There may be hundreds of advancements in treatment of diseases everyday, but one would rather hope the disease didn’t happen at all.
The first week of internship flew by quite fast, and it was only as the week ended that I finally came to terms with the fact that now I have a day job. It does take some time to get used to going to work every single day, but by the end of the first seven days, I had quite fallen into a routine. The second week, in contrast to the former, I was posted right in our own hospital now, in the IPC (Immunoprophylaxis Centre ). Being one of the major pillars of Community Medicine, the IPC is where the entire immunization of a newborn right uptil adolescence is carried out. But being a unit focused entirely on prophylaxis, I didn’t really expect us interns to have any backbreaking work there. And I was right.
There is no dearth of interns at present, with our senior batch ( 17 batch ) completing the last few months of their internship too. Coupled with our batch, Nursing, BPMT, BAMS interns , the senior nurses, and PGs – the IPC room was bursting at its seams with all the staff. The patients, ( beneficiaries as they are better called ) themselves came in quite a steady trickle, and the opd thus remaining at its feet the whole time, but never quite becoming unmanageably crowded.
On our first day there, the first instruction we received was to be present there sharp at 9 in the morning, which was actually the most difficult one to follow, for I quite hadn’t got rid of the tardiness that I had developed over the vacation. The next instruction to us was to memorize the National Immunization Schedule thoroughly, right from the schedule of vaccines, to their does and the site of administration. It was something I had been struggling to memorize since second year. Every year in PSM postings, it was the one thing we had to do, and yet here I was, having again forgotten the schedule and cramming it up for the umpteenth time. As we were then told, our job there was to observe the entire process of vaccinating a child, right from the registration to the discharge.
Another chief part of our duty was to hold the baby while it was being vaccinated. It is an extremely unpleasant experience for a baby to get pricked at 2-3 different sites all at once, so no wonder all those babies would squirm and wail incessantly during the process. We were thus responsible to hold the baby’s arms and legs and head firm, while the nurses and doctors injected the vaccines. Yet another work we had was to administer Rotavirus vaccine to the babies, which is to be given orally. After all the injections were done, we would also had to counsel the mothers regarding further care of the baby. But even with all these chores, free time was plenty, and for most part of the 5 hour day, we would remain sitting idly. I thus solved a few MCQs whenever I could.
I had expected that we might be given a chance to inject vaccines to the babies, but upon observation I understood that it is a job best left to the experts. When any person would come for Tetanus or Hepatitis B vaccine though, we had a chance to try our hand at it. I had thought it would be a walk in the park to give an I.M injection, but when the opportunity actually came I got horribly cold feet. I couldn’t bring myself to volunteer, so I just observed my batchmates doing it. It isn’t the most difficult task in the world though, so I’m sure I will eventually do it with ease, it’s just the initial effort that is scary.
One peculiarity of PSM is whether you are student or intern, you will always be given a homework of reading some topic from Park, and then quizzed about it. So on the last day of the rotation, we had our memory refreshed about the various topics related to immunization, but this time the topics made so much more sense now that we had actually seen all that in practice. By the end of seven days, I had even gotten the elusive N.I.S learnt by heart, after three years of trying in vain.
After the posting I would catch up with my friends in the library, and I daresay PSM posting doesn’t even hold a candle to the hectic life in the more clinical postings. I hear my friends stories, and I think how drastically our lives are different depending upon the postings. PSM offers a comfortable set routine of 9-2, but the variation is little, and it is easy to lose track of where the days fly.
This week in IPC was one where we learnt a lot by mere observation, things we had only seen as chapters and short notes in Park being manifested in front of our eyes.