So I spend most of my days surrounded by monkeys. Real monkey monkeys and chom monkeys. To the extent that I now feel a bit like Jane. Goodall not Tarzan. "Choms like chimps have personalities too. They may all look the same the first time but soon one realizes that each has it's own identity. See this one's called Raj..."
No it's not so bad. But a little exaggeration hurt only the boy who cried wolf. But I am surrounded by specimens. Close encounters happen every other day. Some heart warming some decidedly scary. Like take for example this little runt who works across in the pediatric casualty. Five foot nothing, juvenile and his hair is in the same state of disarray every day. And by the same state, every single strand is out of place in the same angle, so to speak, every single day. And he's mad. Been around for a couple of years in pediatric casualty. QED perhaps.
Or another guy in medicine who saw me condemning a patient to acrossness (more about that) with flourish using a parker ink pen decided that I deserve better and should be gifting me a sheaffer sometime today.
Or people who randomly accost you while roaming lost in the bowels of aiims to show you the way, or those who'll bump into you while you have an 18G needle because they couldn't care less.
The past few days at the job have raised many a lofty thought on health care that in retrospect I think are meaningless. It's bad enough that I now realize that a single health care policy wouldn't work in this country, I now think that it won't even work in a single hospital.
AIIMS is the premier medical institute in the country. At the apex of it all. Does it make sense for it to have a casualty and accident and emergency services? Shouldn't it be a tertiary referral institute. And only do stuff that "lesser" institutes can't. Chitra in Trivandrum and SGPGI at Lucknow already function that way. But we have a casualty. Then shouldn't we be doing it justice. Or be doing the patients justice considering we don't have a choice regarding the presence or absence of emergency services. On an aside their presence is what brought me here so I shouldn't be cribbing.
As one enters the casualty one sees in big bold letters a board that states that it is a policy in this hospital to not admit patients once all the beds are full. Which they almost always are. So no matter who it is, and delhi is filled with politicians of all shapes and sizes, if there are no beds then there is no admission. So a substantial number of patients are "acrossed" to Safdarjung Hospital. It's pretty hilarious once you get used to it but till then you, like me can feel bad about the 2 patients an hour that Safdarjung has agreed to admit if sent from the institute.
But we have a 24 hour coffee shop and a General store that will procure anything (from mats to sleep on to USB LAN cards). We have half a dozen CTs that run almost 24/7, central lines for free in casualty, ventilators if required, good patient load and frequent resuscitations. Some of whom survive to be acrossed or icued.
It's a good hospital. And I'm learning to like it.
And to make the title valid this here are the lyrics to Bebot by the Black Eyed Peas. (Goofy, if you're reading this, enjoy!)
No it's not so bad. But a little exaggeration hurt only the boy who cried wolf. But I am surrounded by specimens. Close encounters happen every other day. Some heart warming some decidedly scary. Like take for example this little runt who works across in the pediatric casualty. Five foot nothing, juvenile and his hair is in the same state of disarray every day. And by the same state, every single strand is out of place in the same angle, so to speak, every single day. And he's mad. Been around for a couple of years in pediatric casualty. QED perhaps.
Or another guy in medicine who saw me condemning a patient to acrossness (more about that) with flourish using a parker ink pen decided that I deserve better and should be gifting me a sheaffer sometime today.
Or people who randomly accost you while roaming lost in the bowels of aiims to show you the way, or those who'll bump into you while you have an 18G needle because they couldn't care less.
The past few days at the job have raised many a lofty thought on health care that in retrospect I think are meaningless. It's bad enough that I now realize that a single health care policy wouldn't work in this country, I now think that it won't even work in a single hospital.
AIIMS is the premier medical institute in the country. At the apex of it all. Does it make sense for it to have a casualty and accident and emergency services? Shouldn't it be a tertiary referral institute. And only do stuff that "lesser" institutes can't. Chitra in Trivandrum and SGPGI at Lucknow already function that way. But we have a casualty. Then shouldn't we be doing it justice. Or be doing the patients justice considering we don't have a choice regarding the presence or absence of emergency services. On an aside their presence is what brought me here so I shouldn't be cribbing.
As one enters the casualty one sees in big bold letters a board that states that it is a policy in this hospital to not admit patients once all the beds are full. Which they almost always are. So no matter who it is, and delhi is filled with politicians of all shapes and sizes, if there are no beds then there is no admission. So a substantial number of patients are "acrossed" to Safdarjung Hospital. It's pretty hilarious once you get used to it but till then you, like me can feel bad about the 2 patients an hour that Safdarjung has agreed to admit if sent from the institute.
But we have a 24 hour coffee shop and a General store that will procure anything (from mats to sleep on to USB LAN cards). We have half a dozen CTs that run almost 24/7, central lines for free in casualty, ventilators if required, good patient load and frequent resuscitations. Some of whom survive to be acrossed or icued.
It's a good hospital. And I'm learning to like it.
And to make the title valid this here are the lyrics to Bebot by the Black Eyed Peas. (Goofy, if you're reading this, enjoy!)
