Close call that ends well

I had never actually gone in an ambulance and wasn’t expecting to. I was just about to fall asleep having set my alarm for two hours later, when the dreaded call came. I was second on call that day and this call was a summons to the ward. There was something the first on call couldn’t handle on his own.

What it turned out to be was an ambulance ride. I was to accompany a patient to another hospital. The patient was fairly stable but still required a doctor to accompany her.

While the patient was well throughout the trip it was something else that made the trip remarkable, at least for me. It was being in the middle of a three lane one way highway, travelling in the opposite direction!

As we rushed head on, the siren screaming, we could see the traffic breaking to either side like waves. But there were a few who really didn’t know what to do in their surprise! After about a 1km ride across choppy traffic, the rest of the journey remained uneventful.

December 31 was supposed to be a quiet day. The general consensus was that nobody would want to be in hospital for the New Year, and thus the weekend was supposed to be a calm one.

As the on-call house officer, I was expecting to have a full six hours of sleep, but instead found myself still awake at 2 a.m. wondering whether the 35 day-old baby who had taken a turn for the worse was going to be the first casualty of the year. There was a sinking feeling everywhere and the mother was informed that the condition of the baby was not good. The baby was gasping for every bit of oxygen that came through the nasal prongs even as we pumped various drugs into his tiny body.

Now there was nothing more to do but monitor and wait. Instructions were given: if the baby arrests you resuscitate. Yet it was the first miracle of the year. He didn’t need any resuscitation. He pulled through on his own. He was meant to live!

The next morning, the drama of the previous night would be forgotten; the nurse who struggled to put the cannula into his non-existent veins, the H.O who had three hours of sleep, and the registrar who thought of every way to save the baby would all have done their job in silence.

The New Year it seemed would bring many changes as well. The registrars (as postgraduate trainees are called) who had in a sense been our immediate bosses were leaving. Their training period was over. They had been the guys who taught us the ropes of how to get along and get things done in the ward. The New Year would bring along a new set of registrars and it would again take a month or two to understand how each of them worked.

Meanwhile, having now been around for sometime, I felt that unfortunately medicine had become rather mechanical.

We found ourselves treating lower respiratory tract infections, viral fevers, Kawasaki disease and sometimes things even the consultants didn’t know exactly. But most of the time the parents were content to let the doctor treat their children without questioning. When they did question we would always try to answer but found it impossible to explain everything to every parent. And in the process many parents in a sense did not fully realize how much effort it took to get that blood report as early as possible or how expensive a bottle of albumin was.

In a sense while we were continuously treating diseases, the parents were also taking things for granted. It had somehow turned into a vicious cycle and the key to breaking it lay in our hands. But the effort seems enormous considering the already heavy work load.

Sometimes you really wished you could disappear and observe everything from another viewpoint. Not be bothered by the million things you still had to do, not be intimidated by what you didn’t know, but to just see things the way a sick child would see it.