Week Three: Back to the Wards!

I was assigned to ID this week, but it ended up becoming a conglomeration of everything I was trying to see before leaving India. On the first day back from Kerala, I showed up to the latter half of CMC's Hansen's disease clinic, which were run by Dermatologists. The first feature I noticed was the classic rash of leprosy: hypopigmented, ill-defined borders, eventually anesthetic. I had never seen leprosy before, so throughout my life, it felt like a mythical disease. That's why my first leprosy patients were so eye-opening, even if their disease were not advanced enough to manifest deformities. I plan to devote my next entry to leprosy, so I will save the details until them. For the next 3 days, I worked in the ID wards, where I saw multiple cases of MDR TB, and the Pediatric ID clinic. The Pediatric ID attending, Dr. Valsan, is one of those rare teachers who can carve an impressionable understanding of all the complexities in a medical condition, including those originating from gross inequity and social injustices. He always had an opinion to pick your brain. For instance, I remember when I asked him what he thought about Slumdog Millionaire, a success that was huge news in India at that time. His response was, "It is a good film that will, at most, stir the conscience." He told me about other documentaries in the past revealing social inequities in India, including an Academy-award winner called "Born into Brothels". The film told the story of children of sex traffic workers in Calcutta. A year or two later after its release, one of the film interpreters discovered that most of the children had already followed into their mothers' circumstances. He posed the question: What glorifies these expensive, time-consuming films? Change, or simply the idea of it?

I want to close this entry with a moment of enlightment I experienced on Thursday. As it turns out, Thursday morning was the deadline for our residency match lists. However, I woke up that morning to discover that an incident had occurred which lost my place in the match for residency. The entire morning, I felt like my stomach had turned over with the idea of scrambling or taking a year off, of flushing down the time and money I spent applying and interviewing. My eyes were blinded by these worries, but as the day progressed, I began to look around at the people walking in the streets earning $1 a day, at the women who will never have the choice of an education, at the beggars who were outcasted from society for one reason or another. I began to find perspective: I am definitely lucky-- in fact, I'm so lucky that it is difficult to imagine when I lose things. But look at the resilience, the happiness that people can still find when they have nothing. This comparison was once a concept to me, but I supposed I needed an experience that was very real, that challenged the way I percieve my life, to make me understand.