Medicine in India...

Hello Classssss!

Greetings from Incredible India! Right now its 2.08pm an i'm in slacking in the Hospital Library. The internet here is crazy, dying as and when it likes.. So Internet access is a prized commodity! hahaa.. Well, if you all must have heard by now, I'm in Pondicherry, a small former french colony located in the state of Tamil Nadu, India! Well, I think that enough of a geography lesson.

Suffice to say, i'm here till 7th March doing an elective in General Surgery at Jawaharal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research.(JIPMER,in short) It is a Tertiary Hospital that provides free medical care, beds, food and surgery to the people. I Kinda chose this place coz its one of the top 5 Medical Colleges in whole of India (I dunno the current rankings..) But that's beside the point, i'm kinda doing this elective to see how rural medicine is like, how medicine is practiced in developing countries, to see the late stage spectrum of disease, to see how life is like in India, and to see if I really wanna become a Surgeon. hahaha.. so many objectives and prespectives to put in place in such a short span of 1 month.

Well, its been about 2 weeks plus here and I must say im really enjoying myself learning and absorbing as much as I can, although I kinda miss things back home. In this short span of time, I have seen and observed soooo many things in the wards, clinics than I have seen back home. There is also a huge huge huge disparity between our standard of living and medical care here and in Singapore. And, if I have learnt anything from this whole trip, it is this, SINGAPOREANS OUGHT NOT TO COMPLAIN ABOUT ANYTHING, ANYMORE. Once you have seen what I have seen here, you would thank your lucky stars that you live a life you live now.

Down here, people are so poor, many havent bathed for a time long enough that they really really really smell so bad that I had to wear a mask and had difficulty breathing when I assisted in the care of the patient in the minor Operating Theatre. Even after the patient left, the stench lingered on till the next day. It is that bad... You have to smell it to believe it. Many of them are so poor that they walk barefooted all their lives with cracked feet, and you sometimes really wonder that maybe all they have is just that dirty piece of loin cloth around them. They are so poor and uneducated... WE need to help them, help them out of their misery. Many times i have seen soooo many countless patients with metastatic cancers... Stage 4, in the clinics. And what i find most heart-wrenching is having learnt that they came from many miles away to JIPMER coz its a free hospital, only to learn the sad truth that their fungating breast lump the size of an orange has spread to her liver and bones. Soooo many cancer patients, all Stage 3 and above.

Survival for them is so slim. YOU KNOW their FATE, YOU KNOW how long more the have got, and consciously YOU KNOW that this man i see before me today, wont be here this time, next year. YOU KNOW all this, but the sad thruth, is that the poor patient doesnt. They dont have a clue. The poor man in rags with who has come to you with a huge mass on the corner of their jaw, and huge swellings in their neck and tells you that his daughter is getting married soon, has to be told the most shocking news of their life that they have stage 3 metastatic Oral Cancer. This stories repeat itself again and again. It is only then that you feel that everyone back home is blessed. There are sooo many 50% or more total burns cases in India, and many are suicide cases. Many are young girls that douse themselves in kerosene and set themselve alight...the sad fact is many live just long enough to go through the excruciating pain before they die. Sad sad sad...

People at home complain about waiting time to see a doctor... BS! Here, people can wait for DAYS before they get seen in clinic! And its not coz of the doctors, but its because of the sheer patient load! We see 4000 patients a day. CAn you imagine your queue number being that long? And worst thing is this, the clinics close at 2pm. So if you dont get seen today, patients just camp outside the clinics till the next morning when the floodgates open and all rush once more to line up and register to see a doctor. This repeats itself on a daily basis. Can you imagine the time you take to see the doctor? And can you imagine the no. of patients the doctor sees? Kinda puts into prespective that these guys work alot harder and get paid alot less than at home. Singapore doctors are already crying when they see 35 cases.

Singaporeans have alot to thank their medical system for! Seriously... At home, patients are treated well. We do Incision and drainage of large abscess under General Anesthesia so you sleep through it. But here, it is drained with little Local Anesthetic or NONE AT ALL! So the patients are fully conscious of the EXCRUCIATING PAIN. You then ask yourself, why? Why are they doing it like this? Its coz, of poor funding, poor resources, poor patients... They have soooo many Incision and drainage cases here that if they are all done in the OT, the surgeon will not stop work and the OTs cant be used for other cases. Things are different here. Patients and doctors face alot of hardship here. There are flies en the Emergency department... Sometimes, a fly settles down onto your wound site... how do you keep things sterile like this?! The Emergency Resuscitation Room is almost non existent.. I saw before my very eyes, the whole process of how a man just expired infront of me, because of the lack of speed of the emergency staff. Sigh... If you thought your life was bad, come here and place yourself in their shoes. Whatever the hardship and life is like here, people eventually get around. People eventually adapt, people eventually accept that this is the way of life, it is how things are like here. It sad, but true.

OH well, I think I have written a little too much on the side of disparity between Singapore and India. haha.

But dont worry, I have ALOT MORE happy stuff to talk about and many photos to show which is the bulk of my trip, but i can only do that when i return. SO many things to say about the food, the people, the operations I assisted in, the stuff I've seen, the many places I've visited in Pondicherry, and much much more...

In anycase, do stay tuned! Hope everyone is doing well guys! hahaaa...

Regards, Victor.