Bogey Man- Medicine Man

Hospitals make me nervous! Common enough complaint! But when your imagination is as rampant and wild as mine and you have additional inputs from books, it is something closer to fear than just nerves.

Robin Cook’s new book Marker was the latest book I have been reading. A good enough book if u are reading a Cook book (pardon the pun :-p) after a long time. Cook has an unfortunate tendency to follow the same tried and tested route over and over again that after couple of books one tends to guess what will happen at the end even as one reads. Of course his Invasion and Mutation were different and good too.

I started reading Cook coz of the popularity of “Coma” but by the time I could get my hands on Coma, I had already read most of his other books and Coma, to say the least, was anticlimactic. Maybe if it was the first book of his I read I might have been equally impressed, but reading it as I did, I could almost foretell what was to come in the next page…and left me wondering what made it that popular.

But Cook, without fail, leaves me frightened sick of hospitals and the mysterious goings on there in.

As such I am not very familiar with what goes on inside my body. Most things I hear about it leaves me gaping with awe, wonder and a tinge of disbelief... you know the surely-things-like-that-are-not-happening-inside-me kinda feeling.
My medicinal knowledge begins and ends with a Saridon for headache, Crocin for fever and Vicks for Cold So I have amazing respect for the people in medical profession. After all they have had the patience to go through 5 years of intensive training and a few more years of internship and have bravely dissected all those cadavers (I remember getting violently ill when I had cockroach dissection in my 9th class.. oh yuck!)… But when all is said and done… it is my body and I am still suspicious of these guys. Sure the docs explain what they are gonna do… but hey! I am medically challenged. Most times I just grin and nod my head very knowledgeably, when actually its all flying way above my head. Of course I get a thrill out of it when the doc gives some real fancy sounding name for what ails me.
But what happens if they forget and stitch their watch inside while suturing after the surgery? (Wasn’t there a movie about this?). How do I know the injection they say they are giving is what they are giving and is gonna make me all better?

And to boot we have this reservation system, which allows students with hardly 50- 55% in their school to get a medical seat, and even there they only have to get the minimal of minimal mark to pass. How do I know the doc I am seeing is not a reservation candidate, who has just learnt to differentiate the scalpel from the kitchen knife?

I remember the time when my bro broke his big toe and had to be operated. We paid big money and what should have been a simple sticking of bones was made so complicated by the doc that the poor kid lost half his big toe…

Gee! Sure is frightening to think how we have to trust our bodies to these strangers and hope and pray that they know what they are doing, coz we sure don’t :-) ..But what's life without a little trust huh?!

*Phew* that sure got the jitters off the system... now y'all can start feeling jittery :-p