ABOUT HOSPITALS
AMONG OTHER THINGS

EVER SINCE A cocky young resident at the Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai told me with brazen insensitivity that my father would be gone in six months because of terminal stage cancer, I confess that I’ve found myself at odds with doctors and hospitals, and a political system which stinks. My father passed away within weeks of radiation treatment – but before that a second consultant oncologist put him through a gamut of scintillating hardware examinations (already done once before)…drink gallons of coloured water, several blood/urine/shit samples, shaving (so that stubble growth brought on infection), even an impressive video show of his insides (cassette copies as many as you wish for a price). I’ve no doubt in my mind that is the radiation which made his last few weeks on earth a hell — unable to eat and drink — and heat seeking escape from his weak body…we took turns placing iced water towel packs on his head and within seconds they would be hot and begging for a fresh change. That’s when I knew he would have been better off without the fancy radiation treatment and wished that I’d taken him to a bona fide naturopath or Ayurveda practioneer. That would have at the very least qualitatively mitigated his last few weeks on earth.

And now I’m brooding over hospitals and doctors in Panaji and Goa. Go for a CT scan and one discovers that nothing has changed. In the eyes of most doctors – especially the younger lot — you’re nothing but a lab organism. They’re more interested in their state-of-the-art hardware and looking at the galaxy of tests they’ve made you undergo than take a good look at you. The ECGs, cat scans, ultrasonographies, stress tests, X-rays, dental-ENT papers, blood, urine, stool analysis…are more interesting! Today’s doctors can’t tell you what’s wrong with you without the aid of a host of diagnostic hardware. Mainstream modern-day medicine is more about the hardware than the software of medical learning. The kind of good old-fashioned, salt-of-the-earth software, which family GPs used to have at one time…they always had time for you and checked your pulse with fingertips, peered into your eyes with a torch, asked you to stick our your tongue, taped and pressed you here and there and listened carefully to your latest woes with body beautiful. And very often they knew what was bothering you be it physical, material, intellectual or spiritual, and with a short prescription it was goodbye for now and perhaps a final word of advice, “Remember to drink at least eight glasses of water/juice/fluid every day and half your problems will be over!”

Nowadays if you go the public hospital you may die or suffer a severe health disaster just waiting for a resident to attend to you to put in place some quick damage control. And in a private hospital no matter how soothing the lobby space and consulting rooms one may be running around for appropriate forms to fill in and a gamut of tests to be done from one end to the other end of the hospital…both in government and private hospitals if you don’t know anybody you may wait forever to be attended to and/or go home in despair. The software of confident, soothing reassurance, is hard to find all the way down or up the hierarchy of a hospital. I wish I could wave a wand and bring a human face to the GMC which is crowded in the day time (patients waiting patiently at the OPD) and like a bhootbangla at night (with accommodation for holy cows in the parking lots)!

With painful memories behind me I confess I have a hate-hate relationship with the medical profession and hospitals. Most public hospitals are fortunate enough to be set amidst some enviable spacious grounds but rarely are they public or patient-friendly, instead they are litter and garbage friendly, and soon a filthy wilderness fraught with creepy crawlies during the monsoon months. Go, take a close look at the GMC where drinking water facilities are installed next to litter bins which haven’t had a bath for ages! Mind you there are richer, better equipped hospitals, and the medical faculty may be a shining study of academic brilliance all around…but there are practically speaking no health-friendly or patient-friendly or public-friendly hospitals in Goa.

If public hospitals have a bland, discouraging face, private hospitals are business houses wearing masks of friendliness but with chinks of indifference/intolerance of human situations lurking behind the cracks of the mask. Our hospitals are business houses and that too dictatorial business houses where there are neither choices nor alternatives to beat a particular diagnostic piece of equipment or health problem. Take my advice, do everything possible to keep a distance between you and a doctor or a hospital! Funny, after every fresh visit to a hospital I realize anew how much easier it is to just concentrate on cleaning up one’s lifestyle…than fall ill and go looking for a doctor’s help.

It’s far easier to review drinking and eating habits and make a few sacrifices (till they cease to be sacrifices) i.e. cut down on good fats and eliminate bad fats, quit smoking and drinking acidic bottled drinks, eat more natural foods, steam cook veggies and greens before spicing and seasoning, go for that daily walk, do that half-an-hour of meditation…invest in an environment-friendly lifestyle. I do believe that if at individual level one is able to clean up one’s act vis-à-vis what we drink and eat, how we live, feel, think, act…in a wholistic and holistic sense…it is a testimony to the benefits of living in a more environment and health-friendly lifestyle. So, if you don’t want to get up close to hospitals and doctors, begin by reviewing your lifestyle which begins with drinking and eating habits, good luck.

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