Why Doctors Are Better Than Most Other Human Beings

Apr 29, 2011

(Disclaimer: This is just a feel-good article. No egotism, people…okay?)

The reasons:

• Needles and sharp objects no longer scare us.

• We can easily watch all the blood and gore in horror/crime movies in which the organs and entrails of characters are pulled out by the murderer. (Maybe at some level we even find that interesting   ).

• We can pronounce all those long drug chemical names without stammering. (Well, at least most of us can )

• We can very easily creep out other people by recounting grisly details of how we dissected dead bodies in the first year itself.

• Reason no. 5 : three words : People trust us.

• We get to do cool stuff like replacing old battered organs & tiny valves with shiny new ones and sewing people back up.

• Everybody calls us “Sahab” by default (as in “doctor saab”). Always. Even in an argument. We command respect, even subconsciously.

• The Paedia people : they have the ultimate capacity to love and care even for those little things which cry, howl, kick, scream and bite constantly.

• Everybody in our family approaches us whenever they have even a little health problem. I know this can be a bit annoying at times, especially for us med students (who basically don’t know as much as they are supposed to), but hey, at least importance toh milti hai !

• The lady-docs in Gynae : they can boast of being in a field where, for a change, the discrimination, if any, is against the men !

• We understand the real, true meaning of the word ‘Emergency’.

• And last but definitely not the least, we bring hope and healing and comfort into people’s life. And in today’s world, that really does mean a lot in terms of the wishes and blessings we get.

Doctors rock, seriously !!

 

Cotton-Candy Dreams

(lines inspired by my sleeping baby-sis)

She dreams . . .

about the closet of her elder sis –
boxes full of glittering jewels,
charm bracelets, silver chains,
golden, blue, black and clear nailpaint,
stilettos and lip-gloss, hairclips too,
cellphone that she never gives you . . .

She dreams. . .
’bout the toys she’ll show friends today;
how many stars the teacher gave;
what mom kept on the topmost shelf;
if SpiderMan died, who will help?
Barbie sets and stickers, Winnie the Pooh,
Hanna Montana, Kitretsu . . .

She dreams . . .

And she turns into a princess
or becomes a rockstar sensation;
discovers a river of mango-juice
and builds her chocolate mansion;
fights a monster and saves a prince,
slides down rainbows, skips on clouds
rides on shimmering butterfly wings
. . . she dreams .

Years will pass and she will know
that kisses don’t transform all those frogs;
at times you don’t reap what you sow.
That slowly, you outgrow a lot of things
though their memories breathe within.
You win fights and bets and races run
against all boys in class
but gotta lose to a chosen one . . .
All this plus a whole lot more,
but till her childhood takes its leave,
dad says let’s just let her believe

. . . and she dreams . . .

(Poem (c) Sanyukta)

(Pic courtesy mylot.com)

 

Quote of the Month. Original.

July 27th, 2008

 

“One of the good things about living alone is that you can throw stuff around whenever you are frustrated, and nobody would say anything….but the irony is, you yourself gotta pick it all up later and set it right. “

 

Nailpaint, OJ, and Hiatus

Notice the contrast between the black and the orange. Cool, yeah?  

(BestFriend said blood would have been better instead of juice, and I threw a marble vase at him. Hypothetically, of course.
Like I happened to enlighten somebody who asked about him, he’s actually a very nice guy who sometimes says wise stuff after…like…getting hit on the head with a football during a game, or something like that. But that is less often and so he’s usually at the receiving end of all my hypothetical violence. )
(Oh and by the way, the pictures are mine.)

Anyways,
I had a full-blown nostalgia trip a few days back. Went to school for some work and it was like- Whoa. They’re going on just the same even with all of us not in it anymore. But that was a fleeting weird thought. So I came back home and decided to bring some order to the chaos in the universe. Now I’m the kind of person who can’t stand clutter AT ALL. Even if the clutter consists of precious objects. And sorting / organizing stuff is almost therapeutic, next only to shopping (which translates to bringing in more stuff to be organized. : | Uh. Ain’t life so paradoxical? ).

So I sorted re-sorted and organized re-organized all my skool stuff- questionpapers, tests, random notes passes in class, scribblings and idle doodles, poetry drafts, keepsakes from trips with friends and a whole lot of other unclassified stuff accumulated from the past three years or so- into neat paper-clipped sheaves, then envelopes and dustproof seal-able folders and stowed it all away out of sight in the hinterlands of the closet.

Yeah, I’m emotional like that. But it felt better. Like, now my future biographers would have no difficulty at all in reconstructing in total detail the story of my life even if I happen to grow into an 85 year old amnesiac eccentric old woman. That’s a morbid thought I know.

Oh. What in sweet hell is the point of this post? It is this. I’m going on a break from blogging till some of the entrance examinations I gotta give get over. And that’s gonna take two months at least. Might be blogging intermittently and replying to comments.
Funny part is, people go on hiatuses between blogging. And I, apparently, blog between hiatuses. : / Yeah whatever.

However, I’ll be on Twitter and updating upon the general state of the world around me and so I put its widget right here on the sidebar *points* . So keep checking back. Or follow me on twitter. (You could comment on the twitters in this post’s comment page, if you would like to.)

There’s no point probably even in informing about this since nobody is like dying to read what I write anyways. But if somebody actually is, *pauses to blow delicately at her fingernails* I have some other alternatives for ‘em:

• Go check out Tumblr and Plurk. Pretty cool, both of them. Miniblogging services, with Tumbler being the more advanced cousin. Plurk is almost like twitter but has a really delightful interface and an actual timeline that’s totally worth checking out. Tell me if you join so I could add you to my network. (As of now, Plurk appears to be open only to invites. This was not so the time I joined that. So if you can’t wait to join that, drop me a line and I’ll send you an invite.)

• De-clutter your own life.

• Write eulogies and sorrowful poetry dedicated to remembrances of me (Okay, that was a farji random suggestion. )

• Add goodness to somebody’s life. In any way.

• Spend more time OUT THERE than in virtual reality.

• Make a to-do list and complete it.

• Then repeat the above process until you finish all your pending/overdue work.

(Do any of all this above, then blog about it and let me know. I’ll give you a special handwritten certificate of commendation. Except for point#1 of course. ) 

By the time you do this, I’ll already be back, promise. Hopefully with the extra pounds lost and a place in a med college. Wish me luck.

Till then, keep on rocking.

Love and peace, universe!

 

Her Princess Dreams

Our local presswali’s daughters Beena and Puja got married recently. Beena’s a bit older than me and Puja is all of 11-12. Yeah, and she was wed off, though she will be staying with her mother only for a few more days. When I first heard this I did, but now I don’t really blame their mother as such. What else was she supposed to do- her husband walked out on them after a bout of heavy drinking once 7-8 years back and she doesn’t even know he is alive or not; she can hardly scrape some money together from her daily job of ironing people’s clothes and other such odd jobs here and there in a few houses. And she herself is a very frail, weak woman, having recently suffered multiple fractures while repairing their one-room shack. I guess she needed some anchorage- an assurance that someone will be there to look after her daughters if she’s dead and gone. There’s another reason as well. She couldn’t afford to organize two different wedding ceremonies, however unlavish, at two different points of time. 

But will the girls really be ‘looked after’ as such? I wonder. From all that I know of Beena, she’s a very serious, very somber girl, already apparently weighed down by life. I haven’t seen her smile often. And she’s probably gone to just another small town and will have to keep on doing all that she did here, with the added cares of a household that she would be supposed to manage. And her husband will perhaps, a few years down the line, hang out with the village prostitutes, come back drunk and possibly walk out on their relation just like her father did.

God forbid, but if something like that happens, what about her princess dreams- you know, the kind where everybody gets to live happily ever after? It’s hard to believe that, but maybe her circumstances never allowed her to have any. Who knows.

 

A Polynesian Rhapsody

I was experimenting with a style I hadn’t tried in poetry: experience projection. Describing through somebody else’s eyes, not your own. Writing as how they would have felt in a given situation. And I came up with this, inspired by “Pioneers of the Pacific” a recent article in the National Geographic Magazine (Roff Smith and Stephen Alvarez, March 2008) about an ancient race of Native Pacific explorers who discovered and colonized almost all of the hundreds of then uninhabited, scattered Pacific islands east of Australia, including Fiji, Tahiti, Easter Island, Polynesia, starting 3000 years back. Their daring voyages in those ancient times have been equated to lunar landings of 1900s in terms of their relative boldness at the time they were undertaken. 

They used to undertake long voyages on their hand-built and hand-rigged canoes (no fossil fuel power 3000 years ago ), searching for new islands to settle upon. It wasn’t like they were forced to move, or that there was pressure on the land. They numbered only a few thousands and the islands were way too many, nearly 300 in Fiji alone. They did it all just for the sake of exploring new frontiers. Researchers now say that one of the reasons why they were able to undertake such long and daring voyages was that they went against the direction of generally prevailing wind currents, so that even if they did not discover any new land, they could just turn around and the wind would take them back where they started from.
Eventually, in a 1000 next years or so, their descendants perhaps reached South America also, eastward from Australia.

So I kind of got inspired from the concept and the wonderful photography in the article and wrote something. It captures a particular moment in the life of two of these people—a couple. The man is setting out on an indefinite voyage to the sea, not knowing when he will be able to return, and even if he will return or not—because after all it’s going to be him against the ocean. Here is what his beloved says to him before he sets out.

 

Go forth, mariner
The blue stretches to infinity
Discover a new paradise
For the two of us…  

May the gods guide your way,

The heavens steer you right
And when your spot new land
Marked by towering banks of cloud
Beyond the dusky horizon
And billowing fumes from boiling lava
Oozing into the ocean,
May the guardian spirits
Protect your canoe from the heat.. 

But if you do not find it
Ride the trade winds back home soon
I’ll be waiting
In our moss-hung cave beneath the cliff
Obsidian will shimmer
Vivid tropical blossoms will sparkle
In my soul
Getting a whiff of
Your intoxicating scent of the sea
Paradise wherever you will be.

*Obsidian is a kind of beautiful natural volcanic glass used in that culture for making ornaments and stuff.

This collage was complied by me for the poem.

The text of the NGM article can be found here.
Pics courtesy Google Image Search, Corbis and Stephen Alvarez for NGM.
Poem (c) Sanyukta, March 2008.

 

 

T.G.I.F

Womanhood is a gift. Thank God I’m Female!

Happy Women’s Day to us.

 

Why physics always reminds me of Rome

Yeah, life is generally good. Except that I kind of screwed up my Chem Board Exam paper. No it ain’t that bad actually, but not as good as I wanted it to be. (And that, my readers, is the metaphor for life.)
(Gawd. I sound like Charlotte Bronte.)  

Now next is physics and I’m taking no chances with it at least. But for how long can you keep appreciating the elegant nuances of subatomic particles and the intangible dynamics of semiconductor electronics? Not that I don’t like studying stuff. But I’m wishing I had studied harder last year. Heck, even this last month.
And I increasingly feel I have more inclination towards literature, languages, history, myth, art, designing, ya know, stuff like that. Non-technical intellectuality. More human stuff.
Or Life Sciences. I could read biology day in and day out and not get tired of it. And I like all that. Yeah I know I’ll have enough of even that in some med course (for which I’ll have a fiz exam first. Argh.) I have enough of that supposed-to-study-stuff in bio even now.
But. I’m. Supposed. To. Mug. Fiz. Now.

On second thoughts, physics is kinda cool. And people hold science people (like, real science people. Researchers, scientists.) in more awe than they do designers/authors/historians. I mean, not as people, but their work in generally more respected, or should I say, considered more erudite. Or at least that’s what I have observed. (Remember Vittoria Vetra, anybody? )
( I wouldn’t mind being a physicist if that would, in addition, also make me as lean, as confident, and as smart as what she was portrayed to be. It’s not like I’m particularly horrible. Glowing skin, check. Long black hair, check. Earthy features, maybe. “Raw sensuality”? Not for myself to judge But slender like that? I wish.
No seriously, I think she was pretty cool. Her whole character. And driving around Rome examining old churches for clues to a wild macabre treasure-hunt-like chase…and that too with a smart, macho, swimmer-physique, Harvard-brain guy (*sigh*) while an un-found Antimatter bomb is ticking away to total annihilation. That all would be totally my thing too. )

See? Started off talking about physics. Guess I gotta go back to my teeny-tiny atoms and nuclei doing that crazy decay-dance of theirs.

But who would ever believe that of all the people in the world (or now out of it ), it was nobody else but Dan Brown who inspired me to study fizix with less hatred. At least for some time.

 

 

Mission Intro

I don’t think the new year has had a really great start for me. I mean, I’m lagging in all my study schedules, am past all the deadlines I set for myself…but no end in sight…And the strangest thing is, I’m not getting pro-active, like I usually happen to do.

Wish someone, something would show me the way, soon. I have the potential; don’t want to be just another wreck.But I’ve realized that writing or any other form of creative expression is kinda necessary for me. When I don’t do anything creative for a long period of time, it’s like a clot in my head that needs to be gotten out to rid me of the pressure. Not very pretty analogy, I know. 

So I think from now on I’ll blog on schedule—say twice/thrice a week at least. Or maybe I should fix a particular day. Yeah, that would be better. Blog on Sundays, Tuesdays; lock myself in a room with books, caffeine, and no internet on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays; and finish long-overdue tasks of saving the world on Saturdays. In between all this, teach my kid sister the alphabet and the correct words to “Johnny, Johnny” while trying not to think about little Johnny’s namesake supermodel-actor.
Also wash my little Carrie and supervise the maid while mom’s gone to work. (I found the maid watching The Bold and The Beautiful—just watching, coz she doesn’t understand English—in some of her idle minutes yesterday. )

Got to do some self-maintenance as well.

Maybe I should put off saving the world on Saturdays till all of this gets done.

So will try to keep you updated about Mission Status as often as possible, and other general randomness. Keep coming back.

(pics courtesy Corbis.com)

 

About a man, his daughter, and a nonexistent son.

Sometimes I think Dad misses a son in his life. Of course, my parents don’t believe in all that super crap about the son being the pride of the family and the parents’ “ladder to heaven” like so many people in this majorly sick and prejudiced society of ours do. Me and lil sis are the very cornerstones of their life….they would do anything to see us happy.Yet, sometimes I think Dad would have liked a son. He never ever hints/mentions anything of that sort, in fact, I don’t even think this idea ever crossed his mind in its full realization. But perhaps it’s always present in his sub-conscious.

When I was that little girl with short tomboy-ish hair, Dad used to rub them dry for me everytime I washed them. After a point, my hair grew too long for him to manage. That was the end of it. He once hinted at a set of toy cars when the same little girl wanted a new plaything. I made a face and chose a Barbie instead. And that was the end of it. When I was still that little girl, he used to buy denims from the garment store for me. After a point, I began to choose floral prints. That was the end of it too.

You see how it is…

• He won’t ever get to hear another masculine voice at home that he can associate with a person in our family.

• Our family holiday album from last year doesn’t contain a pic of him playing golf with his son at the Shillong Golf Course.

• We won’t ever have an argument in the house about which latest bike to buy.

• I can’t go on trekking trips with him all round the month anytime.

• He and mom can never imagine being cared for after retirement by a sweet daughter-in-law, like their siblings can.

• He still has to park both the cars inside the driveway himself every night. [*sigh*.....yeah, I'm still learning the safe parking part...the driveway-cum-parking area is pretty narrow :/]

• He still has to depend only on himself for calling / hassling / bargaining with usually grouchy car mechanics. [Yeah, I can manage the storekeeper / plumber / electrician / appliance servicing personnel...but mechanics are way too much! Plus I know like practically nothing about the anatomy of an automobile...let alone do even some minor fixing myself. Told you I'm learning. Don't label me the insensitive daughter.]

• He himself has to do all the putting-of-strings-of-lightbulbs-on-roof-and-walls at Diwali.

• He has only his voice to drawl along to sad oldie songs on the radio.

• Dad always has to rely on the judgement of the women in his life [mom and me, sis is way too small. ] besides his own judgement, in deciding everything from which t-shirts to buy to where to invest.

He is by far the strongest and yet the most sensitive guy I’ve ever known. Yet, I think he could have done with a little more help in all the everyday stuff. I do help him, but beyond a limit, he wouldn’t let me, or would be extra-thankful, thus propelling me back into I’m-Daddy’s-little-girl mode. And can you ever help anybody when the other person wouldn’t take it, just for the sake of not troubling you, although he needs that help? Yeah, that’s my Pops.

Like when I went to pay the phone and electricity bills for the first time, he gave me an extra 100 bucks for the mere fact of having successfully done so! And only yesterday when his car broke down and he called me to pick him up in mine, he said, “Thank God you can drive now…” And I was like “Sheesh, Dad, Don’t make it so big….” . These are the times I think he thinks I’m going out of my way to help him, which is not the case. Yet, another day, when I hadn’t cleaned up my car for long, he was like “If you drive, maintain the thing as well. See, Mr Y’s son does that every weekend…” and I mentally said to him “How can I help it if you don’t have a son?”
Now I guess that was wrong of me. I took his words in the wrong sense, he never meant to compare me to a son by his words, was only citing an example.

At 52, perhaps a 16-year-old daughter cannot help Dad as much as a guy could have. I might try to fill the gaps for Dad, but still, none of all the stuff that is the business of fathers and their sons will ever transpire between him and a younger guy. I see him looking fondly, almost-wistfully at my guy-friends, and I feel he misses a son in his life.

Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll make you proud one of these days. Just wait. And meanwhile, while you wait, just give me this month’s bills to pay. And oh, the car mechanic’s workshop number too.
I’ll learn about automobile anatomy and money-matters eventually in time. But right now, I think we can go shopping for shirts at least.