GMC TEMPTATIONS FOR PATIENTS…Sodexo meals for breakfast,lunch,dinner and a cup of milk and a protein rich ragi drink for those who want it!
By Tara Narayan
MORE adventures of the GMC kind this week too. It’s the same story all over again. Patient won’t eat the breakfast so his wife who’s attending to him has the breakfast because she doesn’t like the idea of wasting good food. It’s an old story which I may have grumbled about in the past. It’s the curious story of patients not eating their hospital provided meals but wanting their women folk to prepare something at home and bring! Call it typical male chauvinism even in patients seeking more “mukti” than anything else.
For example, this morning: Breakfast arrives at 7am in the private rooms Ward No.121 at the GMC which is like an oasis –the smart young Sodexo girls and boys work like speedy Gonsalves and a tall white cardboard cup of steaming ragi malt drink is put on the patient’s mobile serving table in Room No.6, followed by a platter of idli-sambar-tea.
The hubby has had a bad and so so night, falling asleep in the wee hours of the morning, and in and out of the bathroom several times…for some time now he has been on a hunger strike, eating less and less for reasons only he knows (we may not presume to judge). Great breakfast, I tell him, trying to be cheerful. Come and sit on the chair and have it, “Why don’t you have your breakfast now and be done early?”
It’s a short and snappy, No. He is like that only. And life is like that only. He has a two cups of tea and that’s it, he wants a gallon of tea — which is not possible in a hospital room, you understand. So much tea only adds to your acidity, I give him bhashaan. He tells me to shut-up. It’s the same story in the end for years on end, every time the patient is in the hospital, “I don’t like the Sodexo hospital meals you rave about, you eat them and get me something from home!” Che sera, sera. I grit my teeth, say a few nasty things which roll off like water of a duck’s back.
Being a nasty patient’s nasty attendant is no fun for anyone, let alone a lowly wife! These days I feel like I’m living in limbo land. Toing and froing on my two-wheeler out to the Goa Medical College & Hospital where every morning there’s such a melee of staff and GRPH staff in the morning hours moving in and out as shift timings get over. Attending to patient’s needs of whims and fancies becomes a tiresome chore after some time. I hope there are some lessons here of the incomprehensible kind which I think are worth recounting to cut to the real and mundane story of life.
Once again I’m playing at being devoted wifely attendant these days and after a few days it becomes an uphill, exhausting chore. For more than a week now I’ve been to-ing and fro-ing in my two-wheeler out to the GMC and having adventures of another kind. I’m so happy to see the ornately crafted two wooden benches of old outside Ward No.121 which some patients’ attendants seek to sleep off at night. The stainless steel modular chairs out in the ward foyers are falling apart here and there and are too tight-spaced to sleep on, only sit, don’t sleep here! Really unfriendly chairs. Only a sadist would design modular chairs like these for hospital use.
THEN suddenly in one fell swoop, I noticed one morning that the GMC grounds have been shorn off a score of trees and strong sunshine is pouring in…the guard out here at one of the parking lots was trying to persuade me not to park my two-wheeler here or there “for trees are being cut!” The smell of butchered trees still hangs around in the air, mercifully some of the apte or sonapatra trees with their purple flowers still stand, don’t cut these down please, nor the rain trees and jackfruits and mangoes, neems. The trees with their leafy canopies offer shade and coolness and never mind the crows, pigeons, dogs who mess up the parking lots and the two-wheelers parked there daytime or overnight!
I complain to the guard here about the crowshit, pigeonshit, dogshit and he shrugs, what to do? Shoot them, I tell him, in other countries when the population of any animal species outnumbers habitat, annually permission is given to cull the animals (WHO and Bill Gates have been trying to cull the population of human beings for years now, the latest example being that of Covid-19 and vaccines boom). Well, this is something we must think about some more. Who decides the law of culling and to which species it should apply to, when, and how!
FUNNY or not funny, dealing with patient’s medical ups and downs can be very confusing for the layperson’s uneducated mind. In this country we still perceive the doctor’s fraternity as mai-baap or bhagwan. I tell the hubby (namely, Rajan Narayan, former editor of Herald and later the Goan Observer over 40 years in Goa) it’s becoming a joke cooking for him, when he will eat only three tablespoons of kichadi or half a dosa or half a phulka and say he is done, take it away…eating less and less seems to be a daily mantra and never mind what happens to the struggle between to live or to die itself. But that’s that. Of course, there are times when I ask myself, why do women get married, and that to pig-headed men?
IT’S getting trickier to get into the GMC with all the lacking in common sense development going on out here, although I must tell you most of the vendors selling their morning time snacks outside the gates have now got their own little shops a little further up and here a lot of fruit is on sale – but no one has started a healthy fresh fruit and veggie juices bar yet alongside all the fruit being retailed at higher rates (a tender coconut is now Rs50 here while it is Rs40 down town Panaji).
There’s a Prerna put here whose soft gavan dosa with green chutney I love and sometimes pick up (only resenting the plastic packing!), there’s the usual stuff of sweet sheera-stuffed roti, aloo paratha, methi uttappam, upma, poha and lots more. Much of it better than what you will find at the GMC’s Yoo cafeteria which is decent place to sit and moon moon over a cup of cardamom machine tea though…sorry, they don’t keep such good things as tender coconut water or buttermilk or fresh fruit juices, for that you may go outside the GMC gates and look around if I’m so desperate.
FOR a while it’s morning, noon and night at the GMC and sometimes crying over a patient who wants to die, who wants to live, who wants to die, who wants to live. Everything builds up: acidity, depression, lack of energy and more…injections are given, more medicines are prescribed. Now I hear it may not be TB of the skeleton after all but just an infection of the spine…the clinching test results of a fine needle aspiration and biopsy are awaited.
In the meantime a hospital psychiatrist comes and prescribes “something better than Restyl.” An anti-depressant drug called clonazepam (0.5 g) and it turns out to be deadly, creates havoc , the patient hallucinating for two nights running—he thought he was in the grip of death. It was terrible. Living is not easy, nor is dying. One listened to all the stressed out hallucination talk about police coming to put him away in prison, a guard being forced to chant “Hare Rama, Hare Krishna” to prove himself a true Hindu, gangsters after him — he thinks he is a spy on an espionage trip, may be James Bond incarnate out to kill all the enemies. I wept.
Third day I took a closer look at his prescriptions and google searched them with the help of a friend who zeroed down on a tablet called clonazepam which was prescribed for Rajan…this was creating all the deep end hallucinating. Needless to say the tablet has been removed and patient much improved, back to his normal humor – but alas, his health was compromised long ago as the editor of Goa’s first investigative newspaper.
This is to say friends, beware this medicine called – Clonazepam (0.5). Not all drugs are a gift to mankind, in fact very few are – most work on the law of diminishing returns and take their toll on a patient – Rajan Narayan is a prime example of this. If he has lasted this long it is entirely courtesy doctors of various denomination, good, bad and ugly.
ARE you a human being first or a doctor first? I asked one GMC resident doctor. Flabbergasted, he said he doesn’t know. Try to be a human being first and a doctor second, I advised him and couldn’t care less how that sounded to him. So it goes, the story of a patient and life in a hospital and the search for mukti dead or alive! Hospitals are making me feel creepy all over, I continue with my up and down visits from home to hospital and hospital to home, while my patient in private rooms Ward No 121 at the Goa Medical College and Hospital recovers.
This ward is like an oasis once you step in it! The 23 rooms here are for critical care for vulnerable patients, both single and twin-sharing. Resident doctors from the public wards come and go. Most patients who come to the GMC can’t afford them and nor can poor media patients but….public healthcare, private healthcare, I’m increasingly beginning to think that healthcare is going for a toss – after umpteen tests we may not be sure about what a patient is suffering from at the tail end of his life. Be positive, a doctor friend keeps telling me!