WORKING 24+7

Working 24+7

So the last time I blogged which was about a month ago was when I cribbed about having to move against my will to one of the largest hospitals in the country, far away from my hometown and to abandon my old department which to tell the truth was my own personal piece of heaven based on my vision of how medicine should be practiced as I had over the years molded it with my sweat as a top-class surgery department beyond its financial limitations. The change was painful as everyone knows and not least because it was all so unexpected. And so after a month or so of working at my new department and facing the ragging every newbie gets from entrenched old fossils who have spent all their time polishing chairs with their backsides I am now in a better frame of mind to start blogging again. 

Firstly the positives, I get to treat a lot more patients than I did at my old workplace. The fact that my new hospital is the only large hospital for quite a few districts around town means we get a lot of referral patients from everywhere around a 200km range. And other patients do drop in off their own volition as the reputation of the hospital is such that they believe miracles from the doctors here. Which is a bit surprising considering that the majority of the doctors here are tenured people and like typical tenure track professors – once they have got a guaranteed job till retirement they don’t give a damn about patients are anyone else. The bulk of the work of course falls on the various students here, of whom there are masses and masses doing every kind of course-degrees and diplomas and to tell the truth the students are more than upto it as they realize that this is the only place they can get hands on training and experience which can stand them in good stead throughout their lives and they will be thankful for when they are practicing alone in some little town by themselves. As a corollary I get to guide and discuss and treat all these patients with interesting complaints that the students bring to me for help. Which acts a rapid review refresher course for me as I am now getting to treat a lot of weird disease which defy diagnosis at first glance. Of course, I miss dealing with the kids as I used to do in my old hospital. But still its far easier to treat adults who know what they have and when they got it- no more working my guess-work and intuition and hoping for the best.

My work day starts at 7Am and goes on till 4PM most days of the week. And to top it off the old fogies who don’t like enthusiastic youngsters like me crashing their relaxation spots have managed to fob off all sorts of extra duties on me citing my most junior status. So every Wednesday I am on EC duty- emergency duty/casualty duty (what the Americans call ER) where I check in at 7AM on Wednesday morning and get to leave by 2PM on Thursday afternoon- a total working period of 24hours+7hours. Talk about a new test of endurance- I now get to work 24+7 once every week which come to think of it is still a lot less than people who work 24/7hours all days of the week. So I guess I am better off than them, right? Besides I get to take the whole day off on Friday as a Post-duty off day. And then come back to work only on Saturday. Of course I also have been posted on Sunday duty for this month- which means that I check in on Sunday morning at 7AM and then leave on Monday by 2PM which means I get Tuesday’s off duty as a weekly-off. So all in all it’s a pretty weird work week for me- when I am on, I am on for a long time and then I get to sleep for a long time in compensation. 

The days I am on emergency duty are some of the toughest I have had since my PG days – an unending stream of cranky patients who demand instant treatment for the mildest of conditions and wasting the doctors time, energy and concentration which would be better spent on patients with real emergencies. But what can we do? It’s a rule of every government hospital to treat the hypochondriacs and time wasters with the same standard of care reserved for genuine life and death cases. So the ones with hangovers and tension headaches who turn up at 3AM or 4Am suck up what little energy I retain after working all day and well into the night. What this does to my alertness and concentration and general capacity for thinking on my feet and managing complicated patients I leave to your imagination. All I say is if ever you are intending to get into a big mash-up and end up in the emergency room, please don’t do it on a Wednesday night and for god’s sake don’t do it on early morning Thursday- you will get a zombie doctor on the verge of collapse from exhaustion to manage your complaints, ok?

So all this nonstop work has had a big beneficial effect on me and I have lost, wait-for-it, 4 kilos over the last month despite my sedentary lifestyle- sitting down in one place and writing prescriptions all day. Guess its all the late nights and stress of dealing with snarky and sneaky colleagues. So alls well that ends well right? If I keep on losing weight at the rate of 3-4kilos a month then by 6 months time I would end up a slim and svelte figure, wont i? cheers to my newest weight loss program- work, work and more work and throw in a little mental torture from time to time. Well, I got to push off now- cant keep postponing the mountain of test reports I have to read and sign before tomorrow morning. More next time when I get the time to blog again.

Change Is Coming, Watch Out

Change Is Coming, Watch Out

One of the clichés I hate and I hate pretty much all of them, is the one which goes "change is inevitable". Yeah I agree that change is inevitable but that doesn’t mean that one has to like it. Especially change which creeps on one- sudden and unaware and bites you in a wrong place. For regular readers of my blog- I am sure you remember my previous post at the beginning of the month where I complained about not having a good personal life while having a rocking professional life. I don’t know if what’s known as fate or destiny or god heard me or not but whoever/whatever is up there sure has a quirky sense of humor - they must have thought "hold on dude, you think you have hit rock bottom? Wait up and let me show you what rock bottom really looks like". I am a humorist myself and i appreciate a good joke as much as the other man but this kind of prank is really not to my taste. It’s like a genial host declaring to his dinner guest that he will not allow him to leave without tasting dessert and proceeding to lump it all on the plate in a heap forcing the guest to eat whether he wants to or not.

Now if you are wondering what really I am cribbing about here let me start from the beginning. All of a sudden a couple days ago I got a surprise at work, an unpleasant surprise where a lady (apparently well connected politically) turned up with a transfer order (twin transfer orders actually-hers and mine both) from the government ordering me to vacate my current post and go off to a distant land while she gets to take my place here. After the first shock of it all i looked hard to try and see if i could find any positives at all from this unpleasant reality. After a lot of barrel scraping and googling uplifting memes off the internet I read something which went like "every challenge is an opportunity" and so for the past two days I have been racking my brains hard (what little’s left) to find out the opportunity in this sudden transfer.

Now if I were a positive thinking person i would say something like how such transfer orders eventually turn out to be blessings in disguise and how instead of being a big fish in a small pond I can now go and swim in the big sea as a minnow. I would console myself with the thought that some amount of discomfort, nervousness and questioning of one’s own capacity is inevitable under such challenging circumstances. That is if i were a positive thinking person - but i am sure as hell not, all I can think of are the negatives. About how I had worked so hard here, taken a godforsaken department and built it up into a thriving concern and just when I was sitting back to relax and congratulate myself on a job well done, here I get my marching orders throwing me away into the unknown, again.

Well, my problems are my own and why should i bore you people with it all. I would just like to add this - for the next few months and possibly up to a year or so- my life will be in a constant flux. A new place, new people, new situations it is all going to be different (in a scary way) so I will not be able to update this blog as much as I used to in the past for  the priority here is going to be on survival first and then hobbies - me first and then my blog. When a minnow is thrown into a reef with sharks he has to look back over his shoulder all the item to escape being eaten and maybe, just maybe if he survives the carnage and turns into the big fish of the reef then he can blog about it. You get me?

And finally, you there up there with the weird sense of humor- let’s hope this indeed is the rock bottom, if there is still more to come in the deeps, I don’t want to see it. And dear readers and fellow bloggers and whoever else comes up on this post -the next time, the very next time you hear me cribbing about how my life is boring feel free to come around immediately to kick me up my arse. I would rather have a peaceful life than an interesting life. What say you?

Coffee With Karan- A Few Thoughts From The Show.

Coffee With Karan- A Few Thoughts From The Show.

Recently I was watching a few episodes of Karan Johar’s "Coffee with Karan" chat show now showing a mash up of all the "important" moments on the show  of last season and  one fact which took me by surprise was how many of today’s Bollywood actresses and actors were second generation. Everyone from horse-faced Kareena to chai-bai Parineeti, not to mention Sonam who looks just like her dad in drag, almost every single one of them is a scion of some Bollywood family or the other. The only interesting individual I came across during the entire season of the show was surprise, surprise -Nargis Fakhri who given the cliché of models being airheads was surprisingly witty and well informed especially when contrasted to someone like Aalia who has all the intelligence of someone who never graduated past kindergarten (and never will). And the less said about the men the better, Uday Chopra anyone?

Anyway it pains me to see that even the film world like everything else - every other profession in India is a closed shop nowadays with a selected few families ruling the roost and giving umpteen number of chances to their  untalented offspring in a mutual you scratch my back I scratch yours formula. Come to think of it, the last independent guy- with no godfather and no family background to come up big time was Shah Rukh Khan- not only India’s Biggest Star but a self made one at that (clap/clap). Everyone else seems to depend on family name and connections- which proves that there are millions of people out there, ordinary people who can be better actors than the limited pool who now rule the roost and everyone goes ga-ga about as great actors - I mean people like Ranbir or Hrithik – the best of the average list.

But unfortunately like in all things in India - without a pedigree or a famous surname or a doting father to give you a mega launch vehicle there is no hope for a newcomer to crash into the closed shop of Bollywood and a million dreams die out there unfulfilled. A fact which makes less and less sense when you realize that internationally the movie industry depends on two sets of people- the beautiful and the talented. But it’s a peculiar fact of Bollywood - a perversion even of the international norms- that ugly women become heroines and wooden puppets turn heroes and not even a six pack or a hot bod can compensate for a paralysed face with no acting chops - unless the movie is called the Mask of Zordar or something like that.

Thankfully the scene down south is somewhat better. The South Indian movie industry- collectively called Kollywood, Tollywood, Mollyood, Sandalwood etc actively encourages new comers to show their talent in movies. Any North Indian girl with skin a rich milky shade can turn heroine easily in a South Indian film but of course, only if she is willing to strip to her bikini bottoms and drape herself over a Hero old enough to be her grandfather - at least in dream song sequences, the rest of the movie she should be seen but not heard - which is fortuitous in a way as she won’t know any other Indian language except her default Hindi. And so there are droves of women coming down from Punjab and Gujarat to do just that - willing to act in any movie to achieve stardom. And when TamilNadu Chief Minister Madam Jayalalitha says that she has created more job opportunities than Gujarat Chief minister Mister Modi - she means exactly that- all those Gujju girls coming down south to act in Tamil movies.

So in a way the South Indian film industry is not only helping the nation’s economy by providing jobs to people from other states but also helping national integration by making sure that north Indian heroines like Tamannah Bhatia, Kajal Agarwal and Tapsee Pannu learn Tamil and Telugu. Now isnt that a worthwhile achievement? When you consider the fact that the average North Indian tourist travelling even in the deep south of India talks to the local citizens only in Hindi and expects everyone else around him to understand and reply back in the same language, then you can appreciate the magnitude of the achievement of the film industry when Ileana D’Cruz talks in fluent Telugu to her adoring fans. So the language struggle of the 60’s against Hindi domination is no longer relevant- you want our jobs, you speak our language becomes the moot point.

Anyway to come back to the original premise of this post I wrote this primarily to express my sadness at all these wasted careers. If only these people had not succumbed to the lure of the family profession and taken the easy way out but had made the choice to work hard and carve an independent career (in their field of choice) for themselves not only would they have been happier but we too. As they shared on the show with Karan- their dreams and earlier careers- Parineeti Chopra who worked in sales and marketing might have become another Indra Nooyi or Kiran Mazumdar. Sonam Kapoor could have become a widely read, super popular author- another Shobha De or Chetan Bhagat. And Aalia Bhatt could have passed school. But it was not to be- the lure of nepotism was too high. And hence all these blighted geniuses of other fields are now restricted to wearing bikinis and prancing around in the arms of a hero. Makes you wonder doesn’t it? Is the price of public recognition worth any sacrifice? Or humiliation? I have no answers, do you reader?

P.S. Another cautionary tale comes straight from Hollywood- Will Smith who has pretensions of being another Tom Cruise or Bruce Willis- borrowed a leaf from Bollywood and tried to make an action hero of his talentless son, Jaden. The result was the biggest flop of Will’s career- After Earth- a movie which set Hollywood records for losses. I think Will might have learnt his lesson and send the young man to school after all.