any suffering. In exchange it’s free to erase me permanently from my dream world.

.. now at least I can try to make my government hospital hygienic one… though not pain, it’ll reduce the chance of infection.

Monday, September 6, 2010

happening

Sometimes my life seems to be a fast action movie, sometimes a heartbreaking tragedy, sometimes a horror show… and many times a tasteless, blank, boring unending program without any climax. Valleys are there and banal unyielding, unfertile land laden with boring rocks… but no peaks, I feel sometimes. Though I try hard, I can’t stop feeling bad. I know it’s acute, and as usual won’t last for more than few hours or days… but my heart will continue to ask, what is that I lack… skills, intelligence, luck, good luck, some magic, or some breakthrough incidence? … Or is it mere patience?
I try to console myself… but fail to digest my failures, like dark comedies, telling stories of my all efforts going into fuss. I feel pain in chest, some breathlessness, lack of hopes… the failures knock the doors of my deep seated depression and it comes out to haunt my success deprived brain. I don’t cry, as I’ve become an expert to hide my un- oozed tears behind fake smiles.

Why anyything I think doesn’t happen? Why my life doesn’t take any twist? Why some lottery, some shower of fortune, like that happens in some people’s lives transforming their lives from iron into gold… never happen in that of mine? I know, mistakes were bound to happen as I was still in learning a stage… but what if the mistakes killing my project were not made by me? And what if I know with guarantee that someone has deliberately curded my experiment?

My heart fails to find out any solution… then it weeps, asks why… why I crash always… why everywhere I fail to show my talent… is there something called talent in me? Or am I a crude uncultured jungle beast, far away from skills of being delicate? I can be delicate and I was, I know… and was far away from being careless. My heart was trapped in my research work; it could never allow silly mistakes… then why? Why should I evidence my dreams getting shattered because of someone else’s carelessness?
But I have to evidence it, to feel it, and as usual to survive it. A born loser, of winning something, I feel, I’ve no right… but I wasn’t a loser as a kid, I was… leave it… I’m not an aged worrier who survives on memories of past victories. But… but why can’t my life story be like those whose debut becomes a big success? Leave it… we should work for satisfaction not for success. But what’s the use of hard work, if it results in such heartbreak? Won’t anyone’s heart break if s/he has to tolerate abortion of their dreams in ninth month that too because of someone else’s mistake…
If I’ve to lose every time, then what’s the use of taking part in battles? Today I lost a big battle against the destiny who only had offered me a chance to show my bravery. It turned out that most important RNA samples in my dream project were denatured, calling for ‘the end’ of my project, thanks to a careless fellow who added wrong concentration of chemicals in it... I couldn’t do it as, as a project student I was deprived of the rights to handle them…. He’ll live peacefully, I know… what about me, as I’ve to go back to my working place with those heart breaking photographs of broken RNAs… or with some unplanned project summary concentrating on the less important samples which escaped his ruthlessness?

I close my eyes, and daydreams arrive of completing my beloved project… I wish I could once again start my project, with authority enough to not to allow anyone else to poke her/ his running nose and to spoil my project as it has spoiled now… spoiling my belief that if you work from the bottom of your heart, destiny gets pleased from the bottom of her heart… but my destiny seems to have no heart. Heartless, it loves to bring my each and every effort to a terrible and miserable end.

I want some magic that’ll convert my dreams into happenings… or some energy to keep me alive, and strong enough to digest these unexpected disasters, and carry the aborted dreams to the eternity up to a point of time when they will breathe alive, independent of mine. Can dead dreams breathe once again… but who says my dreams are dead? They just can’t die, even though I can die in between while working for them.
And I die many times like I died now.

With this very big failure welcoming me in the field of research with garland of pricking poisonous thorns, I still feel obsessed with the idea of being a scientist. In fact I wish I would a PhD student here, at this time… only to work tenfold for at least ten times on that lovely project of mine! The research slapped me at the entrance only of that field, and still I felt blessed, I remembered with that painful hit that even Sachin Tendulkar’s international batting career had begun with a duck… it might be my mere good luck that I failed now, like once I had failed in my final year’s final exam, and had encountered an angel leading me to the entrance of my dream field.

… But still I can’t stop my heart from craving for examining whether what I had thought was correct. Oh destiny, I don’t know you’re good or bad, ruthless or just taking exams, you’re surprising, like a puzzle…. may you be coldblooded to whatever extent, let me inform you, my work has not yet stopped… just it has been postponed, and I’ll be a part of it, no matter as a researcher or as a subject, as a human or as a rodent, while living intact… or as a dead!