Ramblings from Week One

I’m learning Bengali words to help me perform physical exams, but I’ve resorted to body language to demonstrate to the patients what I need them to do. This system of one body imitating another is an incredible relief from my every day experience of trying to express myself in words. Wait, why am I writing this blog again?

The doctor-patient relationship flies out our tiny clinic windows. Doctors oftentimes are prescribing medication within twenty seconds of looking over our patient charts. Maybe we the medical assistants are supposed to be creating that relationship, even with our language constraints.

I think that I correctly anticipated finding in India a stereotypically Western obsession with medication. It is inappropriate for me to doubt the doctors’ knowledge of disease trends and treatment needs in the area, but as I said, they seemed eager to prescribe as quickly as possible. Nearly all patients received a prescription, and certainly the strong majority needed it. However, we undoubtedly medicated a number of curious people who probably didn’t need a syrup or pills, including my interviewee Ajay Sankar. Sankar clearly was more interested in talking and experiencing the clinic than in being diagnosed and treated. I also understand that most of these people would benefit greatly from vitamin B supplements. Maybe the nourishment can have long-term benefits for both parents and children. And maybe medications given to the elderly women coughing up worms will be able to exhale without life forms falling from her mouth. We used potent ibuprofen to treat the worm woman’s major complaint: back pain hunched her over every winter. (This Kolkata winter is no less than 50° F, but countless people wear black and camouflage earmuffs in the highs of 80° F.)

I have consistently been picking hard, black boogers from my nose. (I’m balancing the internal constitution of my nose.) As Sandeep pointed out, you can look straight at the sun because there is so much pollution in the sky.

The begging in Kolkata is minimal compared to what I have seen in other countries with severely impoverished people. The street-dwellers are everywhere but they simply aren’t begging. I have no idea why this is the case. One case of begging that I experienced overwhelmed me. I was sitting in the front seat of an SUV, traveling to the Ganges for the first time. We were stopped for two minutes at an intersection when a young, shirtless, extremely thin male beggar approached my window. His right shoulder joint had a large flap of skin hanging from it in place of his arm. His left arm tapered to a nub around where his wrist should have been. My window was cracked enough that his eyes could look at me cleanly, but his mumbling was directed at the window. I had nothing to give, so I begged those in the seats behind me to handle my problem.

We are paying $15/day to rent an ambulance and its driver. A member of Pratit’s insurance company had to pay $1060 for an ambulance to take her just one block on Penn’s campus.

I don’t believe that I could do what Turja is doing. Certainly the support provided by his family, especially his parents and Dr. Charkraborty, is essential for the success of this venture. His parents are providing our lodging and much of our food and transportation. The doctor has the connections in each of the slums and controls the clinic like a man that knows where he is and the people he is serving. (Go localized knowledge!) But Turja is the heart of this program. He maintains the system in the background and makes major decisions in the frantic clinic.

I was a New Year’s Eve “celebrity!” I decided to embrace the attention and didn’t turn down a single one of the forty or so boys that asked to shake my hand with the compulsory English-spoken, “Happy New Year!” There were thousands of people on one of Kolkata’s major street and at least 90% were young males. I danced spontaneously with some of them. When one older man came over to jump around with me, he also asked to shake my hand. Then, when a local boy next to me asked to shake the man’s hand, the man begrudgingly complied, then immediately wiped his hand off on his shirt and walked away.

When the mob of males around us on New Year’s Eve grew too large for comfort, we escaped into a restaurant called Marco Polo. I’m consciously avoiding the label of modern-day European/Western explorer, but I can’t help but feel like one sometimes.

Why do people around the world consciously and unconsciously suffer at the hands of time but decide to celebrate it when the whole constructed cycle begins again at New Year’s?

O hey, Krishna! What’s happening, yo? (We road on a cramped coach bus named Krishna to get to the fantastic picnic on the industrial farm. It was the bumpiest ride of my life!)