Everyday Is My Day For I Am A Doctor Today

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"No. You know what I feel right now. 

I don't feel miserable or angry. 

I don't feel good or bad. 

I feel nothing. 

Which feels great."

-Dr. Gregory House M.D.-

Although he says this in a personal context in Season 7 it makes me brood over the 'heal vs. feel' matters of medicine. With years of schooling and long working hours, respect and money is what the world thinks comes invariably but there is more to the life of a doctor. Missed trips and parties, skipped lunch and dinners and a hundred other little sacrifices made everyday are just a part of it. The many people we meet and treat their stories and the line that we as a doctor need to draw and many times cross. It isn’t easy to curb human emotions and impulses. For healing is more than empathy and less than business, it is life, yours and others. Becoming and being one is therefore a prodigious feat in today’s times especially with so much commercialization. Sometimes you feel like giving it all up and wonder what made you become one and sometimes there is nothing else that brings you more pride than your profession.

One thing I do not understand is a class of people among the family and friends, who every time you meet are up with their medical knowledge and inquiries, wherever you go 'THAT-ONE-IS-A-DOCTOR' tag follows. There is one 'diabetes' aunty, 'knee pain' grandfather, 'acidity or heart attack' uncle and one friend or cousin with all the internet knowledge who knows much better than what you have learnt and seen in your experience.  I bet there is no other job which follows a person wherever he goes. 

So hear it goes to all my fellow doctors who serve without armors and deal with the despicable. Be proud of who you are. There are not many like you, who see life and death so close, who can change the distance and time between them. Isn't that a beautiful thing? To matter so much to another being.

A happy doctor's day to you all ! Yay! :-) 

-R.

Soft-Thursday Challenge

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

'AIDS' For Thought

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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:

• THE NEW YORK TIMES- Health Minister Questions Stress on Condoms in AIDS Fight

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 Dr. Harsh Vardhan, Minister of Health & Family Welfare, Government of India

And the reporters reported that he said:

• THE TIMES OF INDIA: Don't wear a condom, wear values to fight AIDS: Harsh Vardhan

• INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TIMES- Promote Indian Culture Not Condoms to Fight AIDS, Says Harsh Vardhan

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

• NDTV-No Moral Problem With Condoms But Fidelity Safest: Harsh Vardhan Clarifies

• THE NEW INDIAN EXPRESS-Vardhan: No Moral Problem with Condoms

• DNA-Dr Harsh Vardhan, have you heard about 'Modi condoms'?

• ZEE NEWS- Harsh Vardhan says don't wear condom; AAP asks him to be modern

•  FIRST POST- Sorry, Dr Harsh Vardhan: Condom use can't be a 'morality' issue

•  HINDUSTAN TIMES- Only stressed need of condoms, discipline: Harsh Vardhan

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.

PS: National AIDS Control Organization-INDIA