diary of an intern

I wonder sometimes what’s in the alcohol that makes some person an honest slave of it…. an honest consumer who’s almost never honest about his (yes I see almost all males) drinking habit. I know the neuroscience of addiction, I’ve read it, and I also have read that it uses the reward centre of brain- the same that gets activated when we feel happy and makes us to crave for something, the same that gets activated when we fall in love with someone or something, the same that makes us to feel the bliss. Then why people go for alcohol when they can get the same joy from other things like being addicted to some good habit or to some good person? Are they all depressed, or ignorant about the effects of that drug which can damage anything right from the guts, the liver, the brain to the DNA? Is it peer pressure, or pressure from the stress of life, or a silent slow way of doing suicide? Though ignorance can explain alcohol addiction in illiterates, I wonder why people who themselves are doctors also go for it. I’ve read that alcohol forms long term memories and associate the positive feelings of the environment of consuming alcohol- like a group of intoxicated funny talking friends, high fat foods which themselves stimulate the reward centre, the music of pubs to the alcohol and makes the person a fan of it. But our brains are not dead hard wired things and we can change the programming whenever we want, at least theoretically… long term potentiation isn’t a permanent thing. But then why it doesn’t happen in reality, why people continue to go for it again and again even when they know that alcohol is dragging them to death, when they get complications like cirrhosis, ascites, fatty liver, alcohol induced dementia, tremors, anemia, gastritis, and even alcohol induced psychosis, when they have to get admitted in the hospital for these complications for number of times? Why do they go for it at first place, and why do they lack the willpower to fight against it when they become slave of it? I’ve seen people shouting for alcohol when they’re laying on the death bed constructed for them by alcohol only… and I wonder what would have happened if they had loved some person or cause to this extent…

It makes people to ‘see’ everyone as beautiful as their depressed brains can’t recognize the asymmetry of faces, people become more ‘adventurous’ or ‘helpful’ as the inhibition making them ‘shy’ from the prefrontal cortex is reduced… but these depressed adventurous brains are more prone to accidents which could be lethal to themselves or others…

mm… love also makes us to trust others more, to look at and concentrate at the positive things of others, but the causes are different… Is alcohol like love… no, love is totally harmless and alcohol is known to damage many things, we could treat alcoholics with love, but in their case they’re in love with alcohol only… they value alcohol more than any other person or activity in their life, even more than themselves. Whenever they’re happy they celebrate it with alcohol, they look at alcohol for washing away their tragedies and stresses, they go for alcohol for entertainment when they feel bored… alcohol is everything for them, they don’t need family and friends to the extent they need alcohol. Some think of themselves as dedicated to their families, they never drink at home, but for them joy and family are two distinct things… and the ‘joy’ is alcohol.


I’m writing this because I’m really horrified to see the number and severity of patients who get admitted repeatedly only for the sake of alcohol. I encounter poor people mainly who’re illiterate or semi illiterate or maybe educated. They’re mainly males of varying ages, of varying stresses and family backgrounds… till date I’ve seen only one woman who had got admitted for alcohol induced psychosis and she had told that she learned drinking to accompany her beloved drunkard husband.

Alcohol isn’t a small thing to ignore; it’s at the top of list of drugs causing harms to human lives, and still people adore it! I don’t really know why people take everything lightly, including their health, their relationships and their lives? I don’t know why they succumb for drugs like this, and will it be ‘possible’ to make the ‘possible’ thing of changing their synaptic structures possible? I can’t keep guessing now… because I’ve to go, I’ve to tap the ascetic fluid of a dying chronic alcoholic patient.

diary of an intern

The more you crave for something the more difficult it appears to achieve it, I feel sometimes; but we still keep on craving thinking that at least at some time we’ll get at least a trace of it… I dream of a heavenly world, happy humankind and me a tiny neuroscientist working to make it happier… but what I encounter everyday is a series of extreme tragedies sadder than even those of Shakespeare’s, violence enough to evoke disgust even in medieval soldiers, heights of carelessness, drug seeking behavior putting the whole families at risk of extinction, and me a helpless small intern physician doing my job of internship, preparing for documents of internship completion, worrying whether I will get some extension, trying to concentrate on the necessities for getting a good PhD position, making some vague efforts of reassuring the patients and of reassuring myself that one day or other the situation will be better!

I don’t know where to start and how… I don’t know whether dreaming what I dream is ‘normal’ psychologically or whether I’m suffering from some ‘disorder’. But I dream, truly, that too while awake, and I crave for making them to come true, and I try for them at my best… but this my best is not enough, I feel always.

“Why my right hand is not moving doctor, I try but I can’t move it? I can’t work without it, I can’t eat… there’s no one to look after me, I’ll lose my job… please do something, do anything, leave my leg paralyzed, but make my hand as it was… give me some medicine,” a fifty some man begs me when I reach him to insert branula and to take blood samples. I tell him to practice moving his hand, but who’s there to motivate him, who’s there to give him physiotherapy… is there any drug to reverse damage occurred due to stroke? I can’t wait there with him, I’ve to move on to the next patient, there are fifteen admissions today and my job is to send each investigation of every patient before closure of the labs, to bring the x- ray films, to do other irrelevant meaningless official things an intern has to do…

Not all stroke patients are old, not all hypertensive persons are above forty, and not all patients who visit hypertension OPD regularly have their blood pressure under control… they seem to be waiting for a stroke or heart attack or renal failure. There is a tendency to write the blood pressure as 120/ 80 mm of Hg to avoid complications, no matter what the real blood pressure is. And advices about good diet and exercise are neither given nor taken seriously… even the doctors are victims of junk food and lack of exercise leading to increased girth of abdomen and decreased diameter and elasticity of blood vessels. Some patients are also so horrible that they come to visit the OPD fully drunk, with their exhaled air containing nauseating quantity of alcohol. Conditions like dementia, Alzheimer’s, and even Parkinsonism are not big diseases here, they’re mere byproducts of aging… and people with these conditions are admitted very rarely only and only if there is exam of students that too as ‘exam cases’! Everything is as if superficial, lacking depth, being done just for showing or for legal procedures… nothing including health is taken seriously; there is no question of caring for the health of others. No one has time for useless things like sympathy, initiative and even curiosity… I guess if classical case of H. M. would have happened here, he would have died in the darkness even without getting noticed!

I fear I’ll get blind if I don’t get any light of hope… I fear my curiosity will die and I’ll become an input output machine examining predefined things called patients. I feel smothered many times and I think of giving up… I think of going far away from everything and never to return, I think of finding peace within myself like the monks, by doing meditation and by increasing the size of the brain’s reward center or of becoming mad or drugged to live permanently in my dream ignoring the horrid real situation… I can do that, that’s not difficult, but that’s not challenging either… I want to see my dream as a happening without altering my consciousness. I want to bet my life, no matter how hard it seems even to survive the real situation. I’ll keep on trying and searching for hope… maybe on some blessed day in the future I’ll get somewhat closer to my dream.

Abstract… whirlpools of odd thoughts

Our minds are bizarre beings… they make us to sense art in some useless drawings and compel us to search meaning in some weird poetic lines. We find rhythm in some strange voice, and tend to fondle part of our mind beating in any other mind. Life comes as a series of riddles, and we name them as incidents transforming our lives… But it is this strangeness of mind that makes us capable of being called as alive.

diary of an intern

I don’t know when people are going to stop taking everything for granted… and why they do it. I work in NICU these days, its intensive care unit for neonates, and babies arrive there whose uneventful birth and maturation had been taken for granted by their parents. The mothers are nearly always teenagers (many are below eighteen, but their age on our papers is almost always twenty or above… no proof of age is required to have a baby in a hospital), uneducated or half educated… who doesn’t know that it’s necessary to take some active care to have a healthy baby and it’s not a kid’s play to have a baby. They are accompanied by their mothers or mother in laws, sometimes father, brother… husbands arrive only rarely, mostly they come to collect the body if the baby dies in NICU. Low birth weight babies are so common here, so are babies with severe anemia. Sometimes the mother gets PIH, the baby is hypoxic due to delay in birth, and sometimes suffering from IUGR… sometime’s it’s struggling with some infection since in utero. They never come to know this before the birth, because they never attend ante natal clinic. Then after noticing some abnormality, or if some local doctor refers, they rush the baby to NICU in nearly lethal condition…

They marry because they think it’s necessary to get married as everyone does it, and then they get pregnant because everyone has kids after marriage… and they think it’s obvious that the baby will be normal. They don’t know the concept of spacing between the kids. Many know about tubectomy as a method of contraception but according to them, it must not be done till you have a son. To improve their condition, we need to give them health related education and education in general… but what about those who are highly educated?

People don’t really know why they’re doing whatever they’re doing. The most common cause of doing anything is because everyone does it… and there is general tendency of taking everything for granted.

Prepare for the entrance and get the admission and then you’ll become happy, get a post graduation then you’ll become happy… get a highly paid job then you’ll get happy… get some promotion, then get married, then have some kids… then earn more money collect properties, earn some fame… then you’ll become happy… they keep on doing one thing after another and take their own happiness for granted which rarely arrives in their life. And when they get old, they expect the next generation to do the same things… doing what ‘everyone’ is doing, chasing the happiness without knowing exactly where it is!

I get shocked to see my friends who are MA, MSc, MBBS, and PhD crying before me because their ‘to be’ husbands are demanding too much dowry. Then I see my pregnant professor friend praying the god and following some quack regimes to have a son… and mother of my doctor friend, a lawyer’s wife undergoing one abortion after another after diagnosing the sex of baby as female before birth of the baby- till she attends menopause, only because everyone has at least one son and she hadn’t!

Where are we? What is the role of education if everyone is behaving like an illiterate person, and doesn’t know what in actual they want from their life? Does education means only a way to get highly paid job and nothing more? When are we going to stop taking everything for granted? Is it really necessary to do something only because others are doing it…? Or is my brain extremely eccentric to think that we can have happiness in doing things what ‘others’ call as ‘strange’?

Abstract… it doesn’t require words

Life is like a wave of some ocean; sometimes it’s a tsunami, and sometimes a tiny ripple… but it’s not ever lasting and is never constant. All it’s a dance of driving forces- our wishes, our desires, our passions and our needs… sometimes they back up each other, sometimes contradict… and we keep on craving for that summit while struggling to meet the needs to survive. And a tsunami occurs when we throw ourselves into our heavenly dreams and just forget to stay alive.

to prove myself......... to machines!!!!

I wish I should have been born thousands of years ago; I would have ignited first fire or would have sown the agriculture’s first seed.… I would have written books on anatomy or would have lived my passion of finding new things to make health better, without getting trapped into today’s tasteless education system. I would have felt proud in being called as a ‘mad’ scientist. But today mad people don’t become scientists. I live in an era of robots… and madness is a contra indication of what they call success. I live in an era where passion has become just a sexual thing… people don’t and even can’t imagine having it in other areas of life. They work because they have to work to survive, to earn money, to get reputation, to get recognition, to win a competition to get prizes or to get admissions to get a chance to do a more ‘reputable’ work. There is no value or ‘reputation’ to creativity, initiative is a useless thing, there’s so much pressure of proving yourself before other machines that you forget what your inner drive is. Questions are not those which arise in mind after understanding but they are those which appear in exams or interviews… and answers are not those which consume your lifetime but are those which are already given in textbooks. Schools are nothing better than factories of robots who grow up to fight amongst themselves to master strategies of scoring in exams for getting work positions those are completely constructed for robots. And robots are hardwired things programmed for success with unchangeable programming; they don’t possess weakening human feelings, they don’t dream leave apart falling in love with some dream, they can’t understand the delicacy of loving, scarifying, doing something that isn’t related to ‘succeeding’ or achieving things associated with success. In the world of robots, people learn to mutate themselves into robots thinking that it’ll be a reversible change and they’ll become humans once they’ve achieved a ‘safe position’ in life… but the ‘safe position’ never arrives, and they continue to be robots for their lifetime.

For me, being a robot is worse than living the worst nightmare of my life… and I wonder whether there are little suppressed humans still alive in their robotic minds? I have no chance of finding this out, and I’m too small to help those little humans even if they are there to grow up and to express themselves. Meanwhile, I have to prove myself before other machines so that I can survive… that too without forgetting my inner drive. It’s a hard thing to do… what to do, I’ve been born at a wrong time in a wrong era! Alas, I should have been born thousands of years ago………….

Heart of a mother………..

The most mysterious thing in the world is love, I feel as it makes us ready to give up many things just for nothing. It’s a surprising thing, how a mother loves a baby and why when the baby has nothing that can help her in her life. She never demands the child to take care of her in return, or never gets angry in real if the child fails to understand her and even to respect her… but it hurts her if the kid fails to assure her of his or her pleasure. She wants the baby to grow up independent of her, she wants her or him to be successful happy healthy and fulfilled in every aspect of life. She tolerates many things, sacrifices her everything only to make the child an independent satisfied person, and demands nothing in exchange except a sense of assurance that the child is safe happy and is leading a productive meaningful life. If the situation demands, she can give up the warm hugs, can give up the relaxing baby’s touch; she can give up the sense of importance the baby gives to her… but she can’t give up the need of baby’s safety and her need of constant assurance that the baby will continue to be safe and is having and will have a good life.

She doesn’t crave for the presence of the baby in her life (though it’s joyous to have it), but it’s the progress and pleasure of the baby she really craves for. But if the baby suddenly disappears from her life, she can’t stop missing her or him…… I miss you Raani, and I worry for you; just tell me where you are and how.