Testing times at hospitals

A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running. Groucho Marx.

Hospitals have become nicer places these days. An assertion that will be hotly disputed by many and, I daresay, with good reason. Everything is relative and it all depends on how you compare the hospitals of today with those of yesteryear. Much will also revolve on your role as you enter the portals of a large ‘multispecialty hospital,’ as they are somewhat fancifully called. By which, I mean are you there in the capacity of a patient or just a carefree, or careworn, visitor keeping company and providing moral support to a close friend or relative who needs to be examined on some medical issue, emergency or the other? If it is the former, then you are not going to be idly reflecting on the hospital’s interior décor, the de rigueur avant-garde Lord Ganesh statue at an alcove in the spacious, Italian marble tiled lobby, with passers-by paying casual obeisance to the elephant god, the franchised branded cafes dotting the place and similar impressive accoutrements. Had my opening sentence employed the word ‘fancier’ in place of ‘nicer’ it is probable that the disagreement would have been muted. At times some of these grand medical establishments could be mistaken for a major airport. In one hospital, I did not misread a large sign outside a spacious, well-appointed, glassed chamber that read ‘International Lounge’ – cross my heart and hope to die! Not an appropriate phrase while discussing hospitals, but still.

If, on the other hand, you are being wheeled in as a patient for a consult, thoughts of contemporary artefacts, business class lounges and eating joints will be the last thing on your mind. Notwithstanding the benign and benevolent presence of Lord Ganesh or for that matter, Holy Mary Mother of God. Dark thoughts of the possibility of blood tests, CT scans, MRIs, being ‘persuaded’ to be a resident guest at the hospital for a few days (‘do I have medical insurance?’) and generally being poked around your frail body by a series of doctors, nurses and temps, fill your thoughts. Am I going to be under the surgical knife? ‘Scalpel.’ I binge on medical thrillers. More than the verdict to be passed on the diagnosis and the likely procedures and post-op biopsies that must inevitably follow, the daily bills being racked up prey on you in a manner consistent with some deadly virus that could be gnawing away at your vitals. Wiser heads than mine have often expressed the view that the treatment is often worse than the affliction.

I have also never been able to understand why a bevy of medicos, after examining the patient, insist on standing around close to him and carrying on endlessly about the intricacies of his situation. They do it well within earshot of the patient, in loud-enough stage whispers that come through clear as a bell. Perhaps they imagine stone-deafness is a natural corollary to any illness you may be down with. Psst, psst, they go whispering to one another. ‘I think a full body scan is in order,’ declares the senior doctor. ‘For the moment should we rule out malignancy?’ asks a bright young intern. ‘You could, but I will keep my options open until a full-scale endoscopy and colonoscopy is conducted,’ replies the senior doctor. By now, the patient genuinely cannot hear anything because he has fainted out of sheer fright.

Then again, I am just being needlessly alarmist. If it is your fate that you find yourself lying on a hospital bed, pencilled in to undergo a battery of tests and procedures, you may as well lie back and enjoy it. In any case, they will pump you with sedatives so that everything will just seem like a hazy, pleasant dream. Much will also depend on the kind of doctor or surgeon who has been detailed to take you under his tender, loving care. Once you have come out of the ether, after the surgery, with a standard ‘Where am I?’ you will be made an almighty fuss over by your near and dear ones. The doctor who conducted whatever procedure it was you had to undergo is likely to say something like, ‘You were wonderful Sir, wish we had more patients like you.’ There’s another inane statement for you. As if you had any control over what your completely inert body did or didn’t do while they were doing whatever it was they were doing and finally stitching you up. Still, you give the doctor a weak smile, ask for your mobile phone and thank him brokenly.

After keeping you in the hospital for a few more days for observation and recovery, surrounded by bouquets of flowers and get-well cards and selfies being taken to be instantly transmitted worldwide, you are finally given the green signal to be wheeled away to your home, sweet home, but not before hanging around for another three hours for the billing and settling of accounts to be completed. By now you are strong enough to ask your near and dear ones what the damage was. The answer is a curt, ‘Don’t ask.’ You console the family members (and yourself) by reminding them that the insurance chaps will cough up, but we all know that the paper work and procedure for that to happen will be another steep climb, even if you were on the ‘cashless’ system. Talk about pulling teeth.

Modern day cliches like ‘age is only a number,’ ‘you are only as old as you feel,’ ‘yesterday’s 40 is today’s 60’ and so on are repeated ad nauseum to make us all feel better. I think that’s a lot of hogwash. In many traditional societies in our country, crossing the age of 60 calls for special celebrations, rituals and the day is treated with the same unctuous religiosity as a ceremonial wedding. Which was all very well several decades ago, when people retired at the age of 60 or even 58, and were made to feel they should put their feet up and contemplate the infinite, as they were barely a shout out from joining their maker. Nowadays, social media is full of one-minute clips showing 90-year-old men and women doing press ups and running the half-marathon and looking none the worse for it; even if you discount much of it as AI generated. Crossing 100 years has become passé. Virtually every family has a centurion or two, and if they served the government during their lifetimes, their pension doubles! Lucky old sods.

As I conclude this contemplation on hospitals and doctors, I cannot help but hark back to the days of one’s childhood, when your friendly family doctor resided just round the corner from where you lived. And he was not averse to making house calls if the situation warranted. His method was unfailingly the same whether you complained of a stomach ache, chest congestion, raging fever, streptococcal infection or an ingrowing toenail. ‘Stick your tongue out, aaaah!’ he would intone. Followed by a perfunctory placing of his stethoscope at different points in your chest and back. ‘Deep breaths.’ Finally, the thermometer under your tongue or armpit (according to preference), which he would then peer at speculatively, look mildly concerned and without saying anything (and you didn’t dare ask), would write out a prescription, the contents of which only he, his compounder and God could decipher. The compounder will do his stuff in an adjoining, stuffy room and hand over a bottle of pinkish liquid with a serrated paper strip stuck on to indicate the dosage levels. It tasted like something out of the devil’s workshop but in three days, you were up and about, right as rain, humming Satchmo’s What a Wonderful World. Incidentally, I always felt it was extremely stupid to be threatened by our elders with ‘the doctor’s injection’ when we refused to eat our greens.

I recall a memorable snippet from Britain’s much-loved comedian of yesteryear Tony Hancock, whose unforgettable episode The Blood Donor, features this brief exchange, inter alia, between Hancock and a fellow patient at a hospital. To his companion’s appreciative comment about doctors, ‘What will we do without doctors, eh?’ Hancock provides this tart response, ‘Or conversely, what will they do without us?’ How true!