Are You 'Kid'ding me?

When I was born, my grandfather apparently told the family that this beautiful doe eyed child would make a fine doctor. Ever since I was 10, I wanted to be a doctor – logic or no logic. It never occurred to me that there was unchartered territory out there yet to be explored. And wanting to be a baby doctor caught my fancy early in life quite naturally influenced by my own paediatrician who I considered the modern day Midas.

There are some people out there who enter medicine unsure of how life is going to carry them forward and there are a few others who know exactly what they want to be when they grow up. For me, it was always Paediatrics. My heart did cheat on me by wandering to other specialities every now and then though. But 5.5 years later, I am back to square one – aspiring to be a paediatrician as always.

My college boasts of one of the finest Paediatrics department in the state. Every professor is better than the other. So it wasn’t surprising to see really rare textbook cases, first-hand.

I vividly remember an incident from 3^rd year of med school that I’d like to share. It was a bright Monday morning and everything about the day right from the sunrise to the breakfast was pretty perfect. I happened to take the history and examined a 10 year old girl diagnosed with type 1 diabetes with suspected Wilson’s disease. I spoke to her for a while, got chummy, and made her write out stuff in my notebook. 3 days later when I was walking in the wards, I felt someone nudging me softly. I turned around and saw this little girl, breathless, who had come running to tell me that she was getting discharged and going back home. She shook hands with me and gave me the most genuine smile I had seen in the longest time possible. I went back home, with my heart ready to burst. Such overwhelming joy!

Doctors are supposedly vaccinated against the constant emotional brunt that comes with disease and suffering. Yet, I haven’t met even a single paediatrician who doesn’t get involved with his patients and carry the burden of suffering themselves. Children are truly the hands by which we take hold of heaven.

I was so fortunate to rotate in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) for a month during my internship. My job was to counsel new mothers about feeding, contraception, keeping the baby warm and administering timely vaccinations for the babies. I realised that new mothers are some of the most receptive people we can ever find and for good reason. While some mothers had to be demonstrated the art of breast feeding, some others had to be coaxed into visiting their babies with cleft lips and dysmorphic features. The babies were all sick and needed constant attention and feeding. The work hours were killing but so very satisfying to go back to bed knowing that you had held a baby and tried your best for him/her.  

When I sit back and close my eyes, I distinctly hear the paroxysms of cough that a 1 year old child with pertussis had, a disease almost unheard of in the 21^st century; I hear the rumbling noise of a machine like murmur (heart sounds due to turbulent blood flow) in a 12 year old boy with a congenital condition called patent ductus arteriosus, which should have ideally been treated more than a decade ago in him; I see the rashes of Henoch Schonlein Purpura  on the thighs of a 9 year old girl; I stare into the puffy eyes and face of 2 year old Sahana (name changed) who cannot even comprehend that she is ill, leave alone having a renal condition called nephrotic syndrome; I remember the beautiful face of Mrs Geetha Parashuram’s (name changed) 10 day old baby who won my heart, the little baby girl who kept having myoclonus like jerks and went back home undiagnosed after a month because nothing we gave her made her any better and all the investigations they could afford came back clean.

We succeed sometimes and we fail sometimes. But children always push us to try the very best for them and in turn, ourselves. I am living my dream of becoming a doctor. I now begin my journey, in chase of another dream and hungry for more adventure.