Those of you who are regular readers of Us know me for a while now. My articles have kind of made.....
ANOTHER RANT
Those of you who are regular readers of Us know me for a while now. My articles have kind of made it clear that I am an empathic doctor. I am not bragging; just stating a fact. In fact, I do not consider myself a good person. There is no good or bad, no white or black, there is just grey in this world. And I consider myself one of the darker shades of grey. Call it self-hatred or low self-esteem or whatever, but it is true. The point of this pretext is to make this clear that I do not consider myself better or superior than others because I have empathy. It is a trait I sometimes find to be a nuisance.
I do not know why I became a doctor. I belong to a background where a bright student was conditioned to become a doctor. If they aspired to be something else, they would be eyed as a failure. I do not regret becoming a doctor, though. I do think it is my calling. But I regret joining this profession without knowing the ground realities when I was younger.
Us magazine has been an integral part of my journey as a student. It was a guiding light for me when I was young and naïve. It gave me ‘ghaibana’ (in absentia) mentors like Saad Javed and Awais Aftab. I still look up to them. They are still two of my favourite beings on earth. And now when I am wiser (nope) and wrinkly, Us magazine has become a platform to speak out my heart. And this is exactly what I am doing here.
After an extremely cut-throat competition in SSC and FSc comes the MCAT. The ‘do or die’ scenario. Whenever I am whining about my duty hours or my exams, my sister never fails to remind me that I once said, “I would rather die than not get into King Edward Medical University.” I wish I had known that all this crazy love for a profession was due to lack of proper career counselling.
After torturing myself through five years of medical school, I finally graduated this year. When you are finally done with M.B.B.S, you begin to realise the emotional and mental trauma you have been through. Post-graduation crises, the fear of the unknown, the not-having-enough-jobs are common to every profession. But what hurts the most about being a doctor, especially one working in a government set-up, is the hatred from the public. Recently, the respected Chief Justice labelled doctors as “qasai” (butchers). We doctors are so busy with our duties that we did not really care about this label, but when it started showing in public’s behaviour, it really hurt our feelings. The senior doctors are not really affected by this. They have a good practice going on. People will spend thousands of rupees to get a consultation. All this hatred and mistrust by the public directly affects junior doctors. Junior doctors have always been viewed as villains, and the language of the authorities just deteriorates our image even more. Yes, there are doctors around who care less than they should. Yes, there are doctors who do not understand what it is like to be in pain. But there are also doctors around in government set-ups who, after going 36 hours without sleep, will still cry themselves to sleep that night thinking about that one patient they could not help.
I do not expect readers to come to the streets for the rights of the young doctors. I do not say that the issues of illiteracy and poverty are less important than the issues of “villainous young doctors”.
I just want my people to acknowledge that we are also humans. We also suffer from emotional turmoil. We are also affected by poor governance. It affects us physically, emotionally and mentally when we are blamed and ridiculed for things that we have no control over. We are not responsible for the beds, the medicines, the waiting lists, the rush, the small rooms, the lack of water and the out-of-order machines. The government is responsible for all this, not the on-duty doctor. Trust me, the on-duty doctor is more worried about your condition. They also fear God, and have to answer their seniors (who, by the way, also find it pleasing to scold their juniors for things that are not in their control, for example the laboratory machines that stopped functioning one night before).
I do not want you to put us on a pedestal and bow down to us. But please, understand our suffering. Do not hate us. Tell people around you to not hate us. Do not call us qasai and monsters in your casual conversations. You might be a good person, but when you hate a doctor, it leads to us being beaten up in the emergencies. Media has so much grudge against the doctors and they know the public hates us too, so they also find no shame in manipulating the stories.
A young female doctor on duty was assaulted recently by a peon because he thought he could get away with it easily. Please, do not brush these incidents of violence against doctors under the carpet.
If my words mean nothing to you, I urge you all to read two books that will exhibit more appropriately the pain doctors go through. Read them as a favour to the book-lover inside you.
1. Doctors by Erich Segal
2. This is going to hurt by Adam Kay
Ending this middle-of-the-night rant with these lines from Doctors by Erich Segal.
“We have turned doctors into gods and worship their deity by offering up our bodies and our souls - not to mention our worldly goods.
And yet, paradoxically, they are the most vulnerable of human beings. Their suicide rate is eight times the national average. Their percentage of drug addiction is one hundred times higher.
And because they are painfully aware that they cannot live up to our expectations, their anguish is unquantifiably intense. They have aptly been called wounded healers.”
