Tuesday, November 18, 2008

The Obstetrics Departement

This is strange. Where do all these new people come from if, according to Hindu beliefs, people are only recycling through the heavens. You see them dropping from everywhere, little bundles of skin and napkin bumping out of the wombs. (Did you know 'gravitation' derives from a latin word which means 'pregnant'?) Today, my hospital officially surpassed the previous years record of 14 x 103, i.e. fourteen thousand deliveries a year. That is probably the population of Vanuatu (or even less). But this is Hindusthan meri jaan, and sex is our only leisure (frequent powercuts only make it better).
What intrigues me is that how Indian women bear with all the torments we doctors impinge upon them. A patient with bleeding per vagina in her last month will stand an hour in queue before her turn with the doctor comes. And then we will laugh at her being a P4+2 (i.e. four previous issues and two abortions), knowing fully well that it is her male counterpart whose rear should be stuffed. She will silently bear the pain of labor, the embarrassment of three vaginal exams (each time by a different person). She will lose about half a liter of blood, suffer the excruciating episiotomy (an incision over the genital skin to widen the introitus) and its messy repair. Then she will go feed her baby while sharing the floor of the post partum ward with a hundred others, with a raw wound left to heal by itself. And the very next day of her discharge, her sore womb will be implanted with yet another issue.
Our women are the only assets we have left.

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