Right then, Wednesday was my first day in the hospital and I spent it relatively productively following people like a lost sheep and trying to understand Tamil (which is a very complicated language by the sounds of it). My main take away message was that I am going to need to develop some serious linguistic skills and also just learn a whole load about rural medicine!
Compared to these Indian doctors I feel rather dim and certainly spoilt! Things have developed dramatically here but obviously we are still constrained by cost and availability of investigations and I will need to develop much better clinical skills to compensate. In the Western world we get so used to seeing a patient in brief then arranging a huge battery of tests, which is really not an option here.
On Thursday I spent my day traveling to Ooty to register my visa with the local Superintendent of Police. This was quite an experience, trying to wrestle with layers of bureaucracy India style. Suffice to say my visit involved a lot of travel to and from the Xerox shop, requiring 5 copies of every document and using my entire stock (that’s 7) of newly purchased passport sized photographs.
I traveled to and from Ooty with a brilliant retired couple from the UK, she was a midwifery teacher and he a GP. They are currently part of the family of amazing volunteers here at the hospital. So in the afternoon I joined in with their sightseeing trip and reminded myself how beautiful the countryside surrounding me here in the Nilgiri Hills really is.
Today I have been the rather conspicuous shadow of the lovely senior registrar here, Ward rounds followed by out patients and admitting any new arrivals. The more I learn about the way things work here the more confident that I am that I will be able to practice here in a useful fashion, after all the human condition is not that unfamiliar no matter what area of the world you are in.
So this is all for now. I will update you again sometime next week, lots of love,
A x
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