Thursday, March 16, 2006

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

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

If a client can trust us and allow us to code programs without seeing us, we can trust doctors.

Sanjana said...

Pundit,
Thank you :-) I did say reading cook's books make me paranoid... the condition lasts for a few days... oh and join the club.. I am a baby when it comes to needles too. :-)

Vikram,
Come on buddy... coding is not life threatening...

Hazel said...

Thanks for passing on the jitters.. Grr!.. I am sure I have have a knife in my pocket the next time I visit the medicine man. gadbad kiya na .. toh tapka doongi saale ko .. :D hehe

Sanjana said...

chaku ke bhare main pehle hi batha dho, tho gadbad hi nahi karega...
:-)

Sanjana said...

Talking of Eve... she sure proved one thing... guys either just can't think anything by themselves... gullible manipulated puppets that they are... or Adam probably wanted to eat the apple himself but didn't dare to eat it until he could blame it on someone else ... :-)..personally i tend to lean towards the latter.

BTW Pundit, i am sure there are quite a lot of competent doctors out there... other than the lovely ones u have listed :-p... so don't worry :-)

Tamanna said...

Hey sanju
I too hate docs and their hospitals.. yeah yeah u can think mechanical like pundit and take ur gaadi to the doc but there's more to this gaadi than spare parts. We have the imagination. Personally, the ambience of hospis make me feel more ill than what I am actually. Plus these days you have the new fashion of doctors minting money jus for the heck of it. There's no honesty left in any profession these days!!!

I used to fantasise abt marrying a doc ( rem Barney of Doctors fame!!) until I read this story by Roald Dahl. In that, there's this lady who loves this doc but circumstances force her to marry some1 else. As it happens, she falls deeply in love with her hubby and lives happily for some 30+ yrs with him until he dies. Now she happens to meet this doc and ends up in bed with him. He being a doc, lists out what is medically wrong with her now that she is old. She commits suicide in the bathroom.

That scared me stiff. No doctors for me please :-D

Pundit i prefer banana anyday to apple. yewwww apple is so tasteless.

Sanjana said...

Ah! tammanna! u and i , we always think along similar lines :-)

bongbabe said...

I HATE apples 2!!!! YEEEEWWWWWWWW

Anonymous said...

Buddy

Thats 2 of us!!!!

Anonymous said...

Piet Hein (a danish poet famous for his short poems, called "grooks") wrote a cute grook about doctors, that
i really enjoyed (and often seems quite right!)


"
MY FAITH IN DOCTORS

My faith in doctors
is immense.
Just one thing spoils it;
their pretence
of authorised
omniscience."

How's that :-)

Hey, you seem to write very nice blogs. reading ur old posts when i get time! -- so expect more comments!
cheers,
Ranjith

PS: BTW, more beautiful grooks here:
http://chat.carleton.ca/~tcstewar/grooks/grooks.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Hein_(Denmark)
Some of them are too good!

Sanjana said...

Thanks Ranjith. Glad u like my posts... Hey the grooks are quite good... do let me know more stuff like that... Looking forward to more of ur comments :-)