What gives

                    I have just come back after attending   Emmanuel Hospital Association’s golden jubilee celebration .It was a privellage to meet up with so many stalwarts and dear friends and also to just watch all those seniors being commemorated for their long years of services,people who put their lives on hold and actually dedicated their lives to serving in the North Indian missions.For many it would not have been easy but they persisted inspite of all odds,that is what makes it all so special.I had the privellage to sing in the choir .The theme song was beautifully composed by Drs Arpit and Amy Mathew and the choir ably managed by Dr Ashita who had to deal with all our idiosyncracies.I was blessed by it.There were others who had worked night and day behind the scene,Dr Jameela and the central office team were mentioned. The entire programme was tightly manag...

Getting a year older feels good.Just the other day a cousin and a sibling noticed a few grey hairs on my head and had mixed reactions to it.My brother who is a breezy seven years older than I but looks younger was surprised whereas my cousin who is five years younger than I and always complains that we never seem to grow older started teasing me.I relish my grey although they are few and far in between. Special thing about birthdays apart from the fact that the family treats me like I was made of glass is the fact that you get in touch with your long lost friends and sometimes family.The ones who remember do so inspite of years of distance in time and place and we chat and we catch up ,albeit once in a year but they are precious,each one. Good thing about getting older is that a lot of things in life start getting sorted.We tend to prioritise things a lot better,chanellise one's energy in places where we need to ,feel happy doing small things that matter.count it a blessing..in ...

I spent a day in the hospital at the dentist's for my mother's tooth.The doctor pulled out the second tooth in the last two years.It was skillfully and well done.She also got the doppler of the lower limbs done which was normal. Aie Mimi with her wards stood by the road-side waving my parents goodbye even as we boarded the car homeward bound.The same expression of sadness in their faces each time they have to do so. What is it that makes parents so special. Agya is away in the hills with the local villagers scouting for good tourist places they can build up proposals for.He is in the woods for four days at a stretch.The last place he went to was on the top of the gigantic hill I can see from my homestead.He had taken excursion tents which he used for himself but the locals decided to rough it out  in the open jungle.The climb and the descent was a sheer drop,and there were places I believe where they actually had to keep looking at the wall while they swung down the cliff...

In memory of Manoj ,a man with XDR tuberculosis who walked into my outpatient some eight years back to collect his medicines but would succumb ultimately. I gave him the gospel of John ,he thanked me profusely and just when he reached the door turned around and said,'doesn't this gospel begin with ''In the beginning was the Word,the Word was with God and theWord was God....''Even as I looked at him with an open mouth he quietly walked out.He passed away in the next few days.The last few days of his life he read the parts of the Bible to his mother, shared the gospel and went to be with the Lord peacefully.

In memory of Manoj ,a man with XDR tuberculosis who walked into my outpatient some eight years back to collect his medicines but would succumb ultimately. I gave him the gospel of John ,he thanked me profusely and just when he reached the door turned around and said,'doesn't this gospel begin with ''In the beginning was the Word,the Word was with God and theWord was God....''Even as I looked at him with an open mouth he quietly walked out.He passed away in the next few days.The last few days of his life he read the parts of the Bible to his mother, shared the gospel and died peacefully.

I was well immersed in my outpatient work multi-tasking as usual, seeing patients, advising my juniors, watching the patient’s get impatient when I noticed that a lady with a small child was just standing in one corner of the room.I don’t like other patients hanging around when I am in consultation with a patient so I looked questioningly at Radha who immediately pounced on the  duo.She was very careful because they looked like tribals and very poor.The lady kept pointing at me and seemed to not have registered as is the procedure . That was when I realised that we had struck gold. They were actually from the community we had been reaching out to with clinics every week and in various other ways.This was a small step towards victory and I am very grateful to God for it. It is a community of ‘musahirs’ originally so called because they were rat eaters. They live in their so-called village /slum ,work as daily labourers ,eat when they work and form the part of Ind...

Kamla is a dwarf with two wiry legs ,deformed but she stands on it.Her husband has a leg deformity because of which he crawls.on his knees.What struck me about the couple whenever I saw them coming to the antenatal clinic was the joy in their faces and the dignity.As impoverished as they looked they never seem to ask for charity or show a dull face.Kamala’s haemoglobin would not budge above it’s 6.5 value.When the times comes we would have to take her for caesarian section because she had CPD and there was no way the baby was going to come out PV.I asked my colleague to put her on iron injections if blood transfusion seemed impossible and  we had barely managed to give her a dose ,a few days later she came back to us. On my day off she came to the hospital in labour so we had to intervene. She and her husband make their living by selling roasted corn for ten rupees each. We made that difficult decision of posting her for Caesarian section wit...