.........

Things become easier when you are that tired as not to notice who or what you return to....
I hope I will meet some people, some doctors, whose life like me, will stretch beyond staking claim to correct diagnoses, knowing more medicine than most others, churning out factual details of places they visited 3 years, 8 months, 26 days and 8 hours ago. For who, it wouldn't matter how many books were finished how many times over, or who would give their souls a minutes respite to the condescence we usually reserve for people who are not physicians.

By virtue of this presupposed enlightenment, I am dying to meet a person who reads the blood tears shed to come to this point. All life's accumulated, unfulfilled, rotting dreams and sadness. Of the places I have visited so far but never been...Bombay, Cochin, Calcutta, Guwahati, Cherrapunji, Shillong, Rameshwaram, Bangalore, Jaipur, Agra....Delhi and Cuttack have been the two places where I have let my heart out. Where I have once or twice let go of my usual reserved self, sensible, not complicated, over academic self and adorned the Other garb few, very few people have seen me in. My list of admissions would be small, by the virtue of which I would still perhaps be counted as a 'virtuous' girl, but whether the world's final decision of me is cared a hoot by me is baseless.

If anyone cares to listen, our lives, all our lives, are a big mockery of ourselves. For the show of empathy we put on when we have cast cursory glances at patients embattling the biggest disease of poverty, and when they go, they put a hand on our heads and bless us. Us, high profile, Next to Gods. And while fully aware how little we did for them ( we could do for them, under the circumstances), we swell with pride. I feel terrible each time some woman or man blesses me for 'saving' them, or their boy or girl. The blessing are too much for me to carry. The numerous question marks I hoard inside my soul come tumbling out, and I seek refuge in indifference. Few days back involuntarily, my hands went to touch the feet of one such woman I had seen for some time. The bitch in me had once decided never to touch any person's feet here out of 'professional courtesy'. But that woman's eyes were so full of love I had to bend down.

The very little we do for patients out of routine is enough to go by. In 6 months practise, I must say, I have not ever saved a life, the people I did CPR revived momentarily to go again after a few moments, I may have recognised ST elevations and detected a few MIs, but I guess short of a blind doctor, everyone else would have done that. The first patient I had fought for, Promila, died of 3 evacuations. I am good at treating bed sores, and I feel nauseated taking BPs of patients here so my patients have Dettol, Sumag and Listerine mouthwash as a necessary accompaniment to their kitty of pills. Still, I have not felt that rush that should come when people must have saved lives. I have detected few cancers, may have a reasonable aptitude with medicine, but the gloat coming from it is insufficient as I suffer from physical inability to carry on that stems from a mental fatigue. And it is particularly depressing when a patient's attendant apologizes to me for losing the patient with the excuse that 'I did my best'.

I fail to understand why System has to be so screwed when it denies Essential Medical Care to those who can survive, with a little more detailed attention and monitoring. The ones who do are the ones who would survive with the medications alone. That an astute Pharmacist would do equally well. So are we Pharmacists?

This is the story all over the country. Doctors get trained to work as Peripheral Health Workers, and in most instances are so busy trying to outsmart one another that they all fall in the same bourgeoise lot of average mentalities staking claim to excellence. Our system caters to the rich, to the ones who can seek health care and afford it like child's play. And over the years, like triaging IC Bleeds with midline shifts, we cautiously distance ourselves from the lot.

Who doesn't want money? My life is a guilt ridden tale of dreaming that I visit all these places, with the amount of money that would give me the luxury to have the "time" to visit all these places and not to return to be held accountable for my own life's dreams. My life is about having a roof over my head, if not in company with anyone, then with enough engagements to drown my time in. And then my music doesn't have to stop at Pink Floyd, or my books at Midnight's Children. Thats the average lot of providence I have slotted myself in now, and I must crawl through the tunnel to reach the end.

All I am wondering is, if there is anyone else who knows there is a tunnel, who would take action, and not repent it a moment later if it comes to doing something for an average patient with average resources, where one could afford to be a Robin hood with the Power Cables running through my Hospital Hosiery of Muslin and crap.

Does someone live here, who after gloating about the Gold medals and Correct Diagnoses and treatments ad infinitum takes a break and looks inside himself or herself? We cannot change the machines that have been fitted in us from the birth. I am overweight, and graying, and notoriously sceptical, cynical and forthright, numbed over to the point of hostility, if not indifference. I want to know if there is a hidden shadow behind every light that flickers here. Who sees not what he/she is doing to the system, but what the system is doing to him/her. I am even seeking it with the hope that shadows will merge, and then perhaps a catharsis will ensue. Sometimes I feel I am the only insane person here. People seem happy around me, reciting details of job slips I have never checked, gloating in new acquisitions I don't envy, or reciting numerical and geographical details of places they have been to so and so days back...while I am sure they do not remember the very scent of that land.

I hope its only my life that has these question marks, pauses and circles all put together in a narrow mouthed knapsack and purse stringed from above. I am unsure if letting them in is a wiser thing, for I do not know if letting them out will be of any consequence either. What am I at 27? Thousand odd books, two maps, a Chinese Fan and a laptop, a MD Medicine, writer of a new blog with the same name as the one I deleted 3 years ago? With so much faith in the humanity part of it all sometimes I feel like I am a Comrade....Not the person I once used to be. I live alone, and with the company I have, I am not sure I fit in the comfort zone. So I am convinced in my numerical status. But I have questions, and I don't know if it stems from ambition or the truest part of me I keep hidden. And because I don't have answers my loneliness becomes a burden, and I take petty refuge of some kind or the other to get rid of it.

If at 33,000 feet and above the Himalayas, I wonder if my plane would crash and I would be happy enough to fall into the middle of the mountains, I must have been the only person who was thinking that day, that way.

I don't want to. I want to live, like all patients whose deaths I cannot delay. And I don't know quite how, I don't know what lies at the end of this tunnel.