A Nurse. An Angel In Motion.

• They have taken care of my patients as if they were their own kids.
• They have spent sleepless nights in the wards, ICU and Casualty so that the patients can bear a sound sleep.
• They have stricken friendship with desolate patients so that they don’t feel homesick.
• They have refused to leave from duty if an emergency arrived in the waning end of their shifts.
• They have made sure that every nook and corner of the hospital looks spick and span.
• They have abandoned visiting their home towns if there was a shortage of equivalent man power in the hospital.
• They always brought home cooked delicacies when they returned from their ritual of once a year visit at their native place.
• They have cleaned the spilled vomitus and blood stains when the ward boy was not in sight.
• They have juggled hard to learn computers so that they can help the hospital’s vision of keeping the systems as per the advanced standard protocol.
• They have attended their duties even when they are down with viral fever or acute gastritis.
• They have cold sponged the infant suffering with ‘febrile convulsions’, even when the child’s parents slowly drifted into sleep.

Just observing them at work makes me retrospect and realize that I have been bestowed with tons of knowledge by all the staff nurses I ever came in contact with. They have this altruistic attitude to life, and they never make qualms about petty things. A doctor is incomplete without an equally capable army of allied nurses; patient management is a comprehensive process. A nurse is someone most close to God; a mother figure, a sage in motion, an emotional healer. I wish every person of the world gets to know that the nurses sacrifice a lot to make sure that the ailing ones start gaining health again. I don’t think I can do anything that can ever match the favors that have been bestowed over me by nurses. One needs to have this in her soul, in her tissues to be as selfless as a nurse is.

A Nurse is one of the most divine animate beings. I salute to their spirit and their cause.

Dilemmas Of A Resident Doctor

1. You are facing your first job interview. You are asked whether you have intubated a patient solely. You mutter and fumble and succeed in arousing a lot of doubts in the interviewer’s mind.

2. It’s your 4th day of posting in Accident & Emergency Department. You are virtually surrounded by a flurry of patients with near similar presenting complaints with near equal anxiety. You gallantly finished the test by scribbling at every patient’s prescription slip, only to realize that for 2 patients you prescribed Inj Perinorm instead of Inj Stemetil. Now what? You gushing like maniacs to find the piece of literature (available with every medicine) with fine prints to evaluate to possibility of potential side-effects. Life in the fast lane with blinding beams.

3. You did not bother to examine the patient completely and the senior consultant appears from nowhere. You are asked about abdominal findings and you get only 2 abbreviations in your mind; NAD (No abnormality detected) & WNL (Within normal limits). You follow your mind; only to be taught the basics of abdominal palpation with an annoyance. After all, it was no body’s fault that patient’s spleen was massively enlarged with beautifully palpable anterior margin.

4. You are in the middle of the night with virtually no patients to attend on emergency basis. You feel nauseating with the combined effects of nicotine with drawl, hunger pangs and drowsy eyes.

5. You are explaining the consent for surgery and anesthesia to a patient; and this guy is serious. The moment you tell him the rare possibility of dreaded complications (including but not limited to death), he appears shocked and betrayed. And in a knee-jerk reaction, he orders you to arrange a meeting with the senior doctor, so that he can re-decide whether he wants to be anesthetized and operated upon or not. Now who will call the senior consultant; and what sort of explanation can save the resident doctor’s already compromised authority?

6. You feel thrilled to have a sight of a beautiful intern in the ward. You steal glances while organizing your hair with an electric vigor, only to gather in coming minutes that she is blissfully married and preparing for USMLE to settle with her in-laws in Philadelphia. Life is a crap!

7. You are assisting in OPD of your Unit Head. You are told to write ATT (Anti-tubercular Medications) to a patient, you gladly wrote AKT-4 Kit, to be taken once a day. But your Unit Head seems unhappy, he asks to write individual drugs with their dosages and your pen virtually slips with the flood of sweat between your index finger and ring finger. What if he asks about individual complications of each anti tubercular medication? What is the full form of DOTS?

8. Its post midnight. You are in duty room. You get a call regarding refractory febrile spike of a child. You collect yourself to attend him. You get another call about the routine blood sugar (RBS) value of 24 of another patient; you shout on the phone for 25%D infusion. Another call for a patient (Post Operative Day 1 of Hemicolectomy) complaining of severe abdominal pain and increasing distension. Another call from Emergency ward to attend a family (which just arrived in dehydrated and lethargic condition in the hospital) suspected to be having food poisoning. Another call for repeated failed attempts of peripheral canulation of a 5 day old infant. Oh God!!! Why ME?

9. You were set to cool your heels this Saturday evening with your girlfriend in the swanky interior of PVR Saket. In the late morning of Saturday, you are told by ever arrogant Roster Incharge that your shift has been revised and you are supposed to do a 24 hours duty starting this evening. What lies in a Sabbath?

10. You observe with great wisdom that your Unit Head is not able to make a diagnosis; you scratch your brain and the missing piece pops up with a flash. You tell your opinion with puffed torso and somber voice, only to finds its utter triviality in milliseconds. Is there any software for erasing recently acquired memory? If it is there, I would like to apply it to my Unit Head to save my already negotiated self-pride.

Top 10 Problems That Nurses Face

1. The venepuncture site (canula insertion point) gets blocked again.

2. The patient asks too many questions about finer nuances of the disease (The nurse invariably thinks about the silent glance and understanding gesture that the patient portrayed when senior doctor was taking rounds…. That was fine, but what happened to him now? Is he testing the authenticity of my medical degree? That’s fine. But please stick to the syllabus).

3. The patient seems to have a fascination with pressing the nurses call button (What lies in a reason?).

4. The little kid in the ward defies the boundaries of producible sound while crying inconsolably; and does not succumb to the usual baits.

5. A doctor is taking ward rounds and another doctor demands the attention of the same nurse for a different patient.

6. You have 5 trauma patients for whom you have to check vital parameters every 30 minutes. And it’s the busiest night shift already.

7. The anxious patient suffering with Hepatic Encephalopathy with Sub Acute Intestinal Obstruction is adamant at taking the Ryle’s tube out. He has done it 3 times in past 6 hours and you are mumbling divine hymns.

8. Before you take the over from the preceding duty nurse, you are called by a anxious looking resident doctor (its his first day of joining) in the expectation of getting a thorough orientation of the ward, the hospital and the life. Predicament can’t get louder.

9. Though you have finished with the Herculean forms and draconian quality assurance paper-works, you get thumbs down for that not-so-neat handwriting by never-pleasing horde of quality assurance guys.

10. The patient complaining to doctor that ward nurses seldom listen to him (though you religiously put every inch of an effort to help the guy in disguise).