REFLECTIONS
On pills and needles
INDU BALACHANDRAN
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A simple “how are you” can give you material for many hours of conversation.
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If we spent so much money on scans and x-rays, we jolly well expect something dangerous and life-threatening to show up…
“So what did your brain scan show finally?” I asked a hypochondriac friend recently. “Nothing!” he declared, sounding annoyed.
Well! Since no one, really, should publicly admit to a ‘nothingness’ in the area that houses one’s intellect, I thought my pal could have worded his medical verdict better. Stifling a laugh, I asked “So aren’t you glad there’s nothing in your brain after all?”
“Are you kidding me? I just spent Rs 5,500…you think I’m happy to have simply wasted so much money?” he said, outraged.
That’s the thing about us value-for-money human beings. If we spent so much money on scans and x-rays, we jolly well expect something dangerous and life-threatening to show up there… Especially since this gives us material for many hours of conversations ahead.
Unfortunately, the standard party greeting all over the world is “How are you?”— an immediate cue to launch off into a stitch-by-stitch account of the latest operation, or a twitch-by-twitch account of a recent recovery.
Mistaking the pained expressions around the hapless listeners’ faces for acute sympathy, bad-health bores go on and on and on… not forgetting to mention interesting details of uncontrollable bowel movements and nauseous expulsions in their narrative.
At the doctor’s
Sitting in the waiting room at a doctor’s recently, I saw a woman with a bad case of laryngitis. I wondered if it had come about after talking non-stop about her previous illness, whatever that was.
While the doctor was testing his patients, the receptionist was testing our patience; with no clue when each of our turns was likely to come.
Since I had already finished reading even the names of the editorial team of the 1978 issue of SPAN kept in the waiting room, I passed my time looking around the walls. “Time heals everything,” said a framed placard written in Bodoni Italics, with red roses used as punctuation marks.
That was consoling. Perhaps it meant that I could simply walk out, totally healed, after my two-hour wait here, without even seeing the doc.
And I also remembered some sound advice: never consult a doctor whose waiting-room plants have died. I had no cause to worry here.
The house plants around me were in shades of lush green, with rare colours of roses in full bloom too; all in everlasting plastic.
Meanwhile, I was treated to an excellent and detailed report on the malfunction of the intestine of the gentleman next to me, as told to his friend via cell phone. With great candour and appropriate facial and hand expressions, he explained the stages of non-movement of stools over a week till I could take it no longer and moved to a stool far away from him.
Anyway, my name was suddenly announced, and I looked back with smug satisfaction at the huge crowd yet to see the doctor.
That’s the paradox about us impatient patients. The bigger the crowd jostling in the waiting room, the better we feel about coming there, thinking: wow, this doctor is in great demand; I came to the right place. (I feel the same way about dying to eat only in crowded restaurants, even though I’m driven crazy as there’s no spare table in sight…)
Handwriting blues
My session went off smoothly though I did think it was ironic that while it was nearly impossible to read my doctor’s illegible handwriting on the prescription, the bill I was presented with outside was very neatly typed.
And there’s good reason why billing assistants never accept cheques: some mean patients may think it’s a fitting revenge to pay doctor’s bills by signing their cheques illegibly too.
I stopped by at the pharmacy attached to get my many gleaming new foils of pills and capsules and syrups, knowing fully well that after just three earnest days of pill-swallowing regulated by clock-watching precision, I would suddenly abandon it all, consigning the remains of my treatment into a large plastic box whose contents I never throw away. Even though I suspect many of these life-savers have themselves peacefully passed away in their confinement, as their expiry dates have gone past a few years ago…
Meanwhile, I had to go visit a good friend in hospital who was to undergo a gland surgery the next day. Going up in the lift, I flinched hearing some gory post-operative details of random strangers being happily discussed around me.
It did strike me then that a decidedly uncomfortable medical term like, ugh, ‘discharge’ is also the same cheery term for patients being released and sent home… And talking about medical terms: sitting by the bed of the young friend I was visiting, I was witness to his sense of outrage when the smiling young nurse came to take a blood sample. In an attempt to soothe him before plunging the needle into his vein, she smiled and cheerfully said to him, a young man in his prime, “Small prick…don’t worry, okay?” Ha!
E-mail: indubee8@yahoo.co.in
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