Funny One

Being in a very rural area of the country, we’ve our own ways of getting entertained. One type of entertainment we get is from the very stupid and silly questions and suggestions that many of our patients and the relatives give us.

And the group that does this sort of thing are usually young men from the villages who would like to show off. Sometimes they can be a pain in the neck. Most of the time, we find them hilarious.

It is not very difficult to spot them in the hospital. Wearing tight jeans, goggles and having an air of superiority in them, they appear to have been transplanted from one of the malls in a city.

Only when they open their mouth to talk do you realise that they are of the type I am mentioning.

The best example I remember happened during my first stinct at NJH about 8 years back. Such an young man  came along with his sister. Having almost the same attire I mentioned above, he had a bandana tied around his neck which made him look a bit threatening.

It was obvious that his sister was in severe depression. She had recently failed her 10^th standard exams for the third time running. One of the local quacks had taken the family for a ride. He had been giving her umpteen number of injections and had recently suggested that it appears that she has air leaking from her lungs.

Quite an audacious diagnosis. And presto, our hero took out an X-Ray and started to show me the areas where the air is leaking. It was obvious that it was not her X-Ray. It was an overexposed film. On clinical examination, she was absolutely fine.

Well, to make matter hilarious, she suggested that I operate on her. Operate on her??? I could not believe my ears.

I told him that we don’t do surgery of the lungs in this place and I shall put her on some medications by which she should be alright. He would not have anything of it.

He suggested the surgery which I should do. . . ‘You take her to the theatre. The put her on the operation table and elevate her leg end so that the upper portion of the body will be at a lower level than the legs. Then, put a nick on her big toe. The leaking air from the lungs would escape thus’.

The imagination of this young man was the wildest I have heard so far. I told him that I shall start off with the drugs and later take a look at her. I never saw the duo again.

I remembered the above incident as, recently, I had another incident involved another of these show off guys.

It was busy couple of days back. The acute care unit was full.

There was this young man who stopped me while I was walking down the corridor. He told me. . .

‘He doc, there’s quite a lot of development in this place since last few years. It’s really amazing to see all the new gadgets and people in here. But, tell me . . . there’s one instrument that  I saw today in your ICU which I cannot make any heads or tails about. It should be one of those new gadgets as I saw it was being used for patients with different diseases’

I thought he was talking about the multipara monitors. I was a bit free . . . so I told the guy to come along with me and show the instrument.

I could only hold the laughter . . . Below is the snap.

One of the new halogen quartz room heaters . . . 

When I told him what it was . . .  he was quite disappointed. He has been with his patient who was in Intensive Care for the last 3 days. I wonder what all he must have told his friends about this new machine.

However, enough fodder for us to have a good laugh . . .

Fog at NJH . . . Snaps

Winter is usually very bitter in NJH. Our thermometer registered 1 degree celsius yesterday. And being surrounded by forests only make it feel most chilly. However, the campus looks very beautiful and romantic especially when there is fog in the morning. Few snaps I captured the day we had the cases of carbon-monoxide poisoning and the very bad eclampsia patient. 

The view from my home . . .

A far shot of the church and water tank

The church

The view of the road to the highway . . . 

The shot of the church from the other side . . .

A farther shot . . . 

The snap from the emergency door to the hospital

Well, I still remember that I need to write about the very sick Eclampsia patient who came the same day. 

Diagnostic dilemma . . . Ultimate diagnosis - The Silent Killer

Today early morning, we had a handful of very sick patients coming in together. The first one was a very sick eclampsia patient about whom I shall narrate in one of my later blogs. Then, there was a young man who came in with most probably viral hemorrhagic fever. 

But, this post is about a father and his 2 sons, who was brought to emergency at around 8 am. They were conscious, but very confused and could not narrate anything about what had happened. 

One son had a bad contusion of over his right arm. The father had a contusion over the right shoulder. 

The history . . . The family had been watching the India-Pakistan T20 cricket match yesterday night because of which they had slept late. The father-sons trio had slept in a separate room in the house. In the morning, when the mother noticed that the trio was not waking up, she alerted the neighbourhood who came and broke down the door to the room. 

All three of them were on the floor and was talking incoherently. The villagers thought that the family has been devil possessed. The mother thought that the family had a local type of beans for dinner for night which is blamed for causing indigestion . . . which could have produced some foul gases and caused this problem. 

Another diagnosis put forward for couple of relatives was an unknown poisoning. 

I was quite tired after a 48 hour duty. I told the staff to give them a stomach wash and ensure that the vitals are stable. 

I went in to do an LSCS for the eclampsia patient. Meanwhile, the surgeon had a look at the three. He got hold of a history which I could not. 

They had slept in a room with no ventilation with a bucket full of burning coal . . . which is common practice in villages during winter.  

That clinched the diagnosis . . . Carbon monoxide poisoning. There was not much we had to do now that all the three were conscious. 

I think, they were lucky to have rolled out of bed to the floor where the more dense oxygen would have helped them to remain alive. If they had remained on their cots, most probably all three of them may have died. 

Without sophisticated blood tests, I think this is the best diagnosis we could arrive at. 

But, quite an important lesson did all of us learn . . . 

Much beyond rape . . .

There has been much written in the web and print media about the violence against women in our country after the very sad incident of a young lady being gang raped inside a moving bus in Delhi. 

My take on this issue . . . 

As many of us know very well, this is not an isolated incident. This article in 'The Hindu' has highlighted other such incidents. Even, the other day, it was not a difficult thing to spot out 3 incidents of violence against women including rape which was reported by our local newspaper. None of these hogs any limelight. The fact remains that women and the girl child occupy quite a lower rank in the social order. Time and again, I see this being emphasised by families during my clinical practice. It's many a time disgusting. 

In addition, I know families where the son has been given all facilities to do his studies, whereas the girl remains uneducated and uncared. 

When such an attitude prevails in the family, one need not search much to find out the sort of ideals which is instilled in the young men of the family. As they get out of the home environment, they look at women as objects to be used for satisfying their pleasures. 

Not many a day is not passed where the woman is not undressed in their thoughts and minds. And the pleasure so attained graduates to lewd comments and eve-teasing. The media of our day complements such thoughts and actions. Molesting and rape is just the extreme methods of this mindset. 

It seems that one requires to become an eunuch to be immune to such an attitude towards women. And any such protective attitude could end you in trouble as the two young men discovered last year. 

Well, where do we start? 

I believe that our learning starts at our homes where a daughter is as prized as the son. Our homes should be places where the husband will treat his wife with respect and kindness that the son would behave likewise with the women he meets in his life. Our daughters should not know what dowry means. 

There should be as much joy in a home when a daughter is born as when a son is born. The women in the house eats along with the rest of the family . . . 

I could go on and on. 

The situation is so worse in many of the regions of the country that the attitude towards the girl child has resulted in a situation the young men have to go in search of brides to other places. I saw the terminology of gendercide in this article. I'm not sure of how correct the terminology is . . . but the fact is that we have a situation of genocide which is targeting the female gender. 

What we see in the protests in Delhi is to quite a lot of extent, a mob response to this whole affair. I'm sure that there are quite a few aspiring leaders who would want to use this opportunity to make themselves heard. 

Things need to go to a micro-level . . . homes, communities, social groups etc. . .  if we want to see any change in this issue. 

Straight Hair ! ! !

I see people with straight hair quite often . . . rather young children. And it’s not only straight hair they have . . . the hair would be quite colourful. Colourful . . . well, that would depend on how you see it.

Medical textbooks describe such children as having straight and hypopigmented hair with interspersed areas of reddish brown. Quite an uneviable design for your hair. Of course, the downside is that the hair would be a bit brittle, dry and easily pluckable. However, that’s if you touch it. Who bothers to touch nowadays. It’s the view that matters.

Couple of weeks back, I had such a boy in my outpatient department. 

It was quite obvious that he had kwashiorkar – a form of malnutrition which we commonly see in this part of the country. A malnutrition which occurs because of a diet deficient in protein.

We’ve had a statement from the Prime Minister of the country that malnutrition is a national shame. It seems that 42% of the children of our country are malnourished in some form or the other. In my state, Jharkhand, the percentage of stunted children is a shameful 57%.  

Quite difficult to believe this when you know that this is the same country that on a regular basis sends satellites to space . . . our engineers are the most sought after in Silicon valley . . . our cricketers are World Cup class . . .

Well, the next time, you go to some of the poorer areas of our towns or cities, be on the watchout for kids on the street . . . begging or loitering around. Look at their hair. They would have straight hair. It may look unkempt. But, it would be straight.

I’ve googled a picture and put in here . . . I'm sure you noticed the picture of the child in my post mentioned above. Not a difficult thing to achieve for a lower middle class family. 

And can you believe it? We’ve people who would end up spending quite a lot of money to have hair such as this . . .when one can have such hair by cutting down on your food intake. The downside is that is you could have some side-effects like a bit of bloating, a cramping pain in your tummy because of the hunger and some skin changes.

Well, with the increase in cost of living and easy availability of junk foods, I would not be much surprised if I find quite a lot of our folk with straight hair caused by poor nutrition.

This post is in response to a blog writing contest arranged by Sunsilk on the straight hair experiment.