Storytellers

Birthday Miracle  Vijay Gopichandran Disclaimer: This blog is a deviation from what I usually write. This is an attempt at a fictional short story. “Sister, where is the gauze bin?” yelled Arumugam from the bedside. He was precariously standing with his hands in sterile gloves held up so that it doesn’t soil his 2000 rupees Arrow shirt. He was wearing a flimsy face mask, which did very little to shield the foul smell emanating from the foot ulcer that he was dressing that morning. Fine drops of sweat were oozing down from his forehead which now had wrinkled up with anger lines. He was irritated to note that he had meticulously packed everything required for this elaborate foot dressing, except extra gauze pieces. “These young house-surgeons are so inefficient. They don’t even know how to prepare for a dressing. In our times…..” started Kamala sister as she indignantly walked with a gauze bin towards Arumugam. “Doctor, you have been in this ward for more than ...

Need for a paradigm shift in the treatment of diabetes Vijay Gopichandran On 09 February 2020, we conducted an annual diabetic complications screening camp for patients with diabetes in the villages where we work. The findings of the camp, as usual, took me into a very introspective space. I was largely disheartened to see the poor blood sugar controls among most of the patients. Out of the 80+ patients that we saw on that day, only 10 had good sugar controls. I thought, “let me console myself looking at these 10 people” only to find out to my absolute dismay, that a few of them were not even patients with diabetes. They had been included in the screening by mistake! All of these patients are under treatment either with us at our clinic or with the public health system. They are under regular treatment. The camp day was spent reviewing their reports, making changes to their drugs, counseling them on what to eat, what to avoid, how to exercise, and referring them to higher spe...

Helping them accept their diagnosis Vijay Gopichandran Good evening! Today was a very long day at the clinic. We had an annual diabetes screening camp. This is a routine annual ritual that we perform year after year, in which we collaborate with a local organization who funds us, to organize a camp for screening our routine patients for complications. If we find any complications or early indications of them, we initiate appropriate preventive strategies. Often these camps are very disheartening to us from a clinical point of view because we unravel very serious problems that our patients develop silently. Many of our patients who have a well-controlled blood sugar level in a routine fasting and post-meal blood glucose test, show up as having abnormally poor sugar control over the past 3 months on the glycosylated hemoglobin test. This often slaps us hard on the face and wakes us up to the realities of practicing diabetes care in a setting with limited resources. On one hand, we h...

Trust is a privilege Vijay Gopichandran Yesterday a first-year medical student accompanied me to the clinic. This student is a very intense thinker and has ideas that are sometimes very radical, rebellious and sometimes outright revolutionary! He once told me that human beings are unable to fly because we don’t think we can. If all of us sat together and decided that we can fly, then we can. He gave a very elaborate and convoluted explanation for this idea, which I still haven’t understood. I have found his questions and interventions in the classroom to be intriguing. When he asked me on Saturday whether he could accompany me, I had no hesitation in inviting him. The three hours of the train journey and the opportunities for conversation would help me understand him and his thinking. There were many things that we spoke through the day and they were all interesting conversations. But one discussion that we had towards the end of the day, was the one about which I am goi...

A divine encounter Vijay Gopichandran Hello dear reader! I met a very interesting person yesterday at the temple. I am going to write about meeting and interacting with this gentleman. We spent just about 30 minutes in conversation, but I left feeling lighthearted. I couldn’t sleep for a long-time last evening, immersed in thoughts of what he said. And when I woke up this morning, I felt an intense sense of withdrawal of the positive energy that the gentleman had given me yesterday. He urged me to keep writing and gave me several tips on it. I thought, I should begin this new writing spell writing about him and the influence our brief conversation had on my thought. My friend goes to this ancient Yoga Narasimhar temple near her house, which is almost 1200 years old and has several interesting mythological connections. She is an integral part of the micro-ecosystem of the temple. Everyone knows her right from the flower vendor outside the temple to the chief priest at th...

So much to learn each day Vijay Gopichandran Hello my dear readers! It has been a long time since I wrote this blog. I was on a break doing a different kind of writing and taking some courses on how to write better. If you notice something different in my writing and find it good, then the credit goes to my teachers in the writing course. However, if you find my writing has gone from decent to horrible, I take full responsibility for it! There is so much to write about. I decided I will stick to the events of my clinic. I went to clinic today alone, no colleague, no students, like old days before 2016! Two interesting events took place and they have me thinking a lot about myself as a person and my profession as a doctor. “Sir, a man has come to the clinic with massive bleeding from his right hand. Shall I bring him inside?” asked our laboratory technician who was doubling up as a crowd controller in the overcrowded OPD today. I was seeing another elderly lady with diabetes...

Genuine concern for the patient Vijay Gopichandran If you ask me what is the single most important characteristic that defines a good doctor, it is the genuine concern and interest that the doctor has for his/her patient. In this blog, I will describe why I think that the ‘genuine interest’ in the patient is the most important trait for a doctor, more than even technical skills and knowledge. I had a patient last month in my clinic who was suffering from very bad oral ulcers. These ulcers were painful and were preventing her from eating even the blandest food. She came to me in tears, asking for help so that she can start eating again. With the help of a dermatologist friend, we diagnosed that the lady had oral lichen planus. The definitive treatment for this condition is to give oral steroid cream. I prescribed this cream to the lady, but unfortunately, the cream was not available in any pharmacy in the nearby town. She went to the nearest district headquarters which is...