It was a busy OPD and and as always I enjoy talking to my patients . 'A' entered the OPD talking loudly with an elderly woman.A bright woman obviously educated came in with some vague complaints.She was from Delhi but had ventured into town recently and kept asking me relevent questions.However ,I found that she was tiptoeing around certain health issues and not dealing with it as one would expect.
Certain senior doctors run this trust where they do hysterectomies for ladies free of cost.I was talking to the said doctor and she told me about a cause of distress and shame uterine prolapse was to ladies from a rural setting so she along with her husband had decided to raise money to do the surgeries free of cost.
A lot of our patients have benefitted from the scheme.I examined the lady and got out a history that she had a rectal prolapse and had had it since childhood.I was a little taken aback that she had done nothing about it.Suddenly she just broke down and burst out about how in Indian households women were not looked after well.Her exact words were firstly the girls have to face the neglect at their homes and then they are pushed into marriages in alien homes where they are deemed second class citizens.She wept bitterly as my colleague and I ,both woman ,watched and listened to her in a horrified silence.We sat by quietly as she cried.
I had ,just that morning ,been trying to build up a case for a young twenty year old lady who had such a bad post-tubercular bronchiectasis that she had just 28 % of her predicted FEV1 and 48% of her predicted FVC for her age and height.She was the lone potential bread winner in her family.Looking through her chest Xray I wondered where that minion lung function came from .She had no healthy lung left bilaterally.I had requested our community health team to advocate for a disability certificate for her and even while I scoured the reports I wondered how neglected she must have been as a child to end up with a lung like that. Twenty years and she had a whole life left in front of her but she was a fighter.
Coming back to the lady, I gently asked her after her children and she said she had two, and the older one was nine.
The words that came out from my mouth was ,'your children as they grow up will understand you,listen to you and will be your friend,and will look after you.'Even as I said it I had that sinking feeling in my heart.I thought ,'for how long ?Till they get married and have families of their own.'.I did not say so but I told her she could always come back and talk to us whenever she felt overwhelmed.
That gave me much food for thought.This skewed deviation weaves out stories of it's own,told,untold but very much a part of the creation that weeps and weeps with pain.
"Where is the balm of Gileod?Is there no physician there?Why then has not the health of the daughter of my people been restored?"(Jeremiah 8 vs 22)
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