Intern’s Diary 3 by Anedu

A blue sky, the smell of moist soil and the morning sun on my face. All this has become wishful thinking. All I ever get to experience of the morning is when it is not yet dawn, during the brief moment when I make my daily 100 yard walk to the ward from my room.

Having been an outdoor person all my life I was beginning to feel claustrophobic. The landscaping at the hospital was not altogether harsh but there was really no time to stand and stare.

It was my turn to handle the acute and emergency cases, as everything from a wheeze to a heart failure, was called. It was also where everyone old enough not to be in the baby side with a fever came to, and fevers formed the major portion of our admissions. The beds were, are and always will be fully occupied!

Life was more stressful than usual because if children were really sick there was more than the usual load of things to do. The examination had to be detailed, everything had to be entered in the BHT (as the patient's file is called) and you were called upon to go to radiology, the operation theatre and so on as things progressed. It was also a steep learning curve.

Hunting out investigation reports had become a priority in my life by now. It was an amazing process from the time of writing a request for an investigation to the actual time of receiving the report. It was like a relay and there were many people who could drop the baton on the way. If the last man didn't come in with the results by the end of the day, it was generally to the poor house officer that everyone would point the finger. So invariably you had to turn into something of an investigation hunter.

To do this without a very good understanding of the system is impossible.

The system worked something like this: the consultant would want an investigation, you would write the request and give it to the patient’s mother, who would in turn give it to the side nurse, who would in turn give it to the specimen nurse, who would in turn draw the blood and send it over to the lab through an attendant who would hand it over to the relevant laboratory. After this, the specimen would be analysed, reported and then the report put out onto the counter, where it would then be collected by an attendant and handed over to a nurse in the ward who would in turn hand it to a doctor to see, after which they would put it into the relevant patient's file.

So in addition to the 101 other things you had to do, you found yourself monitoring an utterly confusing process. And sometimes you really had no idea where on earth a specimen was, even after checking specimen books, making calls to three labs and even running over to the lab. They would either remain lost forever or suddenly pop up two days later. By that time you would already be tried and hung!

In the midst of all your work one of the sadder things was to see old patients coming back. Old in the sense that they had previously been warded for long periods, many had been coming and going even before your time. It always left a bit of a lump in your throat although you would not get much time to think about it- it would usually be someone suffering from a chronic condition like nephritic syndrome, Thalassaemia or a liver disease.

For them the hospital is a home away for home. And things would have become so familiar that sometimes you wondered, whether they understood how different their lives were from those of children their own age.

They would smile and talk to you, and you would do the same, but their lives were as different from the rest as ours were from our friends.