A day at the hospital

…It is a bit like being on a train. The amount of fun(?!) you have is proportional to the length of your journey… and of course, in case of the hospital, what you are there for… those with the legs in plaster and those sitting with the recovering well types have fun looking out of the windows. And as with trains there are periods of lull – nothing happens, life has ground to an agonizingly slow pace and everyone is doing their own thing…

The excitement is when the stations arrive, minor and major. The doctor’s visit, around noon is the large junction on this trip. People are drifting in and out of sleep, breakfast over, 11 a.m. coconut water prescribed by the dietician consumed, lunch nowhere in the horizon…

And suddenly there is a buzz. Everyone springs to life; the nurses at the counter flit hither and thither injecting more things into people’s veins, checking a pulse here, taking a temperature there. The junior doctors who have been lording over it all so far deflate in front of your eyes as the stuffed frogs – the consultants – walk briskly barking sharp questions at them. The patients or their attendants look up eagerly, having waited with their list of questions since the last visit of the “big doctor” – roughly 24 hours ago – the lucky ones actually get to the spoken to by the big doctor, while most, the unfortunate majority blink and miss that visit. And so the list of question grows… waiting for the next visit… Five minutes later all is still again.

Not for long. Then follows “meals time” – and just as in a train, there is a clatter of plates and spoons and things being generally pushed and thrown around. Who would have thought hospitals could be so noisy? And who would have thought hospital meals could be cause for excitement? Goes to show how everything is relative… when you have spent the last twenty minutes listening to the Gujarati aunty reading out scriptures to her husband who is in bed, then the cacophony of cutlery seems like music?

Can I actually hear the “trrriingkk… colddreeeenk coldreeenk, idlivadaaapi idlivadaaappi” – nah, I have drifted in to sleep again… What I see when I open my eyes is hospital khichdi – which is anyway forbidden on the doctor’s strict NBM oders – nil by mouth, says the nurse helpfully pointing out to the saline going through my system on IV – for maintenance, she says.

Oh, and what about servicing and repairs? It is nice to see one’s friends enjoying themselves, even if they are sitting around your bed in the hospital, and all you can do is smile weakly up at them.

***

I spent a couple of days at Lilavati Hospital, after severe pain in the abdomen – just back home after several tests and several injections – not to mention several thousands of rupees spent… still to find out exactly what is going wrong… When it rains… *sigh*