"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 Not realising I was no longer in paediatrics and the list on the wall was long outdated.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)

Posted by littleindian on . |

Tags: doctors, transfusion, vocation
Posted in India, Life, Religion