THE PATIENT THAT CHANGED MY LIFE.
Posted by bmhegde on 1
“I do not know a better training for a writer than to spend some years in the medical profession-the doctor, especially hospital doctor, sees (human nature) bare.”
Somerset Maugham in The Summing Up.
One learns everyday in life as life is the best school. “No one can teach anyone anything that he/she does not already know” wrote Alexis Carroll. I strongly feel that each one of us learns for himself/herself, if only one keeps all the senses alert all the time. One such incident accidentally changed my life. It was the beginning of my real education. My schooling had come in the way of my education all through although, in the beginning, I did not go to school at the elementary level. I did learn a lot at home from my own mother and the surroundings. I was quite at home in that environment in my native village. After I started going to school my education came to a standstill. I became a robot trying to learn all that the books and the teachers’ notes had to teach me!
I started life in Mangalore city as a consultant and a junior teacher in the year 1964. Young as I was, I was very confident of everything. There is an old saying that “the young know everything, middle age suspects everything; but old age believes everything.” Now I can certify that the statement is one hundred per cent true. To cap it, I must also have been a bit arrogant because I was considered a very good student in the conventional sense of the term. I had the best of training in cardiology at some of the best places in the world-The Middlesex and National Heart Hospitals London and the Peter Brent Brigham Hospital of the Harvard Medical School.
Devanna was a young man in his mid 30s, otherwise quite healthy and fit. He was having his regular check up and all the routine rigmarole that we doctors advise patients to go through. He was brought to our hospital in the early hours of a November morning almost dead. He had a massive heart attack. I was called in but could do precious little to save him. His young wife was in deep shock, naturally. She could not accept this lightening blow on her married life. In that dazed state she was rolling on the floor in the ICU, holding my ankle tightly asking me the most difficult question in my life. “Why did my husband die, doctor?” I could have given her a long lecture on “how” her husband died; but had no answer for her question “why”?
Strange it was but I, for the first time, felt that I was totally incompetent as I could not answer a simple question from the bereaved wife. That set me thinking and realization dawned on me that I was ignorant about most of the things that happened around me. It was a rude awakening. Little did I realize that all those encomiums that I earned in college and school were mere decorations for collecting information about the human body and its function, but the real working of this universe and of the human body in the universe were still enigmas to me.
I had my first lesson in true education-humility. I was reminded of T.S.Eliot’s poem:
“Where is the wisdom we seem to have lost in Knowledge?
And where is the knowledge, we seem to have lost in information?”
Knowledge dwells in heads replete with thoughts of other men while wisdom dwells in heads attentive to their own. I went in search of my own head and have continued to do so till to date. I went into religions, philosophy, theology, our scriptures, quantum physics, and even teleology in a big way. That is where I found some solace and some vague answers to the question “why”? I happened to read an excellent novel based on a true story that occurred in 1844 in Peru. Thornton Wilder was a very famous American novelist and his classic The Bridge on San Luis Rey, written in the year 1927, was that novel. The story revolves round the unexpected breaking of the famous bridge across the huge gorge dividing Lima, the capital of Peru, from the mainland, where everyone in Peru had to cross sometime or the other.
The bridge was built by the Incas and was supposed never to break. Break it did one afternoon in 1844 killing five people, one of whom was a small innocent child. The grieving mother of the child was being consoled by a wise old lady of the neighborhood. Wilder makes some very pertinent points in that dialogue between the two about the existence of two worlds-the world of the dead and the world of the living- both connected by an unbreakable bridge of human love. If one were to love the dead near and dear ones as long as one lives, death loses its importance. It was the greatest philosophic thought that gave me lots of solace.
Similarly, Buddhism gives the best solution to the problem. Goutama Budha, the enlightened, thought that death is not the end at all; it is just the change from one state to another. Where, then is the problem of death? Death is not the end but a part, an essential part, of life itself. The sub-atomic world connects all of us together and us with this universe: death loses its horror in that background. Quantum physics goes very close to the Sanaathana Dharma, the ageless wisdom of India of the hoary past.
It was at this stage that I chanced upon that precious paper by Charles Sherrington, the famous physiologist, who had discovered many new facets of human physiology. Sherrington was just 42 years old when he was appointed Professor of Physiology at the Liverpool University in 1899. In his inaugural address he had this to say: “Positive sciences would not answer the question “why”; they could, at best, answer “how” or “how much”, but not “why”? A physiologist could answer as to how does the heart contract but will never be able to say why does the heart contract.” How true, indeed?
Medical science, along with all other natural sciences, lost its very moorings in 1742, when a young boy aged 17, believed to be a great mathematician, Rene Descartes, proclaimed to the world Cogito ergo sum. He, for the first time, cut off the human mind from the human body, calling them by different names-res cogitans and res extensa. Retrospectively, this was the greatest tragedy of modern reductionist science. The dynamic universe never follows the reductionist linear laws but goes by the holistic principles. Human mind is not only an integral part of the human body; it is the very core of every cell in the human body at the sub-atomic quantum level. All diseases and all our problems start in the mind. The symptoms are felt in the body (soma) since the mind can not be seen. Reductionism and deterministic predictabilities are only myths in this universe.
I have been looking at medical science more critically since those days and have been able to discover the hypocrisy of most of what we preach or do to our hapless victims, the patients. I have also been trying my best to expose these hidden dangers of modern medicine with the view to helping young doctors to find the wheat from the chaff. In the last fifty years medicine has been hijacked by technology and taken to the market place from the bedside. The latter has made modern medicine only a dream for the majority of the people in this world. It is prohibitively expensive and top heavy. The dangers of this kind of inhuman medicine have to be dinned into the heads of the new entrants to the profession before they get converted by the prevailing situation. Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, had recently summed up the present scenario in his own inimitable style thus: “modern medicine, for all its breathtaking achievements, is slightly off balance like the Tower of Pisa.” He couldn’t have been more accurate.
I must admit that I have now realized that the greatest discovery of this century is the discovery of man’s ignorance. At least, as far as I am concerned this is absolutely true. Learning is a life long process and there is no end to it. Life teaches man all that he needs to know but man has to be awake all the time to learn. We have all come from that great source of energy-the creator-from whom we could draw all the energy that we need to push ahead in life. If we have the intention and will, we could achieve great things in life. The power of intention is enormous. One has to be student all his/her life.
“I like to see doctors cough,
What kind of human being
Would grab all your money
Just when you’re down?
I’m not saying they enjoy this:
“Sorry, Mr. Rodriguez, that’s it,
No hope! You might as well
hand over your wallet.” Hell no,
they’d rather be playing golf
and swapping jokes about our feet.”
James Tate, Contemporary American poet, on doctors, in his book Viper Jazz.