Scary Shit

March 1st 2015. I was dreading this date ever since the start of my internship- October ’14. Not because there was something super important or super scary about to happen. Okay wait, it WAS super scary- My ER rotations started on this day. And Lord knows I was not looking forward to it.

My fear/apprehension was primarily because I didn’t know anybody from the medical college and I’m super awkward socially, no really, SUPER. And second, I didn’t understand why 2 weeks in the emergency room was required for a dentist, considering we won’t have on calls and night shifts, or sickly sick people for that matter. Nonetheless, it was mandatory and there was no way I could trick my way out of this one.

Come 1st, I was nervous and agitated and tense. I didn’t know anything or anyone and it was a brand new world. As the days passed, I eased myself into the process, being ahead of my counterparts and in my opinion, faring far better (sorry guys, somebody had to say it). In 15 days, I befriended amazing people who burn with the passion for medicine, and unfortunately also crossed paths with “doctors” who wouldn’t spare a second thought to a patient. And trust me, there were a lot of them. And the reality is really, really sad and scary at the same time. doctor It was the 11th day of my rotation, and I was on the first day of night duty. I remember it was around 3:30 am when me and another intern went upstairs to get some shut eye in the duty room. In less than ten minutes, there was intense rapping on the door and a sleepy female struggled her way out of bed to answer- the bhai had come with a ‘distress call’. (I still don’t get my college’s concept of a handwritten, hand-carried distress call). The doctor who attends the so-written call has to sign their name, write “noted at *whatever time*” and then take whatever course of action they must. In this particular doctor’s case, her course of action was waking the others up and arguing over who is going to attend the distress call. After 15-20 minutes of “not me, you” and “If I take this one, I don’t take ward calls”, somebody did the dying patient the ehsaan of attending them with her presence. And this is just one of the many incidences.

What makes me sad is that these people slave their lives away only for a prefix in their name without any attached meaning or responsibility. You’re a DOCTOR, for Pete’s sake, it is YOUR JOB to attend these calls, and that too, running. And if you really want to take it easy, please, by all means, either join a paraclinical line or don’t be in this faculty at all. I might be nobody to comment on this, considering most of you don’t even consider dentists as doctors, but if that is really the case, you’re no doctor yourself. And I am GLAD I’m not one because at least I don’t have the responsibility of people’s lives in my hand.

Gone are the days when people aspired to become doctors because they genuinely wanted to make a difference. Now it’s all about social status and money. I’m not saying there aren’t any genuine doctors anymore. There are, but only about a handful. I don’t know about other countries, but this is what it is in India. I will not blame the education system alone for this, I will also hold the need for people to be “socially elite” as equal contenders for why the situation is the way it is. The bookworms get all the clinical branches like surgery, medicine, anesthesia etc., while the clinically sound ones end up on second place. The entire system is messed up. And to top that, we have the pressures of society, which screws with this field even further.

On another such occasion, I remember doctors from the ER sending out 4 distress calls for 2 separate patients, and no doctor showed up until after more than an hour. And all they did was make notes, and leave. I mean, WOW. W-O-W. I was filled with anger and immense disgust for these people. And these are the people who advertise their degrees like some sort of achievement. Yes, it is an achievement, but apparently a failed one for you, my friend.

Gone are the days when there were doctors like our fathers, our grandfathers, who dreamt of becoming doctors because they wanted to help people. Turned into dust are the days of passion for medicine, where doctors treated patients with the same kind of care they would treat their own. Lost is the time when the Hippocratic Oath meant something. Half a month was all it took for me to realize, understand and fear the future of medicine. I’ve always hated doctors, but that hatred has changed face and become surprise. Because what was once a respected profession has now become the most widely abused one. And its really scary because everybody has visits to hospitals, and we put our trust into these hands which we don’t even know.

How safe are we from the kind of people who only care about the financial bit of the job? The answer: We’re not.

One can only pray.

“And when I am ill, it is (God) who cures me” [Quran, Surah Ash-Shu’ara, 26:80]

30 thoughts on “Scary Shit”

  1. azmah says:

    How about we first shortlist students on the basis of their marks in the entrance test… well, double the number of candidates to be admitted. And then take an interview of them all; more like an HR round. Where proper psychologists get to judge the candidatures on the basis of the students behavior and nature. That way we’ll have more humane doctors, I suppose.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. NA says:

    This was quite a good read.
    You would find it amusing to know that since I joined college late, I never ended up being part of the Welcome ‘Party’ Initiative thingy..where they make you take the Hippocratic Oath.
    So yeah, I never took the Oath.
    And now I’m a private practitioner.
    God bless my patients. 😀

    Liked by 1 person

  3. Deepak says:

    And if you think the days of your Fathers and Granfather were a lot better then you are sadly mistaken, just talk to the older generation of Doctors, LAMA therapy was rampant at that time, Doctors used to scare patients away before they even entered the ER so that they wouldn’t have to deal with emergencies, they used to pay the patients money to leave so that the tough cases won’t appear in Vivas. They used to fake most of the investigations to escape from the burden of sampling, filing and record keeping was non-existant and there was no accountability of lives in the OT

    Liked by 1 person

  4. Maryam says:

    If you always hated doctors then why did you appear for a Pre-medical test? I mean,isn’t it a common test for both BDS and MBBS? LOL

    Like

  5. mazhar alam says:

    Rather I would sauly that your forefathers did not know the diagnosis and used to treat like a quack. Do u know what a student of girls +2 came to casualty at 1.00 am she was intubated and treated in icu and save. She was taken off from ventilator and shifted to ward and a senior sister injected medications through he iv canula which was somewhat painful and patient said to the sister u r stupid. Although iv canulla was 24 hour old and a new iv canula insertipn would have caused more pain. So moral of the story is that many a time patients expects more than what mony can buy and arm chair critiques write more than what they experienced in just 15 days. God has given u a toungue to speak and hands to write but has also given u a brain to think and speak justly.

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  6. mazhar alam says:

    Rather I would say that your forefathers did not know the diagnosis and used to treat like a quack. Do u know what a student of girls +2 came to casualty at 1.00 am she was intubated and treated in icu and saved. She was taken off from ventilator and shifted to ward and a senior sister injected medications through he iv canula which was somewhat painful and patient said to the sister u r stupid. Although iv canulla was 24 hour old and a new iv canula insertion would have caused more pain. So moral of the story is that many a time patients expects more than what mony can buy and arm chair critiques write more than what they experienced in just 15 days. God has given u a toungue to speak and hands to write but has also given u a brain to think and speak justly.

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  7. Ahmed says:

    You know the most challenging task I have to do in the hospital and particularly the ER ? Its not intubating or insterting a CVP or doing a venisection or tracheostomy, its convincing the patients attendant to donate blood when the patient requires is, Mind you this happens with more than 90% of the patients and most of the times they are the Father/Son/Sibling of the patient and not some stranger, yet they refurse to donate while their ‘loved one’ is dying.

    Point being, people of today easily critique a doctors but do nothing to change the public’s mindset about medical care, you don’t want to donate blood to saved your loved one but sure want the Doctor to sacrifice the joy and sleep of his life to save you. smh

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  8. Bitter Vani says:

    Why this frustrated dentist cum Blogger has so much hatred against doctors? this guy wanted a nap in her 8hrs duty while the doctor receiving the distress call was on duty for 24 hr. This blogger did not observed in casualty that single doctor was attending 70 patient in a day, there was no space to attend the patient in casualty, patients attendant left the patient when asked to donate blood, hospital do not have enough supply of free medicines for poor patient because she was busy in writing a blog to vent her anger on doctors because she could not compete to become a doctor. This so called blogger/writer feels that doctors should not be a book worm but sit with the patient and pray to god. while the fact is that first u read, learn the skill then treat the patient otherwise every OT helping staff will be a surgeon( as they sometimes claims to be).

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    • A- I’m not frustrated.
      B- *Girl, not guy.
      C- I’m not asking them to give up on studying, merely to hone their clinical skills along with it. You can’t ONLY study. The ER isn’t theoretical.
      D- This post isn’t for the entire medical fraternity. I know there are honest doctors out there, because I’ve grown up amongst them. This was simply an experience based post.

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      • Deepak says:

        ER is a lot theoretical madam, how to recognize arrhythmias or MI by looking at an ECG, how to recognize the various poisonings by clinical S/S, to hone the clinical skills there are ward teaching everyday for 3 hours for 4 years continuous, I don’t get how it is a problem if someone spends rest of the time in the library,

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      • Amir says:

        Don’t take it as an insult, but do you know what you come across like?
        Pseudo-British, the usual wanna-be modern girls who think speaking fluent English is a great achievement.
        You start it on Grammar because you don’t have facts to defend your argument, English is not our mother language and not everybody studies in an English medium school, get off your high horce

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      • *horse

        And tbh, I really don’t care what I come across like to people I don’t even know. This is MY blog. I’m going to write about MY experiences, EXACTLY the way I see them. I don’t need to prove anything, because what’s true will remain true, no matter how hard you people try to force otherwise.

        What’s sad is that everybody is taking this as some sort of doctor bashing post, when it isn’t. It is merely a recollection of events that happened and the factual state of at least MY college.

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  11. Shailender says:

    Irony is too much in this post, you complain about laziness of Doctors yet went to take a nap in an 8 hour duty, Miss you need to be present in the ER for the whole 8 hours, even if it is empty, what if a mass casualty comes?

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    • My hatred for doctors is different. And yes, this post ISNT generalisation. It’s called an “experience based post”.

      I’m sorry if that is so hard for y’all to understand.

      Like

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