The hospital was like an octopus waving its arms in the air. All its occupants living, breathing inside its multi-wingedness. The teams of folks in blue,green and black scrubs huddled in various corners discussing the new, strange arrivals. The patients. And their medical and non-medical quirks! While patients sat in designated areas, talking about undesignated topics like the yawn coefficient of the doctors, the stubborn and lost intern, the sleepy inefficiency of its staff,the outdated methods of the hospital and the callous bureaucracy of its money-depositing personnel. At the Emergency wing of the creature, multiple visits to the billing counter, lab and the pharmacy, located on different floors are designed to keep the attendant 'entertained' and on a decent workout, while the patience of the patient is tested inside.
Just below the surface of the mollusc though, lurked compassion. The staff that speeded up when I yelled 'Can you please behave like you're actually in Emergency?' And the lab test woman who centrifuged my mother's blood in a jiffy after I mentioned her age. The billing fellow who 'believed' me, when I said she was entitled to the Central Government Health Scheme's (CGHS') discount, without producing the CGHS card, because it was an emergency.
The hospital is a unique place, where panic, rivalry, confidence, love, humor, humor under heavy pressure, reassurance, rigid protocol and overcrowding among all sections of society, sit next to each other, interacting, hollering, moving, mixing. It's where compassion comes out raw, and sometimes the extreme life and death scenario. It's where one swings between complaining about the competence of the doctors on whose shoulders our lives rest and the overwhelming feeling of dedicating everything to them, when they turn around and do a good job.
While this feeling of awarding doctors the status of gods is ancient, it seems that 'Google God' has taken away at least half the holy status, both enabling and terrifying patients with the deeper how and why of medicine, beyond just the symptom-fixing and quick explanations. The real 'how and why' that doctors across the world have an unsaid consensus about. The vow to never open that pandora's box. As a friend of mine and a doctor says, the medical profession 'eats cooked food, without most of the worries of gathering ingredients, which is the domain of research'. This brings me to how a field can be exalted, specially in India, beyond necessity too, without due credit given to its very basis. Where, for example, in covid times, (or any other times), does the fluid in the injection come from? Is the most important part of the process the insertion of it or the 10-15 years of biological research on average that go into developing the vaccine? Research is for the ones who don't 'make it' to medicine, of course.
As a researcher-turned-writer, a question does plague me though. When will the arms of the octopus start to coordinate what's going on with a patient? A friend of mine passed away, supposedly because of her various bodily systems being treated in silos.
Where, pray, in other words, is the heart of the octopus? Or is it in the general physician's office? In which case, the various scrubs might need to talk to each other.
As I leave, I pay a final visit to the MRI facility to book a scan. My job half-done, I turn to see an old man, talking to me in rapid Kannada.
'Sorry?' I say blinking at him stupidly.
'I'm giddy, can you help me to the lounge outside?' he finally says in English.
'Of course,' I say taken aback but offering him steady support.
His brimming eyes tell me that he's braving his illness alone, as the desensitised nurse perched next to him decides to stay put.
I return to the MRI facility, to finish my booking and ask the nurse if the patient who just headed out is alright. She goes out with me to the lounge area, where he's nowhere to be seen.
The octopus at the end of it all, is a great leveler and a reminder of the trust and play of altruistic human instincts that society is based on. And how closely medicine’s Hippocratic oath resonates with community initiatives like 'Medecins Sans Frontieres' and ultimately activism, in its willingness to go out of the way to 'fix' wrongs.
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