autobiography of a mad...

Am I mad to dream what I dream, people say your dreams should be feasible… a microbe can’t dream to be as huge as a dino, a thorny desert plant can’t look beautiful, a poison can’t dream to save lives… how can an intern dream to be a good scientist, or a doctor, or a healer? How can I dream a heavenly hospital, when I practice at a place where people with their saliva of chewed tobacco, and also urine, within a weak transform a new posh building into a hellhole… or when the freshness of morning in hospital is stolen by smoke of cigarette of the patient, or relative or the compounder or professor doctor? How can I expect doctors to take care of patients, who themselves don’t respect their health? How can I convince the patients to take care of their health, when they’re illiterate, and when surviving for today is their major problem? How can I dream fine diagnosing techniques and healing machines, when even basic norms are not properly followed…?

Am I mad to think all this, when almost everyone wants their self development… when to this almost everyone agrees or ignores, when nearly every medico is engaged in mugging up the bookish lines or copying for the medical entrance, when almost every scientist is running behind hot grants or publications, when making money, enjoying luxury is almost everyone’s goal, when almost everyone hates something new, or odd or anything that challenges the established situation? How can I dare to not to take part in this rat race, when innocence has been graved by formalities, and showiness, and desires to get more? How can I dream a smiling lovely world, when in fact the world is studded with sadness, revenge, lack of knowledge, poverty, violence and negligence?

But smile is also there, and there are hopes, there are some people burning their souls to help others… there is at least some goodness in heart of an almost worst person, I just want to eliminate the bad things, no matter if the world calls me a mad person. I know, the dinosaurs are extinct today, but microbes still persist… it steals your eyes when a desert cactus flowers, almost every life saving drug in emergency is otherwise a poison… anyone can dream anything, and can bring the dream into reality with her perseverance… I can dream my dream world, no matter even if there’s heaven and hell’s difference between the real and ideal. I can breathe for my dream world, and work for it, no matter how close I will be able to take this world to my dream world till I’m in this world. constructing heaven using hell as the raw material is a challenging task, it’s exciting, it gives me adrenaline rush… and most importantly a purpose to survive. I’ll prefer dying for my heavenly dreams to lying happily in arms of some angel in some ready- made heaven… and strangely I’ll be happier. I may really be a mad person…

selfish care...

I’m trying to stop thinking since last few days; and trying to think nothing except me and myself. I want to do something, and earn something in my life… why should I bother about the lives which are not the part of my life? Why should I think what’ll happen to others, when I don’t know answer of that question about myself? Why should I think of rest of the world, which isn’t a part of my own world? Why should I dream about the whole world, when the world is not even aware of my presence? Why should I crave for the smile of those, who don’t even bother about my tears? I feel bad sometimes; I too shed tears, living on the edge of depression sometimes I too sink in ocean of being alone… but I can’t express, neither they’re keen to know about my pain; they respond only to my smiling face, then why… why about their feelings I should bother? They come to me, when they need happiness and forget my presence in their happiness. They come to me, to recharge their souls, where should I go, when my soul gets deprived of energy?

Can’t I be a machine? Can’t I be heartless… a ruthless soldier, defeating innocence for success? I want success, victory in every field of life, and the salute those distant shining stars get. I want to be distant like a star; people don’t respect my easy access… they think it’s my duty to die for them, and consider that I can’t have any personal problem. They think thinking about my pleasure is my crime. Can’t I pursue pleasure like the wild, and think about me, myself and my own private mind?

But my private mind is this world. It thinks nothing if it doesn’t think of others. It becomes forlorn for their pleasure… tells them to do anything to me, but after doing it they should be happier. Then my dreams come of happy world, I can’t separate my world from my dream world. Bringing that dream world into life becomes my purpose of life… if I don’t live in my dreams then I won’t survive. I don’t help people because I’m an angel, or because I’m a fool; I do it as their pleasure is my gain. I gain pleasure from making them to smile, oh sorrowful souls come; I welcome you when you need… as your satisfaction is my lifeline. I can never sacrifice my pleasure, as sacrificing my pleasure gives me more pleasure.

… But how joyous it would have been, if at least few of them had considered about my mind… but still I thank them, as they only have made me self efficient.

reality kills

It’s not easy to write your heart when the heart itself is not ready to dictate its heart… sometimes in life, or many times if you’re the chosen one, your poor heart encounters situations that its tender feelings it has to stop. The mind wishes to stop the heart, to end its beatings… mechanical yet painful. I wish if I had no heart… alas, I’ve it, and it’s merciless like that of any other’s.

I’m an intern, a blood sucker, doing bloody business of taking, marking and sending blood to laboratory studies… I do it, I try to do it mindlessly, without getting involved in the owners of that blood… but can’t. I can’t as usual separate my thoughts from the sufferings of my patients.

Here I see the poverty. Poverty of patients of money, and that of health, and that of knowledge, and poverty of doctors and the staff of sympathy and of the sense of care they should possess as health care workers, and my poverty of maybe guts or of the authority to stand up and to change the situation at once. I can’t even think of any solution to change the situation.

I’m very inexperienced, I know I don’t know many things… but I know from books and from my dreams that this’ not a health service that can be called as ideal, not even close to the good one. Even an illiterate would tell that the fridge in ward is meant to keep drugs and blood and blood samples and not for bottles of alcoholic beverages…
I see pain every day, surgeries, ulcers, wounds, sutures, weakness, forlornness, fear, trust, suspicion… and the rage, the disgust, fear and avoidance… I dwindle to float in this ocean of varied emotions. And I can’t do a thing to stabilize the condition, even if I sacrifice everything. I see traumas, accidents, lost body parts, amputated limbs, head injuries; I see coma and death killing the caring ones. I can’t stop drunken driving, can’t seize the violence, and can’t make those damaged parts once again to work. I see, see and feel and get numbed. I want to scream, but can’t as I’m a doctor, and I should love silence. I’ve learned to cry to weep to moan and to shout in silence. I’ve learned to die silently… and I do it every moment of my strange life.

I fear; I really fear that my life will end in this useless way, in this hell, and I’ll die and wander as a ghost that too here in this hellish government hospital… or I feel that I already have died and have been posted to this modern hell. I crave for making some change, to make at least Earth if not heaven from this hell… but can’t make even a slightest change.

Where are my dreams, I call them mutely, try to search for them blindly… and grope with my numb fingers to figure out the reality making my fingers to bleed, telling my deaf ears that my dreams are more impossible than the complete impossibility itself. I feel regret that still I live, but still I live because I don’t want to feel regret after I die… I still hold some hope, some breaths telling me that something will happen… some day and I’ll see my dreams becoming alive. I want to see my dreams alive… or I want to give up being alive.

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.

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.

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.