Of doctors and medical exams…

I am not sure about you readers, but I am really afraid of doctors. Really. And mortally. If they are private practitioners, they have this something about their smiles as you enter their chambers, that immediately rings alarm bells in your brain. No - that’s old-fashioned, these alarm bells… My brain goes “Gunka – bleep”, “Gunka–bleep”…. like my son’s toy flying saucer.

And if they are in a government hospital, their bored expressions (Sh** !! Yet another patient !!!) and their “one-prescription-fits-all” approach can make you lose faith, among other things, in God…. (I assume you lost faith in the government too long ago to matter…)

I have this habit of visiting my dentist with clockwork regularity every fifteen years or so. The last time I had a terrible toothache and could barely eat, was also the last time my wife dragged me to the fellow in pretty much the same way my mom had dragged me to kindergarten many years earlier. I was bawling on both occasions…

This guy stuck a steel prop into my mouth and looked around. I could see his eyes positively begin to shine at the thought of all that lucre in there, waiting to be excavated… He gave me an injection on the gums, then said “Excuse me,” and walked away to make a call… I could not hear the conversation, but I am dead sure he was calling his wife to tell her, “Darling, I can now buy all the sarees you wanted for this Puja and the next.”

In the meantime there I sat, my steel-strutted mouth wide open, with saliva slowly starting to drool out as I gradually became jaw-less … Then he returned, the smile on his face was a wide grin now, as he extracted two of my teeth…. The medication followed, and the pain went away….

He had asked me to return two weeks later for the other set of teeth.  But like you all, I do love my teeth, and his wife does not need all those sarees any way…..

Then take the case of this medical check-up I had to undergo a couple of decades ago when I once qualified for a government job by mistake. There were fifteen of us who were hired, then sent off to this government hospital for the medicals. They took all our available body fluids for examination, asking us to deliver the solids the next day. They then told us to return on the third day. There they took each one of us to separate rooms, stripped us down to our birthday suits, and poked and prodded more than my mother ever did since I was this high….

The last doctor had a frown, and I asked, “Is everything alright ?” He looked at me and said, “You guys are all job applicants, right ?” To my nod, he said, “Yes, everything is alright.”

“And what if I do not take the job ?” I asked again, and regretted it immediately, looking at the deeper frown on his face. “Then too, you are fine !!” was his retort, as he muttered to himself, “Why do they keep sending these healthy young fellows to me ?”

Today I sympathise with him – he would not have had much of a medical practice, if all he got to see were healthy young fellows….

Last winter I went to my local physician for a check-up and there was this lovely young thing in the waiting hall. I got to observe her for quite a while before the doctor called me in. He checked me up, commented on my racing heartbeat, and recommended an ECG, which of course, came out all normal because the PYT was no longer in sight and the technician was a tall moustached fellow with the build of a wilted asparagus. There is a thing about these pretty young things, you know, particularly as one approaches middle age….

The most terrible of these physical examinations was the one I had undergo to obtain a work permit for another country…. In addition to all those things mentioned before, I had a separate session with the proctologist, who, though very professional, stuck a fibre-optic cable based torch and camera into you-know-where and displayed the results on a large TV screen for all the lady nurses behind the partition to see…. (I guess he was taking a class at the same time…)

Oh !!! I could have died a thousand deaths if only that TV went kaput…. It did not. All I did was blush, lying there, while he went about it with the gusto of an archaeologist looking for the Dead Sea scrolls.

***

Doctors, like lawyers, call their vocation a “practice”. 

I understand “practice” being a valid description for lawyers because they relieve you of your money without any tangible output, with practiced ease. But doctors ? They are supposed to “practise” on you ??? And are their waiting halls an integral part of their “practice” ? Delayed appointments and unending waits are all part of a grand design by these fellows so that you end up being as resistant to suggestions as a sponge…

What would happen if engineers “practised” too ? Imagine a bridge or a dam being built as a “practice”……. The entire civilisation would be up in arms over it. No, no, that would never do.

Engineers are required to be precise – even if they are wrong. Unlike doctors – right ?

***

75 minutes

Our son, all of fifteen years, wanted to watch a cricket match live, at the Eden Gardens Stadium, Kolkata. He said all of his friends had been there at least once, while he was yet to start. We initially said no, but had to give in to his persuasion. He organised the ticket, a couple of his friends, and decided to go. He wanted to carry a cell-phone, to which we said “no” again, and he relented, thinking it was the lesser of the battles. The other two boys who went with him were perhaps, a couple of years older, and both had cell-phones.

About an hour after he left home that Saturday afternoon, the skies darkened and let loose a violent rain-and-thunder squall. We were worried that he would reach Eden Gardens drenched to the skin. We sat down to watch the match on TV. The match started more than an hour late, after the rain had stopped and the field had been mopped up.

We kept watching the match on TV in the fervent hope that we would be able to see our son during one of the many camera sweeps of the crowd, but that was not to be. Around the middle of second innings, the rain came down with renewed vigour causing the match to be abandoned altogether and forcing a decision based on the now famous Duckworth-Lewis rule….

We could see the crowd slowly making its way towards the exits, when suddenly the channel switched over to the other match in Mumbai, which was just starting. That was when my wife called up one of the friends who were with our son. He said, “Auntie, we are now on our way out of the stadium, but I cannot find him, we got separated in the crowd.” I could hear my wife’s voice rising hysterically as she asked for clarifications – when did they get separated, where were they now, how did this happen, et al…. I guess she got disconnected shortly thereafter because the conversation ended abruptly.

I tried to pacify her, asked to give them some more time to come out of the stadium and try to re-group. She bit her lip and sat dumb-founded. Our daughter tried to ring up someone she knew who was a regular visitor to Eden Gardens, but that fellow had not gone for this match. Then my wife started contemplating taking a taxi and going there – an idea that was as crazy as the rapid developments that were taking place.

We called up his friends again after about twenty minutes – they said they were waiting for him at one of the gates and it was still raining heavily. Some relief there. Some twenty minutes later the fellow called up to say that our son had still not joined them and that they would be leaving for home as their parents would now start getting worried.

I always had faith that at fifteen, our son would be able to find his way around, although we had come to know that he had already spent whatever money we had given him on cold drinks and snacks and was left with only ten rupees. It was the lack of money that worried me. And it was the lack of information that made his mother almost sick.

She suddenly remembered an acquaintance who was a big shot in the management of the Eden Gardens Stadium. She called him up. He said that the stadium was empty now except for the players, and then said not to worry, he would inform the police. He called back a few minutes later to say that the police control room had been informed and they had spread the message across to all the policemen on duty to identify a fifteen year-old boy wearing the jersey of one of the teams, if he was found wandering and lost…

The rain had stopped. I was contemplating my next course of action, when the phone rang. It was from the Maidan Control Room of Kolkata Police. They took the full details and description of my son and said that they would be on the lookout.

The phone rang again. It was my son’s friends enquiring if we had heard anything. We said no, and they said they were on a bus returning home, and there was a possibility that he too had taken a bus. Then the gentleman who had informed the police, called up. He said that if our son did not return home within the next half-hour or so, we should lodge a formal diary with the police. We agreed, but deep in our hearts, there was that sinking feeling.

It is at times like these that one tends to think of the most ludicrous possibilities, and when sanity returns, think of some logical steps, only to go back to worrying about absurd things once more. For the better part of the following hour, we swung like a pendulum between a deep, gnawing regret at not having given him that cell-phone and a fervent hope that he would be intelligent enough to find his way home..

I was sitting out on the balcony, observing the rain-washed streets and the people who were passing by, thinking about the next steps, while his mother paced up and down, her cell phone clutched tightly in her hands.

The three street dogs who live in front of our house suddenly jumped up and rushed forward, and I heard my son’s voice talking to them. “He’s home”, I screamed.

He walked up the stairs and into the arms of his mother…. “I have realised today that one does not need a cell phone to survive,” was his first comment.

He then explained how, after being separated from his friends, he waited at the spot outside the stadium gates where they had planned to meet, and then, when his friends did not show up, walked up to the Esplanade Metro station, asking all the policemen on duty there, the way. At the station he asked a senior police officer for a detailed step-by-step direction to take the Metro, get off at Tollygunge station, and find his way home. The police officer was more than helpful, and thus he came home.

We called up the Maidan Control Room to inform them that the wait was over and our son was home. They said, “OK, thank you.”

I looked at the watch – we had gone through roughly seventy-five minutes of ordeal – not knowing where he was, how would he come home since he did not have enough money on him, what would he do if he was lost, since this was the first time he had gone out alone in the city, and what would we do in case he was lost….  Our son too, was shaken by the experience of trying to find his way home through that crowd. We realised it would be some considerable amount of time before he got over it, when he said that it was much better and more comfortable to watch cricket matches in the comfort of a living room, on TV.

75 minutes. We would remember that for a very long time indeed.