Yellow, sodden, eyes in a crater, bulging belly, shrivelled arms and legs……..
Smelly, pus-laden amputated foot….
A little boy, lying with a hood over his head, saliva dribbling form his face…
These are few of the many faces of death that Doctors would face in a general medicine or surgery ward day in and day out.
Life goes on. Somehow, Doctors believe in these words so much that even after watching so many lives lost under their hands every day, they get up in the morning, fresh as usual, ready to save more lives. Help people live. But where do these Doctors get such a Heavenly power to keep sorrow from affecting them and their work is a matter of deep thought. It starts from the very first day of the Medical School; pieces of someone’s arm, someone’s face, someone’s leg; displayed in full montage. These fresh from school young boys and girls are taught why these prosections as they are called are so important in their days to come. These pieces are to act as reminders that they belonged to someone’s brother, someone’s mother or someone’s son, before they ended up on the dissection table as objects of academic interests. It is jokingly said that Doctors are but fools with the attitude of playing God with scalpel and scissors as their playthings. Such play to defy God himself, to revert the process of death; to uplift the various faces of death towards enlightenment. The faces of death do not haunt these Doctors as they have learnt to live with them, care for them, understand them as they are; pages of reading and hours of eyesore and insomnia lead to such a state of mind.
“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic”
Not quite unlike this quote, the first death any doctor faces throws him a big shockwave. He skips a meal; wonders for a day or two. It is by no means less than the feeling of loss of a family member. Death in family is one that you can mourn with other members. Loss of a patient gives him a feeling which he cannot share with the rest of the world and can be related to only by a colleague. Soon he realises the exact nature of this feeling and the various ways in which he has to compress his emotions at the bottom of his heart.
A well composed doctor is born, who can face death with a straight face and move on with his clinical duties.
Until next time,
Peace.
Restless Wanderer 