If your heart is as soft as butter and as sweet as sugar, wait until someone gobbles up that cookie ! ;-)
-R-
PS: For this weeks THURSDAY CHALLENGE
Thursday, June 26, 2014
'AIDS' For Thought
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| Image Courtesy |
On a regular day, a staff nurse from the
operation theatre makes an emergency call to the laboratory, and only she is aware of the number of times she does that before any surgical
procedure and asks “HIV / HBsAg?”, “ Negative Sister, your name? ” we reply and also inquire for confidentiality purpose and inform the much needed report. The PPM
(Personal Protective Measures) and other procedures that is to be followed in addition to the ones already in practice is
another ordeal if the status is otherwise positive.
Meanwhile in the obstetrics
department a pregnant lady waits for her report, a pathologist gets pricked
accidentally during sampling, a surgeon is already undergoing post exposure
prophylaxis, a newly married couple is undergoing counselling in the PPTCTC
(Prevention Of Parent To Child Transmission Centre), a high risk patient
refuses testing in fear of the result, an already diagnosed patient thinks maybe
the infection is of less harm than the treatment, a doctor worries about his
patient’s CD 4 count or about the recent cold or cough he developed, many consent
forms are signed, blood vials are fed into the machines for testing, Western
Blots are run for retest, reference laboratories are contacted, statistics
worked upon and health authorities informed. Day in and out, HIV/AIDS looms around
us like a death eater in hood, outside as well as inside the hospitals. There is no person or organ of him/ her that it spares. Having
said that and experienced it from a doctor’s perspective what compels me to
write this post is the recent hubbub about it.
This is what our health
minister had to say:
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| Image Courtesy |
And the reporters reported that he said:
And then the clarifications, explanations and discussions that followed:
- INDIA TODAY- Harsh Vardhan clarifies: Have no moral problem with condoms but they do break sometimes
I have
tried compiling most of the news that I could come across since yesterday and
they are here in this list, after having read them I can only agree with Edward
Murrow, the American journalist who puts matters such as these in perfect sense
by saying “We
are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks-that’s the show business”. While
our tweets and status updates are adding to the heated argument on what he said and
why he said so, we need to realize that any point which we think and put across is
futile unless it goes beyond the ‘condom vs culture’ debate because ‘HIV/AIDS’
is not just about that. We all have our share of responsibility in making and taking such news. I
wish the science of our minds; be it the ministers, the policy makers, the
reporters or the readers who read and react to this was more sensible than
sensitive. Criticizing anyone or anything here serves no purpose. As an
adult, as a person of medicine, as someone who has read enough about the virus
and the disease and who has seen the ones battling this infection my
understanding is based only on my learning and experience, well I have tried to put it up in a
picture today:
“Viruses have no morality, no sense of good and evil, the
deserving or the undeserving.... AIDS is not the swift sword with which the
Lord punishes the evil practitioners of male homosexuality and intravenous drug
use. It is simply an opportunistic virus that does what it has to do to stay
alive.”
-
Chris Crutcher in King of
the Mild Frontier –
As straight as that.
-R.
Sunday, June 22, 2014
Windows
This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda :-)
It is six in the morning and I look
at this window, the amount of light that it carefully and slowly filled the
house with, ah such a fine feeling. A perfect balance it brought every day. Moments ago I
had fallen off the bed with a thud, you know the sort of dreams people would
not want to wake up with, it was one of those. Somewhere on some cliff
I was bungee jumping and suddenly the rope snapped and I was on the ground but on
a different one, the floor of my room here and thankfully alive.
What an amazing start to the day
it had been! Long ago I remember Ajji telling during one of her story telling
sessions about dreams that come in the wee hours of morning, how they eventually
turn true. Now not that this trivia frightens me but it has chosen to stay in
one corner of my mind.
It is not unusual of me at the
breakfast table to be nowhere but in my own world, and one of my family members
pokes my bubble with a question. So today it was my brother “What are you
worried about?” he asked. I gave him one of those 'I-am-your-sister-I-know-you-care’
looks and smiled, for the person he is my reply being insufficient and inappropriate, ”Will you tell
me what it is?” he screamed. It was hard, to think of the dosa on my plate as
the last one for this life, how I hated them when every alternate day Amma made
them. And now when I am about to leave even these minor aversions seem
difficult to part. How would I go, where would I go and what would happen to
the people around me after the fall ? I wondered.
”Will you tell me what it is?” he
screamed again, trying to avoid his curious stare “What if today was the last
day of my life?” I mumbled. “In that case Akka, do one thing, eat all these dosas
before you go and save the ice cream in the fridge for me” he said.
I could not help but laugh because
there it was, an another window, to my thoughts. Even if it was my last day, I
knew there was nothing more to do apart from keeping away from the ice cream in the fridge, already enough challenge. Life is simple, twenty four is all that you have, first or the last.
“Some people and moments are like
windows, always open and showing us the best scene of our lives...unlike the many
doors that we knock and knock despite knowing that they are always closed.”
-R.
-R.
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Thursday, June 5, 2014
Touch-Me-Not
On this earth, wish each life big ’n small
Had the heart and grit of a touch me not
Closing their doors to the pain and strife
To everything that we refute, every time
An axe is up in the air for all that timber
A knife is made sharper for all that meat
More than a conscience, celebrating guilt
What we mind only on days such as these
Has been here around ‘n surrounds us all
Suffering, while surviving the selfish lot
Whom do we owe for this living and life?
The strength supreme, subtle and sublime
Of nature who bears our hunger ’n slumber
Against whom we fight this battle of defeat
Or her patience on which our ego lies built
Forgetting she is nobody’s enemy to please.
-R-
PS: Written as a part of World Environment Day on June 5th 2014, theme of the year- 'RAISE YOUR VOICE, NOT THE SEA LEVEL' :-). To know more do visit United Nations Environment Programme.
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