Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from January, 2021

The wires in my brain...

Mr P came to the outpatient with a diabetic wife who had chest pain but was stable then. He got around talking about his life.He had missed the govenrment pension and was bemoaning his plight.He had worked all his life in the national jute mill in Kolkotta .When Mr Ramnath Goenka died the  mill spiralled downhill.The government of West Bengal under Mr Basu had to take over  but it was not working , they decided to shut it down. The livelihood  of the thirty thousand workers were at stake ,I suspect mostly from the heartland, Mrs Gandhi had to intervene and the central government apparently took over the running of the mill. In the mean time Mr P retired.The mill ran under the central government leadership for another half a decade after the which the government gave  VRS to all the employees and shut down the mill for good.Mr  P however missed the bus so did not become eligible for the government pension .He is left with memories and the bitter  taste of a missed bus and occassional so

How do you view the world around?

 This is a post long overdue.I promised Evelyn I would write this a month ago but somehow the connect between the pen and the thought process did not come through easily so I conveniently pushed it back somewhere in a file in the grey matter.Today I was reminded, so here it is. I am not too passionate about rabbits.I know them as creatures which have a reputation of eating up the area where they reside...apparently nothing grows around them so I am wary because if there is one thing that can bring a deep seated joy in my heart it is plants and the flowers especially in the wild. I find rabbits dumb and not particularly special to look at.The only time it had me involved  was on a cold Satbarwa winter in Wendy's stew.It was my first and perhaps the last . So I was not too excited to see the creatures cohabit the paraphenalia in one of the old garages in the campus.I looked at it from a distance and enjoyed the roses more than it's neighbour. One day I saw our little friend Danie

Mission

 Laxman came to us at the middle of the night huffing and puffing.He belongs to the local tribal community.He did not have an iota of money on his person.He had this abscess in the chest wall with Empyema on the same side.He basically had empyema necessittans and we did not know where it extended.He had been all over the place for more than a month. We requested the local radiology to do a HRCT of the chest for fifty percent of the charge which they promptly agreed to do.As expected he had empyema necessitans and better stil, it had extended all the way to the diaphragm and the heart. By the time he came back with the CT he was huffing and puffing.It would be fair to say we put in a needle twice but just drew blood which made me a little nervous about putting in a chest tube blindly. Once we had a HRCT in hand we advised the relatives to travel a little further  to the prestigious BHU where he would probably need a thoracoscopy but ofcourse they refused. We did an open thoracotomy and

Pieces of myself.

 Do I have something to say-Nah...I am too busy trying to live my life. The Sikkim government has just announced the vaccines.I finished watching the movie 'Seven years in  Tibet'. Strngely nostalgic and a sad movie. Watched it from a distance even as I tried to find a small part of my root in those closed forbidden  terrains,although Pharidjong where my paternal grandmother came from was lower down near the  Bhutanese kingdom I understand. I try to look at my grandmother through my mother's eyes. I asked her questions gallore.My mother a young bride from a christian and a mixed background  marrying into a family with a matriach who was a tibetain nobility from a very rich budhist culture. I wondered how they got on woman to woman.My mother does not have any bad memories of her  mother-in-law. I get the picture of a very classy woman who never had a harsh word to say about her  and loved her and vice versa.My mother talks about the last days when her mother-in law came over