"me no big chief …

yes, I write against a religion that
denies the equality and the fundamental rights of every human individual,
denies the freedom to practise any religion other than its own

my views on such religion on this blogs have been criticised

it has also brought criticism of my personal self
a few week ago I was asked by someone calling herself noseycow

If you are a physician, how do you reconcile your intense hatred of any Muslim with your oathe to give each INDIVIDUAL patient your best care?

This is how, noseycows

An incident known to only three individuals; unreported untold –
till now.

I had finished my rotation of senior housejobs and had entered the postgraduate surgical residency. Of the many speciality I had worked through in my rotation, I had come to like paediatric surgery the most.

A speciality not sought after by the young surgical aspirants in the 80s. As with many others, the department was underfunded and understaffed. Led by a consultant dedicated to his work, but not supported by the management. Since starting my residency, I had volunteered many of my off duty hours to work in his wards, scrub up with him in the theatre; for no reason other than it gave a meaning to my life at the time.

I was no longer on the paediatric surgery rota, when one night on my way back from a callout to one of my own patients I was stopped by a wardboy with a callbook. There were no pagers in our hospital in those days. Doctors were called for emergencies by handwritten messages in a ‘call book’, the ‘wardboys’ were sent out to find the doctors in their usual hideouts. The outcome of the emergencies relying how quickly the wardboys could track down the doctors.

That night there was an emergency in the paediatric surgical ward. The houseman needed help, he was too scared to call the consultant at home. He had sent out the ‘callbook’ to me in desperation. Not realising I was no longer in paediatrics and the list on the wall was long outdated.

It was well after midnight. but I have never refused a call.
I went up to the ward. There was an infant, a girl with intestinal obstruction in a state of shock. She was desperately ill, but we had no intensive care units in the hospital.

The houseman was new, on a rotation from the paediatric department. His instructions from his seniors the evening before was to try and resuscitate the child. An emergency operation had been booked for the next morning, provided the child survived the night and was accepted for theatre by the anaesthetists.

And if blood for transfusion could be made available.
Getting blood for transfusion was always the responsibility of the patients’ ‘party’. The parents, the friends, the relatives or the children; whoever would be around for the doctor to hand over the sample and the requisition slip. This little girl only had her parents.

We were the only hospital in the city with a nationalised bloodbank. But they had run out of stocks of her bloodgroup as they claimed. The option left was for the parents to donate themselves or to buy units from one of the many privatised bloodbanks.

The young parents were very poor, from a rural district of Bengal they knew no one in the city. They had somehow scraped the railfare to come to the city hospital. To buy even a single unit of blood was beyond their means. In those days I was no richer and even had I wanted to, I could not offer them any money.

Would they donate themselves?
No, the mother thought it would kill them.
No, the father said it would be against their religion.
They were muslims, they could not be forced to donate nor would they ‘buy’ blood for transfusion.
Their religion came first; they decided to accept the inevitable, they had three other children and the child who was still alive was given up for dead.

The child was the same bloodgroup as I. But I was intensely needlephobic.
The young girl was indeed doomed. Besides it would be a bad precedence if a doctor was to donate his own blood for the treatment of patients.

I do not know what made me go down to the bloodbank and convince the medical officer to be gentle with the needle. One unit of my blood was enough for three baby transfusions. It was not uncommon for rare blood groups to become “lost in transit”, I myself brought them up to the ward with me so it would not go missing and so that no one would know except that houseman of course. I had sworn him to secrecy.

We started transfusing the first unit and still had two more for the theatre. It was almost dawn when I went off to bed. I was too tired to think of the ifs and whys of what I had done.

I was in theatre the next morning with my own unit. My professor called me to say the consultant in the paediatric theatre wanted to see me and I was excused from the rest of our theatre list. My heart sank. I knew it had to do with the incidents of the night. On my way over I thought of various excuses to justify myself.

When I reached, the consultant simply said he had a very sick child he was going to operate on, would I scrub up with him. In relief I agreed. We discussed only the possibilities and prognosis as we scrubbed.

Yes, it was that same little girl.
She had survived the night. And another unit of transfusion had been started.

We prepped and draped the tiny figure in silence. The consultant surprised us all by asking me to swap sides, informed the anaesthetists that I would be the surgeon and for the very first time, handed me the knife.

It was a small gut volvulus, a segment of the intestine was strangulated as was anticipated. I resected it out and anastomosed the healthy ends. Everytime I looked up I saw the blood transfusion trickling in. Only I in that room knew it was my blood.

We did get her safely back to the ward.
As we left the operating theatre, the consultant stopped and shook my hands and thanked me for what I had done the night before. He had known, the house officer had felt compelled to inform him. We never discussed it again.

Whenever I could, I went up to check on the girls progress. I was just another doctor doing a round. One day her bed was empty. She had been discharged home.

I do not know what kind of a life I helped her return to.
I do not know if that little girl survived to even reach her teens.

What I learnt for myself that night was being the doctor we are often the last person who can make that difference between a patient’s life and death. As long as there is a heartbeat, as long as there is an output, it is our responsibility to do everything we can to save that life.

That is how we do it.
That is how I do it, regardless of the race, colour, religion, nationality of my patients.
I have accepted the responsibility, and I am prepared to go beyond the call of duty, everytime.

She would be 24 years old this year.

(I was born to hindu brahmin parents)

as a blogger, i often wonder which is the greatest of the scourges,
the loudmouth ignorants,
the opportunist but obvious propagandist
or the manipulator deluded about their own knowledge or intelligence or perhaps both

i have had the misfortune of being visited by one,
who has tried his/her pathetic best to use a play of words to divert from the point I make

as is a norm on this site,
I bring my response to that comment onto the mainpage,
so that it does not get obscured within the binary…

@ duncanr

you are being fastidious about my usage of the words “election year” because you obviously do not have any other arguments against what I have written.

To make it clear, so it sinks into your “non-sloppy” sanctimonious thinking:
a British PM can call an election at anytime of his term.
Under the provisions of the Septennial Act 1715 as amended by the Parliament Act 1911, the next United Kingdom general election must be held on or before Thursday 3 June 2010 – so Gordon Brown HAS TO call that election within the next 16 months – by 3rd June 2010 to be exact.

It is of no consequence whether 2009 has yet not been declared as “the election year” to the public – David Milliband, an individual with high ambitions of his own political future, himself must know when the election will be held – and when he needs to start “pandering” to the muslim votebanks.

Even with your fastidious diversionary argument – you cannot rule out a call for an election AT ANY TIME WITHIN THE NEXT SIXTEEN MONTHS. And if an election does take place before midnight, 31st December 2009 – consider your butt well and truly kicked.

My perspectives are clear – biased? perhaps.
what you are trying is a clever way of avoiding to declare that muslim perspectives too are deeply biased.

You may call yourself an aethist, I expected you would,
that is the another clever/cheap way of avoiding to declare what religion you were born into.
Declaring yourself an aethist does not exclude any bias in your thinking
it is THE PERFECT WAY of concealing a bias based on religion.

Besides NO ONE born into Islam can ever be an aethist.
Is it not, under the Islamic law (sharia), the male apostate must be put to death unless he suffers from a mental disorder or converted under duress and a female apostate must be either executed, or imprisoned until she reverts to Islam.

I stand my ground,
with an election that HAS TO be declared at ANYTIME and CONCLUDED before 3rd JUNE 2010, it is now ESSENTIAL FOR BRITISH MPs TO PANDER TO MUSLIM VOTERS.

Milliband does not dare talk of Israel giving independence to Palestine - he may be a moron, but has just enough neurones to realise that will be the end of his political career. the easy option was to score cheap points by talking Kashmir.

It is ironic,
in the name of democracy, the world has to suffer MPs pandering to a religion to get their votes
when that religion itself does not believe in democracy.

Sloppy thinking? My readers will judge that.
But it has more value than what you dish out day after day on your own website.
It takes a lot more than your diversionary attempts under the pretence of being “fastidious” to try and disprove or discredit what I write.

I do not publish cowardly diversionary arguments here.
Any further arguments that YOU may have – dish them out on your site.

this individual serves his non-sloppy thoughts at a mad tea party
please visit: a display of intelligence as you may never have perceived before

and why not,
Pakistan is far from home,
if the Pakistanis are killing Indians in India, its no problem for the Brits.

David Miliband comments on Kashmir welcomed by ‘terrorist’ group

By Dean Nelson in New Delhi – Last Updated: 12:46PM GMT 18 Jan 2009

The radical Muslim group linked to the Mumbai attacks has welcomed Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s call for India and Pakistan to resolve their dispute over Kashmir.

Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which is said to have been behind the terror assault in which more than 170 people died, has backed comments he made last week during a trip to the region.

In an article ahead of his visit to India last week, the foreign secretary said the ‘war on terror’ had been mistaken and that individual groups like LeT should be targeted and brought to justice. But solving the Kashmir issue would deny LeT its ‘call to arms’ and free Pakistan to fight al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in its tribal areas.

“Although I understand the current difficulties, resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms, and allow Pakistani authorities to focus more effectively on tackling the threat on their western borders,” he said.

The statement will cause further discomfort for Mr Miliband after India reacted angrily to his ‘interference’ in the issue and senior politicians branded his trip a ‘disaster’.

besides it is the election year,
and his party has to start pandering to the muslim voters in Britain.

is this individual fit to be a foreign secretary?

he has no knowledge of history
he has no knowledge of what constitutes terrorism
he has no knowledge of the cause and progress of the conflict in Kashmir

does this moron know that the Instrument of Accession
by which India came to control the princely state Jammu and Kashmir
which includes Jammu, Kashmir, Northern Areas, Ladakh and Aksai Chin was accepted
by Governor General of India, Lord Mountbatten, a British?

can he answer why in 1947 the Pakistani Army invaded Kashmir?
why Pakistan, in blatant disregard of UN orders continue to occupy Kashmir since 1948?

can he answer why Pakistan has waged wars on India
the latest being in Kargil 1999, masterminded by the ally of the west, criminal Musharraf?

Pakistan has no legal rights on Kashmir,
they have dug their greedy evil claws into the land that has never been their’s

Pakistan has for 60 years fought proxy wars through the “islamic militants”
by “terrorising” Kashmir and India.

what this moron has called for is to give into Pakistani terrorism,

and the reason why?

solving the Kashmir issue would deny LeT its ‘call to arms’ and free Pakistan to fight al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in its tribal areas.

exactly what Pakistan has been blackmailing the world they would do, since the mumbai killings

this is simply for his, for the British and the West’s selfish convenience

George Bush and Tony Blair has so glaringly proved they may be world leaders of the first world west, but when it comes to brains, even the goldfish packs more neuronal power in their pinhead calvaria than these ‘educated’ idiots

these cowards are too worried of keeping their muslim vote banks intact, that they will remain
in a perpetual faked denial that Pakistan the state is not involved in terrorism in India

I have come to recognise this as the “simple white christian married mother of three” syndrome

the loud mouths with little knowledge,
and scant regards for those who are being terrorised by muslims far away from home

is he going to say
the same to the jews in Israel?
tell the Americans to pull out of Saudi Arabia?
did his Britain give into the Irish call for an independent Irish State?
was it not his party and government that invaded Iraq for their own convenience?

oh, no. this is about India,
and why should a British MP give a toss for the welfare of a third world state?

this is about double standards, a familiar stench in the west.
till 9/11s and 7/7s hits their own people

foot in mouth Mr Milliband?
let me help you place it in the only appropriate spot of your anatomy