Five minutes

After we finish our final year exams and before we can put a ‘Doctor’ in front of our names, our batch of two hundred students receive a common title called ‘Aye intern’.

Besides getting to do exciting procedures sometimes, majority of our job includes taking samples and running around and it often leaves us feeling, ‘I wish i could be of more help.’ I was sitting amidst a hectic OPD, filling in forms and sending samples. An old lady came in with his husband who had an enormous ulcer on his foot. There are about over three hundred patients in a Monday OPD and five residents to see all those patients between 9 am to 1 pm. At any given point there are about twelve to fourteen patients with a diabetic foot ulcer and half of them scheduled for an amputation.

They were told that it needed to be operated, explained the procedure to get an indoor case and get the reports done in a quick two minute conversation. The resident told me to quickly take the patient to the room beside OPD and get the pre-op work up done. That lady`s face was perplexed by everything things moving so fast. What she and her sixty year old diabetic husband thought to be a wound that could probably be treated by some bandaging turned into him losing his foot. After I finished the pre-op chores, i looked at her face receptively.

She told me that she couldn’t understand why they were going to cut off her husband`s foot, why just medicines wont work. I explained it to her in a way someone would have explained to me before i stepped into medical school- a conversation without any medical jargon or terms like ‘neuropathy’. I knew that five minute conversation would not change their  mood or the outcome. But may be it could give her some answers, may be give her the content that someone was there to listen to her and explain before they cut his foot off.

She kept her hand on my head and shed a tear. And in that moment, I realised that as an intern, always looking for a chance to do an ascitic tap or a chance to see a rare case, something as routine could end up being an important moment. A moment where I felt, I helped someone out in whatever capacity I could. 

-Dhruvi Joshi