Sutured Dreams

Human beings are not naturally inclined towards solitude. Early man found much more survival benefit in being part of a group than living on his own. Now after thousands of years of evolution, these traits manifest in different ways. One of the great teachers I had told me that the people who will shape your potential the most in life would be your friends. They are what you compare yourself to, the standard that you think is both achievable and essential. Good peer pressure can push you towards excellence while bad peer pressure can lead one astray. Friendship is all about convenience. The painful realisation that we will all make in life is that once the convenience disappears, often the friendship will follow suit. Maintaining an old friendship is much harder than just finding new, more convenient ones. Most of the time, there is no big moment of separation. Rather, there will be a slow process of drifting apart until they become little more than strangers. These people will ...

Our loved ones who pass on are never truly gone. They live on with us in the form of memories. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to choose what memories choose to pop up on a given day. We do not remember things in a linear fashion. Memories come to us scattered in arrangement, often starting from the end because those ones are the clearest. Sadly, they can also be the most upsetting. Chronic ailments like cancer and stroke are a terrible thing to live with. Watching your loved one go through that kind of suffering is a traumatic experience. You're completely helpless with regards to what is happening. It takes a lot of maturity to handle these difficult situations but all the maturity in the world is not enough to prevent yourself from being drained emotionally. The part that hurts most is not the suffering itself. It is that the suffering could not be defeated. The disease got the better of my mother and it got the better of my father. But we still fooled ourselves ...

There are many things in life that our education fails us to prepare for. We learn many things the hard way because of this. One of those difficult life lessons is on how to spot a fraud. You'll only learn this after being conned a couple of times. Knowing how to spot and subsequently avoid a fraud can save you a lot of money and prevent needless headaches. But unfortunately, even if you do spot a con, you may not be able to do anything about it. Especially when the fraud is family. A recent example from my life was an episode with Aunt May (name changed to protect identity). She called me one day out of the blue saying she urgently needed Rs 1 lakh to pay off a loan. She needed me to pay it for her that day itself. She then promised to pay back the money the very next day itself. Now there are many problems with this story.  Firstly, Rs 1 lakh is a lot of money. Especially for someone like me who wasn't paid on time for most of last year. Aunt May on the other hand, mad...

I grew up in relative comfort. My parents weren’t rich per se but there as always enough money for my basic needs. There used to be problems, like any household, but I never had to worry about basic stuff like having food on the table. You could say I was spoiled by having my parents take care of almost all of my needs. Fast forward to the middle of my internship and I was quickly finding out what poverty looked like. Nothing in my life till this point prepared me for what I had to deal with. My mother had passed away little over a year ago at that point and my father suddenly became bedridden after half his body was paralyzed by a stroke. My father had no savings and I was completely ignorant with regards to where my mother saved money and what the procedures were to get it transferred into my name. I desperately needed cash to take care of my father. It is difficult to convey the things that went through my mind during those few months. After not getting stipend for aro...

Years ago when my mother passed, I was not mature enough to process the event. It was the worst day of my life. I cried my eyes out. I was not mentally prepared for it even though I should have been considering she had metastatic cancer. Later when my father became terminal, I was wiser and more realistic than I was back then. My job requires me to deal with death and breaking bad news to people. I know enough to know what sick looks like, what the prognosis is. So I knew what was coming even before his doctor spoke to me. Being more aware certainly does help. It helps making the right decisions, like choosing not to intubate if things came to that. I knew that would not be what my father would want. But despite those advantages, the pain is still as bad as before. If not worse. Reflection Knowing that his time is coming to an end meant a lot of time sitting quietly reflecting on old memories. My father was not a perfect man. Far from it. I had often resented him because he wa...

Communication is perhaps the most important part of being a doctor. It doesn't matter if you are smarter than your peers if you can't communicate important information effectively to your patients. Your patients will judge you based on how you interact with them. Unfortunately, in most institutions there is no proper training given to students in this area. Effective communication is more art than science. It is difficult to describe but you know it when you see it. Some are more natural at it than others but regardless of your personality, it takes a lot of effort to become good at it. Dealing with emergencies, death etc is never easy. Patients will refuse care/certain treatments all the time. Some are not too serious while others can be life threateningly stupid. Most of the time, people will make bad decisions because they haven't been properly informed of the consequences. It is essential to avoid confusion in this regard. What I know about communication mostl...

Having been a bystander in several hospitals in multiple states over almost a decade, I can confirm that it is one of the most unpleasant experiences one can go through. But they have given me a unique perspective now that I work on the other side as a doctor. Even in most posh hospitals, unless you're capable of coughing up the extra cash for a room, you'll probably be sleeping on a chair or even the floor with mosquitos for company. But that's not the worst part. The worst part is the waiting, the wondering and the fear of not knowing what's going to happen, especially if a loved one is undergoing a difficult surgery or is in the ICU. Everything else just adds to the anxiety and helplessness of the situation. All of these factors result in you being on edge all the time. And the way the healthcare team interacts with you can make a huge difference in how you interpret the standard of care. When my father suffered a stroke, it was one of the scariest few days...