“Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.”
What a fine pair of eyes you have there. The world is infinitesimally more beautiful when seen through them.
It is as they say, tough times don’t last forever. Well it certainly didn’t last for more than a fortnight for me. After ENT, which was wearisome and rather dull , my next posting was in Ophthalmology. Because ENT and Ophthalm are so often spoken together of as sister subjects, I was looking at Ophthalm through the same lens as ENT. But to my very pleasant surprise it was much more enjoyable, more relaxed and more rewarding. It was also some good fortune on my part that I got placed in one of the easier units. It is always a gamble, a trial of luck, a roulette at the beginning of any posting to find which unit you get placed into. It’s a bit unsettling how much difference there can be in your experience of a posting purely because of the unit, but the suspense is an indispensable part of internship. Anyway I got a very nice unit in Ophthalm, but even if I hadn’t, I still would’ve liked this posting.
On the very first day of posting we were made to understand that no tardiness or shabby work will be tolerated on our part, since the work in Ophthalm isn’t actually very demanding anyway. Fair enough. There are, like ENT, three components to the posting – OPD day, OT day and ward day. One very unique thing about patients here is that rarely any patient is a long term guest in the ward. Usually patients get admitted, which eight out of ten times would be for cataract, and get operated upon the very next day and scarcely any patient remains admitted till ward day. Which meant that OPD day/ Admission day was the busiest of all. As luck would have it, it was exactly during this period that there was an outbreak of conjunctivitis all over, and we had to be extremely cautious to not catch it ourselves.
Ophthalm department here in GMC Nagpur is a separate building adjoining the main hospital. It is thus away from the hubbub and crowd of the main hospital, closeted in a world of its own. It was a breath of fresh air, a welcome change for us. Our job as interns on OPD day was to remain in the Minor OT and help manage it. Minor OT is where procedures like tonometry, syringing, staining of the eye, etc are performed. We not only get to watch it, but it is also expected of us interns to learn these procedures and perform them. The more the helping hands for the residents the merrier, as there is always a continuous stream of patients. One of the most entertaining jobs for an intern here was to bring some breakfast, usually samosas from nearby square, which later everyone would feast on, right from residents to sisters and us interns, along with a cup of freshly brewed tea. These little energising breaks, little moments of tranquility in between the commotion of the hospital is what really keeps doctors going.
Back in third year, one of the cardinal sins that you could commit was not knowing the steps of cataract surgery when asked in the viva. When I actually saw the surgery being performed in the OT with my own eyes though, I was stunned at how swiftly and deftly the surgeons performed the procedure, with no less than three of these being done in an hour. The eye is an incredibly important and delicate structure and one can never be too cautious while meandering anywhere near it. Mistakes would be unforgivable. It must feel like a tremendous responsibility to hold all the power over a patients vision, even as the surgeon wields a scalpel right in the eyeball of the patient. The reward however, is restoring the divine gift of eyesight for the patient, who then wouldn’t hesitate to place you on the same pedestal as God.
This was one posting where paperwork overshadowed any other kind of work for us interns. Writing admission notes, OT notes, consent forms – all in dozens, formed a significant portion of our work. We had to do evening duties as well on admission day, where we would be in the wards, getting the patients ready for their surgeries the next day. The atmosphere in opthalm wards is much lighter and calmer compared to the serious and anxious one in other wards, as the patients here are ambulatory and most of them being senior citizens, get together with each other on one bed and chatter away.
Over the course of the posting, I was once posted on an Exam duty where I had to invigilate the Ophthalmology written paper of third year’s term exam. It was with a self congratulatory satisfaction that I realised that however difficult internship might get, atleast I don’t have to memorize pages after pages of textbook and stress about remembering it all in the exam. Atleast for a while.
Fifteen days of Ophthalmology passed by in the blink of an eye, and it concluded with a pizza party from our residents on the last day. I realized that rotations go so much more smoothly when seniors are friendly and you form a good rapport with them. We got to see a variety of patients – cataract, pterygium, conjunctivitis, ocular trauma and others, learned how to measure visual activity and do minor OT procedures, how to prepare and counsel patients before surgery. It allowed me a fairly good amount of time to catch up on studies, and go out to two movies over the weekend. Perfectly balanced between work and life, I will always remember this posting fondly.