It must be pretty obvious by now that l am talking about a nurse here,right? Well,what isn’t so obvious is her journey and that of so many others like her.

Most of our nurses come from extremely simple backgrounds,often from the marginalized sections of the society.
Earning an education is a formidable task in such sections..and to follow it up with a job,that too a profession that is as demanding as nursing,is no mean feat.

Yet our nurses turn their blood into sweat in the service of humanity,day after day. They are the pillars on which the entire healthcare industry stands…but are they given their due ? While it may appear that the world glorifies the nursing profession and equates every nurse with the revered Florence Nightingale, the unpleasant truth is that there is much darkness in the lives of our ‘ladies with the lamps’! Our nurses are rampantly exploited..they are mercilessly overworked, shamelessly underpaid and often, there are other needless pressures on them.
Inspite of such a grave scenario,in my own experience as a healthcare professional,l have never found a nurse sulking over her lot and shirking her duties!

And shall I let you into a secret? It is the nurses who spend a whole lot more time with patients than do doctors and that gives them an edge. In medical practice,one finds doctors relying heavily on the clinical observations of experienced and sharp eyed nurses to help them with diagnosing and treating patients! Intelligent and enterprising nurses often work shoulder to shoulder with doctors in imparting quality healthcare to patients.
In our country we have nurses with various qualifications..there are ANMs,GNMs,B.Scs,M.Scs etc etc. The degrees notwithstanding,what sets a great nurse apart from others is her empathy,her ability to soothe and comfort a suffering soul and last but not the least,a good clinical eye.

No good doctor worth his or her salt ever ignores the inputs from a seasoned and observant nurse!The Covid 19 pandemic is still fresh in our memories. During those days,the on-duty healthcare professionals had to don and work in PPE ( personal protection equipment) kits ,every shift. Only someone who has been inside one knows just how stifling and suffocating the kit is, especially with the respirators/ double masks, protective eye wear and face shields. The fogging of the eyewear and shields made it extremely difficult for doctors and nurses to see their way around,in the Covid wards! To add to that,there were a host of procedures to be performed on patients , regularly!No one could afford a slip at any step… and who did suffer the most? Yes,you got that right,our nurses ! Simply because they were the ones who spent the most time in the kits,working long, long hours..now, donning the PPE kit was the easy part…..the tricky part was the doffing! One wrong step…and the ‘doffee’ would have exposed herself or himself to an unknown load of the Covid -19 bug! And no prizes for guessing this, many of the nurses themselves fell prey to Covid, right,left and centre! Hence even the best hospitals faced severe shortage of staff which translated into extra working hours for the existing ones.

To count then,there was the Covid 19 virus , the being-trapped-in-the PPE kit- feeling,the interminably long working hours…one would think it was enough,right? Wrong!The icing on the cake was that once the nurses got into the kits, there was no way of getting out of them for 8 to 12 hours of duty,straight! In other words ,no washroom breaks,no tiffin breaks,not even a sip of water! Why? You may wonder…why could the nurse not take off the PPE kit and take a washroom or meal break? The reason,my friend, is quite siimple.Once doffed, every PPE kit had to be discarded,which meant a new one would have to be donned to return to the Covid wards ! An impossible luxury for a third world country like ours! Hence no breaks were factored in at all.

So many of our nurses fainted because of a lack of oxygen behind the so called ‘protective’ layers!
It is not easy to put one’s troubles,personal and professional,on the back burner and tend to others’ miseries..yet that is exactly what each one of our nurses has done,without fail.

Can society even fathom the extent of their dedication to service? Can the world grasp the depth of their sacrifice? Does anyone remember hearing a word of protest from the nursing professionals against their pathetic working conditions? I don’t!

Do we acknowledge their immeasurable contributions? Have we,as a civilized society, done our bit for this class of working women ( and men, occasionally)? As l see my nurses quietly and efficiently going about their duties ,stopping every now and then by a bedside to soothe,comfort,tend to their patients,my heart swells with pride ,knowing that my patients are in the best of hands!

It is commonplace to hear good things being spoken about doctors,clinicians..let us take a moment to appreciate our unsung heroes,our Florence Nightingales. Let us tell them we do see them and express our gratitude..

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“Arre na na,do you have a cellphone?”came the query again. Ah,that….of course! How else would l be alive ?! Just as science declares a ‘cell’ to be the very basic unit of life, we humans have declared a ‘cell’phone to be very basic to life itself! No matter if the oxygen level around us goes down,the charge on our cell phones must remain in the safe range.. does one need say more?!

There was a time when homing pigeons flew miles carrying messages,sensitive and otherwise,from one soul to another. It would take days to deliver and then too,there was no real guarantee of the delivery…the messenger might have been gobbled up by a bird of prey at any point along the way !! Thank God for advances in technology…our present messengers are so much safer!And the speed of delivery of messages now is such that a day is not far when an event would be imminent and the details would have already percolated down to the last person!!

No more the hazards faced by the dak- harkaras or mail-runners of yore,who had to brave bad terrain, unpredictable weather and being mauled by wild animals on their way…our messages now reach their destinations safe and sound, pronto!Yet,does any of you feel (like l do) that ‘instant messaging’ has taken away somewhat from the romanticism of getting your word across,at times? Not that l am rooting for the unreliability , inefficiency or tardiness of the older systems of communication,not the least of which is the ‘Indian postal service’; but l do rue not receiving or writing letters anymore…proper, real letters that one would write to one’s elders,friends,cousins,so on and so forth. There was a thrill in coming home to an unopened inland letter, sitting quietly on the table,in it’s muted sky-blue glory,waiting to be torn or slit open( depending on the eagerness/elegance of the reader!)and read hungrily ,often each word re-read, either out of wonder or disbelief,again depending upon what news the blue pages carried!

And remember the telegram? Here of course,l am talking to my contemporaries,people in the 40s and 50s!!
Yes,the telegram…symbolic of drama,extremes,suddenness of some kind…the harbinger of either joy or utter tragedy..how can anyone of my generation forget the telegram and what it embodied?!

Looking at today’s ease and convenience of communication through instant messaging apps,various mails (email,voice mail),even video calls,l cannot help but wonder how things must have been earlier!

How must a lover have communicated his/ her love or pinings and yearnings to the significant other who was some distance away? How would they have relayed any emergency? What about news regarding a loved one dying,waiting for a last glimpse? How must the world have been,with no word reaching anyone on time, about anything at all,whether good or bad?! After all,you couldn’t have raised smoke signals or run a pony express just to say ” I love you and l miss you”! So much must have been lost in delayed communication..the finer nuances of so many relationships must have suffered! My heart goes out to my ancestors and all humankind of yesteryears for their travails ,their uncountable hardships…as does it for the simple means of communication that existed in those days. Every single time that our fingers fly on the keyboard,punching out words that convey our needs,opinions and emotions, we must realise how fortunate we are to be born in an era where the most hard work that is required of us, is to hit the send button at the very end..and the rest,as they say,is history!

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I have come across families with 3 girls and a boy, 5 girls and a boy,even 8 girls and…yes,you guessed it,a boy ! Why,why,why this desperation for a boy,a son?!

Many of you will smirk and snort and opine that such things do not happen these days anymore and if they do,then only in villages,in backward classes etc. Sorry to burst your bubble,folks,this is happening even now,and hold your breath…amongst educated,upper classes too!Yes,the fascination for the XY chromosomes endures!

Psychologists and social researchers have put it all down to evolution…..the well known need of humans to ensure the continuation of their bloodlines. That is all very fine,but to have a whole cricket team ( women’s,of course!)or a football team simply in order to have a son?! Is it justified?
While the world is making great strides in modernity,with bra burning feminists crying foul at the drop of a hat,such subtle misogynist acts continue unhindered.
Isn’t it unfair that when a boy is born after ‘n’ number of girls,he becomes the cynosure of all eyes and is pampered to the high heavens and gets privileges that aren’t available to his sisters? Advantages based only on his gender?!
When that very boy becomes a grown up man and has only apathy towards his parents,little regard for their needs and happiness, isn’t that poetic justice?! I should very much think so!

I have come across families who keep treatment going at any cost only because it is a son’s life that they have to save..the same degree of obligation is not extended to a daughter in some.
This obsession with the male gender is across communities,castes and classes..and while most people would point fingers at the men in the society for such bias, interestingly it is not always so. It is often the womenfolk of the house who are the behind-the-scenes actors in this drama!

The pressure to bear a ‘son’ many times comes from the mother-in-law,who cares not how many pregnancies her daughter-in-law has to go through in order to fulfill that! And each time she fails,all hell breaks loose….in addition to the extreme stress on the physical health of the poor lady,she has to put up with snide remarks and wrong accusations of her capabilities!

All this ,when it is a well known and scientific fact that a woman has no hand in determining the gender of her child…for once the ‘true power’ lies with her man. Only a man has the Y chromosome which is the real deal clincher(we women carry two X chromosomes..we don’t have a choice!)here!

If one looks around ,there is much noise in today’s world about gender equality/ inequality…but I feel the genders can never be equal psychosocially. Before you scream ‘misogyny’ in disbelief,let me remind you all that we,the bearers of two X chromosomes,one each from our father and mother,we women ,are born nurturers. Tending to, and nurturing comes naturally to us. A fact that millions of parents will vouch for l am sure,daughters are never, never far from them, irrespective of the physical distance between. A daughter carries her parents with her,deep in her psyche,deep in her heart wherever she goes,wherever she maybe.
Every mother will tell you that yes,her daughter does keep in touch with her and calls her everyday or whenever she can..but the same isn’t true of sons in most cases.Again, evolutionary? Possibly. Biologists say men are hard-wired to look ahead,to be invested in their ‘own unit’ …a way to keep the lineage going..and are hence relatively unattached to their roots..it is rare to find a grown up son in constant contact with his parents.
Whether it is our differing predominant hormones or genetic material,the fact of the matter is that men and women can never be equals in certain respects. XY may have the physical edge,but XX wins hands down, any day,as far as emotional strength and depth are concerned! A daughter is a daughter all her life!!
And yet they dare ask ” is it a boy?”?!

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I can still recall vividly the stench of rotting flesh and formalin as we first years filed into the anatomy dissection hall. The faint hearted fainted promptly while the braver ones fought to stand their ground,swaying perilously and threatening to pass out cold,any instant! Add to that the stark nakedness of each body on the stainless steel tables ,be it male or female! The students who remained conscious were struggling between ogling out of frank curiosity and averting their eyes out of painful modesty and shyness. What followed next was sheer horror! The seniors called upon the newbies and one by one ,we were asked to touch the feet of the bodies and take an oath that began something like ” hey, dead body debota…”…it is a wonder that l remember so much because honestly speaking all that registered that day was the foul stench and how the touch of a formalin doused corpse felt to my fingers! I am sure everyone of us was trembling for quite sometime thereafter and a substantial majority felt nauseous the whole day.

After the first major ordeal was over,we were subjected to subjects that required us to know by heart a host of unpronounceable terms and face a number of things simultaneously…items( no,not numbers..they were tests!),lots of writing and drawing assignments from our seniors ( apparently a time- tested tradition!) and more dissection hall experiences along with generous doses of lab work in physiology and biochemistry!

Just when the thrill of successfully clearing the hurdle of first year finals subsided,we were thrown from the frying pan into the fire! The ward classes in a real clinical setup,in a real hospital! I distinctly remember how l had trooped in with my batchmates into the medicine ward for the first time,all novices,fresh,eager,bright eyed,wearing our starched and ironed white aprons. The wards were full of suffering souls who had no idea what rookies we all were..they smiled at us and told us about their troubles earnestly ,in the hope of getting speedy relief…and believe me,we were bewildered and touched at the same time! And so began a chequered journey through the hallowed corridors of my alma mater,where l learned some of the most important lessons of my life,alone and with my peers.
We were taught not just lessons from textbooks but empathy,clinical acumen,to look beyond the obvious and always ,always,to do no harm..that was drilled into our heads and hearts. We may not be able to cure always, but we were to DO NO HARM. That is the very basis,the very foundation of this profession to which l am proud to belong.
The one thing that we were not taught though,was that the society sees us doctors in a certain way..that it expects a doctor to be serving humankind,but not earning well,that it expects a doctor to have no personal life, to be available round the clock,if not physically,then on the phone,that a doctor can never,never make a mistake at any step..an honest, unintended mistake.
As far as society is considered, if a doctor is poor,serving patients without a break, forgoing his/ her desires and comforts, never making a mistake,then and only then is he/ she thought to be in a noble profession and put on a pedestal and deified.
The way l see it ,we doctors are a hundred percent human..and we implore to the society with folded hands to let us remain so. We do not want to be worshipped,and neither do we want to be lynched by a mob… we simply want to be accorded the respect that any professional in any profession is deserving of.
Doctors spend nearly a decade to arm themselves with knowledge,to help cure or alleviate physical and mental suffering,not to hoodwink the society or rob them of their riches..and at the end of the day,being a doctor is also a means of livelihood, a job…they too need to earn and look after their families and do the very same things that the rest of the society does! Why call them by any other name and deny them that?
And just like in any other profession,we do have a few bad apples,a few deviants who will stray from the right path…let the world deal with such cases on individual merit..my plea, please do not paint us all with the same brush!

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They monitor the vital signs and machines
They adjust the doses and fluids
They consult with other specialists and teams
They comfort the families and loved ones

An intensivist is a hero who fights
Against the odds of death and disease
They work day and night with all their might
To give their patients a chance to breathe

A Poem on Critical Care by Bing Chat AI

In the ICU, every second counts
The monitors beep, the nurses run
The doctors make decisions that can save or end a life
The patients fight for every breath, the families pray and hope

But in the midst of chaos, there is also grace and skill
The team works together, with compassion and respect
The science and the art of medicine combine
The miracles and tragedies are witnessed every day

Critical care is not for the faint of heart
It takes courage and dedication to face the unknown
But it also brings rewards and satisfaction to those who choose it
It is a noble and challenging profession that makes a difference in the
world

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