Work

Working in Peds is fun, much as I thought, and I am enjoying every bit of it. Got peed on twice. But trust me, that is nothing compared to getting your underwear soaked in blood during a c-section. Plus I would do anything to see those toothless smiles. Have been doing nursery rounds by myself of late with a lot of help from Rimi. We had some really sick meconium stained babies who were resuscitated properly and did well in the nursery. Most of our pre-terms in the nursery are also doing well and I am so thankful there have been no deaths in the nursery this month so far. That is rather unusual here. Last month we had problems with the 'meconium' babies. Some of them had aspirated so bad that no amount of resuscitation and care with the facilities we have here could keep them alive. The labor ward was overflowing and babies were booming.

Casualty duty
What scares me is the emergency room responsibility. I am required to attend to any case other than an obstetric case that comes to the hospital at night. On call duty starts at 6:00 pm and goes on all the way till 7 in the morning the next day. Most patients who make it to the hospital are awfully ill. And it takes a lot of effort for me to come to the right diagnosis, and I have goofed up; thankfully, not in a major way. We have about fifteen admissions on an ordinary night... that is when the doctors at the district hospital across the border are not having a party and the hospital is functioning. Apparently they did that a couple of days back and we had a huge inflow of partially treated patients. All very ill. And also we have all these medico legal cases coming in on most nights. My last night on duty, I attended to a gunshot wound; entry wound on the left side of chest, exit wound on the right. The bullet had then penetrated the inner part of the right arm and was palpable just under the skin on the lateral surface of the arm. There was no lung injury and the patient was stable. So after providing basic resuscitation we referred the patient to a higher center.

Snake bite
I get to see on an average one snake bite a day. Snakes here are usually elapid - cobra or krait. I have noticed that those with cobra bites are the ones who develop signs of envenomation most of the time. Not that krait bites are safe, but most of the time they are not very disastrous.

Assault
We get to see this in plenty here. People come with bleeding scalps and broken bones. The entry is the scariest part. Everybody is so charged up and wild, yelling at the doctor to do something. It is not unusual to have a crowd of twenty people with one patient and all may be very loud. I thankfully haven’t come across a burns patient yet, but we do see cases of burns. What is interesting is that if you are from Nepal, there is no medico legal case registered where as if you are from Bihar every case gets reported. All poisoning and attempted suicide cases from Nepal thus find their way here.

AGE in Shock
From last month we have been seeing a lot of Cholera cases. And I see about two to five people with AGE in shock on any given duty night. The other night a group of people brought a lady who had been dead for a while. She apparently had been passing loose stools only for the past one and a half hours. Another gentleman who was brought gasping with a history of passing loose stools sat up and talked after we rushed in 6 bottles of ringer lactate.

The Village-doctor
Most of the patients from the village get some medicine from the local doctors before coming here. These are guys who prescribe medicines for most illnesses in the villages, and also in towns. They are not qualified by law to prescribe medicines. But they give everybody who approaches them a shot of two medicines... probably the only ones they know: Dexona; trade-name for dexamethasone, and Monocef; trade-name for Ceftriaxone. No matter what the illness is you can rest assured your patient arrives after shots of these two medicines. So you have to scramble for a higher antibiotic at times. The way they give IV fluids is worth mentioning. They just pump in as many bottles as the patient can afford through a peripheral vein, which is accessed by a large bore metal needle. You have to see it to believe it. They come most of the time with the needle half out. Some times a doctor would accompany his patient posing as one of the family. And he would hang around you just to watch how you treat other patients. Once I had one of these guys come up to me and say, "Hum bhi medical line ke hain." Translation; I am in the medical line also. Talking with him proved to be a very good exercise for building up my patience.