ashokbhatia

One of the several challenges of advancing age is the kind of vague pessimism which starts creeping upon us. The soul awakens us to some deeper realities of life. The mind takes a jaundiced view of Fate bearing gifts. The body, an old creaky jalopy that it becomes, needs to undergo more frequent bouts of denting and servicing.

Different body parts, of which we were blissfully unaware so far, start giving up their life long silence and start a ‘Me-Too’ kind of a campaign, demanding exclusive attention. The engine starts firing only on four out of its six cylinders. The fuel pump starts developing blockages. The carburettor needs cleaning more often. The radiator starts leaking. The battery charge keeps getting depleted faster.  The nervous circuitry starts letting us down. The lining of the stomach starts registering a protest as and when greed takes over prudence on the dining table; no longer can it match the relative youth of one’s taste buds which keep making one drool over deep fried stuff and gorging upon it with gay abandon.

Every 3 to 5 years, a new pill has to be popped up, adding to the existing array of pills and capsules of different hues to be put down the hatch at regular intervals. 

But howsoever dark the clouds may be, P. G. Wodehouse is there to help us to maintain a chin-up attitude!    

A Cardiac Challenge

Fifteen years after I had undergone a cardiac bye pass surgery, a condition of gradually unstable angina again caught up with me recently. I would spare the hapless reader of this piece from the medical and technical details of what exactly transpired. Suffice it to say that a complex array of cardiac tests were done using menacingly hissing gigantic equipment which made one feel sympathetic towards the character played by Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible series of flicks. After some of these tests, one was put on a drip, wired to a noisily beeping monitor and left to reflect on one’s life. The adventurous trauma finally ended with an angioplasty when a doctor with a stiff upper lip announced having sneaked in two stents inside the heart.

The process left one feeling like a much-punctured and deflated balloon, devoid of all vitality. In any case, at the best of times, one enters a hospital with a sense of deep trepidation. The fear of the unknown gnaws at one’s insides, leaving one wondering if someone sinister like Roderick Spode had eventually succeeded in turning one inside out and had then gleefully jumped upon the innards with hob-nailed boots.

But the adventure was not without its perks. Since one is willy-nilly forced to surrender to higher powers, one tends to become more spiritual. One learns to be more ‘patient’. One also runs into a delightful array of doctors, nurses and patients, almost all of different hues, ranks, sizes, shapes and temperament. 

Some Doctors That I Ran Into

One of the doctors I ran into was built along the lines of Doctor E. Jimpson Murgatroyd of Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen fame. His looks could easily send one’s spirits down in the basement. He had sad and brooding eyes and looked like someone who had been looking on the dark side of life since he was a toddler. Nevertheless, his advice was sane, frank and honest, though brutal.

Yet another I came across sounded more like Doctor George Mulliner. He was a caring and compassionate doctor whose brow was perennially worried about his patients. Whether consulting or doing a procedure, he would intermittently flash a reassuring smile, arresting a sudden spike in the adrenaline coursing through the veins of the hapless patient.  He gave an impression of someone who would be thinking beautiful thoughts while in bed but only after having read aloud a kids’ story from the oeuvre of someone like P. G. Wodehouse to his younger ones.

I also met Doctor Sally Smith who was not a generalist in this case but a junior cardiac specialist. I found her to be calm, empathic and fair. She placed a premium on understanding the psychology of the patient and genuinely tried to understand his/her concerns and address these to the best of her ability. When something critical was pointed out to her, her shapely eyebrows did not flicker even a fraction of an inch, making one remind of Reginald Jeeves. I am reasonably certain that during childhood, her doting mother had fed her with ample supply of salmon. She was a living proof of the fact that a woman cardiac specialist need not of necessity be an ugly duckling with steel-rimmed spectacles and a wash-leather complexion. In fact, she reminded one of Drew Barrymore of Charlie’s Angels fame, radiating charming competence of a high order.  

Initially, I also ran into someone like Emerald Stoker. She was one of those soothing, sympathetic kind of doctors you can take your troubles to, confident of having your hand held and your head patted. She was quite young but there was a sort of motherliness about her which one found comforting and restful. One could ask her any question about the impending procedure and she would answer it with empathy and patience. When one left her cabin, the sagging spirits had soared and the brow was not as burrowed as before; the soul was no longer in as much of a torment as it happened to be in earlier.   

The Nursing Angels

Some of you may remember Amelia Bingham of Bachelors Anonymous fame. She had fussed over Mr. Ivor Llewellyn, head of the Superba-Llewellyn studio of Hollywood, so very well that the latter ended up proposing to her, much against his own resolve to cease and desist from making impulsive marriage proposals.

Luckily, unlike Mr. Ivor Llewellyn, I do not head any Hollywood studio. Nor do I have a track record of having suffered through as many as five divorces. I am merely a widower. So, if any of you suspect my having fallen for one of the many nurses I ran into while in the process of getting an angioplasty done, you could not be more off the mark. One has one’s code, you see: The Code of the Bhatias!

If one of the nursing angels was like a Florence Nightingale who ensured that I kept getting adequate nourishment during my stay at the hospital, another was like Aunt Agatha who took sadistic pleasure in pricking the hands at all the wrong spots, eventually finding an appropriate vein in the forearms where a cannula had to be put. All of them had their own methods of removing the cannula and other sticky plasters. Some preferred to zip up the proceedings by doing it in a flash of a second, leaving one all shaken and stirred, ruing the painful loss of some body hair. Others went about it gradually, in slow motion as it were, making the proceedings somewhat painful, though for a longer duration.

However, in some aspects, their behaviour was pretty consistent. All of them kept treating me like an errant school kid who needs to be cautioned to have all his medications on time. When it came to checking blood sugar levels, all of them insisted upon puncturing one of the tender fingers. My repeated pleas to draw instead a sample from the cannula fell on deaf ears.

Patient care and comfort was, of course, their first priority. This included an ever-smiling visage as and when they entered the enclosure allotted to me. Some of them resorted to small talk, making decent and unobtrusive enquiries about one’s family members. When leaning over across the body to attach some leads, they would often apologize.       

Some were cast in the mould of Mary Anthony of Absent Treatment fame. They were tall, had a ton and a half of red-gold hair, grey/blue eyes, and one of those determined chins. Few showed signs of superior intelligence, capable of such feats as supporting a team in burgling banks, like Jill Willard of Do Butlers Burgle Banks? One, with a lissom and willowy profile, came across as Audrey Blake (The Little Nugget), who could have aroused romantic thoughts in the hearts of some of her patients.

The Common Thread

For all medicos, the patient comes first and foremost. When working in a public hospital, the pressure of revenue generation is singularly absent. Their exposure to a large number of patients with a wide spectrum of ailments makes them hotter at their jobs. Their professionalism only grows and matures over time, benefiting humanity at large. They facilitate the process of longevity and make us happy in the process. Their methods may be rough at times, but, as Jeeves says, one has to break a few eggs to make an omelette.  

It may be noted that there was a specific reason I did not carry any book of P. G. Wodehouse while being in the hospital. With all the tubes and monitors one was often connected to, one did not wish to add to medical complications by bringing about bouts of uncontrollable mirth. Guffawing, laughing out loudly and falling out of beds allotted to one would have raised many an eyebrow. Mere memories of his works and the delightful range of eccentric characters and goofy situations he has unleashed upon us are enough to help one to face the harsh slings and arrows of Fate. 

I confess I underwent the traumatic experience only thanks to the support received from my family and owing to Plum’s works. He has left behind for all of us a world which is so very soothing and comforting that one could undergo any difficult experience in life and yet experience happiness.

After all, in Something Fresh, he has himself said that:

As we grow older and realize more clearly the limitations of human happiness, we come to see that the only real and abiding pleasure in life is to give pleasure to other people.

Sure enough, he delivers on his promise!

(Allusions to nurses are courtesy Neil Midkiff; Caricature of yours truly is courtesy Suvarna Sanyal)

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