I was prepared to face the wind. I had no idea it would be a storm.
In some postings you thrive, some you just survive. Riding on the high of rural posting and also the subsequent 2 weeks of vacation, I was quite excited and pumped for my next posting, in ENT. But my balloon was burst, my utopian dreams came crashing down when I saw the nature of work in ENT posting. Because my batch had first three months of PSM, we had no necessity whatsoever of sampling, or putting an intracath, or running around with the patient for investigations. So when we were given these tasks on the very first day of ENT, I was utterly clueless. We asked around to our batchmates and to the residents how to do even the most basic stuff, and I promptly noticed that we were three whole months behind my peers in this skillset. It was, effectively thus, my first day of Internship in the hospital.
When we read ENT in third year, it was one of the most interesting subjects ever, and we also learned a lot in our postings at that time. So I was quite looking forward to getting to know the nitty gritty of this speciality. But as I soon realised, most of the work for interns involved running around for blood samples, collecting reports or accompanying the patients for CT or MRI. And so I realised that learning any procedures here depends upon one’s own enthusiasm and efficiency at work. Because this was a very unfamiliar working scenario for us, hitherto unexperienced, I took a couple days to understand all the intricacies of work expected from interns.
GMC Nagpur is a colossal hospital, which means everything is far apart in various corners of the building. Different components of blood sample have to be taken to specific laboratories – biochemistry, microbiology, pathology labs – some of which are in the hospital itself and some in the adjoining college building. We were blissfully unaware about any of this back in PSM, so now I had to start from scratch and figure everything out. It was difficult not to look like a naive idiot while asking the most basic questions to the residents or other batchmates, who were already proficient in this work. After some time however, I became more familiar with the workings of the hospital, and by the end of one week I had become satisfactorily oriented with the logistics.
There are three components in ENT – OPD, O.T and Ward, and we have rotational duties in all of them. The OPD, was like any other in a government hospital, always bustling with patients. I got to observe procedures like syringing, otoscopy but didn’t try my hand at anything since we were kept busy in some or the other work always. On OT day we got to observe the surgeries and it was intriguing to watch how little the operating field is for ENT surgeons to work upon – for an astonishingly intricate organ that the ear is, it sure is a very minuscule and cramped structure.
Ward day was the busiest of all, as the residents would give us a long list of tasks in the morning, including blood sampling of several patients, accompanying patients for radiological investigations, and tracking the previous reports of the patients. ENT could thus be considered as a scaled down version of surgery posting. It wasn’t quite so much the work, as all the walking around countless number of times around the hospital, that was actually tiring us out. Every two or three times a week, we had to come in morning as well as evening duty in the wards. Those days were the most taxing. Every once in a while I would get a day off, or it would be Sunday and I found myself living holidays to holidays and just surviving the days in between. But sometimes you’ve got to do jobs even if you don’t enjoy it and there is no fleeing from it. Do it with a clenched jaw, do it afraid, do it through gritted teeth – but do it anyway. That’s what my mom told me.
I struggled with blood sampling initially so I would get a sinking feeling every time I had to do one. It’s also very easy to feel defeated if you don’t get it right in the first attempt. But with a little help from my friends, I became better at it, and also understood that most people face similar difficulties in the beginning. On the times I got it right however, I felt extremely pleased with myself.
I guess it’s possible to work extremely hard and yet not feel drained when the work that you do directly impacts the patient in a positive manner. You put a suture on a wound and the patient sees you as a god. But when you draw sample from a patient, all he feels is a nasty prick, or many such. Tracing reports is tedious to the point of frustrating. Taking patients’s calls to various departments is also a rather dull job. Every once in a while it would be nice to be appreciated for your work by the residents, but understandably they are so extremely swamped that two words of praise are rarely bestowed upon you. Harsh words and scolding are plenty though. But the silver lining is that hardship is confined to the hospital. When the shift would be over and I would meet and catch up with my friends later, we would laugh at even our worst experiences, and all would feel good again.
All in all the winds of change that I knew were coming turned out to be a storm, and I was mindblown by the difference in work environment between rural posting and our hospital posting. It was an essential learning experience however, a trailer of surgery posting. But good thing is, ENT would be a smooth sailing for anyone who has done heavier postings earlier. It wasn’t really the best of fortnights for me though. But then it passed, like all things do.