Storytellers

Being visibly queer in a medical college.

- Aadhithya Hridhaya


#TriggerWarning - Emotional abuse, bullying, queerphobia








Contrary to the popular opinion that medical colleges are progressive and more inclusive, they are the most regressive ones. Most of the spaces that we queers get access to discriminate us without exceptions.

The very first day of my college life made me feel very much uncomfortable and cornered. I understood that the learning space I got access to would have my thoughts and expressions forcefully silenced routinely and shatter my sense of self-worth for the rest of my college days. My visible queerness challenged the already existing system and threatened it so much, that in defence, it always tries to box me and put me on the top of a cliff, constantly inducing me fear of being outed or thrown far away from existence.

Being openly queer in closed spaces like educational institutions can result in being highly discriminated and mistreated. The challenge is real and…

Sexism in medicine : The eternal confusion and the innocent mistake.
Srimathi Gopalakrishnan

I came across a blog post yesterday that talked about how female physicians have been repeatedly mistaken for and addressed as nurses or other health care professionals for ages now. Click here to read the article. It says, “The persistence of sexism despite rising female representation indicates that the professional membership alone is insufficient”. I completely agree and I would be bold enough to say that the statement is still incomplete.
We must understand that though increasing the numbers is an important way to fight the sexism, reducing the issue to just representative minority would be similar to treating the symptoms and not the disease. On taking a deeper look, one will realize that the real problem is the underlying patriarchy that stems into various forms of sexism, for example, the quick assumption that a female health care professional can only be a nurse - the situation in questi…

Covid-19 – call to put back people in the centre and not the disease
Vijayaprasad Gopichandran and Sudharshini Subramaniam
This blog is a different experiment. Sudharshini and I write our individual thoughts as two sub-blogs and then I synthesize our ideas to create a collective message. This is a follow up to our previous blog titled “Social Distancing….you must be kidding me”.
134 to home-isolation and many more to go…
Sudharshini Subramaniam
Tense and nervous patients were sitting in the Covid-19 isolation ward of my hospital. The government of Tamil Nadu has recently come out with an advisory for home isolation of patients with asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic or mildly symptomatic Covid-19. I walked in, part of a team of doctors, into the ward to see all of them, talk to them and triage them to identify those who can be sent for home isolation and those who need to be admitted into the hospital. The dominant feelings among all were fear, anxiety and worry. All of them wanted to get…

Through the masked face, express empathy
Vijay Gopichandran
For many people Covid-19 and the lock-down have completely changed their lives. For some of us, privileged lot, not much as changed. My 7-day work week has not changed. I am not locked down inside my home and go out to the hospital every day. For some of us, the not so ‘socially active’ lot, not meeting people, not hanging out, not going out for lunches and dinners etc. also do not matter much. But when I look at my work closely, I have realized that so much has changed. The change has been so sudden, but the ambient uncertainty and anxiety of the pandemic has made it imperceptible.
Yesterday, I saw the video of an innovative ‘no contact’ Covid-19 screening clinic. It is a model of screening patients with suspected Covid-19 while minimizing the contact between the patient and the doctor. The video goes like this. The patient’s token number is called out in the public announcement system. A well dressed, confident young man…

Small deeds to maintain normalcy during pandemic times
Vijay Gopichandran
About two weeks ago, two of my colleagues and I sat in a large room, separating ourselves at the recommended 2 meter distance from each other and my senior colleague remarked “It is as though the ‘reset button’ for the world has been pressed. We all will soon have to adapt to a new normal in our lives”. 
It was the beginning of the lock-down of the whole country to contain the spread of Covid-19. Since there are no public transport vehicles on the roads and I do not drive or own any private vehicles, I have started walking from and to the hospital. The distance is not much, just about 3 KM, but I am seeing things which I have never seen before. There are a bunch of people living on the pavements near the metro station on the way to my hospital. They were part of the background tapestry of the urban busy life that I had never noticed them before. One family has a young man, a woman and two scrawny kids. As I wal…

Solidarity in the time of Covid-19
Vijay Gopichandran

(All names reported in this blog are changed for confidentiality purposes)
“Why haven’t your pasted that sticker outside my door?”, asked an anxious elderly lady to the health worker who visited her to check whether any members in her household had cough, cold or fever.
“The lady was very much worried that we were paying less attention to her house compared to the house which had a sticker outside their door. She thought the ones with the sticker outside their house got better attention.”, narrated Mansoor, one of 26 other frontline health workers whom we met yesterday during our field visit to evaluate the cluster containment activity in the city. The field staff are working in a committed and diligent manner, carrying out their role in control of the Covid-19 illness.
We read articles and newspaper reports about the stigma associated with stickers on people’s doors identifying them as quarantined houses and indelible stamps on…