Riddle me some…

I trudged to the supermarket on one limb(literally) and made my way to the opposite aisle leaving both my grocery basket and my crutch unattended. I limped back and put my weight nonchalantly on my stick. To my horror, it simply gave way. Voila! There was a nut and bolt missing.

Sourced from the internet…adobestock.

Too late to go in search of an elbow crutch elsewhere, I returned to my room. Soon enough my friend’s words came floating in my mind. In a job interview, she was quizzed thus; “If you are in the middle of a desert and one of your car tyers come off, what would you do?” It took her a while to get to the answer she told me dismayed, but got the job nonetheless.

“That is because, you didn’t have the answer rehearsed. You thought of it on the spot”, I quipped.

Well, that was my solution too. I proceeded to unscrew one out of the four nuts and bolts from my door handle and screwed it through my crutch. It worked perfectly for the next few weeks. Both missions thus accomplished, one with regards to fixing the crutch and the second more importantly pissing off my land lady(that is if she ever noticed), I finally called it a day.

My land lady in Kolkata during my post grad was a heavy set woman who chewed on her gutkha and squeezed her humungous frame into this tiny Maruti 800. The poor thing( the car off course)sagged saddled with her weight. If it had a voice and it could, it would scream for it’s engines. I fondly called her Maruti 800 a Mercedes after one of my Surgery professors who tended for his second hand Maruti 800 like it was one. It was a joke between us students. Every time we rushed late to the surgery ward, one of them would quip,” I think Sir has already arrived, I can see his Merc parked outside.”

Unlike my well meaning surgery prof, my landlady was full of horseshit. Total humbug. In short, she made a good three initial months of my stay in Kolkata a nightmare. I worked super long hours and did my chores all by myself( because none of her anointed helps would show up) and went about all of it with a broken leg. I finally changed houses for good.

Sourced from the internet…istock.

A crutch sure came with it’s advantages. You could reach for the elevator buttons and summon it from 2 feet apart, stop the lift door from slamming shut without risking your limb, push open heavy doors and also hail the cab very obviously visible.

I would tell myself only one thing every single day, “It takes 4 to 6 weeks for a fracture to heal and this ordeal will last only a few more weeks. I would thus countdown to the freedom of a crutch free existence. The 6 week deadline cheered me up and kept me limping in high spirits.

The broken plastered leg some humorously and aptly called ‘The welcome gift’ since I had just about started my post grad, was now getting soiled because obviously I was limping my way through the day. So a few weeks in, I decided to change the fore end of my plaster. My orthopedic internship skills kicking in, I made up my mind to do the honors myself. I thus bought a raw plaster from the hospital store, soaked it and sat to do the needful. That is when it struck me that I hadn’t purchased a roll of cotton to go underneath the plaster. So, as always I looked around for that click of divinity and chanced upon my sanitary pads. I ripped off the synthetic upper layer and it was good to go. As sterile as it can get.

Sourced from the internet…istock.

That reminds me, I interned after my undergrad in a government hospital setting. Resources were scarce and we wouldn’t always have an orthopedic on standby to put proper plasters. Hence we stabilized a fractured limb using cardboard cartons as a temporary relief measure.

To me, that is what medicine is- A riddle and a life skill. If nothing I have a skill many others depend on someone else to get right. At least for the most part, I can always treat myself and my family members without much external help.

Now to get to the riddle part, curiosity is what drives me. I obsess over stuff I do not understand and need to find a pattern in the cosmic chaos and put the pieces together whether in life or in medicine. If I get it right I get a dopamine hit. If I don’t, I get the thrill of reading another interesting topic. Again, a dopamine hit. I do care about you. It is just that I care a little more about getting that puzzle right. That puzzle that will otherwise gnaw on my mind and give me nights of mania.

A still from House MD…

Incidentally, I am a huge fan of House MD, the TV series except for the part where the script goes wonky. You know the writers are losing it when they treat cancer on a hunch with toxic chemotherapy even when they don’t know what kind of cancer it is or where it is, and Dr House( the Head of diagnostic medicine) famously says, “ We treat. If it gets better, we know what it is. If not, we keep looking” 🤦‍♀️

So, here I was doing my MD, a huge fan of diagnostics( because puzzle you see)and also looking, rather limping the part.

Sourced from the internet…adobestock.

We do not have a branch called ‘Diagnostic Medicine’ specifically, but to put to rest the perennial debate of Diagnostics vs Treatment.

“You condescending punks, if you never find the Holy grail, you are never going to drink from it. In simpler words, If you do not get your diagnosis right, you are going to treat zilch.”

Sourced from the internet…pinterest.

That’s what I do. I humor and intellectualize my problems. And when neither of those work, I swear like a sailor and get into attack mode. To me, that is as sublime as it gets.

PS:- Also never try to remove a plaster using a pen knife. That shit takes hours.